In short: Nekrotronic (2018)

Given how much I liked Wyrmwood, the previous feature of sibling filmmakers director/writer Kiah Roache-Turner and writer Tristan Roache-Turner, I’m rather disappointed how little I got on with this horror action comedy about demon hunters for some reason called necromancers and demons under the soul-eating tutelage of Monica Bellucci fighting it out in Australia and on the Internet. There’s Ben O’Toole as the lamest Chosen One imaginable, a fighting sister duo (Caroline Ford and Tess Haubrich), a comic relief ghost of colour (Epine Bob Savea) and a plot that’s as busy as its is uninvolving, with characters that can’t even be bothered to have single defining character traits.

The neon colours (this is another movie that has fallen into a septic tank of The 80s) are certainly pretty, and the special effects, apart from the sub super sentai monster costume in the grand finale are the gloopy sort of fun, but the writing’s genuinely terrible: when the dialogue isn’t clunky exposition, it’s utterly brain-dead humour (the last line in the movie is “suck on this”, and that’s about as funny as this thing gets, alas). The film’s world – despite all of that exposition - never comes to any kind of life but exists as a series of stupid, sometimes mildly cool, ideas the film tries to hang a series of action scenes on. Alas, those action scenes are for the most part – the film does have a moment or two – as bland as they are loud. That air of blandness really is the film’s greatest surprise, given all the mugging and the shouting it does, but there’s never anything actually worth all the noise. Particularly bad are the attempts at aiming for serious emotional beats among all the terrible jokes, with little visible effort spent on actually preparing these emotional shifts, leaving the tear-jerking moments as artefacts from a very different film.


Honestly, I can’t imagine what went wrong here.