Stay Out Stay Alive is a 2019 horror movie playing on Amazon Prime. Dean Yurke wrote and directed. It's his first writing and directing work, he's mostly been in the digital side of things, working on effects for some of the biggest genre pictures from the Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel Universe, Star Trek, Pirates of the Caribbean franchises and many more. SOSA is a much smaller picture than any of those, supernatural horror in the Yosemite woods with a fair bit of CGI to help out.
Five annoying 20 somethings go on a camping trip. I didn't recognize any of the cast except for Barbara Crampton, she plays a forest ranger. The 5 are a couple of couples and the older sister of one of the women. A small earthquake opens the entrance to an old mine and the older sister falls down the short shaft. She gets trapped by a boulder and she's there all night. She had gone off for a walk and two couples went to their tents. The next day it's hard for one of the women to get the sister and he boyfriend to search for her. Those two are a real treat to be around. They find her and try to release her. No go.
One of them finds some gold while poking around. Gold fever kicks in and things go downhill from there. As they dig into the mine they unleash the spirits of the Native Americans who were murdered and buried there back in the gold rush days. The spirits appear as animals or shadow figures and the CGI that does it is fair to good. The earthquake footage was fairly good too. What wasn't much fun was the annoying characters. I think it's barely average, mostly because it's such a familiar story with little to elevate it. Good to have seen it and not have bought it. Well, on DVD, I'm paying for AP and not getting many things shipped to me right now, so it's good to get something out of the monthly fee.
Attack Of The Southern Fried Zombies is another from AP. It came out in 2017 and Christian Hokenson, Mark Newton, Stephan Stromer and Daniel Wood wrote the story, Christian wrote the screenplay and Mark directed. It's set in Charleston Mississippi during a blues festival. One of the big draws are the rival meat pie vendors. Timothy Haug plays a crop duster who's working for one of the meat pie makers on the side, during the day his latest job is spraying a new herbicide on kudzu. The kudzu doesn't like it and it starts turning the dead into zombies somehow. At first it's just one poor guy but it soon spreads and the zombies invade the festival.
The characters we meet are a wide range of southerners, mostly done up for a laugh, some are fun and some are less so. The acting is all over the place and so is the dialog. You'd think with that many of them working on the story, there would be better dialog. Be nice to have better jokes too.
Once the murderous horde descends on the festival it's run or be killed. Some folks escape but many are slaughtered. The physical make up is only so-so and so is the CGI used for gun shot hits and explosions. There's no money here. I enjoyed a fair bit of it but I wouldn't need to see it again.
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