Undead

Alas, if you're looking for a serious zombie horror movie, do not watch Undead. This Australian independent movie seems to have been made based on the idea that they can't afford to do something scary, so they'll just make it as over the top as possible and call it offbeat humor. At that task, it succeeds.

The plot is pretty traditional. A group of people from a little fishing town in Australia find their tiny town overrun with a plague of strange occurrences, among them meteors, steaming rain, beams of light taking bugs up into the sky, and of course, zombies.

Among them is a reluctant local beauty pageant winner, the pregnant women she beat for the crown and her husband, a foul-tempered and foul-mouthed sheriff and his squimish deputy, and Marion, the redneck gunstore owner who claims the whole thing is the product of a vast alien conspiracy that he knew was coming all along, even though no one believed him.

Naturally the acting and particularly the stunts are equally over the top. In one notable scene, Marion jumps off the back of a zombie and does a backflip, slamming his spurs into the plaster above a window. (He does not own a horse. The spurrs are a mystery.) He then proceeds to hang upside down and unload clip after clip from the seemingly endless supply of guns he carries in his overalls.

Even more eccentric is Marion's weapon of choice, a triple shotgun. No, not a shotgun with three barrels, this monstrocity is actually three individual shotguns attached to one another and fired from a single trigger. Just the look of the weapon is enough to make most people ask why.


Still, if you know what you're getting into, Undead is worth a watch. If you're looking for Dawn of the Dead you won't find it here. However, if you're looking for a movie where Aussies use aerosal cans and ballpoint pens to kill zombies and crazy people start to make sense, this is the movie for you.

Worth a watch. Two and a half Stars.