2 years before my novella Zombied Out from Closet Monsters would have you pitching a tent in the forest (or wherever you read it), the 2005 zombie movie Severed: Forest of the Dead would give you wood for a very different reason. Severed is about big logs that turn you into zombies when they squirt their sap on you. Hot.
I guess I really do just have a hard-on for zombie movies, because chances are most people would think this movie sux while I would suck on it all night long. Really. I liked it. I just did. It has all the zombie clichés I could hope for along with excellent performances and that grainy, washed out 1970s feel. Plus the lead dude, Paul Campbell, seriously pulls off a Jared Padalecki Supernatural vibe—the same year Supernatural came on the air. Also, the dad from MTV’s Teen Wolf series stars as a wimpy idiot.
So there are loggers out in the woods. There are protestors trying to save the forest. A tree juices on someone and he becomes a zombie. The two opposing sides have to work together to escape from zombies with yellow faces and bloody red mouths. There’s plenty of gut munching (gutt munch?), tons of shaky cam so you can’t really tell what’s going on during the zombie attacks, and an hour of the survivors trying not to be sappy as they’re forced to give their turned friends the axe.
And just when you think nothing different can happen, a whole new crew of zombie-food comes out of the woodwork. It’s a rowdy, scummy gang that plays the typical zombie target practice games to remind us who our good guys should really fear. Eventually, we get one of the best WTF movie endings. If ever it looked like they ran out of money before completing a film, this is it. Awesome.
