Here’s another trio of undead comedies I wasted my time watching instead of streaming something worthwhile.
BIKINI BLOODBATH CHRISTMAS (2009)
This film is part of a series that includes Bikini Bloodbath, Bikini Bloodbath Car Wash, and Bikini Bloodbath Shakespeare. All I have to say is, having sat through Bikini Bloodbath Christmas, I’ve seen all I needed to see.
The intro scene tells you what you can expect; this is pretty much a Troma/John Waters hybrid of a zombie/slasher hybrid. A chick has a nightmare about she and all her half-naked girlfriends running and screaming, which causes her to wake up in bed with her naked girlfriend. Then a dude in drag wakes from a nightmare. Then a furry guy wakes from a nightmare—in which he’s getting a blowjob from Jesus.
Anyway, there are two competing stores. The drag queen manages one—because his sister, Debbie Rochon, is in a coma in the hospital being cared for by Dr. Lloyd Kaufman. The other store is managed by the furry guy. The bikini babes are employees of the stores, and we get a montage of their tits as they dress for work. All the girls are upstaged by a chick with, I don’t know…triple Z tits? I know nothing about technical tit sizes, but these are pretty much the size of small watermelons.
Through flashbacks, we learn that one of the bikini babes was a final girl twice. First, all her friends were killed by a psycho chef during an all-girl slumber party (the first movie). Next, she and her new friends had a séance and brought the chef back from the dead, so he killed all those friends (not sure if that’s the second movie). Okay, I’ll admit, this concept is really funny. Another highlight of the film is the drag queen. His campy lines completely steal the show.
Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is just loads of gross out humor—and loads of shit, literally. A chick eats a shit sandwich. A chick takes a poop, and we see it from in the bowl. A guy craps in a hot tub and picks it up out of the water to show everyone. He later poops out a window, and we get a close-up of poop squirting out a hairy ass. This is a good time to segue to the horror elements….
A psycho Santa comes up and sticks a hammer in the guy’s squirting ass to rip out all his guts. In fact, Santa makes mincemeat of everyone. If the movie didn’t depend so much on poop humor and instead celebrated its ample amounts of blood and boobs, it could be a halfway decent low budget slasher comedy.
The “twist” ending is also a little confusing. All along, it seems the killer is the zombie chef in a Santa suit (he even eats a girl at one point), but then at the end, there’s suddenly a big reveal of a human in a Santa suit and mask. The movie sort of bites its own fun plot in the ass, it seems, unless I missed something (which is quite possible since I was constantly tuning out all the shit humor).
EAT ME (2010)
I’m all for low-budget indie zombie comedies, as long as they have character and charm. Sadly, Eat Me, while offering plenty of blood and guts and a dedicated cast, is about as bland as they get. The material isn’t strong, any hint of humor fails to deliver a laugh, and the entire plot merely goes through the motions. It pains me to say it, but it’s sort of like when imaginative kids decide to “play zombie” on the block and just make up scenarios as they go along. If you’re going to name your zombedy Eat Me, you have to somehow live up to that diss.
The basic premise is that a band is rehearsing in a basement when the electricity goes out. For the next twenty-five minutes, they sit in the basement just talking like a bunch of slackers—seriously, that’s exactly what it feels like. And slackers don’t have much of interest to say.
When they finally go upstairs, they discover that one of their friends—who went to fetch beer—has become a zombie (basic makeup, consisting mostly of blood), so they race away in a car. From there, they just run from one location to another encountering the undead for the remainder of the movie. Aside from one okay fight scene in, um, a basement, there’s simply nothing inspired or memorable here. Eventually, the group heads for water to take a boat away from town. The end.
ATOM THE AMAZING ZOMBIE KILLER (2012)
What had potential to be a good little indie zombedy goes down the toilet—here we go again—as it eventually resorts to stupid Troma humor, such as the constant use of fart effects whenever an ass so much as appears in front of the camera. Sigh.
Regardless of the cover art, don’t expect this to be a movie about a kid becoming a zombie slayer at a bowling alley overrun by the undead, because that never happens. It begins in a bowling alley, with Atom and his friends verbally battling a rival bowling team led by a punk rocking dude with an awesome double winged Mohawk. We also learn Atom and friends are huge horror geeks, so there are loads of pop culture references, including everything from horror movies to Full House.
The funny tone dissolves rapidly, because the film quickly reverts to all kinds of oozing, dripping, body function and orifice gags. Yawn. For me, this is a sign of filmmakers who lack the ability to actually write funny material.
Atom gets bonked in the head and is convinced everyone has turned zombie, even though they haven’t. He only returns to the bowling alley at the end for a final battle…with people who aren’t actually zombies…. Along the way, you get a pointless Lloyd Kaufman cameo (as usual), a drag queen horror host, a gay car salesman, wiener-eating, and plenty of cheap but satisfying gore. If only this movie hadn’t tried so hard to be tasteless, it could have been pretty good.
