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| Credits |
Director: Brett Pierce, Drew T. Pierce
Starring: Michael McKiddy, Ross Kidder, Markus Taylor
Screenplay: Brett Pierce, Drew T. Pierce
Country: USA |
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According to the IMDB, Dead Heads' writers/directors Brett and Drew Pierce are the sons of Bart Pierce who worked on The Evil Dead, and they "grew up amid the production." I guess this explains why there's a scene in Dead Heads where the characters go to see The Evil Dead.
Dead Heads is about a zombie who has retained his brain function. He meets up with another zombie that is sentient, and then remembers that before he died, he had a fiancée. The pair set out to find his true love, and hope that she was secretly a necrophile that will want to spend the rest of her life with a rotting corpse. Along the way they meet up with an older guy on his own quest, and another zombie that's not quite as alert which allows for all sorts of bumbling zombie shenanigans.
It's not that I dislike zombie romantic comedies out right, because I love Braindead, Bio Zombie, Re-Animator and Shaun of the Dead, but I think a movie has to be really goddamn funny to be of interest within this subgenre, particularly in the post-Shaun wave of zombie comedies. Dead Heads is yet another zombie comedy that's just not funny enough. It starts well, with a scene that plays off Night of the Living Dead in an amusing way, but there're some overly zany moments in this film that just don't work. There're a few little jokes, like calling one of the smart zombies "Bub," that I laughed at, and there're some pastiches on horror clichés that play well, but there're also some shoddy Kevin Smith-esque pop culture references and an incredibly awkward, lengthy spiel about monster weaknesses. Even within the goofy universe of Dead Heads some of the things that happen don't make sense, but that didn't make me more inclined to laugh. I did like the Super Ben character that was a revved up version of the hero from Night of the Living Dead, but towards the end I was really struggling to stay engaged, and the cop out ending just made me question whether my effort was worth it.
One thing that sets this apart from Shaun is that Dead Heads isn't really a horror movie at all, it's just a comedy that happens to have zombies. It's a low budget film, but the production values are pretty good. Not in terms of the leads' makeup, but there're trucks and radiation suits and a bit of gore, all of which make the movie look a bit more expensive than it probably was. A few members of the cast are okay, but they are in a definite minority, and the rest of the acting is pretty rough, which may be part of the reason the movie's not as funny as it should be. Thankfully the lead is the best actor of the bunch, and he may also have been the one that did a good job in a specific scene, but I'm not certain if he had a stunt double because his face was obscured. There's a school mascot costume worn in the film and I think I've bizarrely worn the exact same costume. Whoever wore the suit while filming must've had ESP because the eyeholes in the suite are where the mascot's eyes are and it's impossible to see out of them without craning way forward. So, whoever was in the suit did a convincing job playing someone who could see where he was going.
Dead Heads is okay, but needed to be funnier to set it apart from the glut of rom-zom-coms we've been subjected to of late. |
