Tuesday, August 11, 2015

In short: Brain Dead (2007)

Not to be confused with all those other brain dead movies, I mean movies called “Brain Dead”.

A bunch of cliché characters converge at the usual woods/cabin/lake nexus where some cost effective alien parasite zombie thingies do their thingy. Breasts are bared, heads are exploded, and oh so very many horrible jokes are made, until the film truly does to you what the title promised. Your Latin teachers were right!

Remember Kevin S. Tenney? Once a purveyor of silly horror films of mediocre to surprisingly good quality, the 00s find the director still/again dealing in the genre, but if Brain Dead is anything to go by, he’s not even reaching the heights of “mediocre” anymore, for this thing is as dreadful as they come. Sure, it’s kinda-sorta better than some of your usual shot-on-video movies in that the shots stay in focus and the sound is fine which, alas, means you can really appreciate how bad the acting is, and hear the dialogue. However, it’s a bit like saying being hit on the head with a mallet is better than being hit with a morning star – your brain’s gonna be mush either way. So, otherwise, the film offers one would-be clever bon-mot after the next (until you begin to see Tenney’s Night of the Demons as an exercise in restraint), only broken up by a bit of gore from time to time. Alas, about one (two, or three if you’re absurdly nice) joke here is actually funny, and the incessant barrage of “humour” does of course make it impossible to enjoy the horror parts as horror, particularly since anyone with even the slightest footing in the genre will have seen everything here a dozen times before, sometimes even in movies with characters, a plot, a theme, or jokes that are actually funny instead of obnoxious.

I have no idea what I – or anyone else for that matter - did to deserve the cruel and unusual punishment of this thing.

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