Yummy

In the zombie genre Yummy definitely has its place. There is a lot of gore, a lot of blood and guts spilling out, and the make-up artists did a good job with their creations. As for the story it's just what you could expect when watching a zombie movie, nothing too serious, just endless bloody fun. As a Belgian I was surprised they made a movie like this one. Belgians don't make a lot of movies but when they do it's most of the time good if not excellent, and so is this one, a good fast paced gore movie à la Braindead. Gore and horror is certainly not the kind of movies that gets sponsored in Belgium so it was a nice surprise they gave it a shot. A good movie with unknown but decent actors to me, that is if you like this genre of entertainment.

The movie is pretty much what I expected: a horror movie that doesn't take itself too seriously. There is humor in it that works most of the time. Though for a horror movie it's actually not that explicit: real gore is off camera mostly, you actually don't see that much. At a certain moment a head is bashed in with a fire extinguisher, but you only see the blood splatter, not the head being bashed in. They should have gone the 'braindead/dead alive' route with much over the top gore, that would add to the comedy and make it funnier. The 90 minutes go by smoothly and it's a decent watch but don't expect it to be a horror classic.

A young med schools dropout takes his lovely and well endowed girlfriend to a dodgy hospital for a breast reduction but things don't go according to plan. This is a fun zombie horror set in an Eastern European plastic surgery hospital but thats about the extent of it. If you go in expecting nothing more then you'll have fun. Think Dead Snow but set in a hospital and with patient zombies instead of nazi zombies and you'll have a fair idea of what you are getting yourself into. The young male lead and his aversion to blood makes him a fairly useless hero in this situation and so we get something different from your usual lead male heroics. A wide range of characters including the girlfriend, her superficial mother, some creepy doctors and sleazy medical personnel keep things interesting but it still never reaches much higher than can be expected from the premise.

Since a few years already, I deliberately stopped watching zombie comedies, simply because there are too many of them and the vast majority aren't very funny. Of course, I had to make an exception for the very first zombie splatter comedy produced in my home country Belgium! Admittedly it isn't much better than the rest, but at least it also isn't worse, the cast contains a bunch of familiar faces (if you're from Flanders, that is) and there are a handful of deliciously absurd and grotesque gory sequences, which we really aren't used to seeing in Belgian cinema. Seriously, I'm still surprised this film received funding from the VAF (a Belgian governmental institute that decides which cultural projects receive financial support), since usually only stern and tragic family dramas receive funding.

The set-up is very light-headed. The gorgeous but insecure Alison is on her way to a dubious plastic surgery clinic in a non-specified Eastern European country to get a breast reduction. With her are her surgery-addicted mother Sylvia and her clumsy and geeky boyfriend Michael who spontaneously starts vomiting when he sees blood. At the clinic, things go horribly wrong since the head doctor's experimental rejuvenating serum actually turns people into zombies, and Michael unknowingly lets patient zero escape. What follow is a rundown of typically cliched and derivative zombie situations, while the lead characters get munched in order of obnoxiousness. There are a handful of inventive death sequences, but that is a requirement in every zombie comedy, I suppose. The funniest parts include the OTT Slavic accents used by renowned Belgian actors, and the fact that Alison repeatedly asks "ça va, Poepie?" (roughly translated: "Are you ok, sweetie?") every time when her blundering boyfriend hits his head, trips over his own feet or accidentally injects himself with needles.

PS: yes, that shoddy surgeon operating with extremely loud music in his OR is the world-famous DJ Dimitri Vegas.

To be honest I anticipated less, and got more than I could have possible been led to expect. This movie is actually pretty solid and entertaining. The acting is better than expected, the premise is better than expected, the characters (while flat) are better than expected, and the effects are pretty well done. The humor is generally low brow and bawdy but even that is not too bad for what it is, and the ending is actually pretty good even if somewhat implausible. I picked this flick on a whim expecting a truly trashy zombie romp, and instead found a serious genre zombie comedy that was a good cut above much of what is released all too often now.

If you want good old fashioned zombie gore with some cheap sex jokes, some over the top absurdity, and even a reasonably decent premise to be made into a movie, then you can do much worse than to give this movie an hour and a half of your time.