• Directed by Todd Sheets
• Written by Brian Eklund
• Starring
  • Abe Dyer
  • Curtis Spencer
  • Blake Washer
  • Jolene Durrill
  • Jen Davis

Todd Sheets, the do-it-yourself horror auteur of Kansas City, released the original shot-on-video Zombie Bloodbath in 1993. This unrelated second sequel hit the streets in 2000. To hope that M’sieur Sheets had become a more skilled filmmaker in that seven years is to be woefully ignorant of what makes a Todd Sheets movie a Todd Sheets movie. There are two necessary elements: 1) bloody intestines being manhandled; 2) bad actors shouting cuss words at each other. Sheets hit his stride early on, so how could he improve?

The prologue takes place in the far-flung year of 2000 (which would indicate that the final release date of the movie was a wee bit delayed). No, there are no flying cars. There are, however, zombies — government-created zombies, in fact. Seems that the military powers-that-be used a revivification process on recently deceased soldiers to allow them to keep fighting in the nameless war (which doesn’t explain why the hordes of zombies are dressed like off-the-street civilians, but anyway). Now the war is over, the zombies are still around, and the disposal plan is to herd them all into a container which will be taken to space by the space shuttle. Because that’s a good allocation of resources. I note young Jeff Dylan Graham in this scene as the government’s “Agent Raimi” (Really? You had to find a way to make this scene even more annoying?), mainly because he’s practically the only performer here — or in any Todd Sheets movie, really — who went on to have anything close to a thespian career.

Gavin. Talking smack to power.

Thanks to some horrendous computer animation, the space shuttle takes off during the opening credits, flies through the wonders of interstellar space, and enters a swirling anomaly of some sort. We lose more shuttles that way…

We now cut to the present day (which means something previous to 2000), at a high school where we join a blatant ripoff of The Breakfast Club already in progress. Principal Gordon (Byron Michodemus) is giving his opening scold to five student in after-school detention in the library, to wit:

Tiffany (Ruth Gordon), the rich bitch. Sort of like Molly Ringwald, but without any redeeming characteristics (and if you’re one of those people who thought that Ringwald had no redeeming characteristics in The Breakfast Club, watching this movie and seeing how bad it could have been will convince you otherwise).

Characters, shmaracters. Where’s the gore?

Andrea (Jen Davis), who is essentially the Michael Anthony Hall character. (With a gender change. Such innovation! Truly, I was misguided when I called this a ripoff!)

John (Phil Wymore), the jock. Like Emilio Estevez, but Asian.

Rachel (Jolene Durrill), the goth. Not really much like Ally Sheedy, because Ally Sheedy’s face wasn’t twisted perpetually into a “whatEVer” expression that made you want to take her behind the woodshed and wallop her with a two-by-four.

Gavin (Blake Washer), the anti-social rebel who makes Judd Nelson look like a model of sophistication and decorum. He’s in-your-face annoying and exudes a miasma of smug righteousness, as if irritating the hell out of everyone around him proved some sort of moral victory. In other words, he’s going to be treated like the hero, even though he’s about as heroic as a hemorrhoid. Kill me now.

In juxtaposition to these foul-mouthed whiny wastes of oxygen, we also are introduced to Brian (Abe Dyer) and Skillet, (Curtis Spencer), two perfect students who run the school radio station. Oh, but there’s the joke: as soon as there are no teachers around, Brian and Skillet swear just as much as everyone else! Ha! Ha! How droll! Yessir, the F-bomb never gets old, a fact which Sheets uses to good effect by having it comprise 31% of the dialog in this movie by weight. How endearing!

In a Todd Sheets movie, the brain-dead zombies are not appreciably less intelligent than the living characters.

The third group of people we have to worry about (I will not, will not call them “protagonists”) are a couple of (ahem) famous action stars, Mack Brazzle and Durville Sweet (Rico Love and Antwone Steele), who come to the school for an after-class workshop with the drama club. It’s not much of an acting demo; we mostly see them demonstrating high kicks and throws. I guess being as funky and street as Mack and Durville just isn’t something you can teach. (These two, like Skillet, are African-American, which means they speak nothing but ghetto and jive. Because no one can say “f*ck” like a homey can.)

And thus, the story: Brian and Skillet find and odd signal, like that used in military transponders, coming over the airwaves. They follow it to the basement, then down a hatch to huge caverns beneath the school, where they find the space shuttle from the prologue (which they only show from one angle, since that’s the only one in which they could easily composit their model to the main shot). And with it, naturally, are zombies.

Wait. What? The space shuttle is beneath the school? Even accepting the time warp at face value, that makes no sense in multiple ways. Either a) someone placed the shuttle and its payload in the caverns and then the school was built over it — which makes no sense — or b) someone placed the shuttle in the caverns under the pre-existing school — which makes no sense — or c) the time warp just happened to deposit the shuttle in the cavern, out of all the possible locations in the cosmos — which, you know, makes no sense.

Yes, yes. Gut-munching. Giving the audience what they want, and all that.

(This is the point at which Todd Sheets turns up the heavy metal soundtrack to drown out the thought process more effectively.)

So zombies get into the school, Brian and Skillet convince the detentionees (detainees?) and the action stars to go down to the caverns to find the source, people get killed by having their viscera torn out and fondled by zombies, and everyone screams “f*ck” at each other a whole lot. There are jump scares that come out of the blue, inappropriate personal revelations of grievance (which, as you might guess, are a further opportunity for people to scream “f*ck” at each other), and bad bad acting which only stops with the characters’ deaths… Or not. I was ready to stand and do my happy dance when Gavin the rebel was gutmunched, but I took it back when he revived, not only a zombie, but fully possessed of the power of speech and attitude that had characterized his life. (Wait, how does he become a zombie? It’s explicitly stated that the whole zombification process revolves around a microchip implant; since when are microchips communicable by saliva?) Oh, and Brian realizes that, in the future, he will become the scientist who creates the revivification program for the military. Does that make sense? It does not.

I know, I know, I know. Complaining about the plot in a Todd Sheets movie is like complaining about… You know, I sat for a full ten minutes trying to come up with an appropriate simile. The best I could come up with was “complaining about not enough pineapple on your nuclear warhead.” That’s what Todd Sheets movies will do to you.

Emote, man! Emote!

What’s really sad is that this is truly Todd Sheets at his pinnacle. He has one other credit for the year 2000 and nothing after that. This movie was apparently as good as he was every going to get — this movie, which showcases the nadir of filmmaking talent and skill. Or the zenith, if one’s ambitions are to create motion pictures which can only be appreciated by people who unironically use the word “metal” as an adjective.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 11
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0