Bullet Points: Guns of Eden

In this installment of Bullet Points, I will be breaking down the latest film from Uncork’d Entertainment… 2022’s Guns of Eden…

• End of Shift: Megan (Alexandra Faye Sadeghian) and Jeremy (Peter Johnson) are two beat cops with the Buffalo PD. When their shift is over the two cops make their way to a nearby convenience store where Megan plans to grab a six pack, before she heads home to unwind for the evening. If my theory that parking garages are the most dangerous places in all of actin movies is correct, convenience stores would have to be number two on the list. I say this because mere moments after Megan and Jeremy enter the convenience store, a troublesome couple enters with intentions of robbing the place. Their robbery plans may have worked too if not for the fact that two off duty cops were in the store and it is not long before both would be thieves are taken down. There’s no time to celebrate a job well done however, as a uniformed officer shows up, seeing the plain clothes wearing Megan and Jeremy with their guns drawn and mistakes them for the bad guys…. that’s about the time Megan’s gun accidently goes off, killing the cop and changing her life in an instant.
• I Want to Get Away: After the incident at the convenience store, Megan went on leave from the police force and finds herself more often than not drinking her blues away at a local bar. It is at that bar that her friend/partner Jeremy tracks her down. Jeremy is going camping with some friends and thinks it would be a great idea if Megan tagged along… Megan agrees and soon finds herself heading up to Eden County with Jeremy and his friends Blake and Gabriella for a weekend of roughing it in the great outdoors. Things start off innocently enough for the foursome, sitting around the camp fire and enjoying their surroundings. Megan decides she wants to clear her head and go for a hike… Jeremy soon catches up with her and that’s when they see the local police force kill an unarmed man.

• Preaching to the Choir: The police department in these parts is more like a militia, in fact their reserves are nothing but militia men who trace their roots back to the Minutemen of the American Revolutionary War. The ring leader of the group is Sheriff Preacher (Bill Kennedy) As for the man that Megan and Jeremy saw Preacher and his men kill in cold blood, he was Eduardo, the last man standing in a meth operation that Preacher and his men broke up earlier in the day. Now cops going on a drug bust is standard operating procedure, but doing so without a warrant is not. However Preacher does his best to enforce his laws without a paper trail… making it his standard operating procedure. When Megan and Jeremy saw the man, he was digging graves for his three fallen accomplices and after he threw the shovel down and told Preacher to dig them himself, that is when Preacher and his men shot Eduardo and then seconds later realize that Megan and Jeremy saw them shoot Eduardo!
• Targets on Their Back: Megan and Jeremy rush back to their campsite and gather up their friends Blake and Gabby… they need to get the hell out of there and find someone who can help. But like many a classic episode of The A-Team, there is only one road out of town and Preacher’s police force has roadblocks set up so they are going to have to try to evade their hunters on foot in the woods. Sheriff Parker calls in his reinforcements and business is about to pick up action wise as multiple teams of militia men and women go on the hunt with a $10,000 award for each of the four campers they can bring back DEAD or ALIVE. But then it happens, they push too far and they “trigger the wrong bitch” and Megan stops being the hunted and starts being the hunter!

Alexandra Faye Sadeghian’s Megan is the highlight of Guns of Eden. With the odds stacked against her, with her back against the wall, Megan’s training and instincts kick in and she starts laying waste to the bad guys and there are plenty of bad guys to lay waste to.

When it comes to bad guys it seemed to be more about quantity than it was quality… there’s Preacher and then there are a bunch of factions of interchangeable characters that don’t have time to make much of an impression, however they do make great cannon fodder for Megan.

Props to writer/director Gregory Lamberson for the look of the movie… there are times that Guns of Eden has a real retro feel to it, like it could have been an AIP movie from back in the day and I am absolutely here for that. A sequel is teased and if it happens, I hope they go even more AIP in that one.

Guns of Eden will be available on DVD and VOD this Tuesday, December 6th, courtesy of Uncork’d Entertainment.