REVIEW: Redneck Zombies
Every once in a while there is a movie that comes along and really touches your heart. These movies are often sweet, memorable and evoke emotions of sadness, happiness and warmth. They’re often movies of childhood’s end, the pains of becoming an adult and the broken promises of love. Redneck Zombies is NOT that kind of movie. It makes you want to take a shower after your done watching it and when you think you’re all nice and clean… it spits blood at you and sends you on a colorful, LSD trip to an unknown place in space and time. The movie is about a group of rednecks that find a lost barrel of toxic waste and thinking that it’s raw alcohol. So, they distill it and sell it to everybody in their town but the problem is that the side effect to drinking the still is total zombificatoin. Now, as the town slowly turns into mindless flesh-eaters, a group of pot-smoking nature freaks must find a way to survive before they end up getting eaten or worse… turned into a redneck zombie.
Where to begin? Well, I can’t really say much about the acting because it’s supposed to be bad. It’s supposed to be dreadful and over the top because that’s what this movie was trying to go for. I can, however, say that the acting was probably one of the three highlights of the movie since they really exaggerated the hillbilly tonality or even Southern tonality in general. Speaking of characters, none of them are likable and they only serve on purpose: to be eaten, killed and turned into zombies and the movie accomplishes this quite nicely. I guess you can say that they’re likable in the sense of you want them to turn into zombies. Half of the characters are idiot rednecks who think toxic waste is an alcohol, the other half of the characters are pot-smoking nature freaks that share cryptic stories to each other. However, I did find that the only barely likable character had a bag over his head and was only in 2 scenes.
What I can comment about are the ridiculous actions and video effects that the “video†has. Redneck Zombies was apparently one of the first movies to ever be fully shot and edited on video and you can obviously tell just by the way the picture looks. It reminds me of an old Monty Python skit. The movie uses a wide selection of what appears to be programmed filters that probably came with the camera or the VTR that they edited on. They range from solarization, negative, image within an image and much, much more. It’s so gratuitous that it ends up making the movie seem even more schlock that it already is, but then again… what other way could you show that a character is having an acid trip? On top of that, you have characters that wash their babies in laundry machines, a close-up of a woman’s greasy breasts, rednecks that kidnap and butcher young women and somebody that gets so scared that his hair actually stands up on end. Did I also mention that there is a scene where you are literally thrown into a trans-dimensional portal of spinning, vibrating colors? That’s there too.
As for the zombie makeup and special effects… it’s very well done, especially for a b-movie. The makeup looks like they rubbed plaster or clotted oatmeal all over the people’s faces but it still looks really good and really raw. However, at times it looks like there are hoards of Jokers chasing our heroes around because of the black circles around the eyes and the ruby-red lips. There is lots of gore and I mean lots of it. You see zombies eating people’s guts out, there is blood smearing all over their faces, vivisection, intestines, stomachs, the whole nine yards. It looks really phony but at the same time it feels likes your watching the real thing and I guess it has something to do with the format. Perhaps the fact that it’s videotape makes it seem raw as though it’s a documentary. I’d say it’s one of the goriest zombie movies that I’ve seen.
Ever since Stu sent me the link to the trailer for this movie, I’ve been dying to see and I finally did thanks to the miracle that is Netflix Instant. I should have known better because he would send me a trailer of a movie that would make me want to take a nice cold shower. I haven’t had this much schlock fun since I saw The Video Dead so obviously I’m a fan of this, but I wouldn’t watch it over and over again. Redneck Zombies is a must watch for any type of zombie fan or genre fan but only watch it if your bored or curious. Don’t take it too seriously and most importantly… just have fun with it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry (from laughter) and you’ll want to wash it down with a nice cold beer.
Available on Amazon
