Fast Zombies with Guns
Oh, boy. I think I’ll start by saying how much I hate literal film titles that promise a gimmick (COWBOYS & ALIENS, SNAKES ON A PLANE) instead of a story. A title shouldn’t be about content, it should be about tone. Titling your film after a plot hook, is like telling your potential viewers that they are too stupid to decide whether or not they want to watch your movie without being coaxed along by the promise of whatever silly non-sense you’re assuring them will transpire within your film. In a way, employing such an obvious title pulls the rug out from under the movie itself. Aren’t the trailers we are most intrigued by the ones that don’t reveal too much; the ones that present the film as a mystery to be unraveled by the viewer? Are we getting to the point where we will only watch movies if we are certain we will get exactly what we want and expect from them? If so, at what point does it all just become pornography and completely abandon any inclination toward art? We would no longer have movies with the ability to truly surprise us, like MILLION DOLLAR BABY, PSYCHO, 8 1/2 and just about everything Stanley Kubrick directed. But enough about the title, that’s only the first problem.
There was a point during this film, when I got lost. I had no clue what was going on, who almost any of the characters were and other than shooting zombies, what they were trying to accomplish. There are two primary reasons for this. The first is that the plot is hopelessly convoluted. There is something about gangsters and hit men and poison and a locket that I didn’t get. The second, and most detrimental reason, was the horrible audio. The dialogue was recorded so poorly and the music so loud that I had to continually adjust the volume until I just said, “screw it” and stopped trying. I missed a lot of what the characters said, but I didn’t get the impression it was all that important.
If you’ve ever seen a standard zombie movie you’ve seen this. Oh wait, no you haven’t, because in this film the zombies can use guns. You would think that if the undead had the wherewithal to understand the fine points of how to work a firearm, they would do more than just run, shoot and eat people but whatever. Maybe the zombies using guns is intended as satire. Maybe it’s a sophisticated critique of our gun-enthused society and how so many people in this country thoughtlessly invoke the antiquated second amendment as a… on second though it’s probably not that.
Anyhow, tact is not this film’s strong suit. It is rife with gratuitous blood and gore. It doesn’t really have much else to offer. Though one thing I did find interesting, was the amount of people who appear in the film. The director, Bennie Woodell, must have called in every favor he had to get all of these people to be in this. It’s commendable, really.
If nothing else, the film does showcase a ton of ambition, though I’m not positive that is a good thing (just think of Ed Wood). Had that ambition been channeled more into writing a comprehensible script or at the very least recording audible dialogue, this may not have been a complete waste of time.
