Turd Alerts!

Three Worthless Zombie Flicks

There's a cool picture on the front of the DVD box, but no zombies in Feeding the Masses (2004) look anywhere near that good. Bad dialogue from the mouths of ultra-amateur actors pads out this boring pizzashit so that even on the level of abysmal zombie movies this one falls short.

When occasionally the film gets round to showing a small handful of zombies, the gore FX are way phony & very brief, then it's back to the talking heads.

Most of the zombies are played by extras who had no instruction on how to act like zombies so they just walk around. The majority walk about without even make-up FX.

One black woman being a zombie seemed to have some powdered sugar on her face, others had no makeup at all. I mean, nothing could've made this an even slightly good film, but you'd think it would've occurred to someone that zombies should have some death-makeup or something.

There is a plot of sorts which the talking heads explain to us. Although just about everyone who goes to downtown Providence, Rhode Island, gets turned into a zombie, & the mayor is holed up in a secret location, the local government is nevertheless taking control of the local television station (there seems to be only one) in order to tell everyone it's now safe & for everyone to go shopping (emulating George W. Bush's advice on how to help America in a time of crisis).

Don't even ask for all fifty reasons none of it makes sense. Supposing that on some level it's easy to imagine a city government would place economic vitality above human safety even if everyone dies the moment they show up, the mayor would've had to have taken over every satellite dish in the city not to mention the world wide web & the radio.

A couple of guerilla news reporters decide to show the public the truth despite the government ban. But how they periodically get on the air is never explained.

A rare moment of imagination in this failure is the spoofy television ad from the company that can be hired to track down your zombified loved ones, re-kill them humanely, & put them back in their graves. I could just about imagine such a company would arise in a world where the dead become zombies. The filmmakers cribbed this routine from the superb zombie feature Stacy (2001), so no award for originality, but it was something for a film with almost nothing.

There are some other attempts at satire. Most of it falls flat. But the best eight or ten minutes of the film would exclude all the zombies & retain the best three or four comedy bits.

Really this is a total waste of time from the new company Shock-O-Rama which clearly wants to be the new Troma but is not apt to rise to that low occasion. Anyone who actually likes the crappiest of crappy zombie films may find the DVD worth a two-dollar rental.

There are plenty of extras on the disc, including two short subjects, Voltagen (2003) eight-minute variant of Wicker Man (1973), & The Hypostatic Union (2002), two minutes of Jesus & the Devil, both by Duane Graves & Justin Meeks, very amateur horror shorts with poetic aspirations & certainly no worse than the awful feature.

Instead of Feeding the Masses this one should be titled Farted by Monkeys as it seems scarcely feasible it was produced by humans of normal intelligence.



Do movies get any worse than Feeding the Masses?

Sure they do! The Wickeds (2005) -- which due to the rotten typographical design I thought was called The Wickens -- is a retarded zombie movie apparently written & directed by retarded zombies.

The important factors are that it's set on Halloween -- oo, that's exciting -- & it's got teenagers being picked off one by one. Inventive! Plus staggering kids with spaghetti fixins rubbed on their face.

With all that, how could things go wrong? And while playing the retitling game, this one should've been distributed as Night of the Snoring Viewers.

It really is possible to be a cheapy-ass direct-to-video zombie flick & still have a bit of verve or twisted artistry or humor. See for examples Zombie Honeymoon (2004) or I, Zombie (1999). But The Wickeds has got nothin'.

The best thing about the film is the picture on the dvd box which does not relate to the film in any way. You can look at the box for free. Don't bother with the rest.



I could've sworn no one could make a zombie film worse than The Wickeds but there's always someone making the effort. When somebody has no movie making talent but wants to make one anyway, the thing to do is a zombie movie.

Well, no, really, the thing to do is go out in the woods & tease the bears rather than waste horror fans' time & money. But if it's somebody who really wants to screw people over for a couple bucks, they'll go for the zombie production.

You don't have to have any skill holding the camera straight, don't need to know anyone who can apply monster make-up in any particular or intentional manner, don't have to understand how the sound equipment works, don't need to be able to write dialogue, don't need to find people who can act, don't need a clue how to edit whatever ends up filmed.

That Zombie Night (2003) was distributed despite all these lacking elements proves you don't gotta know nuttin. You just have to have a trust fund or a relative who isn't too sharp on the bun, or else be a champeen street beggar on the freeway entrance, cuz even the cheapest most absolutely lowest of low budget crud is gonna take an investment.

In the future, which looks like now, there will be war, & in the aftermath, millions of people will turn into zombies, about as many people as have AIDS & HIV today.

There's a middle-aged dickwad named Dave with a child-wife & a daughter who must've been born when her mother was ten years old or younger, ipso facto, Dave's a pederast. Dave gets some other white trash sunzabitch dudes together for a zombie shoot & off we go.

Now this isn't necessarily a plotline that needs to be come out any worse than nine-tenths of the zombie flicks in the marketplace. But none of it comes together with so much as amateurish charm. Even individuals who adore cheap zombie movies because they're so damned bad will likely be cured of their adoration by Zombie Night (although there really are fans out there for whom "this is even worse than the really bad ones!" is high regard).

The originality of the title pretty much says it all, & it's all down hill from there. It attempts to be funny, on purpose even, but ask some six year old kids to play "zombie" in the back yard & watch that instead, as the kids'll come up with better gags.

Continue to:
Horror of Zombies (1974) and Vengeance of Zombies (1973)

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