To be fair to the two aforementioned flicks, KTaET is waaaaaay farther down on the budgetary production totem pole than either of them. And yet, as amateur as almost every aspect of it was, it was clearly made with love and a burgeoning group of talents who, with the proper experience and cash flow, could really make names for themselves in our beloved genre.

The flick is set in a not-too-distant Canadian future, where an evil corporation of the Weyland-Yutani persuasion has taken over almost every aspect of daily life, from the food you eat, to the cars you drive, to the maintenance of the city you live in. There are still a few zones, ragged slums mostly, which are outside the company’s control. It was into one of these zones that the aged Dr. Wallace Williams (Braveheart…attack victim!), a.k.a. Dr. Gore, escaped when he tired of the genetic work he did for the company. An outlaw scientist by the name of Greg Tobias took Williams in after corporate goons attacked him and left him for dead. Now, in the bowels of an abandoned factory, he and Tobias have set up a lab where their research is devoted to reversing the “genetic mask” process he developed with the company – a process which weeds out any unwanted genetic traits. Unfortunately, every human transient they’ve tested on has reverted into a deformed mutant cannibal, decaying on its feet.

Into this mess stumble Milo and Kellin, looking for a friend of theirs who fell victim to the mutants. Milo is captured and experimented on by the increasingly unstable Tobias, while Williams believes Kellin may hold hope for a cure to the mutation process. All the while, two agents of the company, which forbids any scientific work done outside its confines, are closing in on Tobias and Williams’s operation.

I’ll start with the bad stuff, which is for the most part negligible (at least in comparison to larger studio-backed flicks which suffer unforgivably from the same amateur problems). For one thing, the movie runs a bit too long. It gets boring in the middle, with Tobias and Williams sniping at each other repetitively over the same issues. The best tack to take when making a movie is to assume your audience is not retarded. If something important is laid out, take it for granted that they caught it, or are at least smart enough to figure out what’s going on later, and don’t keep repeating your main theme or conflict over and over again. That’s just going to insult people’s intelligence and irritate them.

Also, for being overlong, there’s a bit too much going on. The movie tries to be a buddy cop comedy while we’re with the company agents, and then a serious horror movie in the claustrophobic lab scenes, and then a Jackson- or Raimi-style slapstick gorefest when the monsters are around. These elements can all work together, but it takes a more experienced and steady hand for it to work like it should. You get a sense that, as crazy as things get, the movie really wants to go balls-out coat-the-walls-in-gore insane, and like as not the reason it doesn’t is that the production just couldn’t afford the kind of effects necessary to do it properly.

Now, on to the good stuff. The lab looks pretty much like a bunch of thrown-together junk, but that’s what it’s supposed to be in the story, so that’s a pretty brilliant copout right there. The abandoned factory, however, is a very effective location and goes a long way toward giving the movie a feel of being a more upscale production than it is. Funny how one good location, or one good actor (because while Sandy McDonald has only this one movie to his credit, he either does a lot of stage work or just knows what the hell he’s doing), or one talented dude in the FX department, can raise a movie above its station and make a seasoned veteran of crap-watching like me take notice.

This next one is a little thing, but the soundtrack is better than one would expect. Usually, if you have any songs at all in a movie like this, they feel misplaced, and they sound like the lo-fi friend-of-the-director-has-a-band-and-wanted-to-be-in-a-movie crap that they are. The songs in KTaET, while not the kind of stuff I would usually buy a whole CD of (it’s mostly punk and a bit of run-of-the-mill hard rock, but it sounds like it’s either professional recording bands, or very good amateurs), feel for the most part like they fit the movie in general and the places where they’re inserted specifically.

The thing that really grabbed me, as far as little details go, is the animation. That’s right, there’s animation in this bastard, too. Oh, it’s not animation like Attack of the Super Monsters (which we can probably be thankful for), but the titles are all hand-animated, as well as various little wipes and scene changes, which drool down the screen like blood, swirl around in a manner suggesting that the use of hallucinogenic drugs would enhance your viewing experience (not that we here at the Tomb condone that kind of thing, because we don’t…and there’s no need for you to look under that couch cushion, officer), or are ushered across the screen by strange little squiggly sperm beasties which I assume represent the infection caused by contact with a mutant cannibal.

Not only are the set pieces and the plot light-years ahead of KTaET’s super-independent movie brethren in terms of complexity; this flick gives us not only killer mutant cannibals ripping people’s faces off, it gives us not one, but two killer mutant cannibal vs. killer mutant cannibal slugfests. Granted, the monsters look like the retarded incest babies of the Creeper from Jeepers Creepers and one of the hotdog-mouthed fish beasts from Horror of Party Beach, but that’s still way more monster-on-monster action than the first Alien vs. Predator had, goddammit!

That said, you have to give this flick the respect it deserves for trying so hard to go that extra mile with so may limitations. Hell, most big-budget genre movies that make it into the theater don’t try nearly this hard to entertain the audience. They just prop themselves back on a pile of money and assume people will like it because it’s shiny. Fuck that noise, kiddies. People like Conall Pendergast are the ones we should be giving that money to, because they would be blowing our fucking minds on a weekly basis.