The Last Survivors (2014)

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

There is nothing redeemable about this awful piece of tripe. Holy isht was it bad. The whole movie is about some 17-year old girl trying to fix a Cesna. She goes through some hard times trying to find a distributor cap for the plane. ... That is the ENTIRE synopsis. Eff the Cliff's Notes. That's the movie.Seriously, skip it. It's ... HORRIBLE. Bad acting, bad casting, bad story, bad cinematography, bad ... everything. THe final boss- monster fight is her and another chick fighting with a (I isht you not) katana. Yup.Bad in EVERY way possible.Now, if you are a North Korean prison warden ... you should put this movie in your inventory, and play it on repeat. Everyone else? ... Avoid at ALL costs. If someone puts this DVD in your Christmas stocking this year ... burn their house to the ground, and go pee on the ashes.Couldn't POSSIBLY be worse, unless it was made in Nigeria, by some random prince. I am angry that I watched the whole thing. Granted, about halfway through, I realized it was in a flat spin, losing altitude, but I stuck it out. I suffered so that you don't have to. Eject. Eject. EJECT!!!

The well wants us to believe that Oregon is out of water....here's a hint go left to the ocean and start desalinating....it's a post apocalyptic movie that revolves around a girl that does everything except eat for 40 days...in which case she would be dead...she is trying to take care of a guy named Dean that you really begin to hate about 15 minutes into the movie....all he does is sleep and complain, when he finally dies I actually yelled hooray!......She eventually finds a means to escape, but does the the stupid thing and opts for revenge. Overall this entire movie sucked, but I will give props to Haley Lu Richardson for actually trying to make this an interesting movie.....she's a good actress, but just got cast in a horrible movie. I mean come on, all they want is water...and one guy eats half a peach 40 days later....it's not a survival movie...it's a joke.

Saw this at the Leiden film festival 2014 (LIFF), where it was selected for the American Indie Competition. Given is a post-apocalypse situation, after all water disappeared from a large area. Some farm houses are still more or less intact, with a few sparse inhabitants who try to survive with limited resources and nearly defective equipment. Our main character is 17 year old Kendal, involuntary head of a household that consists of herself and her handicapped brother with ailing kidneys. At the other end of the spectrum we have a greedy water baron, who claims all of the (little) still available water, collects it underground in water tanks, and is supported by a small army that doesn't shy away from lethal violence. As a result, he makes it more and more difficult for everyone in the area to pump up the water they need for their survival.Our main character Kendal has lots of luck, she is resourceful and armed with plenty of determination. As the story progresses she remains standing, contrary to many others with ill intentions. Kendal even has her way with a sword. Moreover, along the line of sheer luck, her brother with the ailing kidneys who can only walk with crutches, succeeds in shooting three men in a row, in spite of the latter being armed and normally impose their will by means of those armory. It shows desperation all right, but it stretches our belief that this can happen for real.Beautiful shots of a desolate area, leaving us wondering how this situation came about. I'm not sure, contrary to another reviewer, whether it would have improved our viewer experience if we had known more about the background of brother and sister, and similarly about the reason of the water shortage. The background is hidden along the story, and is revealed sufficiently for us to understand a bit of the context. The message we take away is that there is no hope for the nearby future.Another irrational element in the plot is Kendal's desperate chase for a distributor cap of the correct type, that fits a plane in a hangar seemingly belonging to no one. She goes at every length in finding the distributor cap, checking every car or van within reach, in order to get the plane in the air. She hopefully assumes that the rest of the plane is in perfect order (it does not look that way from our viewpoint). This chase for missing motor parts is a constant theme throughout the running time.The label Horror is not correct by my standards, due to missing creepiness throughout. Yet it has all the elements of a slasher movie, that maybe being the reason for the Horror label, coming from the continuous killing that seems necessary in the survival of the fittest process as demonstrated here.None of the flaws summed up above keep us from intensely following what happens on screen, and feeling along with Kendal and her brother. They seem the only ones standing up against the greedy water baron, in short a perfect candidate for a young female heroine to sympathize with. Due to their lone position we cannot expect them to survive until a final solution is reached, nor do we see a viable strategy to leave the area. Yet, they come a long way, much farther than we could have assumed. For spoilers sake, I cannot tell more about how this story works out eventually, but anyway it is different from what I had expected.All in all, depressing landscapes, mixed with little hope for some form of escape from the harsh reality due to defective equipment and limited resources all around. From the "post apocalypse" situation that is the center of the action, we cannot expect an "enjoyable" experience. Nevertheless, the believable acting, the camera work in and around the abandoned farms, and the desolated landscapes, all of that cooperates nicely to let us leave the theater satisfied. Also, no action or violence for the sake of it, but what we get perfectly fits in the story line. In conclusion, I am fully prepared to overlook the flaws that I summarized earlier.

'The Well' was the opening film at the inaugural Other World's Austin Sci-Fi festival this year. Directed by Tom Hammock, the film is set in a post-apocalyptic Oregon where we are informed that 'the rains' have simply stopped some ten years ago (from the not too distant future) and the last remnants of a once fertile valley struggle to survive as their most precious resource - water - systematically becomes more and more scarce. Teen Kendal is one of such survivors that hides out in an abandoned farmhouse with a character whose name I forget. Meanwhile we learn that there is villainous figure surrounded by his many zealots that scour the valley, hunting for survivors who he claims are using his water without his permission (as he has claimed the remaining water in the valley and thus the land). As one of these few remaining holdout survivors, Kendal scrounges for water and supplies why searching fruitlessly for a distributor cap to aide in the repairs of an old airplane (that her group dreams of escaping in). The film itself started off fairly slow though it kept my attention with an intriguing plot and a fairly convincing performance by Haley Lu Richardson. She grows to be a bad-ass through the film battling her foes with her trusty shotgun and eventually a katana. It isn't outrageous or over the top like you'd see in a Tarantino or Rodriguez style film but it still has that 'this is still a low budget sci-fi' charm to it. She gives a decent performance that is not only mildly genuine, but also just felt right for this type of survival flick. The cinematography is decent and gritty at the same time and really lends itself to feeling the sparseness of the wasteland. Other than Kendall and maybe the villain played by Jon Gries, the characters and their development aren't too memorable, but it isn't glaringly sub- par. It's a solid little movie with some fairly decent suspense and action sequences as well as the much needed creepy-factor from both the landscape and the gas-mask wearing henchman.At any rate, I enjoyed The Well for what it was and what it was not. It's clearly not a big budget film, but yet it still manages to capture the magic and intrigue of films like The Hills have Eyes, Mad Max, The Road, as well as a host of other post-apocalyptic films. Like I said – the dialogue isn't all that great and some of the supporting characters are occasionally painful in their deliveries and screen presence, but overall it was still a fun little movie to watch. If you're like me, you'll probably get annoyed by some of the hiccups in the 'attention to detail' category as well as the fact that in a completely barren wasteland, the main character has inexplicably fantastic hiding skills. Seriously, she just runs across the desert and no one spots her or thinks to check behind the door-frame when she's hiding out in a house.