End of Days, Inc (2015)

directed by Jennifer Liao
Canada
83 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I don't know where this came from. It should have a lot more attention paid to it yet for whatever reason it hasn't made much of a splash. It's as good as pretty much anything else that did gain notoriety, possibly even better than a lot of things. The cast and crew aren't even that unknown- a lot of the actors have worked before and the writer wrote Ginger Snaps Back, for Pete's sake- but it's just not out there at all for whatever reason.

I guess since it's not that popular I should probably give a quick summary. Which I don't usually like doing, but with movies this obscure there's less of a chance that anybody reading these reviews would already know the plot. Basically: Four employees working what they think is their last day at a mysterious corporation are told that if they pull one final shift, they'll all receive a million dollars in severance pay. But the complications that final shift entails end up being nothing short of cataclysmic. There's more that goes into it but you can kind of extrapolate that from the title.

It's got that atmosphere- and I know I'm not going to do well describing this- of a low-budget movie that knows its stuff and either isn't afraid to show off that meager budget or just can't really do anything about the way it looks. Around the edges, the sets are very set-like; there's a particular lighting to it that might be half-deliberate but also half-lack of resources. You can tell it's a movie, the audio echoes in a certain way and all the acting has this certain practiced vibe to it, but this is where I probably hold the unpopular opinion, because I think all of those things added to how good it was. I got the feeling that the idea behind this movie was big and good enough to carry it beyond its means, and all of the actors do such a good job (even Mort the zombie) that it keeps the thing afloat.

I was scrounging around for at least some small criticism of it because from a glance at reviews it doesn't have the warm reception I'm giving it here, but I really think any faults are due to small details unrelated to its quality. The length is something of a problem, not because it's too long but because it's just hard to sustain a comedy for the length of an average movie without getting a little boring here and there. The beginning got me hyped up with how good it was but after a while when the quality kind of leveled out it felt maybe like it was getting milked more than it could handle. Still, though: Good beginning, bearable middle, decent end.

Things like this just don't get seen and it's frustrating. At this point there's basically a canon of movies that people consider "underseen" and that in and of itself is annoying because it means that you get all these movies that aren't widely-known, but in certain circles of the internet, you can't go a minute and a half without seeing them mentioned. They're the "acceptably" indie films- Frank, Short Term 12, Winter's Bone, things from the mid-2000s to the 2010s that get this hype that isn't proportional to the amount of critical success they got, while things like this remain un-spoken for.

One of these days I'm going to make a list of really really underwatched directors and post it on here. I'm fired up. My rating for this might be more than what it ultimately deserves but it represents that undiscovered niche that I'm really enthusiastic about.