The Bunker (2024)
Those city-sized alien motherships are back, hovering in threatening fashion over major population centres on Earth. Dr Michelle Riley (Chelsea Edmundson), a microbiologist, is escorted to one of five identical underground bunkers by a blunt military handler (Christopher Matthew Cook), who explains that she’ll need to use a weird dentist’s chair with baffles affair to resist occasional alien scans that have prompted suicides. She’s working with other boffins – handsome nice guy Dr Ellis (Chad Michael Collins), aggressive asshole Dr Barlow (Cullen Douglas), Dr Cooper (Debbie Fan), Dr Bisset (Sharin Ibrahim) – under a mission controller, Major Lawrence (Tony Todd), tasked with developing a bioweapon that will wipe out the ‘travelers’ but leave humans unaffected. Between labwork, which involves dripping possible poison on alien and human flesh scraps, and scan attacks, natural paranoia affects everyone – and Michelle even questions the purpose of the project, while having guilty memories of her brother (Spencer Langston) and Dad (Tobin Bell).
Director Brian Hanson (The Black String), who also co-wrote with Charles L. Bunce, takes a leaf out of the Cube playbook by using one relatively elaborate set five times (with varied lighting effects) as he explores the kind of set-up which used to work so well on The Outer Limits. Large-scale catastrophes are happening offscreen – or are they? – but we’re down in an anonymous living/lab space with a protagonist who can’t really trust any of her team … even nice guy Ellis seems to have picked her for the project because he wants to ask her out, while everyone else is infected early with jitters and Michelle has vision flashes of gory deaths and creeping alien features. Do we even trust Clumsy, the Roomba who is her only companion in this hole. The Bunker is a nicely suspenseful, unnerving picture – with good work from Edmundson as humanity’s last hope.