Zompire Film Festival 2008

Last weekend I drove up to Portland, OR for the Zompire Film Festival, an annual celebration of all things undead.

DAY ONE

The festival kicked off with a block of short films, which included the excellent “Prombies!” a tongue-in-cheek use of zombies as a metaphor for sex. (Directed by Frederick Snyder.) “PROMBIES! is a thrilling journey of fear and discovery,” so the Zompire website explains, “and a heartwarming tale of young teenage lovers coming together to deal with the issues of sex and zombies on one of the most memorable nights of their lives.” In one scene, virginal Amy and her boyfriend Darryl (who’s turning into a zombie as he finds it harder to control his sexual urges) happen upon a zombie feasting upon a young woman. (Except, well…think in more colloquial terms.) “He’s eating her alive!” Amy gasps, as the zombie raises his head to growl at her, and we see a manicured hand slowly push his head back down.

Following a couple of vampire feature films (the thoroughly entertaining Hammer Horror movie Vampire Circus and the decidedly less enjoyable From Dusk Till Dawn), another block of short films was shown. The best of the bunch was a creative and well-acted piece called “The Man Who Refused to Die.” A murdered man who just can’t seem to shuffle off this mortal coil completely finds that being wishy-washy about death can really mess up your life. Dumped by his girlfriend and kicked out of the hospital by his doctor, he ends up with the only person he can think of who’d take him in: the seriously unstable serial killer who stabbed him to death in the first place. You can check out an early trailer for the movie here.

And then came Brain Dead, a feature I had been really excited to see, not least because a friend of mine had a cameo voice-over in the first few minutes of the movie. Unfortunately, her few seconds of dialogue were probably the most enjoyable part of the movie.

All you really need to know about the plot is that when the script was originally written, the big bad monster was not zombies but a giant spider. (The filmmakers’ budget didn’t allow for a decent-looking spider; extras in zombie makeup were much cheaper.) Up against the zombies are a pervy preacher with a nubile acolyte, a smartass college boy handcuffed to a hardened convict (with some pretty godawful Sharpie “tattoos”), and two sexy hikers. The first fifteen minutes of the movie provided us with partial or full nudity of all the women in the film, and supplied a gratuitous “let’s skinny dip in this river” scene with the hikers, one of whom was established as a lesbian soon after she criticized the sexist behavior of the men in their group. (Pssh. what a feminazi. Obviously a lesbian.)

The director (Kevin Tenney, of Witchboard and Night of the Demons fame) has described the film as being a “fun and funny, over-the-top, politically-incorrect throw-back to the hard-core horror films of the 80s,” which I think is accurate if he means “slapstick, overacted, sexist, sloppy B-movie.” That said, there were some pretty great special effects (back-to-basics, non-CGI stuff): lots of blood, and a fabulous scene where evil convict Bob blows the head off a (non-zombie) cop.

Incidentally, it’s a bit annoying that the title was snatched from Peter Jackson’s ‘92 classic splatstick zombie film, also known in the US as Dead Alive. I would have been far, far happier had I been watching Timothy Balme annihilate a room full of zombies using a lawnmower.

Click here for Day Two.

Extra credit: Podcast interview with festival director Andrew Migliori, courtesy of Mail Order Zombie.