Featured Post

Featured Post - Mystery Movie Marathon

I thought I'd kick the new year off with another movie marathon. I thought it was time to check out a few old school mystery flicks. Som...

Saturday, October 6, 2018

Not Another Zombie Movie…About the Living Dead (2014)




Time for another low budget zombie movie. I thought that I would double down and watch one that was also a comedy. As if making a low budget zombie movie wasn’t fraught with enough pitfalls these guys decided to make a comedic one. Well what the hell might as well dive in.

Franklin and Mike end up in the middle of a zombie outbreak after Mike shows up kills Franklin’s zombie son before he can bite him. The pair decide to head to Mike’s cousin Peanut’s house because he is always got a lot of guns. Along the way they pick up some neighbors, lose some of them to zombies, and do a lot of silly stuff in the name of comedy. Eventually they also run into a military man and the rescue team that was sent to find the cure and get it out. See Mike works at the lab where the virus got loose and is responsible for the zombie outbreak! Much goofiness ensues.

It might seem that I’m making light of the plot with such a barebones synopsis, but I’m really not. There isn’t a whole lot going on in this movie other than a group of survivors running from one scene to another. The movie plays like a sequence of skits tied very loosely together, which is common in ultra-low budget horror flicks like this. Normally that annoys me but here not so much. While I noticed that was happening there always seemed to be something funny happening on screen. Where this was weak in scares and zombie action it more than made up for in comedy. Let me give a couple of examples.

First up is Peanut. The actor playing him is hilarious. You have a stoned gangster who never quite understands that there are zombies. He keeps referring to them as crackheads. There are a couple gags that stand out like him loaning his car to another survivor to go get a pizza and another where he has a pocket full of grenades. Both of these lead to some really funny dialogue that had me laughing. In spite of being barely aware of his environment he keeps surviving, which is also a funny running gag.

Second is the mentally handicapped character that Mike and Franklin meet up with. They immediately assume that he is a zombie and attack him, only for everyone to yell at them. This gives us the line, “He’s not a zombie he’s a retard!”. The fact that this keeps happening and that he runs
Generic zombies...
around wearing a helmet and cape made out of a blanket is great. Oh, he also grabs Peanut’s gun when no one else realizes that a woman has turned and shoots her, then claps and smiles. Why is that funny? I don’t know but it is. Toss in a “Samuel L. Jackson” moment, funny dialogue, an illegitimate baby, and clever dialogue for what ends up being an amusing movie.

There are some issues with Not Another Zombie Movie that I have to point out. This was a low budget production that was made for around 15k dollars. So many of the zombies are generic, they try and fail to do some CGI explosions, also green screen was a bad idea, and God damn it what is with the digital blood! I also questioned why they used one particular actor that kept pausing and looking at his phone for the next line. The rest of the cast was much better than this and it was irritating every time he popped on screen.

Still I have to say that I enjoyed this movie. This was very ambitious, and they succeeded more than they failed. It isn’t a perfect but worth checking out if you like independent movies like I do. With that caveat consider this a recommendation.


© Copyright 2018 John Shatzer

No comments:

Post a Comment