Mutant World
Doomsday preppers face mutants in a post-meteor world.
Mutant World, released in French as Independence Wars, is a 2014 Canadian-American television film blending neo-sci-fi, western, and horror. Directed by David Winning and written by Matt Campagna, it was produced by Nomadic Pictures for SyFy. The story follows doomsday preppers who leave their bunker a decade after a meteor destroyed civilization, only to find mutants have taken over. Filmed in Alberta, the movie stars Holly Deveaux as the group’s new leader, Ashanti as a mysterious woman following them, and Kim Coates as the original leader who saved them ten years earlier.
Quick Facts
- Writer
- Matthew Campagna
- Director
- David Winning
- Starring
- Holly Deveaux
- Ashanti
- Kim Coates
- Music
- Mitch Lee
- Country
- Canada, United States
- Language
- English
- Executive producers
- Chad Oakes; Michael Frislev
- Producer
- Petros Danabassis
Facts from the source article.
Plot
A doomsday prepper named Marcus King, who has long prepared for catastrophe, spots a massive meteor heading toward Earth with his son Geoff. The meteor is on course to strike a nuclear reactor. King quickly organizes his heavily armed group, and most of them, including Geoff and his daughter Melissa, reach their bunker—a converted missile silo—before impact. Melissa’s boyfriend Caden and King himself do not make it inside. A decade later, the bunker’s survivors are running low on food and medicine. When an outside disturbance disrupts the bunker’s power, they must send a team out to fix it. After a brief power struggle, a new leader, Melissa, leads Geoff, Rogan, Shaina, and Tyler outside, followed by a mysterious woman in black. They restore the power and begin to explore. The air is breathable, and people can live outside again. But they soon discover that humans exposed to the meteor’s radiation have mutated into cannibals. The mutants injure the group one by one, and after Geoff is shot in the leg with an arrow, they seek shelter. A man leads them to a town that looks like the Old West, where they meet Sheriff Elmore Leonard. As night falls, they learn that the town’s survivors transform into mutants after dark. Among them is Caden, who taunts Melissa as he attacks. The woman in black, Sadie, known as Preacher, is skilled at fighting mutants and knows of other non-mutated survivors. She joins the battle but does not survive. Melissa then takes on the Preacher role, continuing the search for survivors and sanctuary.
Production
Mutant World is a production of Calgary-based Nomadic Pictures, founded in 1995 by executive producers Chad Oakes and Mike Frislev, who gleefully called Mutant World a B movie, which he defined as 'big ideas brought to the screen with very little money'. Director David Winning, who regularly divides his time between Los Angeles and Calgary, having carved out a long history as a gun-for-hire director with a penchant for guiding actors through B-movie terrain, offered a slightly different take on making them: 'It's so tongue-in-cheek. You get into it and laugh and think "this is ridiculous" and then get pulled back into it. Which is the whole point of it when you have no money and are trying to stretch the story as much as you can, which is implausible to begin with.' Mutant World was the third television movie for SyFy written by Toronto-based screenwriter Matt Campagna, all of which have followed a certain formula: take a supernatural, action-packed premise, add an established character actor, and shoot it all cheaply and efficiently. The film's working title at the start of principal photography was Fallout Asylum. It is suggested that Campagna made an effort to ensure that many of the ideas in Mutant World have a grounding in real science, apart from the film's radioactive mutant premise. The star power of Mutant World comes from Sons of Anarchy actor Kim Coates, whose role in the film is small but meaty, requiring only three days for his scenes. He was asked to star in the film by its Calgary producers, Chad Oakes and Mike Frislev, who had a past relationship with the actor after casting him in 2008's coming-of-age drama 45 R.P.M., but he insisted on changes to the script to give his character a more poignant arc. Coates took the character seriously, keen on probing the strange mind of a paranoid doomsday prepper. Mutant World was shot over fifteen days in Calgary (the old Telus Science Centre served as the bunker's interiors), Strathmore, and the CL Ranch near Springbank. During principal photography, Coates sounded skeptical about whether it was possible to shoot this kind of film in so short a time: 'What worries me is we're taking less and less and less time to shoot. When I read the script and (heard) it was going to be done in 15 days, I lost my s — t.' Matt Campagna described it as 'a pretty wild time,' and was happy to have been given 'the gift of gorgeous snowfalls ... You can't even pay for that kind of production value!'
Release
Mutant World received a theatrical premiere at the Calgary International Film Festival on 28 September 2014, at the Globe Cinema, where it sold out. Eric Volmers describes the event as having a fitting 'late-night vibe', with zombies prowling the red carpet and posing with actors. 'It seemed three-quarters of the Alberta film industry was on hand.' David Winning recalled that his first red-carpet film premiere in Calgary took place twenty years earlier, with Killer Image, an Alberta-shot 1992 thriller starring Michael Ironside and M. Emmet Walsh; as well, his 1987 film Storm was screened at the Globe Cinema, and Winning said it was 'very weird' to be back.
Reception
Eric Volmers described Mutant World as funny, entertaining, and action-packed, occasionally recalling John Carpenter's films such as Big Trouble in Little China and Escape from New York. Chris Shalom compared it to World Gone Wild (1987), calling it a spiritual companion with a similar watered-down, goofied-up Road Warrior plot, both featuring a recognizable singer-actor (Adam Ant and Ashanti). Shalom noted that the tale of gun-toting survivors in a barren post-apocalyptic world is most interesting as a contemporary example of a sub-genre of high-camp sci-fi Westerns from the 1980s, listing Radioactive Dreams, Buckaroo Banzai, and Hell Comes to Frogtown. He observed that Mutant World is delightfully female-centric despite a largely male creative team, and that it simultaneously upholds and subverts the Reagan-era theme of father-son continuity, as Melissa's journey leads her to embody the mysterious Preacher rather than her father. Shalom found Ashanti's acting lacking and faulted the film for not being shot on film, saying it looks worse than it would have in the 1980s, and that TV-movie conventions strain the storytelling. However, he concluded that for its target audience, Mutant World is exactly what it needs to be, with constant action, colourful characters, and mutant blood splatters.
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