Yes, I know there was a high level of snark in that opening
paragraph…re-reading it I started to believe that I didn’t like the movie. That
was misleading, the movie is ridiculous there’s no doubt there, but it knows
what it is and that, boys and girls, is what makes the difference between bad
bad and good bad. The most surprising part of the flick was that they managed
to do something different with Zombies, which is rare. So rare in fact that the
biggest change to the Z-lore in the past 25 years was the viral zombies in 28 Days Later and the running zombies in
Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. This
movie adds something that, honestly, I’m surprised it took so long to try,
leaving the dead with some semblance of humanity. It’s very slight, they are
still mostly brain dead flesh addicts, but they seem to have just a bit of who
they were…whether that translates to a zombie cop pulling his gun, the crazy
cat lady next door continuing to bother you after she’s expired, or that crazy
Britney Spears loving homeless guy remembering his favorite singer. It’s used
mostly to cheap comic effect, which is not a slight by any means, some of the
funniest moments of the film come via quick cheap laughs. Let’s not be all
highbrow and act like a cheap laugh is any less funny then an intellectual
joke, they can both make you laugh just as hard and that’s all that matters.
That being said it still introduces the idea of zombies with some humanity left
and that is a very interesting idea…wouldn’t it be a bit harder to stab your
undead neighbor in the skull if he was still shaking his fist at you about
stealing his paper like he did every other day? 
For a group of mostly unknowns the cast is actually pretty
solid with very few scenes that make the lack of experience obvious. There were
a few moments that took you out of the movie but the script was more to blame than
anything else, lines like “Scouts Forever!” and “Who are you?” “I’m a scout”
(commence kissing) are really the only downside to the movie. I was actually
really surprised by how many things worked. For instance there’s a scene
involving a trampoline, a perilous escape and a zombie wiener…you read that
right, zombie wiener. By all accounts that scene should have fallen flat but
they were able to pull it off in a way that you didn’t just have a shock laugh
when the scene started but rather a continuous 10 minute laughing session while
the scene played out. There’s no really any truly negative things I can point
out. If you watched the trailer…hell if you’ve just read the title and know
what you’re in for then that’s what you’ll get.
3 Out of 5 Guttenbergs
