Penelope here. This blog is probably going to be about a lot of different things, including whatever is making my brain spin on a given day. Right now, that’s a movie I just watched called “The Day.” I saw it in the channel guide the other night while I was looking for something else and set it to record in the middle of the night. Last night I got around to watching it. It’s more than two years old so it seems like I don’t even need to apologize for the spoilers.

Apparently, I was not paying complete attention when I looked at the two sentence description in the guide because I had it in my head that it was a post-apocalyptic zombie movie. I like zombie movies. I was 20 minutes into the 85 minute running time before I realized it was just a post-apocalyptic slasher flick, which was disappointing on two counts. First, no zombies. Totally lame. Second, it took 20 minutes for anything to happen. In that time we learned that our five heroes are nomads in a mostly deserted landscape. They’ve been at it a while. They have guns but are running out of bullets. They are also running out of food. There used to be twelve so clearly things have not gone that well for them. They stumble onto a farmhouse and take refuge there from a rainstorm.

There, now you can skip the first 20 minutes or just multitask while it’s running. Things don’t really get going until the two women are sent into the forest to set animal traps, even though they whine about not having seen animals for a long time — more on that in a minute. The three guys stay in the farmhouse to do more manly things, which includes looking around in the cellar. After rooting around in the cellar, they think they have discovered a big pile of canned goods. Instead, what they find is bait and they trigger a booby trap that seems like it must have been dreamed up by Wile E. Coyote. One of the guys gets impaled right away by a huge, swinging wooden spike. The other two are trapped in the cellar and there’s a super loud alarm going off. They immediately recognize that they are caught in a trap set by a local tribe of cannibals and that the alarm bell means they can expect hungry visitors.

The two women hear the alarm and reach the same conclusion. While they are out and about, the tough one of the two kills one of the cannibals. So even before the real action starts, the score is girls one, boys zero.

Four or five cannibals show up at the farmhouse and rip up two floorboards so they can see what they’ve caught in the cellar. You can see through the cracks in the floorboards from the first scene in the cellar so I’m not sure why the guys trapped down there didn’t try to knock through them before the cannibals arrived. Oh wait, I do know. The guys are useless. The only proof of this you need is that cannibals staring down into the cellar at the two still alive do not have guns and our “heroes” do. Seriously, just shoot the smug little twitbag looking down into the four-by-four hole he has ripped in the floor — with remarkable ease, I might add. But, of course they didn’t. Useless.

What happened instead is that the two women return to the farmhouse, surprise the cannibals, and kill them. Mostly they do so with a machete, dagger, and two-headed axe — thrown across the kitchen into a cannibal’s back, thank you very much. To recap, the score is now girls six (maybe seven — it happened kind of fast and I didn’t feel like backing it up to count), boys (with guns) still a big goose egg.

At this point, our two real heroes (the women) should have gathered up their stuff and left the guys as a distraction for the next wave of cannibals. Instead, one (Shannon) turned on the other (Mary) after overhearing one of the cannibals discover that Mary was actually from one of the cannibal tribes. Drama ensues, including a gnarly scene in which the guy now in charge of our little group slices off the chunk of Mary’s thigh containing the cannibal brand and then makes her eat it. In spite of that, they work through their issues, hug it out, and decide to make a stand in the farmhouse. I assume that is because shooting the whole movie in and around one crappy old farmhouse saved some money.

As expected, the whole cannibal tribe descends on the farmhouse that night. One thing leads to another, Shannon kind of accidentally shoots the cannibal leader’s ten year old son in the face (don’t get me started on her), the nicer of the two remaining guys gets killed (he had a bad cough so he wasn’t gonna make it anyway), and three of them survive until morning.

To make amends for her previous cannibal ways, Mary offers to face the remaining cannibals alone while the other two sneak out the back. Not sure why the cannibals weren’t smart enough to cover the back door but they didn’t. Mary goes out to face the very angry cannibal dad only to discover that Shannon has punked her by taking the last six shells out of her shotgun. Shannon has dragged useless remaining guy pretty far away from the house before he grows a conscious and goes back to help Mary. He gets there just in time to go to town on a mess of cannibals with big rifle, complete with bayonet. In the biggest anti-climax of the movie, he just blows a hole in the burly cannibal dad. An epic showdown fight would have been better. Mary survives, but the now only semi-useless guy is mortally wounded. So he was a hero for about three out of the 85 minutes and Mary still finished the movie with the most notches in her machete handle.

Meanwhile, dead cannibal boy’s sister, who appears to be about fourteen, chases Shannon into a thicket and cuts her throat. Justice is done. The movie ends with the teenager wandering innocently to the battlefield outside the farmhouse. She finds her dead cannibal dad, mopes a little and then follows the solitary figure of Mary up the road. It seems like the parting message is going to be “post apocalypse relationships are complicated,” when the camera cuts to the younger girl’s hand quietly working a stone knife point into position to take out Mary. The camera jumps back to a wider shot just in time to show Mary turn and lop off the girl’s head with one backhanded swing.

Now about those animals. I’m completely unclear on what kind of apocalyptic event could leave some humans alive but utterly wipe out every single animal to the point that cannibalism is the only way to get your protein. Seriously, it seems far more likely that at least some of the animals would survive and then, in the absence of us messing up all their habitat, they would completely take over. It seems far more believable that our heroes would be hunted by ravenous wolves than by cannibals, but whatever, it was their movie not mine.