“Aaah! Zombies!!”
2007
Stars: Matthew Davis, Julianna Robinson, Michael Grant
Terry, Betsy Buetler, Colby French, Jack Orend, Richard Riehle, Tracey Walter
Writers: Matthew and Sean Kohnen
Dir: Matthew Kohnen
90 minutes
As the zombie genre continues to become overly saturated
with attempts at homages, remakes, and retreads, it is welcoming to see
something different come along. Different, in this case, does not mean “great.”
It means “pretty good.”
I did not know what to expect with “Aaah! Zombies!!” because
the title itself is awful. I read that it had won a couple of small festival
awards, but reading the synopsis, I found it to be uninteresting and quite
possibly a waste of time. While I was not entirely wrong, I will say this: It
was original to a point.
So, stop me if you heard this one before: A military
experiment goes wrong and the government tries to cover it up. At the start,
the audience is shown black and white footage of an Army recruit accepting a
serum (serum that is glowing green a la the “Re-Animator” reagent) that is
supposed make him a “super soldier.” After a matter of seconds, the soldier
dies and reanimates as a powerful zombie. The clip ends, and the creator of the
experiment, Dr. Richter, is shown placing baby formula labels over barrels of
what the audience knows to be the undeadly reagent. The barrels are loaded onto
a truck and shipped out of the military compound, the truck followed by a
mysterious biker. While the two truck drivers argue over directions, they
nearly run over the motorcyclist, and barrels of the reagent fall off the truck
and roll through a California
A barrel stops and decides to dump its contents on a box of
soft-serve ice cream mixture that just so happened to be waiting outside of a
bowling alley. The mixture is brought inside and immediately dumped into the
soft-serve machine.
That’s a lot of set up for the first five minutes of any
film. In this case, it is needed to set up not only the rest of the film, but
also this review.
So enters our cast of characters: Tim, the dorky, insecure
bowling alley worker, his misfit, goofy best friend Mike, the ditzy object of
Tim’s unrequited affections, Cindy, and Mike’s plucky ex-girlfriend, Vanessa,
all hanging out alone in the bowling alley before league night. Tim unknowingly
dumps the reagent-laden soft-serve mix into the machine while Mike gets the
great idea to mix beer into the soft-serve machine, and then serves it up to
his friends as a taste test.
Here is where the premise of the movie took hold. Up until
this point, the only color allowed by the filmmakers was of the glowing green
serum (and then the soft-serve ice cream). After consuming the ice cream, the
tasters appear to turn into the undead — but then, everything is in color and
they appear to be normal, save some gastrointestinal discomfort. They talk to
each other, they discuss what they are feeling inside, (Mike is damn hungry for
something but can’t figure out what), and decide to head to an emergency clinic
for help. It is when they are hopping into the car that animal-loving Cindy
accidentally kills a cat, one she picked up hoping to keep it from being run
over — and it explodes. The foursome heads toward the clinic, where they then
run into a man, claiming to be a soldier who informs them that the populace has
been infected by a military experiment, giving up some plot points as to what
is going on, until the main characters realize he has half of a motorcycle
handlebar protruding from his stomach. Yup, he is the mysterious biker,
apparently not suffering any pain from being creamed in a motorcycle accident.
With a few unfortunate circumstances happening to the motley crew of friends
along the way, they realize they are actually the infected and try to find a
way to avoid not only capture, but certain death at the hands of the descending
military.
And, yes, some of this is rather funny.
Romero Rules Followed:
Get bitten, become one; the hunger for brains is there; and one of the
crew mentions that zombies cannot run. Some points for that.
Gore factor: Hardly any, despite a few limbs falling or
being hacked off.
Zombies or Wannabees? Zombies
Classic, fine, or waste of time: Fine
Additional comments: Again, while the filmmakers decided to
take the story from the point of view of the zombies, and inject comedy, that
does not make it a great film. It is just OK. There were several gags that I
noticed paid homage to other flicks (the dismembered self-sufficient hand
screamed “Evil Dead II,” and the toxin-filled barrels were an obvious “Return
of the Living Dead” reference), but, I’ve seen these too many times now. If
filmmakers could stop with simply paying respect to stone-cold classics and
find more ingenious ways to inject life into the genre, it would be
appreciated. Telling the story from the zombie point of view was a step in the
right direction, and I know it would be difficult to do so in a serious manner.
But it has been done, yet no one has got it right yet. Come on, guys. Try
harder.
— ROB
