Movie Review: Zombies Anonymous
When I bought this movie on DVD (for $1 at a Blockbuster going-out-of-business sale), I assumed from the title and the fact that the cover has a picture of a girl wearing a sticker that says “Hello My Name Is ANGELA And I Think I’m Dead” that it was a comedy. Oh boy, was I wrong. Sure, there are some funny moments, but Zombies Anonymous is a gory, psychologically-twisted zombie flick. I’m all for dark humor, but it seems a little disingenuous to market your film as a comedy when it opens with a girl being brutally murdered by her boyfriend. Still, I liked the movie that it turned out to be. Zombies Anonymous is a surprisingly original and engrossing take on a genre that you would think had been picked over by now.
The film also has surprisingly strong performances considering its obvious shoe-string budget and do-it-yourself aesthetic (the Deleted Scenes on the DVD say things like “they couldn’t get all the actors back for the next day”). Gina Ramsden does a great job as Angela, the victim in that opening scene. She rises from the dead as a zombie, and discovers that the same thing is happening all over the world. She craves human flesh and her heart doesn’t beat, but she retains her mental capacity and tries to keep living her life. She experiences ostracism and prejudice, and her murderously abusive ex-boyfriend (Joshua Nelson) keeps trying to call her. She starts going to a zombie support group (called “Hugs for the Mortally Challenged”), but finds it doesn’t help much either. Even the “funny” support group scenes have lines like “There are dark times ahead, I can feel it.”
Interspersed with this story is one where her street thug ex attempts to join a group of “alive-supremacist” terrorists, led by a psychopathic female Commandant (played by Christina McNamee, who would be an expert scenery-chewer if this movie had the budget for scenery). When a cult of zombies following the very sixties “Great Mother Solstice” (Mary Jo Verruto) get involved, things take a completely crazy left turn. The story is fairly well-written and involving for much of its length, but then takes a nose-dive when the final third becomes one long action sequence. It’s as if they stopped writing a half-hour from the end and just said “…and then everybody fights!” However, the story up to that point was involving enough, and the pace quick enough, that I’ll still give it a pass.
This movie got points with me for having a very traditional Night of the Living Dead feel, with lots and lots of gore, while still bringing plenty of new ideas to the table. For example, the zombie cult gets high by putting brains into a blender and then directly injecting the result directly into their own brains. And there is room for a few jokes that land. In life Angela was a vegetarian, but now she has to adjust to a ravening hunger for raw meat. It also falls squarely into the tradition of using zombie movies to examine social issues, in this case obviously racism and prejudice, as well as domestic violence. Angela’s cycle of abuse continues even after her own death.
Angela (Gina Ramsden, far left) attends her undead support group in "Zombies Anonymous"
This film was originally released at a film festival or two back in 2006 as Last Rites of the Dead, which would not have been a very descriptive title either but would not have been quite as misleading. Anyway, the film ended up being distributed on DVD in 2008 with the new title of Zombies Anonymous. Unfortunately, there were apparently nearly 15 minutes’ worth of cuts to the DVD release. This becomes a problem near the climax, when the Commandant suddenly shows up with short, blond hair and then, just as suddenly, is captured and no longer wearing a shirt. I was left very confused, and I’m fairly certain that the explanation for these bits is among the footage cut for the DVD release.
Zombies Anonymous looks like it was shot with a cheap camera in the woods behind somebody’s house, but it manages to overcome this problem with strong directing, acting, and writing for much of the film. Writer/Director Marc Fratto and his cast deserve a lot of credit for what they were able to accomplish. This feels like an interesting, realized world, which is what makes it frustrating when everything descends into a bunch of dopey gun-battles It is a highly flawed film, certainly, but there is a lot here to like, and if, like me, you like to support grass-roots sorts of films, you could do a lot worse than this.
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