`UNDEAD' JUST EATS AT YOU.Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Critic `UNDEAD' is a no-budget, midnight-movie horror flick that's probably best enjoyed in the comfort of your home at the aforementioned hour. While it's easy to admire and occasionally even relish the filmmakers' resourcefulness and do-it-yourself spirit, this overlong o·ver·long adj. Excessively long: an overlong play. adv. For too long: talked overlong. zombie splatter movie is ultimately undone by bad acting, plot holes bigger than the perforations in the victims' torsos and an ending that raises more questions than it answers. The movie was shot in 2001 in Australia by first-time filmmakers Peter and Michael Spierig, who then spent the following year doing most of the special effects themselves on their laptop computers. The Spierigs are obviously big fans of horror movies like Sam Raimi's ``Evil Dead'' series and Peter Jackson's early gross-out feature ``Bad Taste'' - a bit too obviously, actually. Exploding heads and spine-bursting body blows can only go so far in compensating for a general disregard for actual themes and new ideas. The action begins when the peaceful fishing community of Berkeley, Australia, is bombarded with meteors - not just any meteors, but infectious meteors that turn everyone into intestine-craving zombies. A few hardy survivors congregate at the home of a bearded, laconic la·con·ic adj. Using or marked by the use of few words; terse or concise. See Synonyms at silent. [Latin Lac mountain man (and he is a mountain of a man) Marion (Mungo McKay), a survivalist sur·viv·al·ist n. One who has personal or group survival as a primary goal in the face of difficulty, opposition, and especially the threat of natural catastrophe, nuclear war, or societal collapse. Noun 1. who believes everyone in his cabin has been sent to him ``for a reason.'' There are some clever touches (zombie fish should be on the genre menu more often), funny lines (''In my day, we respected our parents. We didn't (bleeping bleep n. A brief high-pitched sound, as from an electronic device. v. bleeped, bleep·ing, bleeps v.intr. To emit a bleep or bleeps. v.tr. ) eat them!'') and a giddily gory go·ry adj. go·ri·er, go·ri·est 1. Covered or stained with gore; bloody. 2. Full of or characterized by bloodshed and violence. approach to the carnage. There's even a sense at the beginning that the filmmakers are going to riff on bad '50s horror movies a la ``The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra,'' though the Spierigs abandon that approach as soon as the muse abandons them. It is hard to sustain this kind of thing, harder still if you haven't really got much of a script, and by the time the movie gets rid of its zombies, it has inadvertently succeeded in turning its audience into members of the undead un·dead adj. No longer living but supernaturally animated, as a zombie. , which might be OK or even natural if you're a teenager, but not for the rest of us (abuse) for The Rest Of Us - (From the Macintosh slogan "The computer for the rest of us") 1. Used to describe a spiffy product whose affordability shames other comparable products, or (more often) used sarcastically to describe spiffy but very overpriced products. 2. . Glenn Whipp, (818) 713-3672 glenn.whipp(at)dailynews.com UNDEAD - Two stars (R: strong violence and gore, language) Starring: Mungo McKay, Felicity Mason. Director: Peter and Michael Spierig. Running time: 1 hr. 40 min. Playing: Landmark's Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles
In a nutshell: No-budget zombie film has moments of inspiration, but that's about it. CAPTION(S): photo Photo: Felicity Mason tries to keep the meteor-made zombies at bay in the Australia-set ``Undead.'' |
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