Dug Up

The Walking Dead it is not.

This is a poorly funded B-Movie to be sure, but one that's so bad - it's good. Well, above average anyway...

First and foremost, there are hot women everywhere and it's worth watching just for that alone. Furthermore, each character is funny and the actors all do a good job with their lines. They act stupid on purpose and are quite amusing in doing so. Some of their lines, by the way, are absolutely hilarious. There's also the zombies, of course, and with the budget, they are fake as hell, however; instead of trying to pass them off as legitimate, this movie actually makes that fact comical. On top of that, there are some added bonuses like the firearms and a sudden appearance of a mint Dodge Super Bee.

This movie was filmed in Vermont, but would have been right at home in a backwoods hillbilly area. In fact, the actors do a great job of being clueless and stupid. Unfortunately, that can only go so far. The sheriff of the town is always busy doing extracurricular horizontal activities. An old man dies, and it was rumored he had gold and treasure hidden, and Trevor decides he will try and find it. Instead of gold hidden in a grave, they find a box, and inside is a dial and a medal. In turning the dial, they cause the dead within 100 miles to rise out of their graves. And the zombies can be quite fast. It is low budget and it shows. It is also fairly goofy. But it also wears thin after awhile.

"It's rednecks versus zombies and it's not a match of wits!" Horror "comedy" about a zombie outbreak in a small rural town. Three young grave robbers looking for buried treasure instead find a curious looking contraption that has a dial on it. We later fine out that this device is in fact a Necrometer - can't say that I've ever heard of one before - and it is used to raise the dead, which our dimwits have already done. I like seeing decaying zombies rise from their graves and to the film's credit we get to see this. And the ghouls' makeup is half decent too, though the CGI used for bloody gunshots etc looks very cheap. I also liked the fact that the lead guy explains that these are undead zombies as opposed to viral ones, therefore being bitten by one will not turn that person into a zombie. What lets this movie down big time for me is firstly the juvenile humour, farting and sex gags are only funny for so long until they become repetitive and boring. For me this happened very early on in the plot. Secondly there is the acting, it ranges from bad to abysmal. The zombie-comedy sub genre has been done to death, most are mediocre or below, this is by no means the worst that I have seen but I certainly won't be digging it up again.

DUG UP is your usual indie zombie comedy which feels a little better than some of the braindead efforts that this genre conjures up. The reason for that is that the script isn't totally mindless and the main three actors do seem invested in their roles. The story takes a while to get going and the first half is too obsessed with showing skin to get on with the plotting, but the low rent zombie nonsense in the second half is a bit better. There's the requisite cheap gore effects and some mannered acting bringing to life characters that are more caricature than real person. By the standards of mainstream cinema it's not very good, but by the standards of an indie it's not so bad.

Seriously? It says it's a zombie movie but it's the furthest thing from that. This is basically the early start of the, all southerners are white supremacists/hicks. The accents are just so far over the top that you want to rent a trailer just to say you've got good coverage on the white stereotype that seems to be common these days. The acting is unbearable, the girls are just, yuck. And the guys are basically what you've seen in movies like Deliverance. I mean what's the point? Nobody believes this is real American culture. There isn't any town in the USA that behaves this way. But of course a zombie movie wouldn't be complete without a bunch of Neo-Nazis right? I mean seriously?