13 Days of Halloween – Game Movie Adaption: Dead Trigger (2019)

Developed by Madfinger Games and released in 2012 for iOS and Android. Dead Trigger is a FPS (first-person shooter) zombie videogame. A popular game, it has been downloaded over 30 million times since October 2013. Just the sort of video game that should be adapted into a movie, right?

A zombie horror game turned into a zombie horror film, it should have been so simple. Yet, so irrelevant is the game to this film, that Madfinger Games withdrew their support after the script was altered radically.

The emd result was finally released in 2019 and was promptly ignored/forgotten about just about everyone. After seeing it, it’s easy to see why. A generic zombie horror with a nonsensical plot. Even the likes of Dolph Lundgren can’t lift this out of the doldrums.

The story is set in 2025 where a virus has wiped out billions and turned the dead into zombies hungering for flesh. It’s a war, one the government is losing, and they need new recruits. So they create a VR videogame called Dead Trigger that the youth of America can play. The aim of the game being to kill as many zombies as possible without becoming food for the dead.

However, it’s a propaganda game really and the government use the scores to select the best players to become actual soldiers. Yes, if your reaction to that is to laugh and shake your head, welcome to Dead Trigger. It’s not going to get any better as a new group of recruits are taken through their bootcamp training. It’s here that the actual star of movie steps into frame.

Walker (Lundgren) leads the recruits on a mission to Terminal City where they are to find a serum that may be the cure to the whole zombie pandemic. Of course, this quickly goes wrong as zombies, survivors, the Dead Trigger team and even a traitor clash.

With all its problems being made well-documented, it’s a miracle Dead Trigger even exists. However, everyone would be better off if it didn’t. It’s such a waste of time and if you’ve seen any zombie action movie before, you’ve seen what this movie has to offer.

The walking dead just isn’t enough anymore. You need good characters, you need good actors to portray them, you need a damn good story and you need a ton of blood, guts, and gore. We get none of this and it will be something of a miracle if most manage to get through to the end. Where we get a reveal/twist that renders everything seen so far even more pointless.

There’s absolutely nothing to recommend here. It’s just a complete waste of time. It’s not even worth getting worked up over how terrible it is because objectively, it’s not a terrible movie. It just exists and it shouldn’t.