REVIEW: Stag Night of the Dead
Ah yes. The infamous Stag Night of the Dead but only infamous for me. Ever since I got the go to try to request a screener for it, I wanted to see it purely for the title alone. The film is about what the title describes; after a wild strip show a group of friends take their soon-to-be-wed friend to a government sanctioned sport called Zomball. Here, the customers enter a field outside and use electricity guns to shoot at zombies but the guns merely stun them for 5 minutes rather than kill them. Well, after a few bad decisions and breaking the 3 major rules the friends are now caught in a real battle between the living and the undead. Complications arise, friendships are broken and there is a lot of great zombie action but it somehow felt bland to me.
First off, the production of this movie was phenomenal. I had to budget productions for student films so I know how these things are worked but… how did they get their hands on an (allegedly) real military base? How did they get all the vehicles and such? I’m not sure I want to know because that will ruin the beauty. The film uses several comic book-like conventions like stylized camera angles (mainly canted, stylized tracking, and wide shots), slow motion and a lot of close-ups. I see it as though the film was trying to build off of what Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead did for the zombie genre. I felt as though Stag Night was sort of like the indie equivalent to that.
I really liked the zombies as well. They are very different than your typical infection zombies because they originated from the Avian Flu. One of the military men explains that the Avian Flu had different effects on people resulting in different zombies. For the most part they are just slow-moving zombies but one person in particular turns into a zombie that can walk normally, talk, reason and think. It’s an interesting twist on the mythology and he becomes sort of a zombie dictator/leader. The gore was great and, in some cases, it was a lot more graphic than I thought it would be. Seeing a zombie loose his balls or seeing somebody make out with a zombie is pretty… interesting.
Stag Night made me continue watching it because I wanted to know what would happen next but I guess my problem came from the fact that, despite the stylized effects and cool zombie makeup, something about it felt a little bland. Perhaps it came from the fact that the character didn’t really look too cautious about a game that involves real zombies and hardly in protection or the fact that the father-in-law wasn’t too irked that his son-in-law isn’t marrying his daughter. Maybe I built it up too much, thinking that it would be another Dawn of the Dead type movie but it wasn’t. I am not criticizing the director because he did a good job; I just personally have a bad habit of over hyping and over expecting too much from movies. What I can be sure of is that the film didn’t really have a sense of tension. I knew the characters were in danger but it didn’t feel like they were in danger. It didn’t feel like the zombies were closing in and they had no means of escape. I think that’s one problem that I can be sure of.
Otherwise, the film is pretty good. For zombie lovers, fans of indie cinema and those that like films about games that turn deadly will enjoy this wonderful movie from Great Britain. If you are looking for a magnum opus, you are out of luck. This isn’t that type of movie… it’s a fun movie that you can watch and just cut loose rather than think too deep into. Given the directing style, I am curious to see what else the director has in store the next time around.
