3 out of 5

Directed by: Zach Lipovsky

The wiki plot summary for Dead Rising: Watchtower is exactly one sentence: “Set in A small town where A zombie outbreak purges the town and infects its inhabitants after a failed government vaccine.”  Excusing the oddly capitalized ‘A’s, this literally does tell you all you need to know about the film, and if that’s fine by you, then you should enjoy it.  When trailers first appeared for this Crackle original, beyond the usual cache of detractors, a fair amount of people were already rolling their eyes regarding the pretty cheesy look of the thing.  If the movie had been approached as a deadly serious affair, then yes, this would matter.  But it’s not.  ‘Based on a video game’ doesn’t have to carry the same negative connotation that it did 15 or 20 years ago, but still, Lipovsky and Crackle chose to embrace the energy and cheekiness of the series, which, sure, has more than a one line plot, but that’s not really the appeal: insane combat while bashing multitudes of zombies is.  So ‘Watchtower’ gets the benefit of a pretty talented cast – Jesse Metcalfe as male lead, Megan Ohry as female lead, Aleks Paunovic as bad guy, Virginia Madsen and Keegan Connor Tracy as subplot support – and a writer – Tim Carter, of the Mortal Kombat webseries – who understands the tricky balance between fan service, scenery-chewing and legitimate dialogue, and goes to work, much not-beloved director Lipovsky finding a perfect outlet for his B-movie ethics, concocting some truly awesome (seemingly) one-shot action sequences and, with editor Mike Jackson, effectively chopping up a two-hour film with humorous news report asides such that the runtime actually does fly by.  He also shows Uwe Boll how to properly do the video-game camera thing he failed at in House of the Dead, which may seem like an easy thing, but I have a weird respect for Boll and his enthusiasm screwed up some okay visual concepts in that flick, so it’s nice that Zach can combine the same enthusiasm with a good presentation.

All in all: that one sentence totally does it justice.  If you were expecting more, then you were expecting more.  But Watchtower is what it is – fun and straight-forward – and that’s really not bad at all.