Zombie Undead (2010)

(In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) Sometimes, individual movies get the brunt of some pent-up frustration about an entire genre, and so it’s British effort Zombie Undead’s unfortunate burden to get the brunt of my exasperation with no-budget zombie movies. Thing is — it’s just good enough to be considered a movie, which may not feel like a high bar but does make it better than many other no-budget do-it-yourself efforts. With the rise in digital production means, it’s become easier than ever to make your own film with friends and family. That should be an unqualified good… if it wasn’t for the sheer laziness of most such efforts. Zombie Undead is better than many of them: it’s competently put together by director Rhys Davies, from elementary cinematography to understandable editing. The acting isn’t intolerable, and the plotting isn’t completely ludicrous. On the other hand, it’s not worth praising the result more than strictly necessary: The handheld camera gets tiresome, the dialogue is pedestrian, the plotting is so unoriginal as to be instantly forgettable and the gore effects are essentially limited to red dye. This is no-budget zombie filmmaking at its most basic, and that leads us to a more fundamental question: why bother making a movie if you’re going to make the exact same movie made much better by others? I’m enthusiastic about the democratization of filmmaking, but I prefer when they reflect perspectives, ideas or characters seldom seen elsewhere. Here, though, we’ve got the blandest actors incarnating the dullest characters stuck in the most generic zombie apocalypse possible, with threadbare ideas implemented in a most perfunctory fashion. Why bother? Why be so damnably lazy when no-budget offers you so many opportunities to be creative? Play buzzword bingo! I’ll take a black transsexual communist lactose-intolerant zombie movie over yet another bland white Anglo-Saxon trash. I want a zombie film that could only have been made by the no-budget filmmakers. I want something that the mainstream won’t dare show me. I don’t want the same zombie template used for the hundredth time. It’s not helping me in the slightest that I’m in the middle of a zombie movie marathon all feeling like the same thing but you know what — Zombeavers had zombie beavers; Dance of the Dead had a focus on a prom night marred by the undead; Rise of the Zombie had past-their-prime TV actors going through the standard Asylum formula. Zombie Undead (a terrible redundant title by itself) has… nothing. It dissolves into meaninglessness even as it unspools. Life’s too short for that lazy nonsense — an overdose of zombie movies is a fast-track to cinematic nihilism.