I saw a second-hand copy of this at Blockbuster (who normally don't bother with this kind of film, except for The Asylum's boring efforts) with a box reading 'Day of the Zombie'.
The profit-driven, deceptive title change seems pretty stupid to me - who would rather watch a nondescript zombie flick than "THE ULTIMATE" (or rather, first... I think) zombie musical?! Well, I love musicals, bad films and zombies so I grabbed it.
The movie is very, very low-budget, and very, very poorly-acted (by everyone except Steve Andsager, who is actually very funny). The singing is also truly awful, except by the one guy in the opening scene, who sadly has only one more appearance.
The plot is deliberately very similar to George Romero's classic 'Night of the Living Dead', which these film-makers (like me) clearly adore. It begins with a man and a woman in graveyard, moves to a besieged cabin in the middle of nowhere and ends on a pile of burning bodies. The Romero references are many, and usually painfully obvious.
Speaking of heavy-handedness, I think the biggest flaw here is the large amount of time and effort given over to political satire. Because of the zombie-musical concept, the movie tries to be lighthearted and throw jokes in there. Sometimes they're bad, sometimes they don't even make sense, sometimes they're actually good (the 'hobbies' song made me laugh out loud). But the zombies are referred to as 'zombie terrorists' and the chemical that caused the problem is the 'Jihad Resurrection Virus'.... yeah.
And we're not talking about a few throwaway lines here: this is the major theme of the plot. Believe me, after an hour or so it gets old. It's a nice enough idea to try to parody recent US foreign policy in your movie, make your heroes occasionally look like monsters, follow in Romero's satirical (but much much much subtler) footsteps... But this scriptwriter and this premise are just not capable of effectively satirising that. "We need to bomb any country that had anything to do with terrorism!" What, because your shack is besieged by zombies? The songs themselves are actually catchy as hell! Unfortunately the singers are absolutely horrible, and the bland rock band who play them all are awfully samey. No big book numbers, sadly. All light rock.
It's a bad movie - there's no denying that. There is a tombstone at the beginning that looks like it's made of card and written in marker pen. One of the zombies is topless, and curiously she's always at the very front of the horde, next to the camera...
-- But at the same time this movie really is something special... or at the very least unique.
Every now and again the movie really impressed me with a subtle Romero reference (one character angrily calls another 'flyboy' under his breath) or a clever little spin on a zombie cliché (arms reaching through a wooden wall, waving slowly back and forth during a sad song).
And this is the thing, here. This is why I'd recommend seeing this film. Despite the fact that it's a kind-of-comedy musical, despite the huge limitations it faces, this film really tries hard to add a few things to the zombie lore. There is a scene near the end when one of the characters who's been bitten gathers the others round him and starts to explain the zombies' motivation. Another character asks a rhetorical question, why do these reanimated corpses want to eat the flesh of the living? Why are they cannibals? And suddenly you think.... wait, that's actually a very good point! Why the hell do they? And the answer the guy gives is unusual, interesting, very satisfactory... and quite moving. I'll not forget that bit of zombie character-development in a long time.
And that's a brilliant bit of writing, in this armchair reviewer's opinion. You have to watch two acts of cardboard tombstones to see it - but it's worth it.
Four out of ten. But that's more than I'd give most zombie films released in the last ten years - including Romero's.
