Zombiez (2004)

Posted on Oct 18, 2006 under "Cold", Horror |

Written, produced and directed by “ZWG” (Zachary Winston Snygg)
Starring
- Jenicia Garcia
- Jakeem Sellers
- Randy Clark
- Raymond Spencer
- Gladimir Georges

One look at the double helping of the letter “z” in the title and the African-American zombie on the cover, and you’re likely to assume that this is an edgy, urban zombie flick, busting its hump to earn itself some street cred. You might also assume that the movie sucks green weenies. I’m inclined to believe that the “z” here fills the same role as the “k” in “krab salad,” by tacitly disclaiming the authenticity of the product and thus deflecting any liability for unfulfilled expectations. The “sucks green weenies” part still holds true, though.

As an opening title card informs us (ooh, look! Times New Roman! How evocative!), the original zombies weren’t dead people so much as pharmacologically-controlled (and brain-damaged) individuals beholden to the zombie lord. They also liked to indulge in cannibalism.

There. You now know the whole movie.

What, you want more? Fine. We get a taste of what we’re in for in the otherwise-unrelated introductory scene, in which an injured young black man flees through an industrial area from two bloody-faced “zombiez,” who clutch scythes and meat cleavers fresh from the “Halloween Values!” aisle at your local Walgreens. They catch him and eat bloody “guts” pulled from under his torn T-shirt.

Yep, sure looks like a zombie movie to me.

And now, what promises to be our main plot: A young black woman named Josephine (Jenicia Garcia) works on the “Purgatory Demolition Crew,” which means her day is spent standing around in a deserted industrial yard, exchanging oh-so-street backtalk with her co-workers. While further standing around waiting for a bus, she sees a fellow dribbling his basketball until he’s attacked by someone with a scythe. When she goes to investigate, she gets chased back across the deserted industrial yard — even more deserted, now that it’s past quitting time. She manages to encounter three gut-munching zombiez before sirens are heard in the background (much cheaper than showing them on screen) and the zombiez run away. Yes, these zombiez not only run, but they’re smart enough to make themselves scarce when the cops show up. The single cop who shows up (we know he’s a cop because he’s got a windbreaker that says “POLICE” on the back) gives her the third degree about the three corpses scattered around the place before she goes home.

Home is the loft (and a rather nice one) she lives in with her husband Steve (Randy Clark) who kindly wakes up from his nap to comfort her before helping her down to her skivvies (because stripping down always helps you relax, you know) and then going back to sleep. Um, unless Steve has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I think he’d better get himself a job. Said nap is interrupted when Josephine hears something out the window, and sees two more of the zombiez running toward the building. By the time she’s wiggled back into her jeans, the zombiez intrude on the apartment and grab the two of them.

Josephine wakes up in another warehouse, tied up, while a tattooed Neanderthal with leonine dreadlocks uses a power drill on someone else’s abdomen. She unties herself, runs out past a naked chick on a table (gee, I’m really glad they dressed that set), and sprints across… whoa, is this the same deserted industrial site? Anyway, lionine guy’s a little tubby and can’t keep up, so Josephine keeps running until she reaches…

Nice, um, loft.

The woods. No, seriously, we rejoin her as she wanders down a single lane road, barely paved, in the middle of the forest. Now, I expect that people who use public transportation to get to work may not know all of the streets in their town, but I’m thinking that even they would know “that way’s the city, that way’s the boondocks.” She reacts with joy when she finally sees a mailbox; this is what happens when you leave all signs of civilization behind you. She turns into the lane with the mailbox, and… hey, whaddaya know! A dozen zombiez! Who proceed to chase her through the woods! She manages to lose them, and spends a few minutes “playing Blair Witch” before she… runs into more zombiez! (Or the same ones again. Who cares?) She runs again, this time encountering some little historical village or gussied-up shed or something, where some guy lives (Gladimir Georges, whom the credits helpfully list as the “squater” [sic]). After a minute of her screaming, “You gotta help me!” and him yelling, “Get the hell out of here!”, he threatens the zombiez with a meatcleaver (this movie is just thick with meatcleavers), and — they run off. Yes, zombiez are cowed by the sight of a lone man with an edged weapon.

The two of them run off into the woods, bickering all the way, until he tells her how to get back to civilization. Get this: She needs to go through “those trees” (as opposed to those ones or those ones or those ones), cross a river (!), climb over the mountain (!!) on the other side, and eventually she’ll reach a road. Holy loving son of Murgatroid, how far did she run from the city? What state are we in now? (For that matter, what state did we start in? The production company’s from New Jersey, so…)

Folks, we’re only 36 minutes into this feature, and you can see as well as I can that the writer-director has completely exhausted whatever story ideas he had going in. Not that it looks like he was well-provisioned in that regard. I have an inkling that the “script” for this project was a single sheet of paper which read, “We’ll have zombiez and they’ll get all bloody ‘n’ shit.” Which is exactly how one tells the zombiez from the “real” people; the zombiez usually have blood on their shirts. I can understand why so many low-budget moviemakers decide to have their cast ad-lib their parts, since these amateur actors often have no facility for memorizing scripted lines. However, a moment’s further thought reveals that the very people who would have trouble remembering their parts for their performance would likely also have trouble coming up with anything interesting to say off-the-cuff while the camera is rolling.

“Huh. Must be in South-South-East-South-East-South-South Central by now.”

Oh, and here’s a technical note for aspiring zombie filmmakers: While chopped uncooked chicken breast does indeed make a terrific substitute for brains (as Peter Jackson demonstrated), it doesn’t really stand in well for the “red meat” parts of the human body, or for general entrails. Especially if it hasn’t been chopped well enough and ends up looking mostly like chicken fingers.

What? Oh, Josephine? Yeah, she continues her overland trek, meets a few more zombiez… And get this: She hears a moaning voice. She immediately says, “Steve, is that you?” Um, yeah. I’m sure it’s Steve. I’m sure that wherever he was when he woke up (which wasn’t where you were), he also decided that running away from civilization was the most prudent plan, and through aimless wandering similar to yours, has ended up within a hundred feet of you. OF COURSE IT’S NOT STEVE, YOU IDIOT! Could you please just die and guarantee that you won’t breed offspring as stupid as you are?

No, we’ve got more of this movie to get through, and if I keep up this level of detail I’ll end up gnawing off my own right arm in frustration. (It’s okay, I’m left-handed.) But before we leave the woods — as we eventually must — you should hear this part: she does eventually find the road. She flags down a car, which immediately crashes. But the driver has already been injured by someone; she says, “They cut me,” as her guts fall out in a discrete heap. Then Josephine hears a voice calling her name in the woods, so she goes back in, but it’s only more zombiez, dissing her. So she goes back to the car, finds some wine bottles in the back seat, makes a Molotov cocktail, and goes back into the woods just so she can throw it at the zombiez who pissed her off. (This is the kind of molotov cocktail which makes only smoke, otherwise known as the “I wrote an effect into the story that I don’t have the budget to pull off” variety.) She then breaks her ankle, so she hobbles clear back to the river, splints it with the most pathetic and ineffectual splint you’re ever likely to see, and wanders back out to the car on the road, and from there back to town. Did it ever occur to you that there are people who should get lost and die of exposure in the woods?

Were I to make a “fried chicken” joke here, it would be SO racially insensitive…

So she makes it back to the land of sidewalks, and it’s still a deserted industrial area. I’m beginning to wonder if this isn’t some sort of Omega Man scenario, and there ARE no other people. (”Omega sistah.“) She still thinks that every sound she hears is Steve, even though it always turns out to be “zombiez,” which are more or less just some guys. I think we’ve even given up the pretense of their being anything like zombies by now; aside from cannibalism, there’s nothing at all trance-like in their demeanor. I guess the alternate title, “Buncha Guyz,” didn’t test as well. She ends up fighting some zombiez, and getting caught and tied up again, and getting free again, and wandering through more deserted industrial buildings… Apparently this guy she meets, “the Dr.” (Jakeem Sellers), is the one “behind it all,” though what “it all” is goes unexplained and unimagined. Oh, and she finds Steve. Right before he gets killed. So she kills all the zombiez, and then she and the Doctor have it out. The end.

And sweet hell, that was almost an hour and a half of a movie which had absolutely nothing to say. To say that the plot meanders is to implicitly endorse the idea that there was in actuality a plot, a supposition which is put to rest inside the first half-hour. I mentioned that by the time we’re wandering through the woods, it’s pretty clear to all of us watching that writer-director “ZWS” (yeah, I wouldn’t identify myself with this either) has exhausted his store of creativity; but if you watch through to the 75-minute mark, you can easily identify the scene in which ZWS openly admits to himself and us that he has nothing left to give. It’s the scene in which the Doctor is shown to have his own Subservient Chicken. If you ever wanted to know what complete directorial contempt for his audience and for his implicit contract to provide entertainment value looks like, it’s about six feet tall and covered in yellow feathers.

**“No! Please! No! Anything but — a sequel!!“**

I find myself in a bind. I hated this movie for taking a portion of my life and leaving my nothing in return. But I have recently seen some other bottom-scrapers which not only showed a similar congenital inability to fathom the concept of “story,” but which were shot with utter incompetence. Zombiez, at least, shows a minimum of adequate technical skill. Plenty of steadicam and dolly shots, adequate lighting…. Sure, the special effects were only special in the “short bus” sense, but if someone’s having a sale on plastic meatcleavers and chicken fingers, what are you going to do? The production is still terribly cheap, but I’ve seen entertaining movies made with similar resources. There’s no reason that the level of cinematography and editing exhibited here could not have resulted in a good movie, if anyone had cared to make one. Instead, we got a bad imitation of entertainment.