REVIEW: The Bunker (2014)

Runtime: 87 Mins
Rated: R
What To Expect: The worst movie ever distributed

I don’t want it to look like I’m one of those people who comes out with a ‘worst movie ever made’ without really meaning it.  But I’ve considered it carefully. Here, I am going to say it and I am going to mean it – this is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.  And I’ve seen probably thousands.  Getting through ’till the end was agony.  With DTVs, you know the deal.  There are several tiers.  First is the limbo type, the one that just missed a theatrical run, for example Universal Soldier IV or Empire State (with The Rock).  Then there’s the habitual type, the Seagal movies, the Randy Couture movies.  Often those types are so bad, they’re almost worth it.  Below that is the dogs-dinner type, garbage that somehow got a distribution deal.  Well for this movie, you have to go many depths lower than even that.  You have to stoop into the bowels of the unimaginable.  Some type of coup was pulled here in getting a Blu Ray distribution deal for this vomit.  It’s putrid, a heinous blemish on a DVD shelf.

You gotta give it one thing, the premise (not to be confused with the actual plot that has been articulated) isn’t bad.  A group of nuts in the badass bush (which looks curiously northern hemispherical) are going around murdering and mutilating deserters and traitors. Some G.I.s stumble upon them and must take them down.  I think there’s a riff on Heart of Darkness in there, but God, let’s not even go there.  If you’ve ever seen one of those videos from YouTube where some guys from a local bar who are members of a re-enactment group film themselves with a shit camera in the woods with airsoft rifles, this is basically 87 minutes of the same.  Only with a God-awful nonsensical ‘screenplay’ boring its victims/viewers to death.  It’s hideously and unbelievably cheap.  The ‘cast’ looks like a bunch of dudes recruited at the weekend taking time out from work, with some meat heads from the local gym thrown in for effect.  None of them are familiar with the lines of dialogue they are trying to recite.

Come to think of it, despite having gone rogue and having separated themselves from the rest of the U.S. Army in the wilds of Southeast Asia for a lengthened period of time, the dastardly unit in question has an apparent abundance of anabolic steroids stashed away in their ‘bunker’.  Chief consumer among them being Ken Shamrock, whose acting skills are more than suspect.  I know he’s also on the breadline in real life right now, they probably gave him bedding and food to cover his ‘performance’.  There’s also a new low for shaking cam – blurred shaking cam.  For some odd reason not only is it shaking cam, which I’m not entirely sure was even intentional, it’s now shaking cam with a vaseline lens.  You can see nothing.  I repeat.  Nothing!  The fight scenes can’t even afford us the luxury of being laughable.  When you eventually do make something out, it’s atrocious.  Punching sounds are heard when no punches are thrown, let alone seen to be connecting.  That kind of incompetence can’t be forgiven on any level.

The only thing of interest about this movie, and I keep coming back to it in my head – I can’t grasp how they got this biological waste signed on for a distribution deal.  But if I had to guess, I’d wager that Ken Shamrock being front and centre of the cover was a gamble for someone coughing up the cash to print and merchandise it.  They thought they’d lure in a few unsuspecting MMA fans who were strolling past the Blu Ray section, who still remember that Shamrock exists.  Well I’m telling you now, it was a dirty, low, heinous sucker move even against people dumb enough to buy it.  It was, with all intention, a con job and even theft.

Indescribably, potently shit.  This is the first of two movies with this title this year, the other is simply ‘Bunker’.  You must avoid both, but especially this.  Playing it may even burn your house down.