Action Girls: Soldiers of the Dead Part 1 (2007)

26th Jul 07





Plot
A slave girl fights for her freedom with no clothes on and a woman dressed as a Nazi discovers a way to raise an army of the undead. Lots of fighting ensues.

Review
One of the perks of running a website like eatmybrains.com is that you get exposure to all kinds of weird and wonderful films. What's even better is that quite often these filmmakers approach you. Now this is a mixed blessing - I always feel really bad giving bad reviews to self financed indie flicks because at least those guys are still fighting the battle, you know? - but when I got an e-mail from the makers of Action Girls: Soldiers of the Dead Part 1, which was described to me as 'an action movie with naked babes', I couldn't resist. It's taken me a while to get round to watching it ("What are we watching tonight, dear?", "Oooh, err...") but eventually the opportunity presented itself and I finally got to slip that screener into my DVD player. Now where's the remote...

So, Soldiers of the Dead Part 1 is set in a near future world ravaged by disease, right, where society has predictably regressed back to tribal times and slavery is rife, particularly with women. One such slave trader called Helman trades in women, but particularly likes women with fighting spirit and he regularly makes them fight to the death naked in his makeshift arena with the survivor being aloud to stand by his side as his pet. This story concerns one such pet Adrianna, who consistently dresses like a Nazi for the whole movie, and is heartbroken when Helman starts to take a fancy to new girl Susana. But luckily for her she accidentally discovers a secret serum in a raid on a research facility a few scenes later, that turns dead people into her zombie slaves. She quickly decides to build an army of undead soldiers to take down her former love Helman, while Susana has other ideas about how she can overthrow the tyrant.

Now, let's get things into perspective, Soldiers of the Dead is from the people behind the incredibly successful actiongirls.com website, which is a website dedicated to often naked chicks shooting rocket launchers and fighting in hand to hand combat, etc. So we're not expecting Citizen Kane, and as an independent observer the first few scenes do bring you to suspect the worse.

The film opens with a text heavy intro over a montage of chicks getting rounded up and then fighting naked, before cutting to Susana who's just escaped and is now taking a shower. As she's showering, she has a flashback to when she had her own harem of naked chicks, and then more flashbacks to naked gladiator fights. And then to a scene of Helman's gang rounding up more nubile girls. Uh-huh.

Things liven up though when Adriana discovers the zombie serum and Susana and the other escaped action girls start fighting those more often than getting their clothes off. Yes, what I have to admit the movie does well is low-budget action choreography with girls in bikinis that hit hard. Admittedly it can come across as a little chop-socky, but only ever in an endearing way and never that much. The car chases too are handled really well (there's a particularly good one at the beginning involving a bike, a jeep and a bazooka that's a lot of fun) particularly in the action editing, which flows very nicely. And thank goodness there are a lot of chase scenes and actions scenes in this movie, because you can't say very many nice things about the quality of the acting, which is generally poor throughout and strangely highlighted by the fact that there's very little dialogue, particularly from the slave gang who tend to mumble and get subtitles, for some reason.

But hey, you don't watch a movie with a title like Action Girls for great acting performances. You watch it for the action and the girls, and in those terms Soldiers of the Dead does deliver. I mean, action scenes that are done by hot chicks who are occasionally naked isn't that offensive - no more say than Die You Zombie Bastards - so if that's your bag you'll probably have a laugh with this. Ideal Zombie Club modern day exploitation trash that you can't help but enjoy, so get some pizzas, beer and mates and make a night of it.

Versions
Available on DVD soon.

Posted by
Jim



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