Stag Night of the Dead

If the mysterious plague sweeping the nation wasn't bad enough, Dean is still going ahead with his doomed wedding tomorrow morning.

That leaves him with a choice.

Pick up the button holes and chocolate fountain as instructed by bridezilla Elaine, or go with five mates (and a stripper) to play 'Zomball' at a top secret military compound where you get to shoot zombies with huge stun guns.

Disobeying the golden rule of Zomball ('never never humiliate a zombie') the stags face overwhelming odds from the massed undead and each stag is hunted down. The truth about Zomball is finally revealed and suddenly the mother-in-law is the least of Dean's problem.

And the beginning of ours. There has been a rash of these brit zombie films of late. They are all directed the same. The production values are OK but they are hard to watch because they aren't very good. Count this in the numbers.

A stag party travels to an air-force base where they take part in Zomball, an extreme activity where they get to shoot real zombies, the unfortunate victims of a recent pandemic.

Boozy blokes, tarty strippers, and the living dead. A surefire combination for a hugely entertaining comedy horror movie, or so one would think. But although the title Stag Night of the Dead conjures up all kinds of wild possibilities for sexy, bloody fun, somehow the people behind this film fail on almost every level, making yet another hugely embarrassing addition to the UK zombie genre.

Writer/director Neil Jones aims for lads mag style humour, but thanks to an awful script, a lousy cast, and very little discernible talent behind the camera, his film is about as funny as a kick in the nuts (which incidentally is one of the film's supposedly hilarious gags!). When one of the characters is called Georgina Romero, the level of inventiveness is clearly not very high.

As for the nudity and gore one might expect from such a film, the splatter is extremely limited, thanks to the characters being armed with electric stun guns instead of regular firepower (allowing for some really woeful visual effects), and the bare flesh is limited to one pair of zombie breasts and some tempting cleavage from busty stripper Candy (Sophie Lovell Anderson). All in all, a huge disappointment.

Just watched it again and it still makes me laugh. It's not pretending to be Dawn of the Dead or Dawn of the Dead (sorry. Bad in-joke), but it's slightly off the wall and has zombies in it, together with far from the worst story, script, acting, directing, soundtrack, et cetera in the zombiefilm world. Probably closest to Doghouse - also British - in conception and zombie-action level (but with less overt misogyny).

If you're looking for terror, angst and megagore, move on - you'll be disappointed; but if you like zombielite-ish with laughs (think Doghouse, Zombieland), lots of zombies, the odd hero, and some well-placed karma, you may well want to see it more than once.

With a title like this you'd be correct in thinking you're not going to be watching a profound film on the human condition . Instead you might be tricked in to thinking you're going to be watching something ready made for a Friday nights lads' in with beer and pizza . Buy beer and pizza by all means because that'll be your entertainment - not the movie itself

You can see the producers wanting to do something along the lines of SHAUN OF THE DEAD but there's zero wit involved and instead we end up with something along the lines of STRIPPERS VS WEREWOLVES , a sort of trashy horror comedy that fails to work as either comedy or horror and ends up as trash

I did notice that there is a backstory of a world wide pandemic that has converted much of the human population in to zombies and one wonders if perhaps this might have been directly tied in to THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD or 28 DAYS LATER but the producers were worried about copyright issues . As it stands the producers should have been more worried their own production rather than someone elses and only scrapes three out of ten for including the Johns / Ward track Fantasy

How many DTV zombie films are out there these days? There's must be thousands, all running the spectrum from really good (Apocalypse of the Dead) to the awful (Tokyo Zombie) - meaning that viewers will have to do their homework before even buying a modern zombie film. This one, a zombie comedy, is good enough to warrant one viewing at least, as it low budget really shows, but you've got to acknowledge the effort made. And it did actually make me laugh once or twice.

Five guys and a stripper are out for a stag do when they head off to an army barracks to indulge in a bit of Zomball, which is like paintball only with zombies and stun guns. You've got your innocent groom, best man and fanny rat, tourette's suffering other guy, and a few others. Looks like not all is as it seems at the barracks as anybody who gets munched by the zombies just gets added to the zombie army, or something. It's best not to think about who does what in a film like this.

As you might expect, the zombies get let loose and start chowing down on soldiers and stag party alike. It's a zombie film so I shouldn't need to get down to the plot, eh? You've got talking zombies (which actually kind of works here), bits of gore, bits of humour and not bad characterisation (plus a couple of twists) - We ain't looking for Ingmar Bergman in a zombie film, just good action, gore, and maybe scares. Stag Night of the Dead falls kind of into the 'good' category for me. Low budget, but they did try their hardest.