Product: Zombies Anonymous
Rating: 3.0
Brains, send more brains!
Like the terrific Canadian zombie film FIDO, Marc Fratto's film ZOMBIES ANONYMOUS tries to offer us a refreshing new twist on the tired old zombie story. In Fratto's world the zombies are only the recently dead, they possess all their mental faculties although both their minds and bodies do deteriorate with time, and most importantly they are NOT flesh eating monsters intent on gobbling your grey matter. All these poor souls want is to continue "living their lives" as they had been before they had been so rudely interrupted by undeath; go to work, pay the mortgage, walk the dog, etc. Society however, has major problems accepting them. Most folks just pretend not to see tham at all, while others engage in more overt acts of discrimination such as firing them from their jobs simply because they are "mortally challenged", and still others react as do ZA's chief antagonists by forming hate groups resembling the KKK and the American Nazi Party. As you can see ZA is VERY similar to FIDO in the respect that both deal with the concept of zombies representing a lower caste of humanity that was used as slave labor and/or forbidden entry vis a vis a huge fence in the case of FIDO and in the case of ZOMBIES ANONYMOUS we've got young punks banding together under the leadership of woman known as The Commandant for the sole purpose of making the undead a little less "un".Sounds like a great premise doesn't it? Well, it is. And the fact that it was supposed to be a black comedy made it all the more enticing to me, but the sad truth is that these film makers simply bit off more than they could chew, pun intended. Not only do they take on the issue of racial and/or ethnic prejudice they also tackle domestice violence in one of the stongest opening scenes I've ever seen in a zombie flick (especially one that promised it was going to be a comedy), a scene that is echoed in the finale. Normally I'd say Bravo, nice take on a difficult subject! But now we have two major story lines going, prejudice AND domestic violence and its going to take one heck of a film maker to pull all this off. Especially since Fratto decides to link the domestic violence to an thread of female impowerment.(Trust me, here its a bit odd) Three out four of the most important characters in the film are women; there's our protagonist Angela (Gina Ramsden) who is murdered by her rat of a husband Josh (Joshua Nelson) in that first scene I mentioned, then there's the evil Commandant Christa McNamee who's one nasty piece of work, and of course the big zombie leader known as Mother Solstice, plus this other zombie chick who's hanging with Josh for some reason we're not privy to. I hate to criticize a film maker for attempting too much but that's exactly what happened here. They started with a comedy that really isn't very funny, added several messages, and for good measure they tacked on an orgy of zombie mayhem with everyone trying to kill everyone else. There were a lot of ideas for some great flix in this movie, but sadly there were just too many ideas for one movie.