After an accident a strange car with no owner is towed to a Chicago Police impound. The workers there start to notice unusual things going on. When one of their co-workers goes missing they set out to investigate where they are. This sets them head to head with the hybrid vehicle which only has two things on it’s mind: murder and escape. With the workers trapped in the impound they have to fight to survive any way they can.
At first i thought Super Hybrid was going to be a modern day incarnation of the old John Carpenter movie Christine. I was wrong. The movie is really nothing like Christine, except for the fact it has a car that kills and has no human driver.
Whilst Super Hybrid is far from the best movie i’ve ever seen in my life, it’s far from the worst also. The movie was supposedly made on a budget of $13m which ain’t really b-movie sized funding, yet it’s not the kind of budget you’d expect from an a-level movie either. This pretty much sums up Super Hybrid in a nutshell, it’s really a very fancy, high level production b-movie. Hey, i like my b-movies so that’s no problem for me, though the movie has some things that irk me.
The first half of the movie moves along well, we have the usual exposition of the characters and their motivations as well as being introduced to the car and it’s extraordinariness. The second half of the movie is really us following the characters around as the try to defeat the far using trickery… Sadly that gets boring quick. Most of the movie is spent in the bleak confines of the multi-level impound and it’s easy to lose your sense of location (you can’t tell which level is which) making the movie confusing at times.
The characters are OK. That’s about the best i could say, they’re just… OK, nothing memorable. The acting quality is acceptable if nothing startling. It’s obvious most of them are being set up to die so it’s tough to get involved with them.
The special effects standard is by and large… OK. Most of the time CGI is minimal but when it does show up it shows up bad. Super Hybrid will not be winning an Oscar for best visuals but by b-movie standards they’re fine.
It’s tough to get excited about recommending this movie cause it’s pretty average in almost all counts, though there are far worse movies you could see for sure. I guess if your bored enough and you can get it cheap, then go for it, just don’t expect too much.
Movie Details
Director: Eric Valette
Writer: Neal Marshall Stevens
Actors: Shannon Beckner, Oded Fehr, Ryan Kennedy, Melanie Papalia
Release Year: 2010