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Posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 22:31:11 GMT by: projectcyclops
Posted under: zombie movie review musical comedy

Year: 2009
Directors: Ryan Denmark
Writers: Ryan Denmark & Jason Witter & William Shakespeare
IMDB: link
Trailer: link
Review by: projectcyclops
Rating: 5 out of 10

Verily! Why hast thy mind become split, how dost this moving image picture confuse thee into giving it a 1 star review for it's inherent crappiness, yet boldly awarding ye director a 10 for imagination and the most noble intentions? Verily! Come with me now to fair Verona, lest I give up this Shakespearean dialogue and get to ye point! Forsooth!

'Romero and Juliet v.s. The Living Dead' is admittedly a very cool idea, at least as far as titles go. When I first read about it I thought; wow, two star-crossed lovers fighting off zombies? Could be good! Then I saw the trailer, which actually led to my skipping this at the Edinburgh Film Festival; it looked to me like a Trauma film shot on digital by some teenagers with more ideas than skill or resources. But, verily, I landed a copy and went ahead and checked it out.

It seems that our man Romeo is actually a zombie himself, albeit a fairly calm and approachable one, unlike Mr. Romero's inventions. He and Juliet hit it off at the Capulets' masked ball ("Zombies and Catholics Welcome Not!") which Romeo and his zombie clan, the Montagues, sneak into with the world's least convincing disguises, and are welcomed into the Capulet fold as guests ("You guys got any blow?"). That is until Romeo gets himself trapped in a shower cubicle, while Tybalt sits on the toilet and noisily defecates, and the smell becomes too much for our hero, whose cover is blown (no pun intended...). This kind of humor is the driving force behind Ryan Denmark's film, a kind of lampooning of the overwrought highschool Shakespeare production, mixed with horror and surreal, somewhat post-modern skits and sight gags, as well juvenile toilet humor and sex jokes. The results are extremely mixed with some scenes falling horribly flat and others hitting their mark with a satisfying gusto. All of which makes for a pretty bizarre viewing experience.

The opening text scroll and voiceover explain that it's 30 years since a meteor caused half the world's population to fall asleep and wake-up as flesh-hungry zombies, and that after a cure was created by Lord Montague the zombies accepted a small dose; allegedly enough to keep them from attacking humans. Since then the two races, humans and zombies, have lived a pretty fraught few years together, with segregation rife and tensions running high. None of this really matters though, as it's just a set-up for the story, and with a low budget and fairly pedestrian acting skills on display, the script needs to be well written to make the humor work and to keep our attention fixed. More on this later, although I will point my first irk, and that is that the zombies don't talk, not so much as an, "Aalloo Auunt Aaaalishaaa" nor a, "Send more paramedics...", which was pretty disappointing, although they can emote and communicate in other ways. But onward march we (forsooth).

Juliet is 14-years-old (actress Hannah Kauffmann, clearly in her 20's) and much is made of her great beauty, with suitor Paris (Ross Kelly - The Stink of Flesh) quickly making his intentions known at the Capulet's barbecue. Meanwhile, Romeo (Jason Witter) is walking about the neighbourhood bothering people and eating severed limbs when he meets another zombie, a girl called Rosylin, and they hit it off. Ahh, young zombie love! Back at the BBQ we see Paris kicking the living daylights out of his rival for love, Mercutio, an effete young man who spends most of his time trying to convince everybody that he's not actually gay, while drooling over his cousin Juliet. When Romeo and his gang gate-crash the party and start to eat everyone in sight, the town's Sheriff Prince (Kristin Hansen - niece of Gunnar 'Leatherface' Hanson) puts her foot down and declares any more violence will result in swift execution.

By the time these opening scenes were over it was pretty clear the direction Romeo and Juliet v.s... was going to take, and it was also the point where I began to make a list of every kind of joke that was cracked onscreen, the list as follows is mostly in chronological order:

Masturbation jokes, fart jokes, shit jokes, cock jokes, gay jokes, lesbian jokes, ass jokes, random disco dancing, impotency jokes, even more gay jokes, 'ball-sack cupping', penis-size jokes, merkin jokes, mutual-masturbation-while-peeping-through-a-girls-window jokes, S&M, swinging, girl fights, necrophilia, the unveiling of a portrait of a giant penis, pedophile jokes, gun totin' hill billy jokes, and finally (and why not), bestiality jokes. Phew!

So there we go; the level of humor in the film is roughly that of a 14-year-old-boy or maybe Kevin Smith when he's very drunk and stoned. What I'm pretty much getting at here is that I'm about as far from the intended audience as can be, and while that needn't be a problem, I do feel that the actual intended audience themselves deserve better than this. It's great fun to see well thought-out recreations of key scenes from the original play, being turned on their head and played around with ("Look for me tomorrow, and you will find me a grave man! A plague on both your houses!") but with only fart and cock jokes to turn to after the largely one note gag; that it's a retelling of the play, with zombies, the end result is unashamedly stupid, putrid and juvenile. I suppose had the budget been higher, and had the writers more time to rehearse and see what did and didn't work, then the film might have looked more polished and had better flow. Instead we get a stream of similar scenes involving sometimes gross-out, sometimes sex and more often than not, homoerotic gags ("If only it weren't a sin, eh boys?"), which while occasionally funny, add-up to pretty bland and samey. I'm only being harsh here because, as someone who's written comedy and been involved with making films, I know that when you do a scene and it doesn't quite work, you damn well don't leave it in the film and continue shooting, you re-write and re-write until it really works.

Romero and Juliet v.s. The Living Dead doesn't really work, but at the same time I did find myself watching it with a kind of wry smile, the kind of smile you make when a film is so silly and full of smut and zaniness that you sit there thinking, "Okay... let's see where you go next with this... right, okay..." and occasionally find yourself laughing despite yourself. This is where my, "Forsooth! Verily!" dilemma comes-up. I can't really recommend this, it's trashy, clunky and brainless, but if your crazy friend brings it out on a Friday night, and he's 4:20 friendly, you could do worse, just prepare for an hour or so of stupidity and well intentioned badness.

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