The ol’ President of Earth (Irene Santiago) drops some nukes to end an alien invasion which naturally results in some friendlies getting the all over suntan. So she pops off to an orbiting space station to rule from the sweet, sweet vacuum of space. Enter Sarah (Shannon Hutchinson), a science minded teen who gets chosen to visit the space station, along with smiley genius Brooke (Yael Haskal), sullen Charlie (Jasmina Parent), and pint-sized douche-nozzle boy Tom (Johnathan Newport)…all accompanied by their hard-ass overseer Commander (Vito Trigo). Before you can say “What could go wrong in this scenario?”, an assassin shots the Prez and sets of a time bomb forcing those aboard to jettison to the beautiful, yet hostile, forest planet below. Soon our youthful heroes are up to their noses in alien parasites, body horror, and hot buttered murder…okay, the murder is just regular murder…
Holy hell boils n’ ghouls; Writer/Director Drew Bolduc has really delivered with Assassinaut! While deftly blending elements of the youth adventure, sci-fi action, body horror, slasher, and creature feature genres into a heady ghoul-ash, the film also presents a tale rife with suspense, drama, and the inevitably of maturing…so yeah, there’s a whole lot of things to digest over this film’s nearly eighty minute runtime!
While all of that biz is going on, the film also manages to present a fully realized world with a dense and fascinating mythology complete with it’s own politics, revolutions, alien beings, and clandestine governmental secrets. Assassinaut also manages to deliver it’s own idiosyncratic sense of rhythm thanks to the calculated, often cold, delivery of the film’s dialog by a talented group of thespians more than up to the task.
Speaking of acting, Shannon Hutchinson truly steals the show as our heroine Sarah. This powerhouse goes from child wunderkind lost in her own world of space fantasy daydreaming and scientific study to wide-eyed space explorer to cold, slightly lost young adult with a very uncertain future…all of which she plays with equal skill and aplomb.
Also of note are the rock solid special effects present in this flick; you get surprisingly solid CG work (for space shots and the like), along with top shelf practical gore, alien creature, and transformation effects that really made this horror hound stand at attention and drool!
Look, you cats n’ creeps know that I don’t mince wicked words, so you’ll believe me when I say that Assassinaut is well and truly the shit; and you need to cast your putrid peepers on it as soon as you get the chance…it’s rare to see such a fully realized universe on the screen, and we should all praise the fact that it’s a universe of horrors!