Tuesday 11 November 2014

Mutant Vampire Zombies from the 'Hood! (2008)



One thing the zombie genre absolutely, positively did not need was the addition of rape.  Especially rape as comedy.

Want to guess what this film's addition to the flesh-eating oeuvre is?

Sigh.

Starting with something that annoys me far less, you might notice that the title of this review and the title on the DVD image above are different.  A cynic might think the makers of this film were trying to cash in the success of the Spierig Brothers' (far superior) Undead.  Certainly, the box title is only a skin deep change: the film's credits still refer to it by the title at the top of the post.

The original title is also a lot more reflective of the film's tone.  It's mostly playing the genre-aware card pretty hard.  It's no accident that it gets compared to Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead in the image above - if you think of it as their sleazy, lazy younger sibling, you're on the right track as to the sort of tone it has.

I tend to think that this is a shame, because from time to time there's a pretty good zombie flick peeking out between the not-as-funny-as-it-thinks humour and unnecessary rape stuff.

Because yeah, let's talk about that.  So the film's zombie apocalypse comes about because of a sustained solar flare.  Anyone not adequately protected from the radiation expelled becomes a mutant, in an agonising state of impending death that can be slowed by consuming the uncontaminated blood of those people who were deep underground or otherwise shielded from the flare.

The flare also makes gasoline not flammable anymore.  Because reasons.

Anyway, in addition to the whole blood-drinking thing, the mutations cause the zombies to lose their inhibitions, so we get rapist zombies.  Which would be bad enough even if it wasn't played for laughs, but the film doubles down on this terrible idea by doing exactly that.  It leads to a lot of very juvenile, unpleasant stuff.

Go watch the Spierig Brothers' film instead.


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