Rating: C
Dir: The Soska Sisters
Star: Camren Bicondova, Ashley Moore, Gage Marsh, Andre Anthony
I’ve never quite been on board the Soska sisters hype-train, finding American Mary over-rated, and their remake of Rabid below the original. I have a feeling, if they weren’t hot goth chicks, they wouldn’t have got quite the same coverage, though they clearly have a genuine love for horror. Still, didn’t save the duo when cancel culture came for them post-Rabid, for associating with the “wrong” sort of people, among other allegations. They’ve kept chipping away, but I was surprised to see the Soskas helming this Tubi Original. It didn’t start well. Four minutes and seventeen seconds. That’s how long it took for me to be fully on Team Zombie, wishing death on all the characters in this.
That may be a new record. To be fair, I eventually realized that was probably part of the point. Iris (Bicondova) and Ash (Moore) have been best friends forever, but Ash is now preparing to go off to Harvard, while Iris… is not. This creates resentment, and the Ash-hole friends, shall we say, don’t help. But as a dutiful friend, Iris stays at home to babysit Ash’s little brother, so Ash can spend her birthday at the titular festival. For in this universe, the (conveniently public domain) outbreak of Night of the Living Dead really happened, and is annually celebrated by this event. Indeed, Ash’s grandfather was Duane. So if genes are any guide, who better to cope with a new zombie epidemic at the festival?
The most obvious comparison is Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave from the Grave; this is not as terrible. But it still ain’t good, largely because of a script which forgets that the original NotLD took about the same four minutes and seventeen seconds for things to kick off. This? Closer to forty, before we hit proper zombie action, and up to the point, as noted, these are not people with whom I would voluntarily spend time. The plot convulsions – I’ll let the auto-correct from convolutions stand – needed to get Iris, her boyfriend and the kid brother to the festival are especially dumb. Not least since the small child serves no significant purpose, and could/should have been erased.
If your remote control goes mysteriously missing for the first half, things do improve significantly in the second. Turns out some – though definitely not all – of the characters have mildly redeeming features. I was particularly fond of the guy in a wheelchair, mostly because he’s not defined by his situation. The gore generally leans toward the practical, and the Soskas know their way around using the effects reasonably… um, effectively. I did also have to laugh at the vlogger exhorting viewers to like and subscribe, as he films himself getting his entrails munched upon. But the basic lack of characters over thirty, and the shaky nature of those below that age, leave it feeling like a throwback to the days of SyFy Original movies. This statement is more a warning than a promise.