Thursday 1 September 2011

Deadheads - Fright Fest Review #3



Can you still love after you're dead?  This is the question Deadheads seeks to answer and through a blood drenched, gut achingly funny 90 minutes they manage to answer with a resounding yes!!

Mike (Michael McKiddy) and Brent (Ross Kidder) are dead.  Though this comes as quite a surprise to Mike and that it's been three years since his death.  The only thing on his mind is the love of his life, Ellie (the stunning Natalie Victoria) and getting the ring he was going to propose with, before his untimely demise, to her.  To tell her one last time that he loves her.  However as a zombie, things are never that straight forward seeing as they have some secret agents on their tail because experimental talking zombies need to be kept under wraps.  Oh and they also have to babysit Cheese, a kind of pet Zombie.

If that summary hasn't whet your appetite for this movie then I'll have to try and persuade you to go see it with this write up.  The movie spins the zombie genre on its head, giving us a story entirely from the zombie point of view and adds in a slice of buddy movie, romantic comedy with dashes of actions and plenty of limbs being removed, heads being decapitated and one penis falling off.  Yes you did read that right.

The chemistry between Mike and Brent is superb allowing you to really root for these guys to complete their adventure, with Cheese thrown in for extra (but not cheap) laughs.  All round this was brilliantly written and directed by two brothers with an obvious affection for the genre.  You can't successfully twist something on its head as well as this without knowing the constraints you are breaking free from.  Their knowledge of all things zombie allows them to become self referencing and manages to let them allow their characters play this straight faced.  No one liner style jokes here - its about funny dialogue, great visual gags and the cast playing off each other with expert timing.  If they played like they were in a comedy then this film would probably have failed from the beginning.  All credit to the Pierce brothers for pulling this off and giving us a rom-com-zom to rival Shaun Of The Dead.

Deadheads harks back to the films of the 80's in the same way Grosse Point Blank did with the Action/Thriller genre.  And thinking of it Kidder even reminds me of a young Cusack at his humorous best.

I unashamedly, thoroughly enjoyed this film and look forward to seeing it again, and again.  The cast and crew will undoubtedly go on to do more and I can only hope this film finds the wider audience it so richly deserves.  I wouldn't be surprised to see Victoria becoming sought after for love interest roles with her natural charm, and the camera obviously loves her, but hopefully we will see her in far more diverse material.  As for McKiddy and Kidder, again they could very easily get themselves pigeon holed into The Hangover type of movies but on this showing they both have far more to offer.  With the Pierce brothers I can only hope they do exactly the opposite and bang out more horror material.

Go see it will ya.

4/5

3 comments:

  1. Ah so close to 3/3 with the shared opinion...I hated this movie with a passion. I never bought the relationship between the leads and found the switching of motivations just really uneven. They just seemed to plod along for about an hour, never really getting along all that well and then all of a sudden they were best friends?

    Beyond a couple of smirks the humour never really did enough to endear me to the two leads to care about the journey they were making and I quickly got bored of the "quote as many lines from other movies as possible" stick that permeated much of the film.

    I should provide the caveat that as a day 5 film it perhaps suffered from my tiredness, so I should maybe give it another try at some point.

    Good review regardless though, are you doing the whole batch from FF? This seemed a big leap forwards in chronology from the other 2

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  2. I will be doing the whole batch. There was a jump in chronology as I wanted to share it with the Deadheads guys.

    Think you should give it another go. And thanks again for liking the review.

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  3. Anxiously awaiting review #4! I wonder what it will be this time!? :-)

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