Ruptured Review: Taeter City

Country of origin- Italy

Year of release- 2012  

Director- Giulio De Santi   

Stars- Monica Munoz, Riccardo Valentini, Santiago Ortaez

The film is set in a dystopian futuristic metropolis called Taeter City. The city, and it seems the world in general has had some kind of crisis, and a despotic political figure known only as “The Authority” has gained power and begun to attempt to restore peace with an iron fist. The Authority is keeping the population in check by using special types of radio waves, known as the Zeed System. The Zeed System pre-emptively targets violent criminals and forces them to kill themselves instead of others. The Authority then use the corpses of the would be murderers as food at Taeter Burger, which is essentially The Authority’s figure head of “progress” and it’s used as a way of feeding the population.

However, the Zeed System backfires and mutates a serial killer called Trevor Covalsky, who then proceeds to mutate those around him by emitting the same radio waves that mutated him. The people that Trevor mutates become suicidal and homicidal and begin to murder, and mutilate everyone they come in contact with. The Authority send their troops, which are essentially somewhere between bikers, and Judge Dredd, to dispose of Trevor, but things quickly become apparent that Trevor will not be going quietly.

This is the second film made by Necrostorm, the company that brought us modern classics like Adam Chaplin and Hotel Inferno. But I’m sorry to say that this film doesn’t stand up against those two, and here’s why. Both Adam Chaplin and Hotel Inferno had fairly decent story line’s that ran at a good pace and allowed the film’s to gradually build momentum and coherency. This film however has a very choppy, stop-start feel to the plot, that made it feel much longer than its 80 minute run time. So all this film was left with was the typically brilliant Necrostorm gore and splatter, and a general atmosphere of slightly forced 80’s style cheesiness. Which were both fun, but they were not by any means enough to fill a whole film.

This brings me on to the gore, this has always been the main focus in Necrostom’s films, and this one is no exception. It features a mind blowing amount of extreme splatter and gore that is very well done considering the film’s low budget, and it’s over the top lurid look is very appealing to fans of old school 80’s gore fest films. Alongside the huge amount of gore there is sadly, but unavoidably some very poor CGI which considering the film makers budget and their history I can forgive, as it’s not down to laziness. Overall this is, despite its problems a fun film, to me it’s not as good as other Necrostorm work, but it’s still very much worth a watch, this one gets a 5.5/10 from me.