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The Worst Film Ever

Redundant and unnecessary.

Admirable film.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

There's a moment at the beginning of this movie that is sublimely silly. A guy with a mop top hair cut and a Grizzly Adams' beard rides his bicycle through the forest, silently killing zombies with a pair a hatchets and a homemade javelin while speaking to his dead father in voice-over narration. If The Vanguard had been that defiantly peculiar all the way through, I think I would have really enjoyed it. Sadly, the film collapses in on itself after that interestingly odd beginning and turns into a very cheap, very lame and very badly written rip off of The Omega Man. Yeah, that's right. I can't give writer/director Matthew Hope the credit to say he's done an homage to the original book written by Richard Matheson, the first film version starring Vincent Price or the third adaptation starring Will Smith. No, this thing can only be fairly linked to the schlocky 70s version of I Am Legend starring Charlton Heston, with just a pinch of theft from 28 Days Later for seasoning.As you might guess, this is a zombie picture. In this case, the zombies aren't actually dead. They're humans infected by an evil corporation that took over the world when society collapsed after all the oil ran out, which according to this movie happens in about 5 years. So, I guess we all should start ordering those "survival seeds" advertised on the Glenn Beck Show. Anyway, the infected humans are called Biosyns, have an awful case of varicose veins all over their bodies and act like ticked off orangutans.In this derivative zombie apocalypse world, we meet Max (Ray Bullock Jr.). He's the aforementioned mop top Grizzly Adams. Max's life seems to consist of wandering around the forest killing zombies, sleeping in a tent surrounded by a crude wooden fence that wouldn't keep out a three year old child, whining via voice-over narration to his dead dad about sundry things and waiting around for a guy named Hareem Jabbar. Max eventually runs into Jamal (Shiv Grewal), an Arab/Indonesian-looking guy that's a solider for the evil corporation who has apparently gone rogue. I say "apparently" because why, how and from what Jamal has gone rogue is never all that clear.Max and Jamal team up like this is a buddy cop movie and then encounter Zac and Rachel (Steve Weston and Emma Choy), a soldier and a scientist who are fugitives from the evil corporation. How these four end up together is like something out of a Three Stooges' short. They proceed to wander around the forest and engage in some enormously feeble attempts at serious drama. It's hard to get into any more details than that because, frankly, the last half of this movie doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The characters spout dialog that's almost gibberish and do things that serve no logical or reasonable purpose. Long after my interest was exhausted, some supposed secrets were revealed, some people died and it ends with a line of dialog that includes the name of the film, as in "Oh, that's why they called it The Vanguard".The acting in this isn't all that bad, though there are a few moments where the performers seem to think that showing emotion and random facial twitching are the same thing. The direction is essentially competent, though it appears that 90% of the instructions writer/director Hope gave the cast consisted of "Run over here! Now run over there!" The Vanguard is also a pretty cheap-looking movie, though the soundtrack is quite effective at setting the mood of the story.The overwhelmingly execrable execution of that story, however, puts a stink on this film all the tomato juice in the world couldn't wash out. There were parts where I genuinely wondered how a human being could have written something like this, with scenes that look, sound and feel more like they were coughed up by a faulty screen writing app for somebody's iPhone.The kindest comment I can make about The Vanguard is that a cast and crew with some talent tried to make a movie with very little money and a truly horrible script. They failed to produce anything watchable but they didn't leave me angry at completely wasting my time.

This Movie Was Bad Hilariously Bad' It Made You Think Something Good Was Going To Happen Only To Leave You Confused And Bewildered In The End. The Main Character Just Spends The Hold Time Running Through The Woods And Killing Off Zombie Ape Like People With Axes' He's Supposedly Deaf But Somewhere Along The Way He All a Of Sudden Starts To Talk And Act as If He Can Hear. This Is Where Everything Gets Ridiculously Bad' All The Time You're Waiting For This Thing To Come To The Plot' Cause All Movies Have Plots Right? Right?? Not This One All You Get Is a Bunch Of Running Shooting Narrative Talking And An Ending So Stupid And Ridiculous It Just Leaves You Staring Blankly At The Screen. My Suggestion Is Do Not Watch This Unless You Have 98.Minutes To Kill' If Not Please Pass This Up And Go Watch 28 Days Later Or Some Of The Much Better Made Apocalypse Zombie Films. It's Obvious Whoever Made This Was Just Trying To Kill Some Time As Well.

Well if there is one genre done to death (no pun intended) it is the zombie movie. We have the holy war still waging between fast and slow zombies. We have zombies that talk, act like normal people, shuffle, learn how to do various things (whatever the plot needs), evolve, and some attempts to make them cute. Besides the vampire there is no other great cliché movie. Having said this, every once in a while you see a film take the genre in a way you didn't imagine. The Vanguard is one of those very rare and dying breed. This film takes place in the UK and is after the world has ended. Civilization is represented by the evil Corporation (we never learn it's name) and the barbarians are represented by the Biosyns. They like the zombies in 28 Days Later are fueled by rage but unlike 28 Days they are evolving. The main character is Max and his story takes you on a very strange but also incredibly enjoyable ride with an ending that you probably won't see coming but will be impressed with none the less. A worthy addition to my horror collection and well worth you time to check it out.

Some of the reviews on this leave me wondering if there are not other versions of this film out there as the one I watched certainly doesn't deserve greater viewing. A waste of time & £3.50: I could have picked a better movie at random off the shelves of the rental store.This is a low rent & very poor attempt at making a Stalker type interpretation of the Zombie movie but it fails. Totally. It's incoherent & poorly acted. The sets are unconvincing as are the zombies. They give the impression of being mates of the director & I kept expecting to find them stifling smirks. Its not even logical or reasonable within its own reality. Why does the protagonist live in a basic shelter on the ground level of a forest?? He could increase his safety 10 fold by simply living in a tree hut / platform, if he must insist on a forest location, though why he couldn't find & secure a house is beyond me. I could make a better attempt of post-zombie survival than this character! That's enough time wasted on this movie. Bye.