Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Project Legion’ on Hulu, a Far-Beyond-Cheapo Sci-fi Vehicle for Donald Cerrone

Project Legion (now on Hulu) is a showcase for Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone, the retired mixed martial artist who’s now taking a stab at acting. A handful of small roles – most notably in Spenser Confidential, The Harder They Fall and Netflix series Godless – preceded Project Legion, which, to be charitable, appears to be caught in a rear naked choke by a budget comparable to my eight-year-old’s weekly allowance. It’s pretty rough sledding, and the question here is whether we’ll make it to the end without tapping out first. 

PROJECT LEGION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Three heavy-duty commandos trek through a graveyard at night. A voice from nowhere in specific explains why, and it has to do with the last person to ever die of the black death, who’s buried here and now haunts the area and people went missing and the commandos are trying to find the people, I think. It’s rather convoluted. Why they don’t do it during the day and with more guys, I don’t know. But one of the guys says, “This history of this place – 666 years on this exact date!” which probably doesn’t bode well. Greg (Cerrone) is one of those commando guys, and he sees something freaky and then we see him in a hospital and then a subtitle tells us it’s SEVERAL MONTHS LATER.

Greg, well, he isn’t doing very well. He gets drinks with friends and ends up in a bar fight. His neighbor Karen (Kelly Lynn Reiter) shows up at the bar from out of nowhere and makes sure he takes his medication, two large black pills. He goes home and crashes in bed and then Cindy (Brande Roderick) shows up in lingerie and they have sex in such an awkwardly filmed fashion, you’d think Tommy Wiseau had choreographed it. Greg wakes up and sirens are blaring in the distance. He looks outside and it looks like hell on earth out there. He almost slept right through armageddon, it seems. Even worse, the paintings on his wall are crooked, so he makes a big deal out of straightening them. If humanity is at an end, the least you can do is have neatly leveled wall art.

Then the noises start. Weird noises. Noises like choking and gagging and growling. Something’s out in the hallway of his apartment building. Maybe Cindy’s choking on a pistachio shell? Nope! It’s some humanoid zombie-demons with charred-black skin, and they’re fighting to get into Greg’s apartment. They’re terrifying, but they can’t kick in a flimsy-ass door. Greg starts freaking out. Phone won’t work, TV won’t work, laptop won’t work. But sometimes the laptop does work, I think, because he starts recording himself in rambling video-diary entries. He has altercations with the scorch-o beings and talks to himself and finds a hatchet and talks to himself and takes his pills and talks to himself. Yes, he keeps taking the pills, but they don’t seem to be helping. What’s up with that? And is all this really happening, or is it all in his head? 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The creatures here look like the anti-Splice if they’d been cast in The Room. 

Performance Worth Watching: More charity: Let’s just say that Cerrone could use a little more seasoning in front of the camera. Granted, he’s given material that would make anyone look awkward and stupid, so he’s not exactly getting a great opportunity here. 

Memorable Dialogue: Greg gives us the absolute minimum prescription to make it through this movie: “Four shots of fireball!”

Sex and Skin: Just the one sex scene, non-nude and not at all hot, dropped in there for no reason whatsoever.

Our Take: All the core components of basic filmmaking are sub-optimal in Project Legion: Cinematography, editing, acting, dialogue, concept, plotting, sound, visual effects, music, continuity, set design, you name it – all amateurish. The most complex action sequence, the bar fight, is so hacked up it makes the Applebee’s BBQ platter look like the petting zoo. And to think, the movie stars a guy whose expertise is hand-to-hand fighting, and it fails to make him look like he knows how to throw a punch. Good job. That’s a wrap. Golf clap.  

Rather than play to Cerrone’s strengths, writer/director Lance Kawas locks his expert fighter in a room and makes him talk to himself for long stretches of the movie, which would be a tough task for Daniel Day-Lewis. Cerrone’s stuck in a wannabe Twilight Zone episode where he’s forced to question reality and his sanity; considering how shoddy and cheap everything looks, I can wholly buy the idea that any assertion that this reality is convincing is enough to drive a person mad. The plot is impossible nonsense, and concludes with a twist that’s so obvious, the real twist is that Kawas actually went through with it. During the big climactic sequence, Kawas leads Cerrone out of the apartment so he can hide in a dumpster, which functions as quite the metaphor for our experience of this movie.

Our Call: You don’t have to tap out if you don’t agree to fight in the first place. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.