Screenhead

Well folks, this is it!  The end of another fantastic year of After Dark Horrorfest titles has come, and with it, my personal hope for the best movie.  Was I right?  Let’s have a look.

The folks out at Lions Gate shipped me out a copy of Zombies of Mass Destruction, and the plot may be one of the strangest things I’ve seen in quite some time.  The small, highly conservative, town of Port Gamble in Washington state is under attack by legions of the walking dead, and who’s there to save this clearly red town from getting a whole lot redder?  An Iranian college student under suspicion of being an Iraqi terrorist, a gay businessman, and his lover, that’s who.

If you shared my assessment that Wall-E bludgeoned you over the head with its messages, then you’d better put on a helmet.  If Zombies of Mass Destruction pounded you any harder it’d take your head CLEAN off.  Admittedly, some of it’s funny–the well-intentioned but graphically wrong-headed preacher, the fire-and-brimstone speeches followed by the announcement of bingo the same night–but it can still be kind of insulting, too.  And the lack of subtlety is also a bit of a blow, too, especially if you don’t agree with it. Why no one took the opportunity to use “killer queen” as a pun after one of the two gay guys discovers the weed wacker is beyond me.

And once more for the kids in the cheap seats: Jesus was never a zombie.

Oh, special note–the ending is crap.  Sure, the “29 weeks later” bit was clever enough, but the ending really doesn’t wrap anything up so much as it does just stop the movie.  It’s abrupt and fits poorly into the narrative.

But despite the heavy-handedness of the politics and the craptacular ending, there’s still plenty to like here.  There are lots of laughs, and a pretty decent and thoroughly Romero-style zombie thrills here.  It’s actually a bit like Dead Rising, in which the worst of mankind often rises to the surface, and any chance at survival–even the most ludicrous–is lunged at like the proverbial drowning man.

But this doesn’t overshadow the fact that Zombies of Mass Destruction has an agenda, and it’s working it pretty hard.  Too hard for its own good, really, because this isn’t so much a zombie movie as it is a liberal freaknik with a few zombies tacked on to pull in the horror buffs.

Zombies of Mass Destruction is still a pretty decent zombie movie, when it actually wants to bring in the walking corpses, but it’s not exactly the caliber of movie we’re used to from the After Dark Horrorfest.  And as such, the slightly disappointed Screenhead Ten Scale, feeling somewhat cheated at not getting any really blowout winners from this year’s Horrorfest, hands over a seven out of ten.  It’s pretty good, but not up to snuff.

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