Thursday 23 August 2012

Wasting Away

"Wasting Away" aka "Aaah! Zombies!!" (2007, K5 International, Wasted Pictures, Matthew Kohnen).

Continuing with the theme of unusual zombie films for tonight's viewing, I treated myself to a re-watch of the excellent zombie comedy, "Wasting Away".

A group of four friends, Mike (Matthew Davis), Cindy (Betsy Beutler), Tim (Michael Grant Terry) and Vanessa (Julianna Robinson), are hanging out in the closed bowling alley where Mike works talking about their futures and doing typical young-person-in-the-movies kinds of things, when they realise that the fresh beer kegs have arrived!

Being a creative eater, Tim decides to pour some of the beer into the ice cream machine to make what he christens 'alecream'. Unfortunately for them, the beer and icecream have been sitting outside and have been accidentally laced with the government/army's new 'super-soldier serum' which had turned out to be a failed experiment which had been en route to the ocean to be dumped, when a tenacious 'super-soldier' knocked it off course, causing it to crash nearby (hence the spillage into the alley's supplies).

Dismissing the luminous green colour of the 'alecream', the gang tuck in merrily. Feeling suddenly quite ill, they try to find help but discover that other people either run away or attack them, and also now they appear to be super strong and unkillable!

They bump into the 'super soldier' who caused the truck to crash. His name is Corporal Nick Steele (Colby French). He explains to the concerned youngsters that they are in fact 'super soldiers', like him. And they accept this.

Unbeknownst to our 'heroes' they are infact the shambling undead. But they take a while to catch onto this despite Tim finding a love of a new delicacy...human brains...

The film is easy to follow: when it's black and white, it's reality and you can see the teens for the undead creatures that they are. When it's colour, it's from the zombie perspective, and they believe that everyone else is infected with some kind of sped-up craziness.

Tim takes it upon himself to be the zombie messiah and to lead the zombies to their new 'home'.

A hilarious take on the genre with some enjoyable performances from the main actors as both 'super soldiers' and zombies. And a perfect amount of comedy gore and slime!

This movie really covers all the areas: romance, action, brain eating, self discovery, government experiments, loneliness, growing up... and of course, the all important lesson - being completely rat-arsed allows you to converse with zombies normally!!!!

A really fun film which is both humorous and self-aware. I especially liked the way they showed you how the zombies see something and then how it really is, for example when Steele is 'stealthily sneaking' about when in reality he's clumsily falling around. And be prepared for some overzealous gross-out zombie snogging!

A very imaginative and modern film which even the biggest hater of zombie movies is bound to smile at!

And the ultimate question: will those crazy kids ever get together and live *cough* sorry, 'unlive' happily ever after?!
[Picture: Wasted Pictures]
"Must be *zombie* Love, Love, Love. Da, da!"

Hani

No comments:

Post a Comment