The Geek Address

Strange meteorites hurtle through the atmosphere and slam into a small Australian town, flattening a senior citizen and ripping a hole through a drunken cricketer. Much to their dismay, the residents of Berkley find themselves besieged by flesh eating zombies. Undead is a fun, tongue-in-cheek blood spattered zombie epic.

At the beginning of the film, we’re fleetingly introduced to the characters: a beauty queen leaving for the city because she’s inherited her parents’ debt; the newly appointed constable at the local police station contending with the anger management issues of her superior officer; and the local gun nut who claims the zombies are part of an alien conspiracy.

It doesn’t take long for the blood to start flowing. “Bugger me,” one of the cricketers exclaims as his teammate rises from the dead and promptly decapitates him. This film has everything. Zombies. Blood. Decapitation, Dismemberment. Zombies. The female lead even finds a lame-ass excuse to get her gear off. Something to do with acid rain, apparently.

The Spierig Brothers are fans of the genre. Their intention was simple: make a bloody, low-budget zombie film that fans would enjoy. Undead definitely succeeds on that count. While making the movie, the Brothers Spierig were inspired by the ingenuity of filmmakers like Peter Jackson and Robert Rodriguez: “The budget was very low for this film.  There were definitely some El Mariachi techniques used to complete the picture. Thankfully  we have computer technology that has really helped expand the scope. We were able to build  sections of a set and extend it later in CG, something those other films did not do. Most  of the money came out of our own pockets. The CGI is difficult to work with only  because we are rendering at high definition on fairly domestic machines. The computers  crash a lot. But the freedom it gives you to expand the scope of your story to a level  that only a couple of years ago would have been impossible is just fantastic. Almost all  the make-up effects are on-set appliances. There are a few shots that use CG to enhance  something that make-up just could not do.” 

One of the coolest scenes in the film occurs in an abandoned grocery store when the characters are inundated by a horde of marauding zombies. Marion shakes up a can of softdrink and slams it into a zombie’s mouth, detonating the sugary grenade with a pen. Another character wreaks bloody havoc on her zombie assailants, slicing them up with a makeshift weapon. Undead takes zombie violence to new levels of absurdity. Loads of gory fun.

Undead is the ultimate pizza and popcorn horror flick. Check it out.

Best line: “When I was a kid, we fuckin’ respected our parents, we didn’t fuckin’ eat ‘em!”