Enterfear The Next Wave – review

Director: Tim Wall

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

This is a sequel and, to be honest, I haven’t seen the first film but the opening of this gives a quick synopsis. A year before, a meteorite crashed near a TV broadcast tower and the radiation it gave off caused the broadcast to enter reality – in simple terms it brought forward a zombie outbreak. This was eventually quelled by Frank (Phillip Drake) and Rick (Hunter Bickham) who managed to zap the zombies with a remote and dampen the effects with a “radio virus”. The fragment was taken by the CIA.

Frank and Rick

One year on and Frank has a book signing, when a guy, Lucas (Ryan Reinike), comes to him with a messed-up copy of the book and wondering if the book told all or if there was facts missing. He then gets funny with Frank and declares him a fake. Lucas then meets some mobsters who he has been skimming credit cards for – though he hasn’t brought the required numbers. He’s threatened.

film

Lucas has kidnapped a janitor from a local lab and creates an ID so he can get in – the aim is to steal the meteorite – which he eventually does. He tries to tap into its power, when back home, but fails and puts on the video Vampirum King of the Night and promptly falls asleep. The meteorite powers back up and Vampirum is created – wanting to break the virus that’s holding back the meteorite’s power and take over the world. Vampirum possesses Lucas and they can swap between identities. The possession aspect means that the remote-control trick won’t work.

Ryan Reinike as Lucas

After turning one of the mobsters into the wolf man (Chase Waters), Lucas tracks down Rick at his TV repair shop to try and find the laptop that carried the virus. Rick doesn’t have it but realises things have started again, discovers that remotes don’t work, and tries to warn the new sheriff (Jeremy London), who doesn’t listen. He then gets Frank and together they search for the original Sheriff, Clooney (Wayne Rodolfich), who (they realise) must have the laptop. It is up to the three of them, plus detective Rebecca Wilder (Faith Stanley) and officer Chang (Cuong Alex Do) to stop Lucas/Vampirum.

Vampirum gets the laptop

This was actually quite good fun – though watching the first film would probably have been useful. I was genuinely amused and the Frank and Rick characters worked well. Vampirum was a tad rubbery to look at, but then he was the recreation of a b-movie vampire, so that actually worked, There wasn’t a huge amount of lore with this for the same reasons but it is worth watching as a B but more so as a pretty effective comedy. 5.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK