The Mad

I'm not sure what the fate of The Mad is but lovers of zombie films should give it a go whenever and however it becomes available for public consumption. The Mad is a surprisingly funny and twisted addition to the zombie genre. I laughed really hard at a few moments in the film and I am usually immune to laughter. But the script is very funny.

Billy Zane is pitch perfect, as is the actress who plays his daughter, Maggie Castle. The rest of the cast is admirable but the real standouts are this father and daughter duo.

It took too long to get going and lost a bit of it's steam throughout the second half. And only because it could have used more zombie action and less meaningless effects segues have I rated it as such.

Family bickering during a zombie crisis was never this good.

A father, a daughter, a future stepmother and a boyfriend are traveling when they stop in a small town (isn't it always a small town?) for some dinner and a place to sleep. The restaurant gets its meat locally, but sometimes local doesn't always mean healthy. There's a new kind of mad cow disease in town.

When this film showed up in the mail, I was undecided on how to take it. It had "Billy Zane" written on the cover, which seemed like a promising thing. Because Zane, for whatever reason, seems to suggest greatness -- despite my inability to determine why. And then I watched the trailer on my DVD of "Bottom Feeder", and this looked like a possible American answer to England's "Shaun of the Dead". Boy, is that giving it way too much credit.

The company behind this film is 235 Films (a new company behind such greats as "Bottom Feeder" and "UKM: The Ultimate Killing Machine"). Their gimmick seems to be get a half-baked script, an unknown director, and then find one B-league star and put his/her name prominently on the cover. First Michael Madsen, then Tom Sizemore and now Billy Zane.

Now, Billy Zane ("Demon Knight", "Back to the Future") is a great actor and a wonderful action star and comedian. I think I could say he was the best part of this film without much debate. But he just couldn't save it. They gave him no good lines and he was just way too big to fill such a small character (not a small part, mind you, just such a one-dimensional character).

You see, the cool parts only take up ten minutes of the film. The rest is mostly a bunch of scenes where the daughter and future stepmother fight with each other. It's overdone, poorly scripted, poorly acted and really doesn't tie in to the overall plot. I was quite bored through much of this. I guess the daughter was sort of cute, but that didn't even come close to making up for the sheer blahness of it all.

Best scene was the "zombie debate" scene where they were trying to determine if the people they were fighting were zombies or not. They were flesh-eating and not dead... but were they undead? It's a good scene, and way too short. This sort of discourse could have carried the movie if it came in copious amounts.

Also, as with many films, I enjoyed the deleted scene. It was a music scene and nothing really happened in it, but it had artistic merit. And if you're going to give me a boring, pointless film -- you can at least make it artistic. Instead, they excised it out.

This film wasn't worthless. It had some good scenes, it had some humor, it had Billy Zane and I think the story was interesting. Maybe it had the wrong writer or director or editor. Maybe it had the wrong actors. It's hard to pinpoint it, because it seems like something that should have been kick-butt. If someone wants to remake this twenty years from now, or even a year from now (heck, "The Incredible Hulk" gets away with it) I support your cause. Because I think this one has a piece of hope buried under its large, bulbous morass.

Billy zane and co get up to mischief in this 80-some minute long movie.

It definitely has its moments that warrant a good chuckle, and the writing had decent flow, but it rapidly overstays its welcome.

The cinematography is kinda all over the place, and the editing leaves much to desire, what with the whole early 2000s vignette, which was the style at the time.

There's not much else to critique it on, ultimately the movie is okay and will get a few giggles out of you, it doesn't do much new. If I had to pick a specific issue, it's that it runs for way too long and boils down to them repeating the same joke for the entire span of the movie, kinda like a bad SNL skit, but they don't look at the camera after doing something they think is funny.

You could do worse, maybe it'll be right up your alley, give it a shot if you want, but you'll not miss much by skipping over it.

I was just saying that I feel like seeing one unapologetic movie like Crank or Feast. The Mad is just that: a ridiculous zombie flick that doesn't take itself seriously for one single moment.

Was it good? Absolutely not. But it was fun enough. Perfect tension breaker after you've watched three other horror movies and felt like unwinding a bit.

Anyway, it is not as good as Feast, nor as fun, but at least is one film that breaks the norm and makes a little difference. Of course, meat corporations would have approved making a movie about how eating bio steak turns people into zombies :)

I take any bet that everyone rating/reviewing The Mad lower than with a humble 3 never had the experience nor joy to watch a really bad movie - and the zombie genre really got a lot of unwatchable schrott produced. Anyway, The Mad is a zombie comedy that is no revelation or new cult but got me here and there smiling (including a tango dance of the father with a zombie girl) and on top we get here and there some little gore injected. For sure a B-movie that got a decent level of cheese and trash, maybe with some lengths here and there that could have easy cleaned up with some cuts. Recommended only to the lover of the genre that does not mind to dig in trash to reveal something worth to watch.