AUTOMATON
TRANSFUSION (2007)

Automaton Transfusion (2007)
Director: Steven C. Miller
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Language: English
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only)
Number of discs: 1
Studio: Weinstein Company
DVD Release Date: March 4, 2008
Run Time: 75 minutes
DVD Features:
- Feature Commentary
With Writer/Director Steven C. Miller And Producers William Clevinger
And Mark Thalman
- Trials And
Tribulations: The Making Of Automaton Transfusion
- Deleted Scenes (with
optional Director's commentary)
- Suffer Or Sacrifice: A
Short Film By Director Steven C. Miller
- "Can You Hear Me Now"
Music Video By Blinded Black
- "Arsenaholic" Music
Video By Dancefloor Tragedy
Movie:    
Disc:    
Here's
a DVD guaranteed to have you projectile vomiting all over your lounge room
furniture . . .
High school kids must battle an outbreak of super-fast zombies a la the
ones in 28 Days Later . . . following a failed
experiment by the U.S. military to create an army of the undead in
Automaton Transfusion. (Guess you don't have to pay them any salaries if
they're technically dead.)
Yup, this DVD will have you holding down your lunch
- but no,
it's not because of the "brutal gore fest" promised by Moviethunder.com on
the back cover blurb.
It's because of the jerky
image quality. Automaton Transfusion must boast the suckiest DVD
encoding we have ever seen in a mainstream release by a major Hollywood
studio, even if they are so-called "independents".
This DVD is being
released by Dimension Extreme which belongs to Dimension Films, basically
the horror movie branch of the Weinstein Company. The Weinstein
brothers, get this, built their reputation on making "art house" films for
Miramax. Who would have guessed whilst watching Chocolat that one day
the producers would churn out the sort of cheap straight-to-DVD trash that
outfits like The Asylum
-
the makers of Snakes on a Train
-
specialize in.
Or it could be the
technical limitations of the digital equipment that was used to film
Automaton Transfusion (it really is a cheap movie). Whatever the case:
the jerky image soon had us as sick as your typical
Cloverfield audience. It did what the
sight of livers being ripped from victims, people being beheaded and the
heads being eaten, etc. etc.
-
all of which got pretty tired real soon in any case
-
couldn't. (One way to spot pimply teenagers making a movie: they will always
try to gross you out, for much the same reasons a six-year-old boy would
blow milk from his nose.)
Add charmless lead
characters, a by-the-numbers plot and you'll soon be pressing the Eject
button on your remote as it's really a bitch getting vomit stains out of
your lounger.
Each generation has its own
defining horror movie the trailer for this movie proclaims. If Automaton
Transfusion is this generation's defining horror movie, then this
generation (whoever they might be) is definitely being short-changed.
They're probably better off checking out their fathers' horror movies in
such an event. Ones such as Night of the Living
Dead, which realized that it wasn't enough to gross your audience out,
but that you actually have to scare them too. . .
(Zombie flicks you might
want to check out instead: Shaun of the Dead,
any of the Resident Evil flicks
-
yes, Automaton Transfusion is really that bad
-
28 Weeks Later . . . and
Planet Terror.)
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