The Battery: The Best Zombie Movie You’ve Never Heard Of

Halloween is right around the corner and that means, if you’re like me, your thoughts are currently dominated by two things: eating all of the candy your kid collects while trick-or-treating and watching horror movies. For years, I’ve been a huge fan of zombie movies. At what was probably much too young of an age, my older brother introduced me to George A. Romero’s masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead, and its sequels, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. After watching them back-to-back-to-back over the course of two days, I was terrified and had nightmares for weeks. But I was hooked. Since then, I’ve gone out of my way to consume just about every piece of zombie-related pop culture I can get my hands on. With zombies having exploded in mainstream popularity over the last 10 to 15 years, you would think this is a great time to be a zombie fan. But the sad reality is, outside of AMC’s The Walking Dead (which itself can be hit or miss), an occasional big budget flick that gets it right (28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Zach Snyder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake), and a couple of cult favorites (Dead Snow, the kinda-about-zombies-but-maybe-not-really Pontypool), most of the dreck that fills the zombie genre is subpar at best.

What keeps me coming back, though, is the possibility of discovering a hidden gem like The Battery, which is the best and most original zombie movie to come along in years.

The premise of The Battery is simple: Two hipster minor league baseball players — Ben, the brash, fearless alpha-male (who looks like he could be a long lost Avett Brother), played by the film’s writer/director, Jeremy Gardner; and Mickey, the sensitive, music-loving shoe-gazer who sports boy-band hair and a sweet Van Dyke, played by the film’s co-producer, Adam Cornheim — navigate the Connecticut countryside several months after zombies start roaming the earth. The guys aren’t exactly best friends. Before society started circling the drain, the pair played ball for a farm club in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Ben was the starting catcher and Mickey was a relief pitcher. While their personalities and priorities couldn’t be more different, circumstances have bound them together for better or worse.

The titular phrase “the battery” takes on multiple meanings over the course of the film. In baseball terms, the battery is the unit consisting of the pitcher and catcher, a description that summarizes Ben and Mickey’s relationship in the simplest of terms. But battery also is defined as “the crime of…unconsented physical contact with another person, even where the contact is not violent but merely menacing or offensive.” By that definition, there is plenty of battery that occurs over the course of the film, both of the violent and menacing varieties, enacted by zombies and humans alike. On the most literal level, batteries — the everyday types that power everything from Mickey’s beloved Discman to the station wagon they violently repossess from a reanimated corpse — play a prominent role on several occasions, as well.

The Battery strips away the huge set pieces and sprawling casts that are so prevalent in most zombie productions these days. According to Gardner, The Battery was “filmed in 15 days with a budget of only $6,000.” That’s an amazing feat when you consider how beautiful the film looks and how effective it is at creating a believable world. You can count the number of speaking parts in the film on one hand, most of the scenes play out in natural settings such as deserted back roads, open fields or wooded groves, and the filmmakers succeed in conveying the scope of the outbreak despite the fact that there are never more than about a baker’s dozen zombies on the screen at one time.

This being a zombie movie, there are scenes and tropes here that you’ve probably seen before, like scavenging for items in abandoned homes and random zombies appearing at the most inconvenient times. But the filmmakers explore plenty of territory mostly heretofore unchartered in the zombie genre, including a scene where Ben forces Mickey to face his fears in the most dick-headed way possible, and one notably cringe-worthy moment in which Mickey has a close encounter with a relatively attractive female flesheater and, well, since KSR is a SFW-site, you’re best off watching the scene for yourself to see how it unfolds.

But strip away the constant threat of being eaten alive by monsters, and The Battery is a classic indie road movie at its core. It is filled with plenty of scenes of the leads discussing life during less vicious times, as well as a handful of powerful, quieter moments that depict the pleasure the characters derive from momentarily enjoying some of the simple joys of their former lives, like sleeping in a bed, listening to a great song, scratching off a winning lottery ticket, or brushing their teeth. These are the types of moments that, if you found yourself plopped down in the middle of the world’s end, would undoubtedly make up the majority of your remaining days, but which are often forgotten, overlooked or pushed aside in big-budget zombie movies.

You can’t talk about The Battery without mentioning the movie’s final act. Without giving anything away, I’ll say that the last 20 minutes of this movie — and, in particular, a nearly 7-minute stretch that you will know when you see it — just might represent the ballsiest decision a filmmaker has made in recent memory. During the climatic moments of the film, Gardner has the confidence to let the audience sweat it out with his character in real time. And while more mainstream films would cut away to drop you in the center of the action and show you the blow-by-blow in graphic detail, The Battery creates one of the most tension-filled scenes in zombie movie history simply by letting the viewer’s imagination run wild. I can’t think of a film’s ending that I have enjoyed more or found more satisfying so far this year, and that’s saying something considering the last few weeks alone have brought us a lineup of really solid films including Gravity, Rush, Captain Phillips, and Prisoners.

I’m hesitant to use this descriptor, because the phrase is a bit loaded these days and with it comes all sorts of slightly negative connotations, but this is a “small” movie. The action is contained, there are no major sets and the special effects are almost entirely practical. In the right hands, this could be staged as a play with a small cast on a barebones stage. But the restrictions that are inherent in low-budget, indie moviemaking are exactly what make this film such a standout in today’s crowded, zombie-infested pop culture wasteland. That means if your idea of a perfect zombie movie is a loud, fast-paced, CGI-fest like Resident Evil or World War Z, this may not be your cup of tea. But if you’re looking for a reprieve from the uber-slick zombie flicks of the last decade or so and long for something that harkens back to the original Romero trilogy and the genre’s gritty roots, you’re going to love The Battery.

The Battery is available to rent or purchase on iTunes, Amazon Video and a variety of other services. Or you can buy a DRM-free copy directly from the film’s official site for only $5.

@TheSEShepherd