Misleadingly positioned as a snarky comedy, Grace Lee's sly mockumentary dissects lifestyle fads, political correctness and the politics of identification by positing the living dead as the last minority.
Failed filmmaker and life-long horror buff John Solomon (John Solomon) persuades former film school classmate Grace Lee (Lee), a successful documentarian, to work with him on expose about zombies -- not the bogeymen of campfire tales and midnight movies, but the real zombies who walk among us. Lee thinks Solomon is a jackass, but realizes that the burgeoning zombie community is rich material for a non-fiction film: Infected with a rare virus triggered by violent death, the resurrected range from barely sentient, well, zombies -- easily mistaken for mentally ill or substance-abusing homeless people -- to high-functioning individuals agitating for basic rights and social acceptance. After all, they're just like everyone else, except that they don't sleep, have no idea who they were before they died and bear the gruesome stigmata of their involuntary "transition." They're the last minority, catered to by a flourishing industry of therapists, hucksters, gurus, groupies and miscellaneous opportunists looking to make a quick buck from zombie labor, zombie art, zombie studies and zombie control. Lee and Solomon focus on ZAG (Zombie Advocacy Group) founder Joel (Al Vicente), whose organization provides job placement, counseling and legal assistance to the disenfranchised resurrected; slacker Ivan (Austin Basis), who publishes the 'zine "American Zombie," has a girlfriend with a thing for the walking dead and shares a crash pad with angry, undead artist Glen (Jose Solomon) and the "loser human roommate" (Kevin Michael Walsh) whose name is on the lease; florist/string artist Lisa (Jane Edith Wilson), who's haunted by dreams of her brutal death; and perky vegan Judy (Suzy Nakamura), who loves kitty cats, scrap booking and bridal magazines, and does her best to forget that she's no longer one of the living majority. But Solomon just won't back off the vulgar questions about cannibal gut crunching, and alienating their contacts will guarantee they never get permission to shoot at Live Dead, the Burning Man of the no-longer living.
Bitterly clever and unexpectedly haunting, Lee's pitch-perfect social satire, written with Rebecca Sonnenshine, owes less to cut-rate flesh feasts than to Max Brooks' lacerating World War Z, a bleak, supremely self-aware vision of the end of the world as we know it refracted through the mutable mythology of zombies. It's tailor-made to share an apocalyptic double bill with George Romero's despairing DIARY OF THE DEAD (2008), and zombie movies don't come better than that. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
