Description from Netflix:
Part mockumentary, part unabashed gore-fest, this film
follows two documentarians as they infiltrate a Los Angeles zombie community.
My thoughts:
First of all, the “unabashed gore-fest” is completely misleading. There was very little blood in this
movie. And, what little blood there was
(mostly at the end) could not be considered a “gore-fest”.
And I’m pretty sure a mockumentary is supposed to be
interesting. Or funny. Or show the genre in a different light.
This movie had none of that.
This film had 3 classifications of zombies:
Feral – Your common, everyday zombies. They roam and bite. That’s the assumption, anyway. We don’t see much of them.
Low-functioning – A step above feral, but not capable of
thought. They don’t roam and bite, and
are actually able to join the workforce.
The ones we see are working on an assembly line. Think the zombies putting away shopping carts
in Shaun of the Dead or the collared
zombies in Fido.
High-functioning – Pretty much like humans. But undead.
They can pass on the zombie virus, but most choose not to.
Through the eyes of our two main documentarians (Grace &
John), we meet a handful of these zombies.
To me, the most interesting of these was Joel, a zombie rights activist
who headed up the group Z.A.G. (Zombie Advocacy Group). Through him, I thought I could see where this
film was going. Heading back to Romero
(especially Dawn of the Dead), zombie
movies have been closely tied to holding the mirror up to society. With all the talk in this movie about equal
rights, I thought they would be making a statement about same-sex marriage or
something along those lines.
Sadly, I was very much mistaken, and gave this movie
entirely too much credit.
[SPOILER ALERT]
At the end of this movie, we find out that even the
high-functioning zombies are, indeed, still zombies, and their end goal is to
take over. Even Joel becomes violent and
screams things like, “Your day is done!
We will rise!”
So, unless the message was “homosexuals are evil and will
try to take over the world as soon as they are able to marry” – and I really
hope it wasn’t – there was no message to this movie. Which means it was pointless.
[END SPOILER]
About halfway through the movie, we find that all the
zombies are planning on attending an event called “Live Dead”. Basically, it’s a place for zombies to
gather, talk about zombie things, buy zombie things, do zombie drugs, make
sweet zombie love (as best as they can, anyway), and listen to zombie
music. Like Burning Man, but with
zombies. John was convinced that
terrible things happened there (he kept asking all the zombies if they ate
human flesh), so he had Grace work hard to try to get them in.
Which she did.
Of course, once it looked like stuff was starting to head
towards the crazy zombie stuff, our documentary crew was kicked out. And, even though they were able to film some
of the events, they were far away and didn’t get a very clear picture of what
happened.
And that’s pretty much it.
I had a number of problems with this film.
The biggest problem I had was that it was amazingly
boring. As I mentioned, we spend pretty
much all of our time with 4 high-functioning zombies. The make-up wasn’t great, to say the
least. Most of these zombies were
nothing more but normal looking people with a little bit of grey painted on
their necks. They showed a bit more of
the wounds in a few scenes, but not very much, and it didn’t look great when
they did show it.
What we were left with was a group of documentarians talking
to people who looked and acted almost exactly like normal people. And most of them were pretty boring. They would talk about their zombie
experiences, but they weren’t very interesting.
Much like Mimesis,
this was a great concept, but terrible execution. It could’ve been really good, but it wasn’t
even mildly interesting. A boring, pointless
movie. No wonder I never had anyone
recommend it to me.
Also, John (one of our main documentarians) was an entirely unlikable person.
Rating: 1/5
Zombie Talk:
As I mentioned earlier, there were three classifications of
zombies in this film. I spelled out the
specifics on them at that point, so I don’t feel the need to go over them
again.
I would assume they could be killed by a blow to the head,
but it wasn’t really discussed. There
was a scene where they interview a PI.
After tracking down some family members, he was then asked to “take care
of them” if they had been turned into zombies.
He then demonstrated how he did this, by hacking up various mannequins
in a parking lot. While he did seem to
focus on the head (beating it in with a baseball bat, driving it over it with a
car, severing the head with a shovel, etc.), he also spent some time bashing in
the stomach and severing various appendages.
Still, I was left with the impression that destroying the brain would
kill the zombie.
I would also like to talk about the life-span of a
zombie. According to the Zombie Survival
Guide, the average life-span of a zombie is 3-5 years [pg.10]. That seems a little long to me, but I’ll
defer to Brooks on this matter. Since
we’re discussing intelligent zombies, there’s a chance they would have found
something that would allow them to extend this period. They didn’t say anything about it in the
movie, so I doubt anything like that had been developed.
Even so, over the years, each zombie would be steadily
decomposing. Month-to-month, they would
begin to look noticeably worse. By the
end of your first zombified year, you would start to look pretty bad. Towards the end, there wouldn’t be much left
of your body. Just a crawling, chomping
skeleton (and not even much crawling or chomping, as most of the muscles would
be gone).
Yet, in this movie, you would never know most of these
people were zombies. Some of them have
been dead for several years, yet, aside from a slightly grey neck and some
yellowing teeth, there’s no real evidence of being dead. At one point, we meet the founder/emcee of
Live Dead, who tells us that he has been a zombie for 7 years. And yet he looked like a normal person.
I know zombie movies are not founded in reality, but at
least try to make a little bit of sense.
Last but not least, I’d like to talk about the origin of the
zombie outbreak. In this film, people
were turned into zombies if they died “a violent death”. Like a gunshot wound or something like
that. They could also be turned if
bitten by a zombie, but, apparently, the outbreak started by violent
deaths. Like ghosts.
Looking past the rampant stupidity of that method, and I was
still left with one main question: why now?
People have been dying violent deaths since the beginning of time. Why is it that people are just now being
turned into zombies? What changed? Why did Abel not become a zombie when killed
by Cain?
I don’t demand that an origin be given. But, if you are going to give the virus an
origin, at least give it one that makes some kind of sense.
1 comment:
Your Cain / Abel note makes my mind race with fun zombie story ideas.
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