Brendan Riley (briley9)

Imagine that you found the excised bits of an early American Pie script. Then, having recently enjoyed such teen zombedies as Idle Hands or My Boyfriend?s Back, you would make Night of the Living Dorks, or perhaps Boy Eats Girl. As I said, this film reminds me a lot of other teen zombie comedies, particularly in that its ?heroes? find zombie-hood to be a mixed bag, taking moments to enjoy their newfound strength (ala Spider-man in the wrestling ring), but they also find themselves driven to, well, eat people. Some other thoughts:

* If you decide to watch this movie, hold on to at least the 30 minute mark. The beginning is absolutely terrible. I nearly turned it off. The sex jokes are really awful, not only in their stupidity, but in their ham-handedness.
* I like the idea that people react differently to being zombified ? some give in to it more easily than others. The three characters continue their own paths: the uber-nerd who nurses his grudges manages to play out that insecurity, while the normal guy gets to be more normal and the stoner/sex fiend becomes more stonery/sex fiend-y.
* The goths are pretty funny in the movie, especially the part where Phillip chastises them for their crappy skills: they use frozen chicken and one of their mother?s hair for the mystical rites. And they draw a six-point star of David instead of a pentagram on the ground.
* It?s amusing that the bully in the film wears a sweater over his shoulders like Troy from The Goonies.
* The recurring theme of using a staple-gun to reattach body parts that have fallen off is pretty funny.
* I watched this streaming on Netflix, which was okay except that it was dubbed instead of subtitled. The goofy performances in the dubbing were pretty distracting, frankly. I would have preferred subtitles.

Overall, pretty mediocre. Not better or worse than Boy Eats Girl, but definitely not the best zombie comedy out there.

I didn?t expect much of this movie, since it made very little money and it has Brendan Frasier, an actor I like but who inexplicably dooms any movie he signs on to act in. It?s also hard to watch a movie like this without scoffing a lot. A. LOT. Some thoughts:

* I think the movie yielded too much initiative to the 3D. There are several moments where these weird choices in cinematography suddenly remind me that, oh yeah, this movie was produced in 3D and they had to have some pop-out moments. But these were always gimmicky. Who needs em?
* The scientific ideas in the film were pretty preposterous, of course. But I also found a number of smaller serious concerns: if the ?air pocket? regularly heats up to 200 degrees F, how does it sustain a large biosphere of diverse organisms? And where are all the other mid-size prey animals for the giant carnivorous plants and T-Rexes to feed on?
* Vernians are people who believe that Jules Verne wasn?t writing Science Fiction, but science fact. These are not a fictional group concocted for the sake of the movie, but real people, with a website. Delusional people, but real, apparently.
* Stupidest moment? When they find an old abandoned mine with creaky, rusty old mine cars that they happily hop into and careen nearly to their deaths. Really? Sigh.
* And at the end of the movie they imply that there?s some serious writing being done based on the journey, but they brought back, um, ZERO pieces of evidence. Yeah, they?re gonna get published on that.
* Oh, and did I mention that these giant underground caves are well lit by, um, they don?t say. But they?re well lit. Sunny, even.

Not worth watching. Just watch Indiana Jones or National Treasure (which at least has a goofy charm this movie misses).