I’ve been
watching a lot of comedic zombie movies for my most recent marathon. I thought
that I’d mix things up a bit and check out a low budget flick. There are a lot
of them but I found 101 Zombies on Amazon Prime and after checking out the
reviews decided it was the movie for me. The filmmakers must have a lot of
friends with IMDB accounts…
There are
several story lines that eventually intersect. One follows a waitress who gets
trapped in the freezer at work. She has a son, who along with a couple of
friends, is another story line. They fight their way to save her. There is also
a truck driver, a zombie prepper, a moonshiner, and a cameraman for a local
cable channel. They all get caught up in a zombie outbreak that is caused by
some contaminated moonshine that immediately turns anyone who drinks it into a
zombie. Stuff happens, people die, bingo is played, and lots of shitty CGI goes
down. The end.
I now
remember why I quit watching independent zombie movies. Most of them are
miserably awful and this is one. Let me start off with my biggest complaint and
it is something that so many of these damn things do. Don’t have your
characters watching Night of the Living Dead. I get that it is in the public
domain so you can legally do it but you shouldn’t. Why remind the audience what
a low budget zombie movie made by someone who has talent looks like? We will
immediately compare it you what you shot and realize how bad it is! Don’t do
that to yourself or to the viewer.
Next up is
a huge problem that I have with independent filmmakers and not just those
shooting zombie movies. Write a script please. Having shit happen for no reason
and characters that appear to be ready for the apocalypse just because they are
might seem mysterious and cool. This isn’t your zombie fan fiction being posted
on a message board. You’re making a movie and you owe it to the people who pay
to see it to at least put some effort into character development. I know that
actually writing a script is hard, but for the love of God do it before
grabbing your camera. Here we have uninteresting characters with no story arc
that do nothing.
 |
| This is one of the better effects shots in the movie. |
Once you
have your script you need to read it. After reading it think about if you have
the resources to shoot what you have written. If you don’t then you end up
using awful CGI to cover the scenes of your characters driving their car with
the zombified head of their friend as a hood ornament! A car that keeps running
the undead down in increasingly bad CGI effects. I’m not even going to go into the
overuse of CGI generated heads exploding every time you shoot a zombie. As
annoying as that is it pales in comparison to the other garbage you have spewed
on the screen.
I’ll
finish with this. Learn how to stage a scene and use your extras. I get that a
low budget movie can’t exactly recruit people that can act. This is
particularly so for those who are background fodder for your zombies. But at
the minimum I ask that you at least have them run and not calmly walk away from
the undead. More than once it appears that in the middle of a supposedly
horrible attack that your cast could barely be bothered to briskly walk away
from their doom. You are shooting on digital so it isn’t like you were running
out of film. The fact you used these scenes just shows how lazy and/or inept
you are as a filmmaker. I know that I’m sounding mean here but you put this out
in the hopes that people would spend their hard-earned money on it. Show the
audience some respect.
This is a
terrible movie that no one should ever watch. Remember this comes from me, the
guy who watches and enjoys some really bad flicks. My standards are not that
high and if you can’t reach them then that alone should tell you all you need
to know. I’m done wasting time on 101 Zombies or whatever the hell they want to
call it.
© Copyright 2017 John Shatzer
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