Terminus Pitch Trailer Familiarizes You With Cage-Fighting Zombie Approach

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

By any stretch of the imagination, a film whose own filmmaker refers to it as “The Walking Dead meets Mad Max meets Fight Club” should, by that very definition, be a real piece of shit, seeing as how those films exist separately for a reason. And just in general, most independent, post-apocalyptic zombie films are exercises in patience and aggravation.

But there is something fairly significant going on in the above pitch trailer for director Steven C. Miller’s Terminus, but I can’t figure out what it is. The trailer’s editing is quite superb, and makes the film look like it will be amazing, but I’m not even fooled by that. I’m just looking at what’s going on in between all the quick fades and smash cuts, and even that stuff looks to be on a level of quality that far exceeds what is normally associated with lower budgets — in this case “less than $10 million.” Oh wait, I know what it is. This is all footage from actual movies that were good and generally cost more than $10 million.

Miller is responsible for the well-crafted action thriller The Aggression Scale, but he immediately followed it up with the terrible Silent Night remake and the entertainment-challenged Under the Bed. But Terminus sounds like it would be in a completely different league from those films.

To pull a quote from the Bloody Disgusting story: “This movie is the beginning of an action sci-fi franchise that shows how society continues after the zombie apocalypse.” So there’s human vs. zombie cage fights that might not even involve zombies because maybe they’re just experiments of some kind? I’m not sure if that part was just added for tone or for actual plot content.

Terminus was written by Jeremy Lott, who co-wrote Lore, a proposed upcoming project from director Barry Sonnenfeld (the Men in Black franchise).