Director/Photography – Michael Su, Screenplay – Adrian Milnes, Producers – Michael Mahal & Sonny Mahal, Music – Clint Carney & Ted Phelps, Special Effects Supervisors – Vincent J. Guastini, Julia Hapney & Eric Yoder, Makeup Effects – Haley Dunphy, Vanessa Giacoletti, Anthony R. Risen & Junior Rubio, Production Design – Sean Costello. Production Company – Mahal Empire Productions/Bootleg Films/Jeti Films/Spicy Ramen Productions.
Cast
Kate Watson (Sergeant Hernandez), Robert LaSardo (General Vasquez), Sarah French (Susan), Michael Paré (Colonel Charon), Dane Bingenhaimer (Lieutenant Whitmore), King Jeff (Private Sanders), William ‘Bill’ Connor (Big Jim Gill), Alexander Hauck (Captain Boyd), Johnny Huang (Private Lin), Zach Muhs (Dale Harper), Dee Cutrone (Mrs Gill), Kyosuke Nakamura (Lieutenant Nakamura)
Plot
A unit of soldiers under General Vasquez is in California as the country is overwhelmed by the zombie apocalypse. Vasquez gives a squad orders to hold a bridge until the state troopers arrive as backup. The squad set up position and plant explosives around the bridge. However, both the zombie onslaught and something that lurks beneath the bridge picks off their numbers. The captain is killed, meaning that Sergeant Hernandez has to take command. Along with the zombie horde, she is also forced to deal with a group of civilians who have sheltered nearby and are refusing to move.
Bridge of the Doomed was the seventh directorial film for cinematographer Michael Su. The Taiwanese-born Su has mostly worked in the horror genre as director where he has made other efforts such as The Revolting Dead (2003), Doomed (2007), My Demon Within (2017), Numbers (2022), Tommy Knockers (2022), 2025 Armageddon (2022), Bloodthirst (2023) and Transmorphers: Mech Beasts (2023).
Bridge of the Doomed is a zombie film. It comes out amid the vast eruption of zombie films that came about in the early 2000s with the likes of Resident Evil (2002), 28 Days Later (2002), Dawn of the Dead (2004), Shaun of the Dead (2004) and tv’s The Walking Dead (2010-22). That was before the genre toppled over into self-parody and combining zombies with deliberately ridiculous things. (For a full listing see Zombie Films).
Amidst this outpouring of zombie films, almost all of the genre’s fairly limited plot possibilities feel as though they have been exhausted. It is slim pickings trying to find anything amid new releases that offers an original treatment. Bridge of the Doomed is no different in this regard, although is one of the rare serious zombie films still being made. It is essentially a zombie version of Zulu (1964), a classic, historically-based film that had a small group of soldiers defending a location – a fort in Africa in that film, a small bridge here – against an attack by massively overwhelming numbers.
Robert LaSardo as General Vasquez
Michael Su offers up some moderately furious military combat action and that is about it. There is never too much more to the film than the soldiers defending the bridge against zombies. For all that, Su never pushes the material to any kind of gripping tension as you wish he would. There are encounters with a group of other people encamped nearby and some conflict between both groups, but this never comes to a particular head of steam. Also the film’s low budget comes into play – the titular bridge, for instance, is a small one over a stream that is only about thirty feet across that leaves you wondering why this is so crucial to halting the zombie onslaught.
I was initially intrigued by the synopsis “A group of soldiers are ordered to hold a bridge during a zombie outbreak but what lives underneath the bridge, proves to be even more deadly.” This makes it sound like there is a fairytale Troll under the bridge, which seemed a uniquely different take for a zombie film. And towards the end of the show, Kate Watson goes into hand-to-hand combat with a troll-like creature in a cave, although we are given no explanation about what it is and it never features any further than that.
Kate Watson takes the lead and proves moderately kick-ass. The top-billed name is Robert LaSardo. Ever since LaSardo caught my attention in tv’s Nip/Tuck (2003-10), I have always had the image of him as a cartel leader and he has played other similar roles. However, this typecasting makes it a stretch to accept him as a decent general here. Not to mention that Michael Su has a way of shooting LaSardo that makes him look much shorter than everyone around him.
