If this is a zomcom, kill the director.

Now we start the sliding scale of mediocre to atrocious of the 8 Films to Die For, with the Horror/Comedy “Zombies of Mass Destruction”

Title: Zombies of Mass Destruction (2009)

Tagline: They are just like you… only dead!

Rating: 3/10

Synopsis: Life is wonderful for the people in the quiet, island town of Port Gamble until a zombie virus outbreak hits.

Review: The Horror/Comedy genre is a tricky one to handle, very few films know how to exactly balance the two genres. You will either get a film that is mostly horror but has some trickles of comedy such as 2006’s Slither or is Slapstick and comedic with someone getting killed every now and then such as Dead and Breakfast. Don’t get me wrong there are some films that balance this perfectly, Evil Dead 2 and Shaun of the Dead come to mind but then there is also films where they don’t manage to fulfill either genre, Zombies of Mass Destruction is one of these films.

This movie sure is a weapon of mass destruction. Yeah it really bombs *doh hoh hoh hoh hoh*

The film follows the night of a zombie outbreak in an isolated American town, following two different groups. The Iranian Abbas family with the American Miller family and a gay couple holed up in a church with other church goers. As stated on most of the advertising for this film this is a “political zomedy” and looking at that description you know exactly what is going to be “satirized”

I'll give you three guesses.

Yes, this film is the writers way to satire the Muslim fear inbuilt into Americans these days, as well as the homophobia of the nation and it doesn’t work, it really. Does. Not. Work. Nearly all the humor the film tries to squeeze out are based on Muslim and gay jokers and by 60 minutes in, it had well worn out it’s welcome. Don’t get me wrong, done right these topics are ripe for satire, take Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo bay for example but the writing and the delivery here is close to embarrassing. Stop me if you have heard this before; an American going over the top to interrogate an innocent Muslim looking person. Very camp gay people having to awkwardly come out to their parents. Church ministers wanting to “fix” the gays with some weird Clockwork Orange inspired machine. If these scenes aren’t up your alley don’t worry the just make up fifty-five fucking minutes of this film and here lies the main problem of the film, why the zombie backdrop?

Seriously cutting out the zombies and you just have your usual assanine American comedy. My guess is that the satire is exactly what the writer wanted to do but knew that if he added zombies to the mix, he could trick horror fans to pick this movie up as well. So fuck you Kevin Hamedani fuck you and your slightly Muslim sounding last name….. well shit.

See look some of my best friends are Muslim!

Okay let’s move along to the acting. It’s bad, it’s really bad, I’m talking Megan Fox levels of  bad here. I don’t know if I am just being unfair because of the great performances of the last two films or they are just trying really hard to work with this miserable script but there is just no passion here and you can really tell in quite a few of the scenes. The one that sticks out in my mind the most is at the start of the film the Iranian girl and her date are in a car smoking a bong when a zombie bursts through his window and starts chowing down and through his screams he says in almost a deadpan voice “ohh that’s my blood” and it really stuck out to me, if he didn’t change his tone then, while stupid, it would of been okay but he is saying like “ohh that’s my CD player” and that is not the first time it happens, two maybe three other guys I can’t exactly recall now say the same blood line. What is this a fucking running gag? I have seen kids films with better written gags and that usually involves one of the characters repeatedly getting hit in the nuts!  By the films end there were no characters that I could relate to at all, not hard seeming my choices were stereotypical gay men, Iranians and racist whitey and seeming I went back in the closet years ago all these choice were out.

Ahhh my blood... look it's everywhere.... owww.... this hurts bro.

So while I have mentioned how badly the comedy fails in this film, let’s look at how the horror fares. This film did not instill any horror in me at all, no squirming from the buckets of blood, no dread that the characters were going to die, actually this film didn’t even go for the cliched jump scare and while I usually bag a film for using them, I’ll let this film have them if it means I get some horror out of this horror-less movie.

Even the gore was pretty pathetic for this film, every bite and cut pisses out blood like they cut the femoral artery and the humans seem to have the problem of being made out of plasticine. I think you get to see about 3 or 4 peoples get their arm pulled off and these aren’t the new fast super zombies that you see popping up these days, no they are the sort of slow shuffling Romero zombies but somehow they can just rip off arms and legs like they were held together with blutac and happy thoughts. As shown by the picture above one zombie manages to cleanly rip off the face of the date and it really is a clean rip, the zombie could put over it’s face and role play Silence of the Lambs if he wanted to.

God even the zombies are bad, seriously I saw better at last years zombie walk.

So you have no horror, no gore and not even comedy to save this film, oh wait actually there was one line that made me laugh and that is when the pastor is talking about how this is a rapture style apocalypse and says the following line “Have no fear friends, because we have histories greatest zombie on our side, Jesus Christ”, other then that though this Zomcom really fails to deliver. In fact if I am going to see a good Zomcom, I know exactly where to go…

Up for The Winchester?

Alrighty then the first negative review is now out of the way, although knowing the genre it won’t be the last. What did you all think? Has anyone else seen this and if so what are your thoughts?

-The Reviewing Basterd

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or send me an email thereviewingbasterd@hotmail.com

P.S Also I am aware that there is a comic book of the same name released by Red five, however this film is not based off the comics and surprisingly there is actually a film in the works based on these comics. I wonder if any naming issues are going to get in the way.