Cast: Warren Otteraa, David Leeming, and Alana
Tranter
Director: Christopher Jacobs
87 minutes (15) 2016
Widescreen ratio 2.35:1
Miracle Media DVD Region 2
Rating: 4/10
Review by Andrew Darlington
It’s no use hunting on the excellent and
usually-reliable IMDb for Sole Survivor, because it’s not there. But track
writer-producer-director Christopher ‘Chris’ Jacobs through to its previous
identity as Lone Wolves and there’s all you need. His debut project is re-issued
misleadingly with a new title and DVD cover showing hovering alien motherships
strafing burning cities – which is entirely inaccurate. There are no alien
motherships. No alien invasion fleet. For this is an entirely different kind of
apocalypse. No zombies or runaway viral pandemic either. Just the world made
strange. Filmed around Melbourne, using the Wurundjeri aboriginal tribal lands
– to whom thanks are duly extended, ‘no actual science was harmed (or used) in
the making of this motion picture’, despite its muffled lunges into
relativistic particle physics.
We are living amidst a very healthy upsurge of
indie movie-productions, as vigorous and gloriously-flawed as all that implies,
with new faces and new low-budget spins on themes, pivoting only on the
invention and ingenuity of their creators. Here, surly crop-headed Private
James Conroy (Warren Ottera) of the Second-Division West has anger-management
issues, and plays paramilitary games with guns in the forest, always alert,
always preceded by his four-barrel shooter. His voice-over narrative drifts
within an over-obtrusive soundtrack, with a debris of occasional indistinct
phrases surfacing. “Date unknown. I’m still here. Lost track, still don’t know
what happened...” Maybe the imprecision is deliberate atmospherics to imply
dislocation? “It looks like everything’s the same, but it’s not... everywhere,
things are out of place.” It’s the apocalypse, James, but not as we know it.
Everyone vanished – or killed, “a few survive; I survive.”
A glimpse of a devastated city... There’s been no
bomb, but there’s radiation, and red-flashes on his RUN life-detector alert him
to mutant creatures, horned skull-face red-vision monsters in flickering
distortions, what they are, or where they’re from, is unknown. He’s haunted by
flashbacks of lost domesticity with his ex, and it’s only when his mobile blips
– he answers it “Suzy?”, that things begin to fall into place.
On the down-link is bespectacled Gary Freeman (David
Leeming), marooned as Space Shuttle ‘Polaris’ attempts to dock with his 426
orbital station. Both the retro-Shuttle – already made long obsolete by NASA,
and the station itself are convincingly modelled by Jacob Matyr, enhanced with
visual effects by Leo Flander. The word ‘Laika’ on the bulkhead also hints at affection
for earlier space race ephemera. But Freeman is a ‘spaceman’ with a failing
life-support system, on the brink of hitting the ‘Purge Atmosphere’ button to
hasten the end, when contact with the ground revives hope. They’ve gone from
Lone Wolf… to Sole Survivors.
At first he’s suspicious, can he believe Freeman? Was
the Moon-landing fake? Conroy sets out to locate a signal-boosting sat-dish to
amplify the link which so far equates to “pissing on a coin from the top of the
Eiffel Tower.” He meets a thought-projecting
monster in the shape of a cute little girl, but realises the subterfuge in time
to blast it to messy pulp. He descends into a suitably-dark effluence channel
where he meets... himself, or at least, another self, impaled and dying. Then,
under Freeman’s direction, he instead erects a makeshift array himself, out of
wired-in colanders. It picks up Dr Elizabeth Harding (Alana Tranter), and more
bits tumble into place. From a two-hander, two becomes three as the action
neatly vaults into triple-hazard threat. If the dialogue is occasionally
stilted, and the nasties are Doctor Who aliens come adrift, attacking too fast
for clear detail, the action carries its own effective momentum.
Elizabeth is a
theoretical physicist, appropriately seen against a revolving vortex of
spinning sub-atomic particles. She’d been working with fanatical Dr Edward
Fischer (Dan Purdey) on “the bleeding edge of possibility,” opening overlapping
inter-dimensional portals with no regard for consequences. The consequence
being that Earth is part-sucked through a singularity-portal, part-“trapped in
a parallel dimension.” The idea of ‘tearing holes in space and time’, punching
wormholes into new worlds, provides a certain uniqueness, but in truth, not
much more than a regular Doctor Who storyline. “We have the key,” explains Dr
Liz helpfully, “but not the door.”
In a high-tension climax, Freeman’s in orbit,
donning his spacesuit to conserve diminishing life-support. Conroy battles his
bloody way across dereliction through converging monster-packs to reach her
bunker, while Elizabeth packs a pistol across the hi-tech installation to hunt
down the mad scientist (who, incidentally, was also responsible for
‘terminating’ her astrophysicist parents!). By the time they blast their way
through to Fischer he’s midway into horror-transfiguration, and they must
neutralise him before they all mutate into a broken world. Needless to say, the
ensuing mega-explosions re-set “the nature of space of time” back onto its
correct path, allowing Space Shuttle Polaris to safely dock with Freeman’s
orbital habitat, and offering a new chance for Conroy to reclaim his flawed
life. While only she chooses to pursue the infinite and ‘move on’ through the
portals.
Inventive and playful in the kind of way that, say,
early Roger Corman was, this movie is further evidence of a vigorous and
gloriously-flawed upsurge of indie movie-productions, whether you call it Lone
Wolves or Sole Survivor.
