Days Of Darkness

OCTOBER 14, 2007

GENRE: INDEPENDENT, WEIRD, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (SCREAMFEST LA)

Uh.... what?

That is something I said no less than 20 times while watching Days Of Darkness. It’s a zombie movie with what appears to be a higher body count than usual, with a really somber title, and yet the movie hits Monty Python levels of absurdity at times. Except, it’s not funny.

Let’s see, we have a big black guy wearing a pink T-shirt saying hugs not drugs, plot devices such as disintegrating male genitalia, a former porn actress character who never stops reminding everyone that she’s a former porn actress (yet never fucks anyone!), a virgin birth, a guy wearing a kilt for no reason, and the idea that if you’re drunk you can’t be infected by the zombie virus. So I say again: Uh... what?

The movie just seemed like a big injoke among the director and his friends, er, actors. Many of the cast and crew were in attendance, and they would often laugh at things I wasn’t aware were supposed to be funny (they’d also laugh at the intentional, often unfunny jokes). It was like a zombie movie borne out of a drunken improv class.

It barely even works as a zombie movie, seeing as there are very few zombie attack scenes. Like Night of the Living Dead, the humans have to worry about one another in addition to the undead, but here the zombies almost seem forgotten for a good chunk of the film, and during the film’s few ‘action’ scenes, there is nothing especially exciting or unique to the proceedings.

That is, excepting the film’s odd subplot concerning how the zombies infect you. Instead of just the standard get bitten > turn into a zombie motif, writer/director Jake Kennedy proposes that when bitten, your cock and balls will fall off, and be replaced with a sack that holds a zombie baby that can re-spawn its appendages off camera. Or something. More of this would have at least kept the film squarely on an absurd angle, but they continuously go back and forth between the nonsensical plot elements and the (mostly botched) attempts at compelling human drama. Either way, the movie doesn’t really work, and the only thing that kept my interest was the super cute female lead, as well as the hilarious notion that being drunk can save you from becoming a zombie (a plot device introduced only in the film’s final 5 minutes – I would have LED with this!).

Oh well. Seems every Screamfest needs a "good concept done bad" zombie movie (last year’s was Quick And The Undead, a Man with no Name Western fused to a zombie tale, crippled by the terrible cast and bizarre cinematography), let’s hope this is this years’ and all the others are an improvement.

What say you?