As with many films featured in Shitty Movie Sundays, Zone Drifter started with an outsider dreaming of becoming a filmmaker. For most, there is no future at Cannes or under the starry lights of Hollywood. There are no sympathetic juries at Sundance, and no standing ovation at Tribeca. But, it has never been cheaper to film a movie, with most of us carrying around HD cameras in our pockets. And, an internet with a voracious appetite for content means that making one’s film available has never had fewer hurdles. A low-budget, anonymous film has more of a chance of being a signal lost in the noise, yet that’s still better than the days when a handful of VHS tapes were the best a filmmaker could hope for.
For Charles Conkin, hailing from Wyoming, his filmmaking dream led to Zone Drifter, from 2021, being a family affair. Written by his brother, Kraig, and produced by his mother, Madonna, Zone Drifter was shot, edited, finished, and then placed into the hands of Wild Eye Releasing, a distribution company with a less than stellar reputation amongst filmmakers. It looks as if Wild Eye made some DVD prints, plopped Zone Drifter onto Amazon through their Prime Video Direct service, and then that was it. It’s a minnow, left to its own devices. There isn’t even a copyright anywhere in the film I could find, which means this flick could very well be in the public domain.
So, is this the little film that could, or is Zone Drifter, indeed, just part of the noise?
It’s the future! Some event has triggered war and the collapse of civilization. Two brothers, Travis and Merle Ramses (Aaron Jude and Charles Conkin), were part of the Continental Army, but split after Travis decided to desert the army and flee into the wilderness with his wife 
(Melissa Baker). Merle didn’t take that well. Years later, after he becomes leader of a group of roving bandits, he tracks Travis down, rapes and kills his wife, kills their infant son in his crib, and leaves Travis for dead. Now Travis wanders the wastes, looking for Merle and his revenge. That’s some grim stuff.
In fact, bleakness is this film’s defining trait, even more so than cheapness. It’s common for a low-budget affair to have a lighthearted air to it, almost as if the flick is a more evolved form of childhood backyard hijinks. Not Zone Drifter. Conkin peppered his flick with an impressive amount of gunplay for a film of its ilk. Combined with liberal use of CGI, this movie becomes a bloody affair. Scanners never saw this many heads pop.
Most of the movie is Travis traversing high desert landscape, sometimes with a companion or two, getting in the occasional bloody firefight, leading to the predictable denouement. There is a subplot involving a leftover secret project from before the war, or maybe it’s a desert spirit, that is left unresolved, but that’s just an artifact of weak storytelling, and can be treated by the viewer as just an excuse to gather the cast for more violence.
This is one of those shitty movies that is remarkable for its very existence. As stated in these pages many times before, Missile Test appreciates how difficult it is to make a movie, regardless of the advances in technology that have removed so many constraints. That doesn’t mean we have to blow smoke. Conkin’s flick is a bloody affair with little to offer beyond its violence. It barely manages to hit familiar storytelling targets, and shows a poor grasp of fundamentals, all the way down to continuity. The cast looks as if they were gathered from Conkin’s friends and acquaintances, with the expected result. The cinematography is tough, with the movie being run through filters whose desaturated, muddy aesthetic evokes the unfortunate brown period of 2010s video games. Even for the shitty movie mutants, Zone Drifter is a tough watch. It tumbles way down the Watchability Index to settle amongst the noise, displacing The Amityville Curse at #526.
Unfortunately, there will be no opportunity for Conkin to develop as a filmmaker. He died in 2024 at the age of 44. He didn’t leave much of a mark, but the mark was indeed made. Keep making art, all you outsiders.