“Day of Reckoning” is a pseudo-biblical horror movie that teams “Doom,” “Day of the Dead,” “The Walking Dead” and the Roland Emmerich disaster pornos in to one ball of baffling entertainment. “Day of Reckoning” is teeming with potential and actually manages to be entertaining every now and then. When a mining company accidentally unearths a hibernating brood of demonic monsters, the beasts arise from their slumber to begin wreaking havoc on humanity. The monsters are a variety of winged, stampeding, anthropomorphic demons with varying degrees of appearances and habits. Sometimes they’re a random herd of monsters, and sometimes they’re scheming and planning. They can poison people to apparently turn on everyone else, and they have a thirst for human flesh. Best of all they can be taken out by dousing them with enough salt.
Apparently, the “Day of Reckoning” is when Earth is finally draped in darkness and experiences God’s wrath in the form of an endless horde of merciless demons that proceed to destroy civilization–for a while. Seriously, if you organize yourself and wait, maybe play a campaign of “World of Warcraft,” they’ll eventually go back in to their holes waiting to bug the crap out of us for a day. In the center of the film are a disjointed family led by warring divorced mother and father David and Laura. Their son Tyler is in love with high school classmate, but things go awry when the apocalypse introduces itself. Now with the family having to re-unite to survive the onslaught of demons and eclipses, they venture out in to the wasteland and try to outwit the monsters.
Though “Day of Reckoning” has only snippets of a plot here and there, it manages to be quite engaging when it wants to, from the family’s efforts to get in to a shelter, to dad David racing to get his family to a bunker run by his uncle Ted. There’s also their dealing with a maniacal military officer who forces his way in to the bunker attempting to establish dominance among the rest of the group. If you can get past the rocky effects, and cast that all look half asleep, “Day of Reckoning” is decent horror action filler, with creative concepts, and some tense writing. I also quite enjoyed the brief appearances by Barbara Crampton and Raymond J. Barry.
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