if you’re a gore hound who is willing to let a novice filmmaker slide on the technical aspects of filmmaking, check out Automation Transfusion
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"Automation Transfusion" is the most unexpected fun I´ve had watching a zombie movie since I popped "Dead Alive" into my VCR almost fifteen years ago. It´s full of senseless violence, buckets of gore, and some jaw dropping (pun intended for those that have seen it) special effects. "Automation" may be a bit too low-rent for mainstream audiences, but for a film shot on a Panasonic DVX100 relying on a budget under thirty thousand dollars, the end result is surprisingly great.
First time writer/director Steven C. Miller fully abandons any sort of original storytelling for the sake of extreme action and over-the-top gore, but for once it´s a good thing. The plot of "Automation Transfusion" is based your basic zombie story, with almost no explanation of the outbreak or character development. With the film running a surprisingly short seventy-five minutes, the lack of time wasted on unnecessary cinematic elements is entirely appreciated. Would you rather see an inexperienced actor waste fifteen minutes of film attempting to convey his love for his girlfriend, or would you rather see a head explode or a body bent in half? Exactly. Snap it in two, blow up that dome, and save the character definition for a movie that needs it.
Although his script steals from almost every zombie flick ever made, Miller and his crew more than make up for it by turning out some entirely original death scenes and blood-splattered effects. I´ve been watching horror films my entire life and there are multiple moments in "Automation Transfusion" that caused me to exclaim, "I´ve never seen anyone die like that before!" I´m not trying to spoil the film with the following sentence, but I just want to put it into perspective: Miller has one of his zombies do something that would make Takashi Miike take notice; simply put, the bar on the use of fetus in horror has been raised…considerably.
Video:
"Automation Transfusion" is presented in widescreen with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and it looks terrible. The film was shot with a type of camera that is generally used for 4:3 standard picture. "Arrested Development" and "It´s Always Sunny in Philadelphia," two of the best television shows of this decade use the same cameras and look significantly better than this. The picture seems stretched out and grainy and may have had a better chance to not look like crap if it were shown in the full-screen mode it was probably filmed in.
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[release]23256[/release]