I watched a bad movie today. It is sort of a guilty pleasure of mine. Watching bad movies that is. I revel in the terrible plots, paper-thin characters, cheesy effects, and wooden acting. It fuels me. I love them in a way that I can’t quite describe, or feel about bad games or music. To me, bad films deserve to be recognized, talked about, and maybe occasionally ridiculed. This one is no exception.

I don’t know what exactly about zombies caught the attention of the world, but for the last few years, the shambling undead have filled our screens, becoming the lowest common denominator of antagonists. More than anyone else, the makers of bad movies love zombies. The makeup is cheap, there is plenty of action, and little moral dilemma in mowing down giant crowds of them in bright red splashes of blood and gore. To most of these zombie films, the more violence they can cram into the runtime, the better, and Navy SEALs: The Battle for New Orleans is no exception. And for a movie titled as such, the action feels much smaller scale than the filmmakers would like us to believe.

Apparently, there are just zombies in this world now, and the Vice-President is trapped in New Orleans along with “crowds” (read: a few extras in bad body paint) of zombies. There are hints of subplots, machinations by the VP to become president, but these are ignored, leaving them as hanging threads hinting at a better, or at least more interesting, movie.

Instead, the SEALs are sent in to save the VP, and they do so handily, putting him on a helicopter out of the city before the movie is even halfway over. Then they have to figure out what to do with the rest of the runtime, so they just kill off the VP, never to be mentioned again, before running off to a hospital, which for some reasons houses a secret research lab. Apparently, there might be a cure there, so they get sent to retrieve the scientists. The entire way, an annoying reporter and her camera man tag along to “report.”

The title of the movie had me hoping for something. An actual, city-scale battle of special forces soldiers versus crowds of zombies. That could actually be a bit interesting. Instead, it quickly reminded me why I should never have hope in when I watch these movies. It felt like the movie equivalent of a pair of bad video game escort missions crammed together from different stories. The gunfights are boring as they spray bullets at poorly made-up extras and toss grenades which explode into awful CGI explosions. There is no variety, no ingenuity, and no originality. Just a couple of generic soldiers with sharp jawlines and assault rifles gunning down waves of equally generic zombies.

I like a good zombie movie, but there are just so many terrible ones out there that I wish I had never seen. Navy SEALs: Battle for New Orleans is just another in a long line of mediocre, disappointing zombie action movies that make promises that they’ll never keep.

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Tags: Why Did I Watch That?, Action, Zombies