reel zombies

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” It’s a warning repeated time and time again in mad scientist movies just after some creature created on a slab is finally burned, be-headed or drowned in a swamp. But it applies to filmmakers themselves as well, particularly the team responsible for Zombie Night and Zombie Night 2: Awakening. While relatively inexpensive video and editing systems have made it easy for just about anyone to make a quote-unquote “movie,” technology can’t replace talent…either behind or in front of the camera. And both of these low-rent gore films were lacking in almost every area except ambition.

But, giving credit where credit is due, the same group of filmmakers came up with a rather clever idea for their follow-up project, Reel Zombies. In this faux-documentary an actual zombie apocalypse goes down with all the typical death and destruction (all off-screen, of course). But producer Mike Masters (playing himself, as does the rest of the cast and crew) comes up with the idea of producing a zombie film using real zombies to save on expenses. The fact that there’s no distribution or exhibition in place is just a bump in the road. Filmmakers make films. So with previous Zombie Night director in tow (David J. Francis) and a zombie wrangler added to the crew (Bill Simmons) the cameras start rolling.

It’s one thing to have an idea. It’s quite another to live up to its potential. Reel Zombies is the sort of invention that works well in a no-budget filmmaking environment. Heck, George Romero already made his own found footage zombie film six years ago (Diary of the Dead) and that wasn’t exactly a classic. So what sort of chance to these yahoos have? Not much, but casting themselves turns out to be one of the better choices in a film filled with bad ones. The constant references to the sub-par quality of their previous films is reassuring; at least these guys know they’re making crap.

But there’s very little done to expand that original idea. The zombie wrangler is a hoot, roaming the neighborhoods looking for undead extras. And various crewmembers make a better impression as actors than the paid actors themselves. But there’s not enough scripted material here to move the story along at a quick enough pace. It all seems to be made up as it goes along...which it likely was. That might be entertaining enough at a cast party, but not for a paying audience.

Reel Zombies finally finds a home at Synapse Films (the movie itself was made in 2008), which packages it with an audio commentary from the producer / director team and 40-minutes of deleted scenes and outtakes…which, quite honestly, aren’t much different from the film itself.