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A meteor is about to hit earth, but gouvernment and NASA have been
lieing about its trajectory, which is why much of the population hasn't
prepared for an eventual fall-out and has arranged big meteor parties
instead. Billy (Chris Giese), whose family has owned a funhouse for
generations, has prepared though, and converted the whole place into a
bunker long ago. So he takes his friends Gordon (Jed Rowen), Cassie (Tasha
Tacosa) and young Ida (Remmy Jones) - and he would have taken more, but
none took the whole thing seriously enough - and they lock themselves
inside to live through whatever may be thrown at them. First tensions
arise when Ida desparately wants to go outside to look for her family, but
just opening the door would let enough radiation in to kill them all, so
eventually they have to shoot her dead, an event that leaves them all
scarred. However, their real test comes a few months later (with ratiation
levels already lower again) when a bunch of high risk convicts, accidently
released by a gang of scavengers, breaks into the funhouse to take over,
and all Billy and company have for their protections is the attractions
their horror-themed funhouse has to offer ... Richard Grieco can be seen
as a fellow survivor who's in constant radio contact with Billy and warns
him of the prison escapees, genre fave Michael Berryman plays one of the
scavengers who free the prisoners, and B movie veteran Vernon Wells is a
scientist who predicts the impact early on. Now admittedly, the
first act that's setting the premise up drags a bit too much and hammers
its point home too bluntly, and makes Billy come across as a bit of an
obnoxious know-it-all, really. But once the characters go into lockdown
and see their sanity and humanity slowly eroding is where things really
get interesting, also when other characters are given center stage and
prove to be damaged goods. Likewise, the temporary shift of the action to
the prison does the film lots of good, and the finale in the fun house is
properly creepy, all of which make this a very fine specimen of
post-apocalyptic entertainment that's sure to please not only the genre
fan.
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