Monday 19 October 2009

Not Quite Dead (2007)

Director: Stephen C Krystek
Star: Victor Crespo
Zombie shorts are everywhere nowadays, it seems, and here's one made here in Arizona by writer/director Stephen C Krystek. The zombie plague has come and the living dead are roaming the streets. Up on the roof of a house overlooking all this is Kris, a zombie nut who's in hog heaven because his dream has come true. He's happy to take bets on how long people are going to survive out there or go zombie fishing by hanging raw meat on the end of a fishing line.

You know all these Facebook apps that tell you how long you're going to survive in a zombie movie or a real life zombie attack? Well Kris is the guy that wants to find out for sure, and it turns out that he's not as good as he thinks he is, especially when he lets a friend in who's been bitten, then doesn't kick him back out again. Sure enough, it doesn't take long for him to get bitten himself and his idiot friends seem to be happy to leave him with a gun and a samurai sword.

This is a fun little film, though to be honest most of the fun comes through the infectious enthusiasm of the people making it. Their characters are believable idiots who have fun reinforcing to us what we already know: all those guys who think they're going to kick ass during a zombie apocalypse are going to be the first ones down, they're not going to like it too much and the rest of us are going to be busy trying to learn how to really survive to laugh at them.

Cinematically it's a mixed bag. I'm not so fond of the shaky editing but the effects are great and there's some good framing going on. The acting is believably rough and it aids the story, or what passes for a story in a zombie outbreak where nobody has a clue. It's not a bad little zombie short but there are a lot of not bad little zombie shorts out there right now. It seems to be the easiest thing to make when you have a budding filmmaker, a budding effects guy and a bunch of friends. I'm sure we'll see a lot more. Many of them will be better than this one but I'm not sure if any will be quite as honest.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fantastic review!

Hal C. F. Astell said...

Thanks!

This is an old one though and I'd like to think a new review would be a lot more substantial.