Rise Of The Dead

NOVEMBER 18, 2007

GENRE: POSSESSION, WEIRD
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

OK, let’s get something out of the way. Rise Of The Dead, despite its very zombie sounding title, not to mention rotten zombie guy on the cover, OR the fact that it’s called a “Frightening Zombie Thriller!” on the back, is NOT A FUCKING ZOMBIE MOVIE. A ghost possesses some folks, and when they are possessed they drool and get that dazed look on their face you might expect from a zombie, but once the possession is over they go back to normal. The people who are killed never come back either.

That said, this movie is an unparalleled, amazing piece of “what the FUCK?”ity. I’m gonna have to spoil the ending in a bit, but I hope you all go check this out. It’s only 72 minutes long, and the ending redeems every bad thing about the movie and then some. Spoilers begin now.

So OK, the people in the film are possessed by the ghost of a little baby who accidentally put a gun in its mouth and pulled the trigger (pretty impressive for a kid, I can see one or the other, but doing both? If he wasn’t dead, that kid would be ready for advanced Lego sets by the time he was 3). We learn that he was adopted, because the birth mother was only like 17 and didn’t have the means to take care of him. So throughout the movie, people involved (the adopted parents, the father, the doctor who delivered him, etc) with his birth keep dying or killing other folks. She figures out that it’s her son’s ghost like 40 min into the movie (but due to the length, that’s also with only 30 to go) and tries to warn everyone, but they don’t believe her. Fine.

Here’s where it gets weird. She realizes that the ghost is simply trying to be with his mother again. So to solve this problem, when her boyfriend (not the father) is possessed, she almost knocks him out, then pulls his pants off, says “come to mommy”, and proceeds to more or less rape him.

Now, for those of you following: yes, via possession, she essentially fucks her own son in order to get pregnant again so he can be reborn with the “right” family. Holy fucking shit. You think Shock or Ghost Son got a little weird??? Found it odd when the girl in Big Bad Wolf blew her boyfriend’s dad to get his DNA? This eclipses all of them, easily.

It’s almost like writers Joshua and Jeffrey Crook and Kris Scotto wanted to make a film that served as a metaphor for living up to your responsibilities as a parent, but somehow got forced to make it into a horror movie. The horror elements seem fairly shoehorned in (and the music is just a straight up ripoff of the Halloween score, for good measure), and hell, the movie doesn’t even end on a “scary” note, which makes the DVD’s excessive attempts to sell it as a zombie movie all the more puzzling. Granted, I have no idea how you can sell such a concept otherwise, but still. I wish they provided the commentary instead of the director and star doing typical “this is my friend, we shot this in blah blah” boring crap (however, they do point out a co-star who is now dead. A quick Google revealed she had like 3 DUIs and died of “suffocation”, which probably means “choked on her own vomit”.).

So yeah, I urge you to check this out, if only for the fact that 65 minutes of not very interesting stuff results in a scene that would make Freud himself go “What the FUCK?”

The film also features a supercute naked chick walking out into the cold and axing a guy.

What say you?