Hide and Creep (2004)

• Directed by Chuck Hartsell and Chance Shirley
• Written by Chance Shirley
• Starring
  • Barry Austin
  • Melissa Bush
  • Chris Garrison
  • Chris Hartsell
  • Chuck Hartsell

There’s precious little hiding or creeping in Hide and Creep, which is at its base just another no-budget valentine to the zombie movie genre. However, if you’re going to put together a humorous paean to the traditional living dead flick, you could do much worse than this one; it contains all the predictable elements, but with enough likable characters and general joie de vivre to make it a positive if minor representative of the format.

Just to let the fanboys know they’re in the right place, the first character we meet is Chuck (co-director Chuck Hartsell), the phlegmatic proprietor of Super Video World in Thorsby, Alabama. As will earn the respect of the living dead aficionados watching, Chuck is fully capable of holding forth on zombie movies to the customers that call: where the line between zombie movie and possession movie is (it’s just this side of The Evil Dead), how few good American movies don’t bear Romero’s name… However, he does reach the end of his customer tolerance when he’s told that the reason all of his zombie movies are out is that the conspiracy shows on AM radio are preaching an eminent zombie menace, and the listeners are trying to train themselves.

I spared you. Thank me.

Chuck’s introduction to the zombie menace on the ground is the pasty-faced moaner who breaks in the back of his store first thing in the morning and tries to bite him. Chuck over powers and kills the supposed “homeless guy” by bashing him over the head with a VCR (one of the few uses left to those appliances), but then he can’t get the local police department to deal with it; the sheriff is out of town until Monday and the deputy’s ended up in Florida after a wild night, leaving disinterested receptionist Barbara (Melissa Bush) more or less in charge.

Meanwhile, some of the people who could have benefited from those zombie rentals are Keith (Kyle Holman), proprietor of the Thorsby Gun Club, and the three newbie members to whom he’s introducing the perks of their back-in-the-woods clubhouse, namely the satellite dish that carries the Spice Channel. Unfortunately, their festivities are interrupted by the shuffling dead who cut their generator wire and start munching one of their number. Fortunately, you know, Gun Club. If anyone’s going to survive, it’ll be these guys.

I think the first line was superfluous, but…

Let’s see: video store guy, incompetent/absent law enforcement, armed rednecks… what other obligatory elements should we expect? Oh, there’s got to be a religious presence of some sort, and at first I thought it was going to be the lazy “intolerant know-nothing preacher” cliché when Chuck finds his video return slot stuffed with pamphlets entitled “Hollywood: The New Sodom & Gomorrah.” But instead, Reverend Smith (Barry Austin) of the Mulberry Baptist Church turns out to be a sincere and likable guy. It’s his congregation that deserves our disdain, mostly for treating the reverend like dirt — taking his folding chairs without permission and leaving him high-and-dry for the potluck, or coming to him for money even though they’d never darkened the door for services before. He’s the nicest guy in the movie, really, and it’s a shame that he gets bitten so early. (Whoops — retroactive spoiler warning!)

Oh, and here’s something you weren’t expecting: Michael (Michael Shelton), a guy who wakes in a tree after fuzzy memories of an alien abduction. Unfortunately, he wakes without any trousers or shorts, and has to walk back to town using his T-shirt to cover either the front or the back of his nether regions. It’s good to see a genre movie in which the majority of the nudity is definitely of a non-exploitative flavor, but damn.

Final ingredient — the government agent! (You knew there had to be one.) Known only as “Agent F” (John Walker), he parachutes (!) into Thorsby, lands on the police station roof, and starts commandeering vehicles, starting with Barbara’s Pontiac. Knowing that they’ve got something of a crisis on their hands — Chuck dropped off the body of the “homeless guy” at the police department in protest at the lack of law enforcement interest, and it came back to life — Barbara calls in the only other person she can trust, her ex-deputy ex-boyfriend Chris. And now, our cast is pretty much complete.

“Relax! I work for the government, and I plan to handle this situation with all of the efficiency and expertise you’ve come to expect from the government!”

As is our plot, really. The separate storylines established here pretty much coast on their own for quite a distance before intersecting (thankfully, Michael gets himself some pants pretty soon, and not too long after that Agent F falls prey to his own carelessness around the living dead and writes himself out of the story). The remains of the gun club take it upon themselves to patrol the town and warn the populace, while Chuck, Chris, Barbara and Michael try to get their hands on a trustworthy vehicle to get them out of Thorsby. Along the way, everyone discovers the standard technicalities of most zombie films: bites are contagious, and headshots are the only way to take them out. Oddly, Chuck is not a font of information here, though he has seen enough zombie movies that he takes the bloody deeds to come well in stride. (Oh, and these zombies are scared of the dark, which is why the movie starts at sunup and covers the events of one day. I didn’t mind that not much was made of this detail; instead, I was grateful that the filmmakers, mindful of their restrictive resources, wrote in an excuse to get around murky night shooting.)

Yes, these are the guys I want in my corner when the zombie apocalypse goes down.

What impressed me most about this movie was that just about every character was sympathetic. The gun clubbers aren’t rigid unthinking rednecks who can’t deal with anything beyond their ken; instead, they’re can-do workers who see a job to be done and get to it. Chuck, Chris and Barbara could easily have devolved into the ad nauseum bickering that often fills time in unimaginative horror flicks (with Barbara as the designated bitch, naturally), but instead they work together with a minimum of carping and a maximum of rational thought. The reverend uses his impending zombification for the strength to finally tell off his congregation of fair-weather Christians. Usually a rural-set horror movie like this thinks that making fun of smalltown characters is hilarious enough to make up for the universal unlikability of those characters; this movie was actually made by people who realize that rural folks are still people, and while good-natured ribbing abounds, such folks aren’t automatically worthy of derision simply because of the absence of sidewalks.

The makeup? Well, let’s just say that it’s a good thing that we dwell mostly on the (still-living) human relationships, because the majority of the makeup is nothing but greasepaint and Karo syrup, with a wee bit of latex here and there. On the other hand, this movie doesn’t make the mistake of some other low-budget zombie flicks I could name of putting no more time and resources into the makeup and FX, but then letting the camera linger long on the zombie gutmunching scenes, as if there’s nothing an audience would find more fascinating than greasepaint-swabbed extras chewing on bits of rubber.

I swear, if Savini got a nickel…

It’s nothing special, but for a zombie movie shot on a credit-card budget, it was refreshing.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 9 (counting only those individuals we saw alive before they died)
• breasts: 5
• pasty male butts: 1
• …and sausages: 1
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0