You’re pulling my leg, right? I mean, I was supposed to laugh when the lead character, General John Gibbs, announced gravely that the real enemy wasn’t the zombies, it was…us. And I’ll bet you wanted me to cringe when General Gibbs shook his fists in the air and howled “damn you Father! Damn you to hell!” after Gibby was forced to plug a zombie kid between the eyes.
But who had time for cringing when I was doubled up on the floor, tears streaming down my face and gasping for breath, my windows still rattling from the peals of laughter that filled my living room as Gibby followed that drama queen moment by rhapsodizing about how after that his life had no meaning! How where once he felt like he had been of God, but now he was of the Devil his very self! You and me both, buddy. You and me both.
Maplewoods is one of those backyard zombie movies that every middle class white suburban male has dreamed about making at one time or another. They’ve all sat around watching the various iterations of Night of the Living Dead thinking that yeah, it was cool, but they could do so much better. And with the help of all their neighborhood friends. Why, who wouldn’t want to be all made up for an afternoon, wear old clothes and shuffle around, periodically munching on raw meat from the local Safeway?
You can forgive some of the amateurishness of the players involved and the self-absorbed length of the opening and closing credits (okay, we get it – David B. Stewart III just about single-handed birthed this defect, now get on with the movie already) if there were some original ideas or neat twists in this tale of a special group of soldiers dispatched to a secret location to wipe out all traces of the Maplewoods project. Sadly, I can only report that not only does the film manage to unironically tap most of the cliches of the genre, but manages to hang all those cliches on the skeleton of a story that makes little to no sense.
It all starts out low budget enough in a parking garage where General Gibbs has a meeting with a couple of other military types. One character apologizes for all the “cloak and dagger” stuff involving the parking garage, but it was probably cheaper to shoot in the local parking garage on a Sunday morning than to try and sneak a film crew into the local military base and commandeer an office for a couple of hours.
Gibbs is told that he’s been selected to head up a team to go in and wipe out all traces of this project his father was responsible for creating. Damn you Father! Damn you to hell! Oh wait, not yet? Sorry.
The super elite team of soldiers looks suspiciously like a super elite team of high school friends and local punks who are using up all their time off from KFC and have probably convinced themselves that this is their big break. Today, a homemade zombie movie, tomorrow the lead in a Michael Bay film!
They aren’t helped out any by the silly looking uniforms they’re wearing that make them look like police officers from some banana republic, but the CIA agent along for the ride is easily the worst of the bunch.
A doughy white guy who acts with his sunglasses and hilarious facial expressions in the way too plentiful reaction shots, is wearing some sort of fatigues complete with a CIA patch on it! Uh, wasn’t this supposed to a secret mission? You know – way off the books – and this unit and its assignment never existed and if David B. Stewart’s family is ever asked about it, they’ll deny all knowledge of this movie?
The problems with the plot become evident almost immediately when they get to the location of the project and discover that a bomb has been activated and they’ve been doublecrossed. Except that there is never any explanation as to who doublecrossed them or why.
Then once they find out there’s a bomb, do they haul super elite ass out of there? Not right away. Gibby decides to go down to the sublevel of the lab where the bomb is located and where he just lost half his squad to rampaging zombies to see just how much time is left before the bomb goes off!
Then you’ve got the scene where Gibby burns all the files related to his father’s project. Even though the bomb that’s about to detonate would probably handle that adequately.
Oh and the project? Just your standard Nazi scheme to create an army of the undead that Gibby’s dad brought back the paperwork on when he was in Berlin during the waning hours of WWII. This movie will lead no zombie cliche unturned!
Maplewoods only gets worse as it goes along, having characters miraculously run into one another in the woods just so that dramatic encounters can result. The super elite team takes all of thirty seconds to degenerate into a bunch of scared, undisciplined fools and even worse, the movie is told in flashback for no good reason.
Gibby tells his story to some guy from a cell at Ft. Leavenworth which means that every fifteen minutes or so we go back to Leavenworth where Gibby mutters something along the lines of “that was really bad, but things were about to get worse” and “I couldn’t believe that happened, but what happened next was even more unbelievable.”
Maplewoods clumsily and weakly manages to hit most of the zombie and secret military unit banalities without any style at all. Recommended only for Stewart family reunions and then only at gunpoint.
© 2010 MonsterHunter
