Night of the Living Zoomers.

Festival of the Dead is a zombie movie by the Soska sisters Jen and Sylvia. I’m going to be honest, I’m not familiar with their work but they were involved in a Dead Rising film. Their studio seems to do stuff like Troma but maybe with higher budget and more gore. Anyway, I’m sure these two won’t be a subject of any controversy ever.

The movie stars Ashley Moore as Ashley, your typical teenage girl who is really into zombies. Her grandfather was Ben from Night of the Living Dead. Yep, this is an unofficial Night of the Living Dead sequel. In this timeline after Night of the Living Dead the events become like something of a national tragedy and for some reason there’s a festival dedicated to those who died call the Festival of the Dead. Ashley wants to go but the tickets are like a thousand dollars, and she also has to babysit her brother Luke (Shiloh O’Reilly).

Now the main characters in this show are mostly all stupid assholes and I hate them, with the exception of two characters. Foremost I’m referring to Camren Bicondova as Iris, the punk rock chick all of these movies need. Camren you may recognize as Selina Kyle from the hit Gotham-based series Gotham. I miss when she had big hair. Iris is more than best friends with Blaze played by Christian Rose who ain’t got no legs. Incidentally Blaze stays true to his name and turns out to be the most badass character in this movie, so good for him.

When I say that the characters in this movie are mostly awful, I mean to an incredibly detrimental effect. By the time bodies start dropping you’re just happy people are finally shutting up. The gang gets into a car accident early on on the way to the festival and the girl with a broken leg starts livestreaming herself crying because she’s pretty sure it’ll get her clout online.

There are a lot of parallels you can see between these characters and the original cast, but only in surface level personality traits. The movie has none of George Romero’s wit, none of his insight into society and his views on capitalism and inadvertently of racism. It’s obvious from the very beginning that the Soska sisters only picked Night of the Living Dead because of its gravitas as the origin of the modern zombie movie, and because that film is conveniently in the public domain. Meanwhile this film doesn’t really seem to be interested in saying anything about anything.

I’m more disappointed that the movie doesn’t take the obvious references. There’s a point where two of the characters are standing next to a police car and I really wanted them to get on the radio and say “send more cops.” And then later on in the film they’re at an ambulance and I was waiting for someone to get on the radio and say “send more paramedics.” There’s no “they’re coming to get you Barbara” or anything. Also the premise makes no sense. How does Ash have her grandfather’s gun and know that he’s a hero when he was shot at the end of the movie and there was nobody around to actually tell the story of what happened in the house?

Also there’s nothing intelligent in writing that devolves into characters saying the fuck word every other sentence. But I will admit that the zombies look pretty darn good in this movie. The practical effects on the zombies vary from person to person but they did a much better job than I expected. In fact I’ll go as far as saying that the props department and perhaps Blaze and Camren are the only entities displaying signs of talent in this film period. Absolutely not  the folks who mixed the soundtrack with the movie volume.

Rating: B