At work today we have been mainly watching films; the two Starship Troopers movies to be precise. You’ve probably seen the first one, Paul Verhoeven’s enjoyable satire on fascism and war propaganda; you probably haven’t seen the second, though: it went straight to video, got virtually no publicity and pretty well everyone ignored it. Well, I’ve seen it, and to save you the bother of seeing it yourself, I’ll summarise it in the form of a simple equation:

(Pitch Black + The Matrix + Alien + Species + The Thing) * 70s Zombie B-movie * 70s B-movie budget = Starship Troopers 2

It’s a terrible film. Awful. Really astonishingly bad. But (and here is where the views of myself and my co-workers start to differ) it’s so bad that it’s actually really enjoyable. Not in the same way as, say, The Usual Suspects or Amelie are enjoyable, of course, but in a 70s zero-budget horror-B-movie kind of way. The acting is comically bad – the dialogue is worse; the plot is wafer thin, and has almost zero connection with the original film; the characters are flimsy and the editing and direction are heavy handed and clumsy. The special effects, however, are actually rather good in places (the film was directed by the creature effects supervisor of the original movie) and there’s plenty of splatter-film style gore thrown around.

Indeed, this is far more of a zombie horror movie than it is science fiction – and once you realise this, it becomes infinitely more enjoyable as you see all the cliches of bad zombie films played out before you. This isn’t a film to sit down and critique on a scene by scene basis – this is a film to put on when you get back from the pub with your mates and you want something you can laugh at and cheer along with.

And hell, I enjoyed it, even if no-one else did.

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