The Mutant Chronicles

There’s a machine that changes men into mutants and it’s buried under the earth and its secret is protected by a secret cult. It’s been around since the medieval times, but has lasted through the year 2707, when four corporations rule the world. They’re all at war with each other, but the battle between “Capitol” and “Bauhaus” is the most extreme right now in what used to be Europe. Out of nowhere, these random zombie–like mutant pop out of the ground and start cleaning house on both sides. Apparently, war broke the seal and awakened the machine. The mutants take civilians and military people to the machine and it changes them into a bunch more mutants. Ron Perlman, as Brother Samuel, asks the leader of the cult (John Malkovich) for a small team of people to go destroy the machine. Samuel pulls together soldiers from each of the four corporations to be the fighting unit, including Thomas Jane (from the Punisher) as Mitch Hunter. The Mutant Chronicles are a prophecy/guidebook to how the machine can be shut off. The team is instructed in how to destroy the machine and how to fight the zombie mutants (which includes swords), and then sent off to destroy the machine. Most of the people on the mission are killed by the mutants, but Mitch keeps going and brings as many pieces of the Chronicles as he can scrap together. He gets captured by the machine and half turned into a mutant. Then he grabs a couple of injured soldiers and proceeds to try to blow up the machine, which turns out to be a giant space ship and launches into space. Who writes this stuff?

For being 2707, the weapons are surprisingly 1950-ish. A lot of heavy iron and oddly, what appears to be steam-powered stuff. Really? It’s some sort of steampunked WWI combined with Alien and with a splash of Sin City thrown in. I still can’t figure out why the mutants seemed to be pieced together with bits of metal band-aids and such. The CGI in the film is really bad, not tear-wrenchingly terrible, but it’s still pretty obviously low-budget and painful. Almost as bad as Megafault, but that one still wins the prize for the worst of all time.