Mad Zombies

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 :)

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.

"The Mad" is without a doubt meant to be bad. There can be little doubt that both the cast, the director, and most likely the screen writer foreordained this to be a laughably bad film. There are time in which Billy Zane's performance not only breaks the forth wall it shatters it into a thousand pieces, leaving the viewer in a vortex of both confusion and pure hilarity. If it's not zombies, who's only zombie like aspect is alka-seltzer driven mouth foam, it's seemingly omniscience beef patties that attack the characters in-mass. The full affect of this leaves one with more per-zombie-giggles than "FIDO". If you happen to have a group of pro-zombie minded friends and what a movie to put everyone in stitches try "The Mad".

"The Mad" is a decent but very silly horror flick.

The Plot: Jason Hunt (Zane) and his family stop at a small town restaurant. While there, the townspeople turn into zombies after eating the hamburgers. Now Jason and his surviving daughter Amy (Maggie Castle) have to escape and figure out the mystery.

For a direct-to-video horror movie, this wasn't so bad. I expected the worst because it's distributed by the same company that put out UKM. Zane saved the movie with a funny performance. There was some good gore scenes too. The only flaw in the movie is the editing. There's no need for the movie to turn into a epileptic fit. It only happens a few times though.

"The Mad" is a good rainy day movie. It's fast-paced and gory, topped with an entertaining Zane performance. Recommended.

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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.