Snuffin’ Zombies (2008)

• Written, produced and directed by Karl Benacci
• Starring
  • Karl Benacci
  • Joseph Byrd
  • Don Wilson
  • Robert Muye
  • Matthew Wilson

I used to feel bad when a do-it-yourself filmmaker would send me a screener of his undistributed or self-distributed microbudget opus in the hopes that I’d like it… and I didn’t. Heck, I’d sometimes even pull punches on those reviews; the directors had come to me with honest expectations that I would appreciate what they had done and spread my approval far and wide. Telling them (and you) how much their movie sucked was like finding the fluffiest, saddest-eyed kitten in the pound, and then drop-kicking it for the field goal.

I no longer have much of that problem. One reason is that as I’ve gotten older, both my figurative and literal hearts have become shriveled flinty things, unable to feel human empathy or any other warm emotion. But the other reason is that, frankly, these filmmakers deserve what’s coming to them. I don’t actively seek screeners most of the time, so I can reasonably assume that anyone who seeks to send their movie to me really wants to hear my honest opinion. Plus, I’ve got over 700 reviews on this site, many of them of movies by other backyard movie impresarios; anyone can take a cursory glance over my output and discover exactly how I treat “movies” which turn out to be “a guy and a bunch of his friends fooling around with a camera and having a grand ol’ time and also there are zombies and stuff.”

So when I say that Snuffin’ Zombies sucks rocks and isn’t worth your viewing time unless you’re suffering from a debilitating neurological condition that leaves you unable to process any more than the first panel of a Bazooka Joe comic, I do so with only the slightest twinge of regret, and that usually fades away once I take my blood pressure medication.

Gaah! Get a light meter!

My first intimation that I was going to regret the time spent watching Snuffin’ Zombies was the screwed-up sound mix. At least in the version that was sent to me, the dialog and all ambient noise was only present in one channel, while the music was in both. I often watch movies on my laptop with headphones, but the single-channel dialog was too annoying, and after three minutes I gave up and waited until I could watch it with speakers that were farther from my person. This, I thought, does not bode well.

And what three minutes they were. An old bum (James Byrd) stumbles from the train yard as the opening credits play, rolls down a hill, and ends up at an empty-looking warehouse. He invites himself in, talking to himself all the time, and sees through the windows in a locked door someone eating something. By the time he get through to where the person was, said person is gone, but his unfinished lunch — a frog — is still present. The bum then finds a bathroom, and while he’s enthroned, the mysterious person — a zombie! — comes out of another stall and throttles him. Wow.

Then we jump to “Three Months Earlier,” where we meet our protagonist and I abandon all hope. His name is Frank (writer/director/producer/cinematographer/editor Karl Benacci), and he’s an utter jerk and loser. We’re introduced to him as he arrives two and a half hours late to his job at a machine shop without any excuse, laughs it off when his boss Dudley (Donald Wilson) tries to chew him out, and eventually gets fired. Then he rants that he’s going to be on American Idol, he’s going to be famous, you’ll regret this, etc. And also I find Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to be deeply flawed because of the abrupt switch of protagonists twenty minutes in, I found myself praying that this movie would “pull a Psycho” and spare me the company of this waste of skin for the rest of the running time.

Suddenly, I’m in favor of gun control.

Later finds Frank and Dudley together at a rundown bar (they may be friends, but Frank’s still fired), where expositional devices just short of those employed in The Great Muppet Caper are employed to flesh out backstory. Frank’s mother killed herself ten years ago (we know this because Dudley asks out of the blue, “So, how long has it been since your mother killed herself?”), and even though he got some inheritance/insurance money from that, and even though his grandmother has let him live in her condo rent-free since she went to a rest home, he’s flat broke with no prospects.

After far too much time in the bar, Dudley leaves and Frank’s other friend shows up, Ralphie (Joseph Byrd), an autistic guy who likes horses. After more time in the bar (yeah, watching drunk losers steadily lose coherence at the bar — THAT’S entertainment!), the bartender Bob (Robert Muye) tells Frank to come by the house tomorrow for a business proposition.

After an embarrassingly bad scene of Frank trying to wheedle money out of his grandmother (Ingrid Hedlund) — literally, “Grandma, I’m broke, can I please have some money?” — Frank ends up at Bob’s house, where he hears the proposition: Snuff films. Bob has some organized crime investors who are willing to pay a total of $3 million for ten taped deaths, with $1 million after the first five. This shows shaky judgment on the bartender’s part: If you were involved in an enterprise that could get you send to death row, would you make an offer to an unreliable numbnutz to go off on his own with a videocamera? Ah, but you’re not a seedy bartender who has Big Money Connections.

Look, if I had to see it, you have to see it.

You think that the next scene, in which Frank is insulted and abused by Ralphie’s foulmouthed brother Parker (Matthew Wilson), is to give Frank someone he wants to kill enough to accept the offer. But no; after Frank tells Ralphie they’re going to be rich, he then goes back to the bartender and tries to back out, then gets talked back into it with some perfunctory dialog, then has Ralphie borrow Parker’s key to the warehouse where he works (alone and unmonitored, apparently), and then… Then he lures Dudley to the warehouse with the story that he’s planning to shoot a porno and he wants Dudley to co-star with a beautiful prostitute. He gets Dudley down to the area of the basement known as “the crypt,” and while Ralphie operates the videocamera, Frank “shoots” Dudley. I used quotation marks because not only is there no smoke or muzzle flash, there isn’t even a gunshot sound effect; it sounds like a hammer clicking on an empty cylinder, with the volume maybe turned up in post-production. (At least Dudley has a dribble of blood on his T-shirt afterward; for most of the deaths to come, people simply fall down as Frank points-and-clicks at them, with nary a blotch or blemish to be seen on their white tees.)

In case you’re wondering, forty minutes of the movie have gone by.

Although Frank takes Ralphie out for ice cream to assuage his conscience, Ralphie still apparently feels bad; he looks up a voodoo priestess (Cathi Mitchell) on the internet and has her meet him in the crypt, where they’ve just left Dudley’s body. She does a ritual dance over the corpse, but just as she finishes, Frank arrives with the gun in one hand and the camera in the other. (He saw the webpage touting her services that Ralphie left up on his computer, and put two and two together. The greatest instance of intelligence to be had in this movie.) It isn’t until after they leave that Dudley’s body starts twitching…

Don’t get your hopes up, though. Dudley’s first and only victim is Parker, working in the warehouse alone some time later. He chokes him to death. Yup, all that setup to show that Parker is vile and most deserving of Frank’s paid vengeance, and Frank doesn’t even get to off him.

Yes, it’s just that easy to raise the dead. That’s why everybody’s doing it.

What follows is a montage of other victims brought to the crypt and shot. Bizarrely, the montage also shows Frank making fun of Parker’s body; I would expect that finding a corpse you aren’t responsible on your killing ground might set off some kind of alarm in your head, but maybe that’s why nobody’s offered me $3 million.

But Parker comes back as a zombie and pals around with Zombie Dudley, just wandering around the warehouse and never crossing paths with Frank and Ralphie, who don’t even notice that the bodies they leave around the place are moving on their own. (Why does Parker come back? I dunno. There’s no sign that zombism is communicable — and anyway, throttling doesn’t count in any zombie mythology — so being killed by Dudley doesn’t work as an explanation. On the other hand, if it were some lingering aftereffect of the voodoo dance, one would expect it would affect other corpses as well, especially the voodoo priestess’.)

We then fast-forward three months, which, if we’re speaking of precise measures, means that it’s after the homeless guy got slaughtered by the zombie (zombie Dudley, actually), though again, no one noticed an extra body around the place. Frank is now rich, with a chauffeured car and palatial house and everything. (We call all that conspicuous spending “red flags for the IRS”). Ralphie is also rich, and planning on opening his horse farm soon. Frank gets a call that the “investors” want their last kill that day. (The “investors” have also been cleaning up the bodies for Frank, although they’re two short, and it leaves me to wonder why exactly they outsourced the killings when they’re not maintaining a deniable distance from the crime.) So Frank takes his current golddigger bedmate (Amy Eisert) out to the warehouse to shoot her.

Then fast-forward another four weeks — why? I dunno — and Frank and Ralphie each get a mysterious letter telling them to meet at the warehouse at midnight. They both assume it’s Bob and the “investors,” and despite that they show up with little trepidation. If it were me, a call to meet mob bosses for whom I had completed questionable work in a secluded spot at midnight would scare the heebie-jeebies out of me. When they show up and no one’s there, they call Bob and find out that he didn’t arrange the meeting. Which means… that the two shambling, non-verbal zombies (except Dudley, who keeps muttering, “Porno… porno…”) wrote and mailed the letters? WTF?

Zombie action. In all of its glory. Yay.

Anyway, there’s chasing, and everything ends with comeuppance. I’m sure that someone, somehow involved in the production, thought that this was like Macbeth with zombies, and it would be if Macbeth were an entirely unlikable loser who doesn’t fall from hubris but instead just follows his idiocy.

You know, I don’t begrudge Benacci and his friends and family (and their families) for putting this together. I really don’t. Everyone needs a hobby, after all, and if this is where he decides to pour his disposable income instead of into cigarettes and cheap beer, more power to him. It’s when someone takes the end result of this kind of production, done on a lark and unencumbered with technical prowess or a worthwhile script, and asks other people (i.e., those not directly related the cast and crew) to watch it as if it were a real movie… That’s what gets my dander up.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 11, plus 1 frog

• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0