Nekrotronic (2018)

Pinning this down to a genre - or even a short list of genres - is virtually impossible. The movie, for better and worse, plays like a barrage of ideas and imagery drawn from Ghostbusters, Blade, Marvel movies (Doctor Strange in particular), The Matrix, Men In Black, as well as more obscure fare - there's a surprising amount of The Frighteners in this. Meanwhile, the pacing feels like it's right out of a Michael Bay Transformers movie, which I promise is only 50% intended as an insult (Nekrotronic, for all its faults, is consistently interesting to look at, which is no small feat on a limited budget). If I had to try to classify this, I'd settle on action/adventure/comedy/horror/fantasy/superhero. More than any of that, this feels like a tongue-in-cheek two-decade-late adaptation of Mage: The Ascension (ask your parents to ask those weird people they knew in college).

You'll note something was missing from that long line of genres: Christmas movie. And that's going to be a sticking point, because this thing's holiday connections are baffling, even relative to all the other baffling aspects of this thing. And seeing as this is a Christmas movie site, let's start there.

Following a prologue establishing a secret war between demons and necromancers that's been waged since the dawn of civilization and has now incorporated the internet as both a weapon and fighting ground, the movie immediately establishes it's set "Close to Christmas" through onscreen text. About ten minutes in, we see a boardroom of demonic executives wearing Santa hats. At one point, a demon says, "Merry Christmas" before decapitating a necromancer. Some of the executives have Santa hats in a fight scene at the end. Also, there are a few extremely brief shots during a montage showing Christmas decorations in the background (when I say "brief," I mean about a second of screentime combined - I had to rewind and pause to confirm they were even present).

And I'm pretty sure that's it. I didn't notice any Christmas music or decorations (other than in the montage), nor were there many opportunities for those to be present. The majority of the movie takes place in abandoned buildings, alleyways, and cyberpunk/occult sets. The handful of brief shots we get of people cloud the issue even further. There are a couple montages implying relatively cold weather (we see a busload of people with coats, for example), which would imply a December setting... if we were in the northern hemisphere. But remember this is an Australian film presumably set in Australia, so shouldn't Christmas be in mid-summer?

But maybe this is supposed to be set in a US city with an unusually large population of Australian immigrants. Who can say? The point is the holiday elements here are abnormally sparse for a movie that goes out of its way to establish it's set right around Christmas. So why bother?

That's not... I'm not being rhetorical. I'm really at a loss here.

I suppose it could be an attempt at some kind of inside joke at how ubiquitous the holidays are becoming as a setting for genre movies. Alternatively, the movie may have really wanted to use demons with Santa hats and felt they had to justify it (if so, they should have just used the hats and never explained it). Or maybe this was a situation where the movie was produced quickly and by the time they realized they lacked the time and money to decorate a few key scenes for the holidays, they'd already filmed the Santa hat bit. Or maybe some planned holiday scenes were cut due to budget or pacing.

There are certainly reasons you might want to set something like this at the holidays. The season's decorations (lights in particular) can help establish an otherworldly feel. And of course associations between ghost stories and Christmas date back centuries, if not millennia. Alternatively, there are interesting religious and mythical connotations to having potentially apocalyptic events at the end of the year.

But none of that is communicated by nominally saying this is all around Christmas. You'd have to actually convey a sense of the holidays, and there's no indication Nekrotronic is even trying to do that. There's no use of tone, nostalgia, or imagery to connect this with Christmas. So I'm inclined to think whatever's going on here has less to do with sacrificial kings and the closing of the year, and more to do with a rushed production schedule. But I'm not at all certain and would be fascinated to know what the filmmakers thought.

Regardless, this isn't something I'd really call a Christmas movie, despite passing my litmus test of being set around the holidays. I don't think Christmas tells us anything about the movie, nor does the movie tell us anything about Christmas. I could be convinced otherwise (that ghost story connection feels like it should be significant), but I'm leaning towards saying this is a rare exception to the rule where movies set during the holiday should be considered holiday movies.

None of which has anything to do with whether this is any good and/or worth seeing, obviously. That one's also complicated.

I went back and forth on this while watching. To its credit, the movie's madcap energy and refusal to dilute its lore make for an unusually fast-paced flick with a lot going on. Character revelations and transformations that typically take an entire movie to build culminate around the twenty minute mark. This delivers its backstory on speed dial, then starts the process of adding elements and complications. By the time the movie ends, four characters who started alive are undead, each under a different definition of the word "undead." There are plasma rifles, demonic rituals, psychic attacks, multiple kinds of ghosts, and old fashioned gunfights... all in an hour and forty minutes.

On the one hand, that keeps you interested. On the other, none of it adds up to any kind of satisfying storytelling. Not that it has to: this is aiming to entertain more than anything. The movie knows it's serving up a genre puree, and it doesn't insult your intelligence by implying it's anything more elevated. When it's a question between pathos and comedy, this consistently sides with comedy, which was almost certainly the right call under these circumstances.

So, how's the comedy? Eh. Passable, maybe? I chuckled through most of the movie, both at the jokes and the gonzo mix of ideas that would never be permitted within a hundred feet of a Hollywood production. That's despite some jokes that shouldn't be in any movie in 2018: some homophobia, a bafflingly dumb gross-out joke centered on the leads working with human waste, and a bit of ableism. And plenty of jokes that just don't land, of course - I assume that goes without saying. But a decent number do, and more than that the premise is just so silly in itself you can't help but laugh a little.

The cast and director do a good job with the material. Ben O'Toole is cast as a sort of generic Marvel lead, and he pulls it off pretty well. Epine Bob Savea plays his best friend, who winds up providing comic relief as a wraith. Caroline Ford and Tess Haubrich are demon-fighting sisters asked to carry most of the action. The main villain is the one name you're likely to know: Monica Bellucci is a corrupted necromancer turned demon, who's also the lead character's lost mother (this movie's weird, folks). Everyone seems to know what kind of movie they're making, and they manage to sell the silliness.

Same goes for director Kiah Roache-Turner, who approaches it as the ridiculous comic book it is. It's also worth noting that the visual effects, make-up, and set designs all look about as good as could be expected (the makeup actually looks a little better). It's all got that "direct-to-streaming" vibe, of course, but we're decidedly in the competent low-budget streaming movie side of the spectrum. That counts for something.

Ultimately, this is about as good as it could have been, but that doesn't necessarily add up to "actually good." The humor is still juvenile, the effects are limited, and the whole production feels like an homage to bigger movies, but - so long as you're not expecting anything more - this isn't a bad choice, particularly if you're watching with friends similarly entertained by weird genre fare.

I just wouldn't recommend it as a Christmas movie. There's no shortage of ridiculous sci-fi/fantasy/horror options out there where the holidays occupy more than a nominal role. I'd pick one of those instead.