Tristan
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Posted: May 25, 2008 at 12:00am
My last few run ins with independent and/or low budget zombie movies have been a disaster. It would seem as though all the hidden gems out there have already been discovered, and now all we have left to do is sort through what's left, hoping to find at least one redeeming quality in the leftovers. I'm not sure why it's always the zombie genre that gets shit on by filmmakers who think they know what they're doing. Maybe because it's cheaper to buy some green and grey makeup than it is to buy vampire teeth or a werewolf mask. Whatever it may be, the zombie film is probably the biggest victim of bad horror movies next to the backwoods/survival horror idea. I was hoping that I might be the next person to find a gem in the first half of the Diaries of the Living Dead Double Feature Dead Summer, but unfortunately, it didn't reach that shimmering status.
Your town has been quarantined due to a zombie outbreak, the military supplies are getting lighter and lighter each week, and it seems that there's more zombies than ever wandering through the woods. What do you do to pass the time? Well like any self-respecting person would, you sit in the local bar and drink yourself into a stupor every day.
This seems to be the case for the young folks in this small Pennsylvania town. In the opening scene we're introduced to a small group of rednecks friends having a brilliant conversation about which cereal box character is the toughest. I know, stuff like this puts Tarantino's Like A Virgin monologue to shame. After a brief zombie encounter, we find out the quarantine has been placed on this town for over 8 years, and the "sweepers" just aren't killing enough of them to let the military open the town back up. Some of the locals like to help out by going on zombie - or deadhead, as they like to call them - killing marches. It seems like the zombies are merely an annoyance at this point, until one of the local alchemists farmers discovers a combination of chemicals that drives the zombies insane, turning them from slow, lumbering creatures into vicious and deadly fast killing machines. When one of the friends steals this liquid to trade with the military for a ticket out of there, he manages to spill it all over himself and his friends. Butterfingers then comes up with a brilliant plan to run for the borders and get some help from the military, all the while being chased by a handful of super aggressive zombies.
As can be imagined, this movie wasn't flawless. When the opening sequence to your movie shows zombies with makeup on their faces, but not on their necks, arms or legs, you know you've got problems. I know, I know, it's a low budget picture. But I'm sure there's ways to afford enough makeup to cover a few extra feet of skin. I can overlook minute details like this, but some things just bother me, and I have to be a little critical. The main problem with this movie was the audio. You might have noticed I didn't mention any character names, this was due to the fact that I didn't catch a single one of them. The ones I did catch were the cousin or girlfriend who didn't even have a part in the film. If you sit through a 70 minute movie and don't pick up a single name, that's saying something. I know most independent movies suffer from this, but I couldn't make out more than half of the movie. This isn't even an exaggeration folks, almost every scene that was outdoors - and there's a lot of them - was a fuzzy mess of words. Not that it really mattered however, as the acting was so good they didn't need words to communicate what was going on. Oh wait, I'm sorry. The acting was equally bad and aside from a couple of scenes where I felt they made some smart moves, the characters were lame and made all the typical mistakes you'd expect of a group of rednecks trying to survive a zombie outbreak.
That said, this movie actually had a lot of potential. While I didn't find that gem in Dead Summer, I did find a zombie movie that was worth at least one viewing. It wasn't the most original idea, but at least it attempted to do something new. This is a pretty brave move for such a small film, and I tip my hat to director Eddie Bedevich for his ambition and interesting take on the zombie outbreak. The zombies didn't follow the usual rules which was probably for the simple reason of budgeting. It's a lot easier to dump fake blood on someone's shirt than it is to create a head wound on a dead zombie. You could tell that the director had some neat ideas about what he wanted to do with this film, and then had to come up with some filler to stretch it out to a reasonable length.
I was going to go with a 6/10 for this one, but due to really terrible audio and some unbearably awful acting, I'm going to knock it down a few points. It's a shame too, because while it wasn't a great movie, at least they were trying to do something original.
4.5/10.
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