Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		3.5

The Battery Blu-ray Movie Review

Juicy.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 19, 2014

Six thousand dollars? Note to ambitious young filmmakers who think it takes mortgage sized investments to put out your little movie— that’s the amount that Jeremy Gardner allegedly spent to make The Battery, a fascinating and maybe even audacious spin on the ever popular zombie craze. Gardner doesn’t ignore or reinvent genre conventions here, only slightly skewing them at times for his own purposes. Instead of focusing on a ragtag group of people attempting to mow down as many zombies as possible, Gardner instead concentrates on two guys, baseball playing buddies of long standing, who are among the only humans still hanging on to their identities. Ben (Jeremy Gardner) is the more overtly aggressive of the duo, leaving Mickey (Adam Cronheim) to disappear behind the veil of his headphones and nonstop music. The two are simply trying to make their way through life without running into any of the walking dead, but when a zombie does occasionally cross their paths, Ben is quick with both gunfire and from time to time a pretty deadly bat. The Battery (the title refers to the “unit” of pitcher and catcher in baseball, but perhaps also tangentially to Mickey’s battery driven music listening) only has a relatively minor amount of gore, something that may upset those devoted to as much blood and guts as possible in a film like this, but it’s still an unusually unsettling piece, at least in part due to its very small scale (read small budgeted) intimacy.

As The Battery opens, Mickey is seen listening to music on headphones, appearing to be little more than just your everyday slacker, albeit one perhaps preparing for a camping trip or similar expedition. Smoking a cigarette and taking it easy on the porch of a bucolic looking farmhouse, Mickey is the very picture of a laid back, disconnected (to the outside world, anyway) dude. Only a few minutes later, when a manic Ben appears does it become clear that the two are in the midst of a post-apocalyptic landscape that is overrun (or at least overwalked) with shambling zombies. But right off the bat (no pun intended, considering the baseball subtext of the film), it’s clear that Ben is the guy in charge and that Mickey is a somewhat more hesitant responder to the realities of life among the walking dead.

What ensues is something akin to a buddy and/or road flick, with two disparate characters meandering through the countryside and dealing with each other’s quirks and foibles. Ben is intent on getting Mickey to recognize that being in a defensive posture, ready, willing and able to take on any given zombie threat, is an absolute necessity. Mickey, perhaps because Ben is so ready, willing and able, tends to not want to get involved—at least in a more aggressive, physical sense, anyway. He’s more than happy to look on as Ben takes out various threats.

Things take a somewhat bizarre turn once the two stumble on a pair of walkie-talkies, utilizing them to stay in touch with each other, but then being shocked when they pick up what sounds like signs of actual other human survivors who are broadcasting on the same frequency. Mickey seems especially taken with a female who is on the frequency, though she and a brusque sounding male tell the two to stay off the line (so to speak). Mickey implores them to let him and Ben join them, but they make it clear theirs is a closed society. But Mickey is smitten, and seems to be nurturing some major fantasies about the unseen woman.

As this scenario unfolds, Gardner stages several sequences that are simultaneously horrifying and hilarious (potential spoiler(s) alert). In one scene, Mickey stays in a car the two have found (after killing its zombie “driver”), while Ben explores a kind of dilapidated motel that could have been owned by Norman Bates. The scene is shot from Mickey’s perspective in the car, and as he watches in horror, two stumbling zombies emerge from one of the motel rooms. Ben is out there, totally nonplussed, armed with nothing but his trusty bat, urging Mickey to man up and start dispatching these monsters as easily as Ben has been. The humor here is centered on the very fact that zombies don’t move very quickly, so even as Mickey becomes increasingly panicked, Ben just moves the zombies around like chess pieces, until of course he beats the living (and/or undead) daylights out of them with his bat.

Later, in one of the film’s most remarkable scenes, Ben is out foraging, leaving Mickey alone in the car. A zombie girl approaches and tries to get inside the vehicle. Instead of reacting in fear, Mickey gets seriously turned on by the girl’s bosom pressing up against the window and he begins to pleasure himself as the zombie female attempts to reach in through a small opening in the window. It’s a totally out there scene, one that veers precipitously from squirm inducing humor to absolute horror once Ben shows up and wastes no time in (once again) taking matters into his own hands (and then dissolving into uncontrolled laughter once he spies Mickey with his pants down around his ankles).

There are a number of similarly remarkable little moments scattered throughout The Battery, including a horrifying sequence where Ben “delivers” a zombie to Mickey, who’s asleep in a room in an abandoned house. Ben thrusts the zombie in the room, shouts to Mickey to wake up, and then holds the door closed, finally forcing Mickey to respond to an imminent threat without any aid (other than a bat that Ben has kindly left in the room). That engenders a subtle but noticeable change in Mickey’s demeanor, one that fuels some darker elements as the film wends toward its conclusion.

Jeremy Gardner is obviously a force to be reckoned with. He looks remarkably similar to a young, shaggy faced Vincent D’Onofrio, and he brings some of that actor’s patented intensity to his role. But perhaps his greatest achievement here is as “writer” and director. That “writer” appellation is put in quotes since Gardner is on record as stating there wasn’t a traditional screenplay, but instead a broad outline that the actors discussed before catapulting into scenes as improvisatory exercises. The laudable thing here is that there’s thankfully precious little of the self-serving fat that tends to append such attempts, and the story here is lean and lithe, concentrating on two guys in the midst of a crisis, rather than more traditional zombie tropes. Gardner’s directorial hand is similarly firm, with scenes well staged, and a remarkably lyrical approach to capturing scenes of a largely abandoned countryside through which the guys roam.

The Battery Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Battery is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory (an imprint of Shout! Factory) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Shot digitally (according to the IMDb, with a Canon 5D, a camera not exactly in the same league as higher tech models like the Red or Alexa), the film doesn't really offer mind blowing sharpness, but clarity is excellent, colors are accurate (when not graded) and the image is always stable. There's an almost Terence Malick feeling to much of the pastoral footage here, and while contrast is occasionally pushed (see screenshot 5), depth of field remains very good to excellent. Fine detail is also very good in close-ups. Considering the relatively lo-fi ambience of The Battery (including its filming conditions and technology utilized), things look remarkably good here. There are no problems with overt compression artifacts.

The Battery Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Battery's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 may not be the most explosive, effects driven mix in zombie film history, but it's rather surprisingly consistent in surround activity, with both ambient environmental effects, Ryan Winford's nicely realized score and some well chosen source cues by bands filling the side and rear channels. Dialogue is very cleanly presented, and the track offers excellent fidelity and no problems to cause concern. For the record, the disc also contains a somewhat more focused and narrow DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix that is perfectly listenable.

The Battery Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Tools of Ignorance: The Making of The Battery (1080p; 1:29:20) is a great in depth piece full of some fun (and often quite funny) interviews.


• Trailer (1080p; 1:59)


• Outtakes (1080p; 11:37) also includes some candid behind the scenes footage.


• Rock Plaza Central at the Parlor (1080p; 10:48) looks at the reunion of one of the bands providing music for the film.


• Commentary with Writer, Director and Actor Jeremy Gardner, Producer and Actor Adam Cronheim, and Director of Photography Christian Stella. Despite these guys' youth and relative inexperience, they offer an interesting commentary (the majority of which is Gardner). Gardner talks about some of the winnowing process that went on during the shoot, and Stella offers some interesting insight into the lo-fi shooting conditions.

The Battery Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Battery emerges as one of the more unexpected surprises of not just recent zombie flicks, but Blu-ray releases coming out this year. It will be interesting to see if Hollywood reaches out to Gardner, obviously a talent worthy of consideration, but it will also be interesting to see if Gardner is "spoiled" by huge budgets and an ability to indulge his every cinematic whim. The Battery is smart, funny and horrifying in equal measure, and it certainly marks one of the more audaciously successful feature film debuts of a writer-director-star in recent memory. Did Orson Welles ever make a zombie film? Recommended.