American Zombie

An often entertaining movie with plot holes, contradictions, continuity errors and characters doing things from out of the blue. Various elements are also left unexplained.

Watch ZA: Zombies Anonymous instead. It has a similar sense of dark humor and depicts the zombies in similar way (with intelligence and the ability to function in society. while being a much better put together film.

While this movie is entertaining and it's mockumentry style intriguing, it is very sloppy, especially towards the end. Only watch if you can ignore major flaws.

When asked if there are flesh-eating zombies out there, Joel--an undead political activist--quickly retorts: "are there flesh-eating humans?" Grace Lee not only directs American Zombie, but plays herself in the film. She teams up with John Solomon--also playing himself--to film a documentary project about an undead community living in L.A. The duo quickly find out that some sort of virus, brought on by a violent death, is plaguing its residents, and ultimately zombifying an entire community.

American Zombie is a veritable slice-of-life of four "revenants"--Joel, founder of Z.A.G.: the Zombie Advocacy Group; Judy, who naively searches for true love and denies her zombiness; Ivan, a convenience store clerk who aspires to be a writer; and Lisa, a florist specializing in funeral arrangements for other people--who secretly longs for her own. Each character represents an average person with average emotions and average problems, showing us that the undead aren't too different than the living. Well, except for their rotting flesh, of course.

What's really great about the film is the absolute mockery the protagonists make of themselves. Grace, the ever-so-astute naturalistic documentarian, and John, the bumbling investigative reporter, are at odds with each other throughout the film, and ultimately to a fault. What makes this film not-so-great is twofold: the running time and the conclusion. I think the film would have been better as a short. While it's in-depth look at each character is interesting, I'm not sure if its compelling enough to steer the audience towards anything meaningful. And even worse is the ending, after which, the audience can no longer sympathize with the plight of the community. Unfortunately, what could have been a provocative social commentary, becomes nothing more than a sensationalistic--albeit unique, comedic and funfilled--mockumentary.

"American Zombie" is probably the biggest pleasant surprise I encountered in quite a few years and I urge every fan of cinema – whether horror or films in general – to check it out as soon as the opportunity occurs. The film is an odd and unconventional mixture between a zombie film (duh!) and the so-called "mockumentary" (people with hand-held cameras registering the unusual situation they find themselves stuck in). Just because of this label, I approached "American Zombie" with extreme caution and low anticipations. Let's be honest, the market for zombie movies already suffers from over-saturation since many years and the Mockumentary forms a suddenly unstoppable trend ("Cloverfield", "rec", …) that yet has to prove its stability. George A. Romero also joined in on the combination of zombies and shaky cameras with his latest effort "Diary of the Dead". Now, he's an acclaimed director and even the founding father of zombie cinema, but what to expect from a bunch of inexperienced documentary makers? Well, I love being proved wrong when it comes to innovating and new film projects! "American Zombie" is refreshing, original, intelligent, well structured and far more stylish than it has any right to be. The subject matter may sound ridicule, but writer/director Grace Lee presents everything in a convincing style and even the cast members, who have the difficult task of depicting plausible corpses, play their roles with a constant straight face. The script uniquely introduces resurrection from the dead as some sort of congenital defect, caused by a substance in the brain that is activated in case of a violent death. There are several categories of "Revenants", varying from the absolute braindead to the living dead with most of their vital brain capacities still intact. Throughout a period of several days, a Los Angeles film crew follows four of these "intelligent" zombies and illustrates how they live their everyday afterlife, deal with all sorts of discrimination and desperately attempt to oppress their physical decomposing. Just like normal people, these revenants have different personalities, hopes, desires, sentiments and goals to achieve. Meanwhile the film also centers on the arguments between the filmmakers mutually, as Grace wants to maintain an objective viewpoint whereas John continuously confronts the revenants with provocative questions. The revenants' stories and the crew's constant quarrels are already fascinating to behold, but the script is uplifted to an even higher level of quality through interviews with other groups. There are scientists listing the characteristics and history of the Living Dead, Zombie-haters (displaying various ways to destroy a dead brain) and Zombie-chasers (similar to people who write love letters to convicts on death row). Seemingly without much effort, "American Zombie" succeeds in bringing a biting satire that subtly mocks modern social issues and media sensationalism, but simultaneously doesn't lose track of story depth and character drawings. There are multiple powerful scenes in the film and you honestly come to care for the revenants … even though the maggots occasionally fall out of their bodies. "American Zombie" is also a rather atypical "Mocumentary" (since there are still professionals in charge of photography, sound and editing) so the amount of shaky camera movements and extreme close-ups are thankfully kept to a minimum. Highly recommended to open-minded cinema lovers.

The people who wrote all the previous reviews must be trying to sell the movie, because I don't see how any of them could have got what they say they got out of the movie. It is boring from start to finish and the characters are flaky and uninteresting! There's really no plot other than that they are making a documentary. Some elements they bring up in the film are so vague it makes you wonder why they put them in the film in the first place. It makes me think if the Lifetime channel made a zombie movie, this is what it would be. If you are a true zombie movie fan, then this movie isn't for you! Trust me, you'll be more entertained sitting in front of your TV for an hour and a half with it turned off!

I just signed up to IMDb simply to express my delight in how refreshing this film was. It is an exploration of how groups are marginalised by society, and labelled with negative connotations, causing not only fringe group extremists but self fulfilling prophecies.

John represents the world view of the Zombie group, and as the film progress you can see how this world view is pushing the zombies away from integration, into the fringe of society and into the arms of angry primarily labelled and conforming leaders who's angry voices are the only ones to be heard at such an extremes of social exclusion.

People have said that the movement of the Zombies at the end, into the expected "typical" behaviour of that group ruins the film, and any sympathy for them dies with it. It in fact shows how having pre-conditioned ideas of how a people behave actually creates a self fulfilling prophecy.

Excellent film. Bravo.