In short: Zombie A-Hole (2012)

Frank Fulci (Josh Eal), zombie and other supernatural nasty hunter with a cowboy fixation is on the hunt for the titular Zombie A-Hole. Said undead (Brandon Salkil) is demonically possessed, nearly unkillable, and a very dapper dresser. He’s also going around the backroads of the USA, murdering female twins, and then some more female twins, and then even more female twins. This hunt is a bit personal for Frank, because of course it is.

Also looking for Frank’s enemy are a mysterious one-eyed, one-handed woman with some home-made utility hands (Jessica Cook) and the zombie’s twin brother Castor (also Brandon Salkil) – and yes, before he was the Zombie A-hole, our antagonist was indeed called Pollux. Eventually, team-ups and flashbacks to tragic backstories will occur.

I don’t love – or even like – all of the many films Dustin Mills has made in the last decade or so, but Zombie A-Hole is certainly a film with its very own room in my heart. This is the really indie sort of indie horror, held together by spit, creativity and whatever money and talent a filmmaker can scrounge up; it’s also the sort of indie horror I’m only writing about very irregularly, because many of these films are simply not very good when you’re neither the filmmakers nor their relations (groups that tend to have quite the overlap), but also made with so much love that talking about them only to rip them to pieces seems mean-spirited and pointless to me.

This one, however, actually is really rather good, in the way a short, sharp, smutty punk rock song is good, or a rusty but polished fender is, feeling as if it were built out of old pulpy horror comics, a love for the weird side of gore, and Southern Americana. Technically, this is obviously in parts pretty rough, and looks cheap, but Mills usually wrangles these problems into becoming part of an aesthetic, especially thanks to his often very sharp editing, and effects that dare to just go there. There’s a lot of visual imagination and highly creative staging of scenes here, also, often used in ways a professional/mainstream filmmaker would never do things because they are just not slick enough or simply too weird (that’s a compliment). The result is perhaps not always clean, but more often than not surprising and atmospheric, and practically always perfect for the film’s attitude and its peculiar sense of humour.

Personally, despite the many good gore gags in the movie, I would have wished for fewer twin killing scenes – the ungodly number of them really isn’t terribly good for the film’s pacing. But otherwise, this one turned out to be absolutely worth my while as a film with a genuine spark.