The 2013 film, 13 Eerie, takes place on an island that is not quite as deserted as our heroes originally assumed.
The island, known as the Eerie Strait, was once the home of a brutal, maximum security prison. The island is full of abandoned buildings and abandoned vehicles, all of which sit there as monuments to the brutality of mass incarceration. Prof. Tompkins (Michael Shanks) teaches a class in Forensic science and he brings six of his best students (played by Katharine Isabelle, Brendan Fehr, Brendan Fletcher, Jesse Moss, Kristie Patterson, and Michael Eisner) to the island. With the help of an ex-convict named Larry (Nick Moran), Tompkins has set up several fake crime scenes (often featuring very real corpses) for his students to investigate. For the class, the students are required to work in teams of two and the teams are not allowed to communicate with each other. However, each team is given a walkie-talkie so that they can still communicate with Tompkins.
Now, just speaking for myself, I would probably drop the class rather than take part in any of this. Seriously, as soon as you tell me that I’m going to have to spend my weekend hanging out at an abandoned prison and examining real corpses, I would probably walk out of the classroom and switch majors. (Then again, I probably wouldn’t be majoring in forensics to begin with.) But Tompkins’s students are very enthusiastic about heading off to the island. I guess if doing obviously dumb things, going off to an isolated location with an ex-con would be an attractive option.
Anyway, the students head over to the Island and — surprise! — it turns out that there’s a lot of extra dead bodies lying around. At first, the students think that the extra bodies are all a part of their class but then some of the dead bodies come back to life. It turns out that the island — much like the prison camp in Garden of the Dead — was once used a place to experiment on prisoners. As a result, many of the former prisoners have now been transformed into flesh-eating zombies who roam the island and look for new victims.
(And again, anyone who has ever seen a zombie movie, should have realized that this would happen. It always amazing me that people in zombie movies have apparently never come across Night of the Living Dead on television late at night. At the very least, you would think that these people would have at least read an article or two about The Walking Dead. And really, even if you have somehow gone your entire life without being exposed to any zombie media, the sight of the dead walking around should be enough to convince most people to run away.)
13 Eerie has some atmosphere but it doesn’t really bring anything new to the zombie genre. In fact, it so closely follows the rules of the genre that it actually gets kind of boring. I appreciated, as always, the committed performance of Katharine Isabelle and I also liked that the film ended on a bit of a down note. But, for the most part, 13 Eerie doesn’t bring anything new to the world of the living dead.
Through the Shattered Lens 