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Unrated
Directed by Gerald Nott
Review by Dr. Royce Clemens
The straight to video zombie flick THE QUICK AND THE UNDEAD came to me at a time most precarious. I watched it the same day I saw Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s brilliant 28 WEEKS LATER. Also, I am currently near the end of Larry McMurtry’s masterful Western novel DEAD MAN’S WALK. So if you’re coming to me all “Zombie Western,” then an A-Game best be brought.
Sadly, there is no A-Game to be found with THE QUICK AND THE UNDEAD. I knew I was in for trouble when the screener I got in the mail had the trailer in front of it. A trailer that had absolutely no spoken dialogue from the characters, indicating there is no dialogue within the movie actually worth hearing. Nope, just a dude who sounds like a radio DJ who broke down the rules o’ zombie-huntin’ and then informed me that I indeed WAS the ninth caller and won tickets to the Trail of Dead concert at the Sokol Auditorium this Friday… So “Yay me.”
As for the movie itself, it solemnly intones at the beginning that eighty-five years ago there was a plague that turned three fourths of the population into the slathering and flesh-eating undead. So here we are with Ryn Baskin (Clint Glenn) who is our post-apocalyptic zombie bounty hunter for tonight’s proceedings. He’s doublecrossed by his sniveling toady Hans, (Nicola Giacobbe) who sold him out to a rival group of zombie-hunters led by Blyth Remington (Parrish Randall). So Ryn dusts himself off and goes after Remington, killing zombies along the way.
This movie, at the visceral appreciation level of someone who just wants to have a good time, is very bad. So this puts me in a weird position. I’ve read reviews on other horror sites of straight-to-video movies and little independent slasher flicks and they act like the Red Cross, with the attitude of “supporting horror.” And gee, I’d like to. Really, I would. But if it’s bad, why encourage some folks? Certainly there are other ways people can make a quick buck off the puppy-dog eyed hope of others while giving next to nothing in return. Like Politics.
Nevertheless, because I have the theory that you “get whacked” if you don’t play along in the horror community, I will list the good things about THE QUICK AND THE UNDEAD.
-This is a damn fine looking movie. Making the best of the HD tape stock, cinematographer Scott Peck uses green and blue backlighting to eerie effect while using the Santa Clarita locations to the best compositional advantage. So this movie may be a turd, but at least it’s a SHINY one!
-Ya want gore? Ya got gore. Granted it ain’t much, but it’s there. This stems from the good makeup effects by Paul Molnar and Elissa Prager. Being as this is a low-budget movie, they just rubbed fake blood on the faces of some of the extras, but that shouldn’t detract from the others that time and effort was spent on.
-And… Uhh…
So like I said, at face value, THE QUICK AND THE UNDEAD blows. But there are a few laughs not to be had… Just not intentional ones.
And what better place to start than the lead character? Here, writer-director Gerald Nott mines every single influence he could possibly have and puts them on transparent and less than subtle display. Here we have a a badass puttering around after the apocalypse, (MAD MAX) missing a finger on his left hand, (like Roland from Stephen King’s DARK TOWER series) in a cowboy hat smoking those tiny little cigars (The Man with No Name) and all the while he carries a guitar case filled with guns (EL MARIACHI). I can just imagine Nott at his computer thinking of a way to build his lead character while writing his screenplay and just looking at the movie posters on his wall. “OHH! I know!”
But this could have been pulled off… IF someone other than Clint Glenn were playing him. He’s got the looks for the part (Imagine a fuzzy human Xerox of Eric Bana) but he has neither the ability, nor the sound. The guy chains smokes fuckin’ CIGARS and sounds like the dude who runs the health food store at the mall trying to sound badass. And the way he delivers his dialogue is the most stiff and stunted you’ll have seen outside your niece’s Thanksgiving play at school.
Thank you, Mr. Post-Apocalyptic-Cowboy-of-the-Undead, for telling us that “maize” is the Native American word for “corn.”
But what kills the movie is that it’s just plain boring. It’s a dude walking for ninety minutes killing zombies until he gets to a house and kills MORE zombies. There’s no story, and the afore mentioned nothing to hear. It doesn’t have the King-Hell craziness needed to carry the unlikely moniker of “Zombie Western.”
So the badness combined with the laughs director Gerald Nott DOESN’T want you to have, makes for the sequel to ERNEST SCARED STUPID we’ve all been waiting for.
2 out of 4
3 out of 4 if muted with the captions on
Read all of Dr. Royce Clemens reviews in his Archives.
