Undead

Directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig
Written by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig

So there I was with a Friday afternoon off, meeting my friend Scott for lunch at two (he’s moving to D.C. tonight), what to do to kill some time? If you’re anything like me, you’re thinking, zombie movie! I suppose I could have just walked around the corner to the Battery Park City Regal to see Land of the Dead, but the more I hear about that one, the more it scares me (and not the good kind, either). So, it was off to old City Cinemas Village East to check out this new (to these shores) zombie flick from Australia, Undead.

With my ticket came a flyer announcing that Michael and Peter Spierig would be there to do an intro and a Q&A for the 5:00 and 7:00 shows, plus they were having a drawing for an autographed gas mask. Damn.

Undead begins with a quick introduction to our principle players. They are, in no particular order: our brooding heroine (Felicity Mason), the hysterical pregnant girl (Lisa Cunningham), the goofus dumbass (Rob Jenkins), the asshole cop (Dirk Hunter), his naïve and skittish (and asthmatic, to boot) first-day-on-the-job partner (Emma Randall), and the grunting, monosyllabic, survivalist gun nut with John Woo moves, Jack Black looks, and an unending supply of spring-loaded weapons in his coveralls (the wonderfully named Mungo McKay).

Then meteorites fall from the sky and turn people into zombies. And that’s about it. You keep hoping that something more will happen, that the Spierigs are going to spring something on you, that these people are going to turn out to be, or turn into, something more than their three-word descriptions above, but…the heroine broods, the pregnant girl gets hysterical, the goofus does something dumb, the cop is an asshole, the skittish partner reaches for her inhaler, and Mungo gets to grunt cool lines like, “Nobody drives this shitbox but me.”

And then the aliens make their first appearance, and you know that you are just shit out of luck.

Undead is far from the worst movie I’ve seen this year (that would be The Jacket) - the scene where Mungo is punching the zombie fish in fact got a bigger laugh out of me than anything in, say, Fever Pitch. And on the zombie movie scale, I'd place it somewhere above Night of the Comet (which is quite a few rungs up from 28 Days Later, in my book). Still, Undead is a pretty limp affair, as either parody, comedy, or horror.

If you’re dying to see a funny zombie movie, it is time to rediscover Peter Jackson’s brilliant 1992 gore-fest Dead Alive (hey, remember back when Peter Jackson still made interesting movies?), or last year’s resplendent Shaun of the Dead. Still, damned if that gas mask wouldn’t look pretty fucking sweet on my bookcase.