The Battery (2012)
★★ — The Battery (2012)
There is a version of the zombie film that has nothing to do with gore counts or crowd-pleasing set-pieces, and The Battery (2012) sits squarely in that corner. Written, directed by and starring Jeremy Gardner, the film follows two former baseball players, Ben and Mickey, as they wander rural Connecticut in the aftermath of a zombie outbreak. The title is a baseball term: in the sport, the battery refers to the pairing of pitcher and catcher, and the film uses that idea as its central metaphor, two men who need each other to function but who are fundamentally ill-matched as people. Ben is pragmatic and hardened; Mickey is withdrawn and reluctant to engage with the reality around them. It is, in many ways, less a horror film than a character study that happens to feature the undead hovering at the edges.
The production came out of O. Hannah Films and was made on a reported budget that the author himself addresses in his review below, so we will leave that figure for him to land. What is worth noting in terms of context is that Gardner handled writing, directing and the lead role simultaneously, which is no small undertaking on any production, let alone one assembled with minimal resources in the Connecticut countryside. The film found its audience largely through festival screenings and word of mouth, and it sits in a tradition of American indie horror that prioritises atmosphere and relationship dynamics over spectacle. It draws natural comparisons to low-budget genre work from the preceding decades, including the original wave of independent zombie cinema that Gardner's film is clearly in conversation with. For a sense of how other horror films handle restraint and ambiguity, it is worth looking at You Won't Be Alone, another horror film reviewed here that leans heavily on mood rather than conventional genre mechanics, or Castle Freak, another horror entry from the blog that takes a different approach to low-fi dread.
On screen, the film rests almost entirely on the shoulders of its two leads. Gardner plays Ben, and Adam Cronheim takes the role of Mickey, with supporting appearances from Niels Bolle, Alana O'Brien and Jamie Pantanella. Because the film is structured around the friction between its two principals, Cronheim carries a significant portion of the dramatic weight, and the chemistry (or lack of it) between the two men shapes the viewer's experience from beginning to end. The film does not offer much in the way of plot machinery to fall back on when that central dynamic starts to strain, which makes casting a particularly loaded decision for a production of this type. Whether Gardner pulled it off is, of course, the question, and that is where the review below comes in. For a broader sense of how other small, drama-led films from the same decade fared under the same critical eye, Luigi and Lost Boy in Juba are both worth a read.
For the first hour, nothing happens The fact that they made this entire film on a $6k budget (considering Night of the Living Dead cost $10k in 1968) is pretty fucking outstanding. That being said, I do have to be honest with my review. I'm a huge fan of zombie films in general and The Battery is just not even "ok" for a zombie film. The major issues are Mickey is just an unbelievable character. He doesn't carry a weapon, refuses to destroy the undead, listens to music through headphones all the time and generally seems to be clueless about their situation. Also, the actor who plays Mickey is just a downright bad actor. The other issue is that because the film has such a low budget, there are long periods where nothing much happens at all. I'm talking the first hour of the film, save for maybe a few minutes here n there, you can pretty much skip. On the hour mark something interesting happens but even then, 10-15 minutes later it leads to a scene where for like 5 minutes you're just watching someone have a cigarette in a car and the proceeding moments are very predictable. Then... finally... it ends like a netflix movie. No conclusion. No clarity. Just sudden end. Overall I would say this is a below average movie. Only really watch if you're a fan of zombie cinema, but like I say huge credit to the director/writer/lead actor for getting this off the ground with a tiny budget, it just shows.
And that, I think, is about the size of it. There is genuine admiration to be found here for what Gardner managed to pull off logistically, and I would not want that to get lost. Getting a feature-length film made and distributed on that kind of money, whilst carrying the thing as writer, director and lead, takes real graft and a fair amount of nerve. But admiration for the effort and enjoyment of the finished product are two separate things, and The Battery asks you to sit with very little for quite a long time before it pays anything back, and even then the return is modest. For zombie completists, it is worth a single watch out of curiosity. For everyone else, there are better ways to spend an hour and forty minutes. Sometimes the budget excuse only stretches so far.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2012 | Watched: 2025-04-20
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Battery (2012) on YouTube
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