Denver Film Fest Review: 'Zombies of Mass Destruction'

Zombie comedies, heretofore known as "zombedy," are all the rage these days. Zombieland tore up the box office and resulted in a weird cult of Woody Harrelson (I still say his best role is as Woody on Cheers), while Doghouse, though relatively unseen outside the festival circuit and the U.K., blew me away with its unique brand of humor that failed to miss a beat. Kicking off the new decade with a slot on After Dark's 8 Films to Die For is Kevin Hamedani's Zombies of Mass Destruction, a zombedy with a political bend it wears on its blood-soaked sleeve.

Zombies of Mass Destruction takes your standard "group of people trying to survive a zombie outbreak" trope and layers it with a heaping plate of social and political commentary. Iranian-American Frida has recently returned home from Princeton to only be met with ignorant yet neighborly racists and her devoted Muslim father. Meanwhile, couple Tom and Lance have arrived from the big city to reveal to Tom's mother that he's gay. To make matters worse, a zombie outbreak has inexplicably cropped up. As they struggle to survive, the zombies become the least of their worries as they face rampant racism and religious persecution that has come to typify the small town they tried to leave behind.

Somewhere within Zombies of Mass Destruction is a brilliant and scathing attack on post-9/11 paranoia and religious extremism, but it unfortunately fails to stand out from other zombedies by eschewing subtlety in favor of blunt criticism that quickly becomes tiresome. It was also given no help by the stilted acting and poor special effects, the latter of which serving as evidence of the meager one million dollar budget. It's clearly head and shoulders above a student film, yet at times you're forced to wonder how some of the scenes managed to squeeze into the final cut. While on the surface these elements might serve to dissuade you from ever seeing the film, it should be made known that Zombies of Mass Destruction, once past the first twenty minutes, is uproariously hysterical.

Much of the humor is centered on dialogue, particularly the awkward exchanges between gay couple, Tom and Lance, with the remainder invoking fits of knee-slapping laughter you might expect to find from a sketch comedy group. Walking away from the film I immediately pictured a moment in time where writers Kevin Hamedani and Ramon Isao hand the script over to the guys from The Whitest Kids U Know and tell them to go to town. The humor is juvenile and remarkably un-P.C., but you can't help but laugh. You'd think telling a flamboyantly gay individual to "act more straight" would get tiresome, but somehow they make it work. Bonus points go to Russell Hodgkinson, who manages to play ignorant redneck neighbor Joe Miller without devolving into a caricature of post-war paranoiacs and racist ideologues. While the humor is relatively evergreen, one can't help but assume that the part of the plot that evokes racial hardship would have been far more appropriate six or seven years ago. This, however, is countered by the sexual and religious discrimination felt by Tom and Lance, which serves as a perfect companion piece for the hullabaloo surrounding gay rights in the country today.

Zombies of Mass Destruction is far from perfect, but its irreverent humor and spot on, albeit slightly overbearing, look at how ignorance is far more dangerous than the walking dead makes is a delight to watch. It will make you laugh, it will make you groan, and it might even make you think.