Tsunambee is one of those movies which is so howlingly bad it makes your eyes bleed; or at least it makes you wish your eyes would bleed because at least it would mean you hadn’t wasted an entire eighty minutes of your life and that there might be a vague chance you’d remember the experience a couple of days later. Really, this is just terrible. “Atmospheric catastrophes” (could ya make that a bit vaguer for us?) cause havoc in Los Angeles; onscreen this means some seriously shonky loose-change CGI depicting a few burning buildings and a crashing helicopter. A handful of survivors flee the city (fleeing the film might have been a wiser move) and end up in one of those achingly bland wildernesses so beloved of painfully cheap B-movies. Before long this mismatched bunch are attacked by – there’s no easy way to put this – a plague of giant killer bees (which actually look like wasps and are described as such in what we might generously describe as “the script”) which appear from nowhere, killing people and turning them into zombies. That’s right, zombies.
So far, so tedious and terribly badly realised. The effects are uniformly risible, the acting pitiful (there are performances here which will make you want to chew your own knees) and the drama distinctly undramatic – apart, oddly, from one sequence where the car these losers are fleeing in crashes and hangs precariously over a cliff for five minutes. Eventually the survivors of this group come across a farmhouse inhabited by a good ol’ God fearin’ father and his young daughter and, as the already sluggish pace grinds to a halt, we suddenly realise that what we’re watching is an extremely clumsy faith movie. You gotta believe! You gotta have Faith! God wants us to survive! Scene after interminable scene drags by with characters discussing their faith and putting their faith in God and praying for salvation and on and on until, presumably, the End of Days. Now we’re not suggesting for one moment that faith movies don’t have their place in the cinematic scheme of things but Tsunambee (was a film ever more haplessly titled?) is about as subtle as a sledgehammer or, perhaps more aptly, a sting from a giant bee/wasp/whatever-the-Hell-these-things-are and the religious pontificating seems utterly out of place and genuinely awkward and unsubtle in what purports to be a scary (it isn’t), exciting (if only), apocalyptic (the sooner the better) thriller.
Tsunambee could have been a ‘bad movie’ in the style of one of the SyFy Channel’s cheapos, it could have done for bees (or wasps) what the Sharknado series has done for our finny friends from the deep blue sea. Not a chance. Terrible performances abound, the incidental music rarely fits in with what’s happening on-screen and even a ‘shock’ ending is utterly unable to redeem a film which has been so inept and, most unforgivably, bloody boring for so long. Oh, and did we mention the entirely superfluous zombies? Bee off with you, Tsunambee…never darken our hives again.
TSUNAMBEE / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: MILKO DAVIS / STARRING: STACY PEDERSEN, RUSELIS AUMEEN PERRY, SHALE LE PAGE, MARIA DECOSTE / RELEASE DATE: TO BEE CONFIRMED (GEDDIT?)
