DEAD SPACE: AFTERMATH

A made-for-DVD sequel to a made-for-DVD prequel to a videogame . . . We think.

This sequel of sorts to 2008’s Dead Space: Downfall has been released to coincide with the release of Electronic Arts’ Dead Space 2 game and is aimed squarely at fans of this particular horror / sci-fi videogame franchise.

Normally we’d be tempted to say that there can’t be too many of them around since Dead Space: Aftermath is languishing at number 3, 750 in its sales category at Amazon.com at the time of writing, behind even a 21-year-old title such as Stephen King’s It (that thing with the evil clown, remember?) even though it is a relatively new release.

But that isn’t true: the PlayStation 3 version of Dead Space 2 is actually hovering at the number 3 position on Amazon.com, which means that (a) the movie is being marketed poorly and Dead Space fans simply don’t know about it or (b) Dead Space fans remember what a waste of time the first made-for-DVD animated movie was and can’t be bothered.

We’d like to think (b). Dead Space: Aftermath is more of the same violent anime style horror as the first film. Except it now undergoes an even more fatal creative misstep by adding clunky CG animation to the mix. The story is told largely in flashback, making it one of the few slasher flicks in which you know in advance which characters are actually going to survive the slaughter. One half of the movie set in the present and is filmed in the sort of amateurishly crap 3D CG animation that you expect to see for free on YouTube. (It looks really crap.)

The flashback scenes are told in anime-inspired 2D animation of the sort you see for free on Cartoon Network (except for the gore and profanity of course). Considering that the story is an unoriginal mesh up of Event Horizon and Alien with the sort of clichéd dialogue Hollywood screenwriters churn out in their sleep, you’d have to consider option (c) why Dead Space: Aftermath is underperforming in the sales charts: fans can’t be arsed with actually paying for it and is downloading it for free from the Internet. And who can really blame them?

(The plot? Oh yeah, doomed spaceship crew bring onboard an alien shard that screw with their minds and turns them into homicidal psychopaths while already dead crew members are being turned into zombie alien monsters. One can only assume that aliens designed it as a practical joke of sorts since it serves no purpose other than to serve as a plot device in a made-for-DVD sequel to a made-for-DVD prequel to a videogame.)