There are a lot of truly inspired, original creators in the indie film world, so it’s a shame to hear when one of them has gone to the dark side, say, by making a stoner comedy/Anti-Zombie film with truly graphic and gruesome violence against the Differently Animated:

How do you make a $2 million feature film for only $5,000?

Talk to Thomas Newman, producer and driving force behind Bong Of The Dead.

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Bong Of The Dead (a title take-off on low budget zombie classic Dawn Of The Dead and the parodistic Shaun of the Dead) may just be the Citizen Kane of stoner-buddy-zombie movies – a sharply photographed, well-lit picture, rock-steady even in its frequent tracking shots, full of dynamic compositions and ingenious special-effects work.

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The only apparent limitation is that it’s intended for a specific market niche – if slow-witted potheads, oozing zombie make-up and gallons of fake blood is your idea of cool, Bong Of The Dead is definitely the movie for you.

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Set in a post-apocalyptic world in which meteorites have turned most of the population into zombies, Bong Of The Dead follows the misadventures of survivors Tommy (Harris) and Edwin (Wynn), whose principal occupation is growing (and smoking) as much pot as they can.

The discovery that zombie brains have a magic fertilizing effect – allowing them to grow a highly potent species of weed – sends the two stoners on a road trip into the “danger zone,” an area where the zombie population is concentrated.

It also sends them into the clutches of a Nazi-like gay zombie (Nerling) who plots to mobilize the other zombies into an “army of the undead.”

But along the way they meet another survivor, Leah (Bailly) – the kind of tough chick beloved of all action movies. She also happens to be an inventor who has built an array of zombie-fighting weapons on her farm – all of which the trio get to try out in a blood-splattered finale.

Dude, Where’s My Anti-Zombie Bigotry?

I honestly don’t know what to say. Newman has decided that not only does he have to revive the Nazi-Zombie connection, beloved of bad 80s movies, but that he’s going to throw in wholesale on-screen murder of the Differently Animated to make the Soylent Green version of Marijuana? Those poor Zombies! Victims of Big Agribusiness and the narco-cartels of the post-apocalypse.

This is just shockingly hateful stuff with a slick marketing angle, and, obviously, a very friendly relationship with the press. It could be going places, and that’s a shame – for Zombie Rights, anyway.

What happened to the good old days, when stoner comedies were inclusive, anyway? What a monstrous perversion of the form, transforming the sub-genre from its go-along, get-along roots to this divisive and destructive hate-peddling.

We’ll be keeping an eye out for this one on the indie film circuit, here at the ZRC.

Tags: Movies

This entry was posted by John Sears on Thursday, February 3rd, 2011 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.