MURDER DROME

Two rival Roller Derby attract a regular small but loyal following at their local skating rink.

Among the fans are cool dude Squids (Anthony Cincotta) and his more reserved pal Brad (Jake Brown). Squids has a thing for the girls on both teams and will proudly fuck anything that moves. Brad, on the other hand, is more discriminate: his heart belongs to one girl in particular - star player Cherry (Amber Sajben).

There's a problem. Brad's ex, Hell (Rachael Blackwood), plays for the opposing team and is incensed that Cherry has started dating her former beau. She lets our demure heroine know this during a showdown at the local diner. Undeterred, Cherry continues to grow close to ostensibly good-natured Brad, and willingly accepts the strange old medallion that h proffers to her as a gift.

Uh-oh. The medallion appears to contain extraordinary powers which resurrect demonic former Roller Derby player Mamma Skate (B-On-The-Rocks) and her old team, who were involved in black magic and thus have had their souls condemned to Hell ... until now.

Now that Mamma Skate is back on the scene, she's determined to have Cherry take her place in Hell (the place, not the woman). But not before she and her punkish cronies have run amuck hacking and chopping their way through as many guys and gals as they can.

MURDER DROME's cover had me dreading what was on the disc. It all looked a bit too PLANET TERROR for my liking. Thankfully co-writer/director Daniel Armstrong's film isn't yet another of those 'post-modern' grindhouse-wannabe shitfests that have transpired in PLANET TERROR's wake, you know, complete with fabricated scratches to achieve that "authentic" 70s drive-in look.

It is, however, one heck of a mess. The addled script races along at a pace that would literally have wrapped this film up in 30 minutes, were it not padded out to the point of absurdity with footage of women skating/fighting/dancing to pop-punk tunes. These montages beef the running time to 72 minutes, by the end of which you'll most likely have no idea what the film was all about.

Characters are badly drawn, dialogue tries hard to be amusing and cool but often simply obscures whatever plot points Armstrong is trying to convey. Everything feels so rushed and random - what's with the skating rink's creepy janitor (Max Marchione), for instance? - that the head-scratching soon becomes tiresome and by halfway through it's far easier to give up caring.

The soundtrack is, at least, easy on the ears. CGI gore is quite well handled considering the film's reported low budget ($6,000 Australian dollars). Performances are amiable enough if your taste leans more towards the camp side of acting (Cincotta, looking like a pot-bellied Noel Fielding, is my favourite). Comedy - lame one-liners, grisly visual gags, subtitles during a rock concert which take into account the pronunciation of the Australian cast - is seemingly aimed at pre-teens.

I don't know. MURDER DROME is confused to the point of being virtually plotless. It looks cheap despite its HD sheen. And yet, whether it's the affable cast, gaudy colour schemes or the sheer energy with which this incoherent madness is delivered, it retains a bizarre charm about it that prevents me from dismissing it as crap.

Camp Motion Pictures' DVD is a region free affair that presents its main feature fully uncut and in an impressively bright, crisp 16x9 widescreen format.

Colours are deep, blacks are solid, detail is sharply defined: there are no complaints here, especially given the apparent low budget.

Likewise, the film is graced with an evenly balanced, clean and perfectly audible English 2.0 audio mix.

The disc opens to a static main menu page. There is no scene selection menu on offer.

An interesting selection of bonus features bulks out this DVD.

These begin with a rather chaotic audio commentary track from Armstrong and a selection of cast and crew members (if they bothered to introduce themselves then I missed that). Commendably free of pregnant pauses, this however is a tad difficult to fully appreciate due to the messy overlapping style of the multi-person chat. A bit of self-moderation would've helped. To be fair, this does settle down after a while but especially in the first third of the track it sounds like everyone is vying to be funny. And not succeeding.

8 minutes of outtakes and deleted footage (mostly of the 'gag reel' variety) ensues.

Next up we have an illuminating 2-and-a-half montage of before/after clips detailing how the computer-realised visual effects were achieved. Very impressive, though definitely not instructional.

A 13-minute early short from Armstrong follows in the guise of ALICE IN ZOMBIELAND. This begins like a riff on 28 DAYS LATER with a hot Goth chick waking in a hospital bed to find the land overrun with the undead. Then it goes all videogame-ish when she takes to blowing the zombies away with a huge gun. Finally, the action mutates into a pretty amusing rap-rock video for Slipknot clones Kidcrusher.

Four more music videos follow: "Zombie Brains" by Strawberry Fistcake is pretty poor female-fronted punk rock complete with spiked Mohicans; The Dark Shadows' "Stand Off" is poppier, more professional-looking and benefits from being interspersed with clips from MURDER DROME; "Can't Stop" by The Mercy Kills is enjoyably up-tempo; the video for "The Joke's Over" by Thorn Within manages to spice up their mediocre metal with footage of women fighting in cages and crudely executed gore FX.

Finally we're treated to a plethora of trailers for other Camp Motion Pictures titles: MY FAIR ZOMBIE, INTERPLANETARY, ATOMIC BRAIN INVASION, DOCUMENTING THE GREY MAN, GROUND ZERO and TRIPPIN'.

MURDER DROME is cheap and manic. It can't hope to tell a story in any coherent fashion, but at least it's got a cool soundtrack and buckets of blood.

Review by Stuart Willis