Come Get Some (2003)

Posted on Oct 01, 2003 under Comedy, Horror |

Directed by Jason Griscom
Written by Jason Griscom and Steven A. Grainger
Starring
- Steven A. Grainger
- Colleen Galeazzi
- Jennifer Strickland
- Bonnie Moore
- Hayley Mattison

The eminent Dr. Freex once wrote a piece which both praised the Evil Dead trilogy and blamed it for the decline of true horror in horror movies (or at least pointed to it as the poster child of said decline). The trend, as exemplified by Raimi’s trilogy, was away from shock and horror and toward tongue-in-cheek humor. (And gee, you thought that knowing winks were invented in Scream…)

**See? I told you he was dead!**

Nowhere does this trend hold true more than in modern (i.e., post-Day of the Dead) zombie flicks. Not only is the toothless winking of the rest of the genre present, but most zombie films in the last fifteen years have been micro-budgeted homages to Romero and his Italian imitators. These filmmakers self-financed their cinematic opuses¹ because they loved those older movies. They had fun watching them, and wanted to have fun making their versions. And it’s awful hard to make a movie of imitative admiration without acting like it’s all a big joke that the audience is in on.

Thus, no-budget zombie movies keep trying to be funny. Not all of them, naturally. But a goodly proportion.

Come Get Some! makes no effort to hide its homages, swipes, and borrowings from the forerunners of the genre; in fact, this review would become almost an encyclopedic history of zombie movies if I tried to cite every moment of celluloid deja vu. Yes, it is celluloid — shot on 16mm black and white film, for that “Night of the Living Dead” vibe. And to make sure that that vibe isn’t lost on those who aren’t paying attention, the first scene has a lone woman wandering through a rural cemetery, righting flowers on tombstones — until a decayed hand reaches out of a grave and up into her privates. Cue the gore, and the punky hardcore rock. (Hope you like edgy, dissonant music. Really, really like it.)

The last, best hope.
We’re so screwed.

Next comes our hero, who never gets a name (it’s a running gag). Kept in the wings by the government as a tool of “last resort” in cases like these, we first meet him passed out facedown on his couch. Between his flabby physique, his Hawaiian shirt pulled from the laundry, and his desperate affectations of cool, he comes across like Bruce Campbell trying to parody Michael Madsen. Since I need to call him something other than “Hawaiian-shirted lardbelly,” I’m just going to dub him “Mikey” and have done with it.

We also meet our femme power — four goth girls (excuse me, “womyn”) who’ve made it their mission to clean up this little Southern flyspeck town, one redneck-laden poolhall at a time. There’s Skylar (Jennifer Strickland), the blonde one; Christa (Hayley Mattison), the, um, other blonde one; Ashlyn (Bonnie Moore), the not-as-blonde one, and Summer (Colleen Galeazzi), the most Gothed-out of the four. I could try to point out the little character quirks that set them apart, but suffice it to say that they all excel in assertiveness and confrontation. Oh, and they kick ass real well too.

Love that creamy chocolatey filling!

The girls (yeah, referring to them that way is just asking for it) have it in for the Warner Brothers, a quartet of redder-than-red rednecks who make the town the uninviting place it is (exactly how isn’t explained, although one could surmise that body odor plays a role). Said brothers have also recently been co-opted by a shadowy government agency, as opposed to one of those brightly-lit government agencies. Seems that the agency has been suffering from budget cuts, so they’re fomenting this particular zombie outbreak (the worst one “since Pittsburgh in ‘68″) to rectify that, and using the Warners for dirty work like spilling toxic waste in graveyards and such. Probably the most creative scene in the movie features the Warners in their pickup, playing “mailbox baseball” with the zombies on the roadside — but when one of them tries it with an actual mailbox, the others all lecture him about the federal penalties for disrupting a mail receptacle. Oh, and Mikey has been called in as part of their nefarious plan — since he’s a guaranteed screw-up. (Boy, that all makes sense now.)

It’s inevitable that Mikey and the femme foursome will meet up, initially distrust each other (mostly it’s the wimmen’s understandable distaste for his overt machismo), then band together and start fighting both zombies and human badguys. All is well and good, but somewhere around the middle of the movie, it stopped being funny.

I know what you’re thinking: “Since when did Nathan start running Calvin Klein ads?”

Or rather, stopped trying. It’s not exactly comedic gold when every gag is stolen from somewhere else, but the over-the-top comic-bookiness of it all helped cover a multitude of sins. But right around the point at which the women and Mikey hole up in an abandoned farmhouse and stand watch over one of the girls who’s gotten a zombie bite, the komedy is replaced with some dark seriousness. Mikey tells Ashlyn his sad history of losing the girl he loved in a previous zombie outbreak (complete with flashback footage); she responds with her equally sad history as a sixteen-year-old bride in a marriage rife with marital rape (complete with flashback footage). And unfortunately, the attempts at a serious dramatic side to the movie not only stops the pace cold, but shows up the inadequacies in the acting, especially among the femmes. Summer may be the worst in this regard, being of the “hunch her shoulders, pace back and forth, and repeat, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’” school of acting.

Which means it’s a relief when they get back to zombie-stomping in the morning. In fact, the last fifteen minutes is pretty much an all-out battle and gore-fest between Mikey, the three surviving womyn, the two government spooks, the Warner Brothers, and a crapload of zombie extras. Thank heavens that goth chicks carry medieval weaponry in their trunks at all times.

**“Make a still out of it? Why ,that’s so crazy, it just might work!”**

As imitative zombie films go, it avoids the label of “ripoff” of any of a number of older films by sheer openness in its borrowing — there’s no way it could be interpreted as anything but a heartfelt Valentine to all of those great and not-so-great movies that came before. I mean, when characters are named Romero and parks are named Savini, you know it’s being served up with heaping helpings of admiration. It’s not half-bad, but you may get more enjoyment from simply charting the pedigree of every scene and riff than from the movie proper.