Coeds, zombies and cliches, oh my!
Dead Before Dawn
Canada is a really mixed bag when it comes to zombie movies. Some great, brilliant stuff — Pontypool, for example — comes out of there. Also some of the worst, most painful attempts at zombie movies ever made, like Zombie Night or Forest of the Dead. This movie is Canadian, and luckily it falls toward the better end of the spectrum. It’s not great, by any means, but it is reasonably entertaining and well put together. It’s kind of a meta-horror piece, like Scream, that comments on its own genre. That’d be zombies, if you didn’t figure that out on your own. Specifically these are curse zombies (lot of those this ZMMM — seems to be an emerging theme) that are brought to life when a dumbass kid does something dumb to try to impress a girl, then his dumbass friends make it much, much worse. It’s also horror comedy, and heavier on the laughs than the scares. Pleasant, if a bit forgettable.
Daddy, I’m a Zombie
More zombie movies for kids! This one looks to be aimed at tweens, based on its own just-teenaged protagonist, a girl who gets killed after being a jerk to her dad, then comes back as a zombie. The animation was weak, the plot was thin and I honestly had a hard time paying attention to this. It was just kind of dull and perfunctory, like some people decided to make a dumb tween movie and randomly decided to throw in zombies because, “Hey, kids like zombies!” It was made in Spain, I believe, which is neither here nor there, but worth mentioning.
Buck Wild
What happens when three idiots and one psychopath go on a hunting trip and run afoul of a bunch of chupacabra-spawned zombies? Buck Wild is what. Yet another horror comedy, working in the classic mold of the “guys getaway that goes awry” mold. A plan to marry a girlfriend is revealed, an affair uncovered and lots of zombies are killed. I enjoyed it honestly, but mostly because I expected nothing and got slightly more than that. The chupacabra was kind of pointless, but if you squint hard you can pretend it’s a Sumatran rat monkey.
The Coed and the Zombie Stoner
Is there anything you need to know about this movie that isn’t contained in the title? Okay, maybe one thing — it’s from Asylum. It is also exactly what you would expect — an artless melange of college movie cliches crammed into a sack with a handful of zombie movie cliches. And lots of gratuitous nudity, of course. The plot, if you can call it that, concerns a nerdy sorority sister who has to find a frat guy boyfriend or get kicked out of her sorority. She meets a zombie that her science teacher has kept on ice since the ’80s, spruces him up and dates him. Then at a party he goes berserk and makes more zombies, and it’s a full-scale campus zombie apocalypse! But really, just an excuse for a lot of dumb jokes, including a homage/rip-off of one of Airplane!‘s iconic scenes, and tons of weed jokes. How awful does it sound? In truth, it’s a lot less awful than it could be. I even was amused once or twice, though it did seem to go on forever. Probably only watchable if you are as stoned as the people in the movie (i.e. very fucking stoned).
