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UNDEAD (2003)
Agonizingly quirky With the lonely exception of luminous lead Felicity Mason, every character (even the animatronic ones) and every situation thrown at us in this movie is relentlessly, mercilessly wacky. Which makes for a couple of minutes of fun zombie-stomping, and a lot of bizarro-world plot twists that I still don't understand, but after the trailer and the poster, which were both all business, I'm disappointed as hell that Undead was a...farce. Mason spends the entire film looking worried, and maybe she should be because zombies are attacking her and her most reliable ally is a hillbilly who claims he was abducted by aliens. There are aliens, and a giant, thorny wall around the town, meteorites that seem aimed at people (and fish), and beams of light beaming animals up through the clouds, and later on, we even see some people undergo something I don't think I've ever seen in a zombie movie before: de-zombification. That's the interesting stuff. Otherwise Undead is a compendium of the most exhaustedly over-homaged bits of zombinalia (basement barricades, grocery store ransackings, "you don't look so good" moments) and all things wacky, which are usually given musical cues that could've come from Looney Tunes. Which I guess could've been funny, but they're not. "Bugger me!" is what passes for funny last words here. The hillbilly gets a bunch of Hong Kong-style "gun fu" moments. A few visual quotes of sight gags from The Simpsons (lethally exploding beer can, a super-gun made of several guns lashed together). I already said each decade is good for only ONE zombie comedy, and this has already had one. "Shoot 'em in the brain, they won't get back up again" we're told. Nobody told that to the zombie with half a head. (c) Brian J. Wright 2006 BACK TO THE U's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |