Undead (2003) Now that New Zealand
native Peter Jackson has made it to the big time with his hobbit movies, it
looks like everybody in all of Oceania is picking up a camera, firing up their
computers to generate some snazzy special effects, and maxing out their Visas
to buy gallons of fake blood all in an effort to follow in his low-budget, home
grown horror roots. That's cool because I don't live down there, so it's not
like I'm ever going to run into a detour on my way to the liquor store because
some bushwhacker is doing a late night shoot for his post-modern, slightly
ironic take on Friday the 13th.
It's also cool because odds are I'll never have to sit through all these
almost-slick, self-satisfied efforts full of computer generated severed limbs,
because my local theatre is much more concerned with filling its 28 screens
with the latest big budget fare from Clooney, Cruise, and Crowe (dang it - is
there no way to keep these southern hemisphere freaks off our big screens
completely?) which is what every strong American should be asking for in trying
cinema times like this. So how was it that I ended up seeing this zombie movie made by a couple of
Australian brothers? Good taste and a nondisclosure agreement prevent me from
going into all the sordid details, but the PG version of it involves a late
night phone call from someone who was calling in their marker. And lets just
say that when your marker involves one of your platoon leaders cutting through
about fifty Cambodian irregulars while you were pinned down with shrapnel in
both legs on a mission that officially didn't exist and him dragging your
shredded carcass out of there because you never leave one of your own behind,
you can't very well beg off. Next thing I know, I'm on a military transport to a private airfield deep in
the bush for a top-secret screening of a little zombie movie that was in
desperate need of some mainstream American attention. Obviously, since
MonsterHunter isn't given to hyperbole, the money men wanted an honest to
goodness opinion on whether this was going to be one of those quirky imports
that kick ass at the box office and connect with Joe Sixpack like 28 Days Later or be an overrated stinkeroo that would best be left to an overpriced DVD
edition that only rich, fanboy morons would purchase like Wild Zero, Versus, and Stacy. 
First of all, Undead was a technically well done feature, far outpacing the sporadically crappy Wild Zero not to mention completely blowing away the junior high level achievement of Stacy. Unfortunately, Undead suffered from some of the same problems those two films did as far as the
story went: it didn't make a lick of sense.
I'll never understand how some of these movies can take the silver screen's
simplest concept (dead people walk around eating living people) and turn it
into the biggest, most confusing turd pie since the Teapot Dome. I've pissed
and moaned a lot about George Romero's zombie movies, but say what you want
about Dawn Of The Dead, at least you can grasp what's happening. It isn't too hard to get what's
going down in its follow-up, Day Of The Dead, either. It's just that what is happening is downright stupid. But at least
you get it. The confusion isn't evident right off the bat, but only becomes so as the film
progresses and the Spierig brothers attempt to deepen the usual zombie plot
with a bunch of hooey involving acid rain, alien abductions, and killer fish.
There's a sleepy town named Berkeley where the residents do stuff like elect a
"Catch of the Day" Queen for reasons either unknown to me or forgotten due to
my jet lag. Rene is the reigning queen and she and a variety of characters are
thrown together once a bunch of meteors start whacking residents on the head or
hurtle completely through them. Yes, this one is adopting the "meteorite" version of zombies over the
"government experiment gone really wrong" version of zombies. So, who is in the
obligatory gang of folks thrust together and trapped in a house until someone
decides to do something stupid (like leave the house)? There's Rene, two cops,
a guy and his pregnant gal pal, and Marion. Marion is a rather burly guy
dressed in overalls, wearing a big floppy felt hat and decked out in full
hillbilly beard. He would be the Marion of Marion's House of Weapons. Marion is seen as an odd bird by the town because he's previously reported
being abducted by aliens and attacked by flesh-eating fish. He's one of these
guys that talks all quiet and tough and throws his guns in the air and catches
them after using a bigger gun to blast zombies and even does a flip where he
ends up clinging to the side of the wall with the spurs on his shoes like some
sort of backwoods Spider-Man. There's even a scene where he flings a pen into
the bottom of can of soda that's in the mouth of zombie causing it to explode.
It all comes off more as a desperate attempt to be cool rather than as cool
itself. 
For awhile everyone hides in Marion's House of Weapons until this pregnant
woman starts trying to have her baby. The cops decide they need to get her to a
hospital. Everyone leaves and ends up finding their path cut off by a big spiky
wall. One of the cops climbs the wall, eventually falls off and dies. Everyone
else stands around in the acid rain that starts to fall. There's also some
hooded alien dude milling around every so often. And sometimes Marion would
have flashbacks to the day when the fish attacked him and the aliens abducted
him and then let him go. There was also the expected scene somewhere in here
where they stopped at the store and picked up supplies. If you wanted to be
original, you might try skipping the "shopping scene" and not trot out the
aliens from the X-Files on us.
Now, it's time for the helicopter scene. You know this scene. The remaining
group decides to take to the air to escape to somewhere else. No one has any
idea where, but the thought is that they can fly to a location that the end of
the world doesn't have any flights scheduled to. (I'd have guessed that
Australia was far enough out in the boonies, but who could have predicted the
even fish down there would turn on you? ) But wait! This movie is cutting edge
and has its own 21st century attitude, so the helicopter scene is now the small
plane scene! It doesn't really matter because the movie spirals way out of control at this
point. This is where the aliens really step it up and appear in groups and do
stuff like splash water on people's faces, abduct them, turn them into zombies,
turn them back normal, and hold everyone in the town in stasis high in the
nighttime sky. That did lead to some unfortunate accidents when one of our guys
was flying his plane into the same sky with these people. It turns out the
floating people are pretty much like raccoons and possums when it comes to
getting out of the way of oncoming traffic. Eventually both Rene and Marion get abducted and held in the sky. In the
outside world, everyone comes to know that some kind of crisis is going on, but
the big spiky wall is keeping them out. Then all the townspeople are returned
to their city, the spiky wall takes off into the sky, turns into lots of
glowing lights and/or spaceships and leaves. The people are all back to normal
leaving Rene to lament that all the people they killed would have turned back
to normal if they had just left them alone. Luckily, Marion displays some
intelligence (in spite of his Deliverance-style appearance) and reminds her that these poor people were trying to scoop
his and her brains out of their heads before getting waxed. 
Things go on too long after the aliens leave and end with Rene newly empowered
as some sort of zombie fighter complete with black outfit and spurs! Marion has
turned into a zombie, but she's inspired by his words to her that since she's
still alive, she must be meant to battle against the alien invasion or the
zombies or the acid rain or those really mean fish. It ends with her holding
off a bunch of penned up zombies outside of some safehouse she runs in the
country.
The movie failed to explain any of this and none of it connected up. Why did
they turn into zombies? Why did they turn back into normal humans? What was the
acid rain? Why did they abduct Marion and let him go? What was the point of the
invasion or of keeping all the townspeople up in the air? Why did the aliens
abduct grasshoppers? While the movie looked decent enough (though it seemed to be filmed through a
blue filter a lot of the time), the actors left little impression, with both
Rene and Marion having zero charisma (you will not be seeing them in any
mainstream films I would wager - though Marion did have a credit as "bartender"
in Inspector Gadget 2) and the supporting cast being portrayed as buffoonish clowns (particularly
the screeching police officers). The movie's feeble attempts at black humor are
ill-advised and by now that whole "extreme gore crossed with funny stuff" is
played out and should be avoided (28 Days Later was wise to do just that). A movie that looks better than its low budget
origins, but with a bollixed up story that sinks it faster than a dingy full of
zombie carp.
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