Zombex


Dir: Jesse Dayton
Star: Lew Temple, David Christopher, Emily Kaye, Desiree McKinney

Points deducted for massively deceptive advertising which touts heavily two stars who barely appear in the movie. I'm not even going to mention their names here, but I doubt we'd have bothered with this otherwise; so, yay for dishonest marketing! On the other hand, we didn't pay anything, so this cost us nothing, except 80 minutes of our lives. I guess you get what you pay for. This is set a little while after Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans. A drug company is handing out "free samples" of product with an unfortunate side-effect. With the air-space shut down, talk-radio host Aldous Huxtable (Temple) and musician Charlie Thibideaux (Christopher) hit the road to Texas, where an antidote is apparently available. But two members of the drug company's security team ("Black Rain," an obvious allusion to Blackwater) are also on the same journey.

The inspiration is Zombieland, with the pair of characters on a journey through a zombie-infested landscape, occasionally pairing up with a couple of women. That aspect doesn't work too badly: Huxtable was apparently inspired by conspiracist Alex Jones, but is a good deal more likeable, and makes for a good pairing with his sidekick. However, the rest of the film is a complete mess, with large chunks which appear to be present for no reason at all, and/or make no sense - the entire Black Rain subplot seems there purely so the writer-director can get his wife (Kaye) into the movie, as some kind of burlesque dancing security-guard. Like I said: make no sense. Maybe it does if you're part of the Austin "scene" which apparently produced this, but for anyone else, there's nothing to separate this from the other million (mostly better) zombie flicks produced this decade.

D
[May 2014]


The driving dead
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