American Zombie (2007)

Review by Tim-O



Directed by Grace Lee
Starring: Grace Lee, John Solomon
Zombie movies are fun to debate for us horror fans. Fast zombies vs. slow zombies, originals vs. remakes, voodoo slave zombies vs. undead apocalyptic zombies, brains or whole body munch downs… one thing that seems constant is that we love our zombies. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that they are mirror images of us without souls. I’m partial to the shambling Romero zombie movies where the zombies are basically human sized viruses infecting everyone until there’s no one left. They don’t need to move fast or be smart because they are only motivated by impulses. They are going to win and it only takes one to infect the world, so what’s the rush? That scares me because I find the scenario totally believable and something LIKE a zombie apocalypse in the realm of possibility. O.K., maybe the thought of dead people roaming the earth doesn’t keep me up at night but it’s not the zombies that scare me. It’s whatever “bug” the zombies have that infects people that scares me.

Think I’m kooky? Maybe, but think back to recent hysteria and scares with SARS and Swine Flu and how different people AND the media reacted to them. Pandemics are real no matter what the disease. “American Zombie” uses this fear and tries to make a relevant social statement using zombies as a kind of minority (illegal immigrants perhaps?) that deserves the same rights we all have. Shot in documentary style, the movie stars Grace Lee and John Solomon as themselves out to make a movie to show that zombies are a lot like us and just want to be accepted. Apparently, in the “American Zombie” world, zombies are living and even working among us. They become zombies because of a virus that lies dormant in the brain and only becomes active after a violent death. They wake up disorientated with their memory completely erased and wander around until they somehow realize that they are a zombie. Lee, Solomon, and their crew spend most of the movie interviewing zombies and showing where they live and what they do in daily life. As the film progresses, Solomon becomes more and more suspicious that the zombies are secretly eating flesh and are biding their time until they have the numbers to attack the living.

“American Zombie” is shot like a documentary and has the production values of one. The acting standard for these kinds of fake documentaries…like “Fahrenheit 9/11” (Sorry, I couldn’t resist) and the camera work is not as nauseating as some of the hand-held movies I have to watch with my eyes closed…like “Quarantine”. The movie is billed as mockumentary/comedy like “Best in Show” but is actually 100% satire. This is where some people might have a problem with the film. Satire tends to be ironic not funny. On the surface, Lee seems to be taking shots at liberal special interest groups. The movie focuses on a not-for-profit organization that is an advocacy group for zombie rights but is knee deep in cover-ups and lies trying to hide and gloss over the not so “human” nature of zombies. The group’s leader acts so suspicious that it actually becomes almost cartoonish at times. By the end of the movie though, I got the sense that Lee was tricking the viewer into trying to find a deep message in the “documentary” aspects of the movie while all along it builds up to a more horror movie-like climax. (Unfortunately for gore-hounds, it never becomes the splatter-fest like most zombie movies do.) I think if there’s a message attached to the film, it’s one that says don’t believe everything you see in a documentary any more than you believe any line of crap the government is handing out this week for media consumption. It’s all about how the message is edited to fit a certain point of view. That’s what I took away from the movie at least.

“American Zombie” is an O.K. movie but not a great one. It’s a mix bag of satire and horror that didn’t totally work with me. That being said, it held my attention through the end of the film. I did also like how it set me up to think I was about to be beat over the head with a political statement and then swerved into a more horror scenario. Thanks for that, Grace Lee. I hate being preached to in movies. Worth a rent if you’re in the mood for something different. 5/10