PLOT: When the small island community of Port Gamble, Washington is overrun by a league of uncouth flesh-eaters, it’s up to a persecuted Iranian girl and a gay couple to band together and put an end to the madness once and for all.
REVIEW: In nearly a first time effort across the entire board, Kevin Hamedani’s feature length debut ZMD: ZOMBIES OF MASS DESTRUCTION is a micro-budgeted zom-com that largely relies on its charm to overcome its technical deficiencies. To that end, the flick succeeds, if only in scant doses peppered throughout the 92 minute running time. For all its limitations in front and behind the camera, the flick is a pretty fun-filled grue-gala that managed to clench its fangs on my brain for most of the time. Here’s why…
Despite trampling covered territory in terms of story and plot, ZMD boasts a few unconventional tropes in the American horror genre, not to mention the zom-com offshoot. We meet our lead Frida (played by the beautiful Janette Armand), an Iranian girl living under the thumb over her doting, traditional father (Hamedani’s father, Ali). Everyone in town mistakes Frida as Iraqi, a joke meant to satirize the xenophobic mind-state our war in the Middle East has incurred. Next we meet Tom (Doug Fahl) and Lance (Cooper Hopkins), a gay couple who are in town to finally come out to the former’s mother. Of course, when Tom’s mother turns into a blood-parched ghoul as the news is broken, foaming chunky pink mucus and whatnot, Lance retorts: “My father reacted the exact same way.” I will say this, family relationships in the film are far from sacred, and it was a bit refreshing to see that even the strongest of bloodlines weren’t exempt from political incorrectness.
What I dug most about ZMD was the playful tone and unbridled energy that was laid throughout. The pacing is brisk, most the jokes are funny and evenly dispersed, and there’s more blood in this damn thing than female swim team on collective rag-time. Seriously, the gore in the film is comported in over the top J-horror fashion, geysers of blood spraying all over the place. Walls, ceilings, doors, clothes, faces, floors, you name…it’s gore sodden! In other words, I dug the zaniness. The exorbitance. I mean, to take this kind of material too seriously would only result in a gauche, ham-cooked debacle. Instead, Hamedani seems to revel in the cheese, embrace the frivolity and just f*ckin’ run with it. Also, I’ve always been partial to flicks that take place in one day, in one relatively confined space. Here, most of the events occur in one town over the course of one night. In that respect ZMD has a simple, self-contained formula that, perhaps in response to the technical constraints, keeps the film quite focused and watchable.
But alas, we are talking about a shoe-string effort from not only a feature first-time director, most of the cast and crew popped their cherry here as well. So it’s no surprise the flick has its detractors, not the least of which being the actual look of the flick. Bad. Not quite eye averting, but pretty damn close at times. The editing in the flick is also quite shoddy throughout, at one point devolving into the video-game, MTV rhythms where you had to squint to suss what the hell is going down. Prior to that, the flick swam at a more drawn out pace, aptly mirroring the tempo of the zombies themselves. Which was cool. The acting is serviceable, perhaps better than it should be for a cast of such limited experience. Janette Armand as Frida was believable and sympathetic, definitely someone you could root for from jump street. Fahl and Hopkins add some droll one liners and sight gags (no pun) as a gay couple in more peril than perhaps their own lifestyle evokes. In fact, the whole gay couple in the throes of a zombie attack is an amusing premise, one that’s only partially realized and never really mined of all its inherent humor.
All in all I’d say ZMD is a fun, entertaining way to rock 90 or so minutes with friends. Probably forgettable after the fact, but that shouldn’t deter you from give in her a day in court. The jokes are decent, the makeup and FX very good at points, the lead characters are relatively fresh, and it’s overall a good time. It just suffers from a lean, thoroughly unoriginal storyline, lackluster cinematography and inability to maintain any real staying power.
Rating: 6.5/10