Sole Survivor

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.