SILLY STREAM: did you mean to be funny?

Did I laugh, scream, or yawn? Find out which of these three—Slaw, Girl On The Third Floor, and The Zombie Club—satisfied and which disappointed.

SLAW (2017)

The director of A Zombie Invasion takes on a parody of Saw. I prefer A Zombie invasion. Slaw is bad. It’s really bad.

Wrestler John Kap (who wrote the movie) and little man Aaron Beelner, who delivers the funniest moments in the film, play brothers treated awfully at a restaurant when they meet one of their heroes, muscle daddy wrestler Kevin Nash, who is there with his entourage.

The brothers decide to enact revenge. They kidnap a bunch of people, chain them up in a lair, and then…leave them there to spend most of the movie making really outdated, overused, non-PC race and gay jokes.

The cast looks like it had a fun time making the film, but it just doesn’t carry through on plot or comedy (even resorting to the usual fart humor in desperation). The movie goes nowhere and feels more like a series of sketches than a movie, jumping around from the abducted group to the brothers and their family life to the two detectives on the case.

GIRL ON THE THIRD FLOOR (2019)

It’s been getting tons of hype, so I finally took the time to check this one out—assuming the overblown social media enthusiasm would ruin it for me. But going in without having even seen the trailer, I found it a fun little midnight movie.

I don’t know if Girl On The Third Floor was intended as a comedy, but I mostly interpreted it as such, which is why I ended up liking it. Well, that and all the sexual themes.

The cute leading man hams it up nonstop, and often the camera uses straight-on shots that give him that goofy distorted look. Add to that the fact that he sounds like Bruce Campbell, and I was pretty sure this movie was going for a Sam Raimi vibe.

The cutie comes to a new house to fix it up before his pregnant wife arrives. He is immediately battling gooey gunk that seems to be pouring out of every crevasse and orifice in the place.

As he works, a flirty girl keeps coming around, so he eventually has to turn down her advances. That makes her quite unhappy.

But this is no Fatal Attraction; this bitch has some sort of supernatural ties to the house, forcing the main man to battle his own home. When the madness kicks in it feels like Evil Dead 2 meets House.

It’s horror fun, but the film also has some freaky and sexy surprises. The glue of the plot is sexuality and a battle of the sexes (there’s even a comment made about how a gay guy would fare better in the house than a straight guy). I think where it kind of loses its way is in the final act, which changes tone, changes character POV, and suddenly tries to deliver explanations for everything that has been going on all at once.

THE ZOMBIE CLUB (2019)

I can only assume this film was made for Disney or Nickelodeon or something like that. After clearly defining the bullies and their victims in a high school, the film’s plot lands them all in detention together with a crazy science teacher.

Needless to say, the teacher’s experiments turn them all into zombies, and they are forced to work together to figure out how to change back.

Along the way they discover they each have special powers that end up teaching them more about themselves.

Sadly not one student in the school gets eaten alive. This is pretty much a PG movie at most. It’s cute, has some funny moments, and even goes for stupid silly, relying on fart humor during a caterpillar feast scene. One thing that did surprise me is how white this movie is—and I mean even before the kids turn into zombies with the simple application of white face paint. If I remember correctly, there wasn’t a single person of color in the entire film.

Keep an eye out for Dean Cain as the principal, who gets a pretty good lecture about bullying from one of the mothers. He was probably thinking, “Stop raising a snowflake, bitch. I voted for Trump.”