MAY 12, 2017
GENRE: ZOMBIE
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)
Considering how much I dislike watching sequels when I haven't seen the originals, AND how I try to balance out my sub-genres, I find it amusing that this and the previous HMAD review are for sequels to zombie movies I never saw. But unlike Dead Rising, I didn't even realize For A Few Zombies More was a sequel until a character had a rather blase reaction to the appearance of aliens, and got suspicious that I had missed something, i.e. an entire movie. That film, 2004's Hide and Creep, is one of the ones I had on my DVD queue back in the "every day" days of the site, but never got around to seeing it - now I pay the price! Oddly enough, the Blu-ray case doesn't even mention the first film, so perhaps they're purposely trying to play down the connection anyway.
Luckily, besides that quick bit, I never felt at a loss here, and a quick read of the first film's wiki page shows that apart from a few characters there wasn't much of a tie between the two films, as most of this focuses on a character that doesn't seem to have been in that one. Her name is Natalie, and she's on a rescue mission that ropes in the returning characters (including Chuck, played by co-director/co-writer Chuck Hartsell), but if I'm understanding correctly that film had an anthology type structure (like Pulp Fiction or Trick r Treat) as opposed to this one's straightforward narrative. Long story short, if you too haven't seen the first film and have an opportunity to watch this one, don't let your "ignorance" sway you - I'm super picky about these things and I barely even noticed, let alone let it bother me.
Besides I was too impressed with how many zombies they had and the amount of shootout action the film offered. The budget for the first one was only 20k, and while this one was not reported on its IMDb I doubt it was much higher since funding for these sorts of movies has gotten harder, not easier, in the past 10-12 years. So while that means some of the locations ring a little fake and not every actor will be going on to bigger and better things, you get a lot more of what you came for than you're usually liable to find in such things. There's a bit around the halfway point or so where zombies swarm a car, and I was legitimately impressed with how many they had - a wide shot shows several dozen coming from both directions as they close in on the car, keeping it from driving off to safety. Not every scene is that populated, of course, but even Dead Rising I don't think ever offered 50ish of the damn things onscreen at once.
As for the shootouts, they get a bit repetitive (there's even a joke about their frequency that made me chuckle), but since the zombie action was probably harder to pull off and more expensive, I found it to be a pretty nice consolation prize. So even though there's not a lot of undead action, there's still plenty of GENERAL action, as opposed to people just talking or driving around backroads hoping that other cars don't pass them by in this supposed post-apocalyptic wasteland (or dystopia, if you will). Imagine if Day of the Dead had the same amount of zombie action, but instead of Joe Pilato yelling at everyone the characters all just kept shooting at each other - that's kind of what the pacing is like here. That said, I would have been thrilled if maybe ONE shootout had been chucked in favor of another zombie scene, even a simple one like one or two zombies trying to get into a room where our heroes were trapped with no other exit or something - it felt like there were long stretches without any real zombie appearances at all, which minimizes their threat.
Then again, more zombie action would mean less dialogue, and that's there the film shines. Again, not all of the acting is great, but a number of the characters are dryly sarcastic and kind of world-weary about their predicament, which I found amusing - even when they took a shot at Armageddon out of nowhere (*shakes fist*). Hero Chuck is a film buff, and he apparently just wanted to sit around and watch movies until the whole thing blew over, which is pretty much what I'd want to do if the real world got overrun by the undead. But thankfully he doesn't drop too many obvious references, and a number of them are even inspired - mentioning Starship Troopers at one point turns out to be a setup for a later punchline about that film's Dina Meyer (whom young BC was quite smitten with back in the day). And I like that Dawn of the Dead is a movie that exists in this world, without it becoming a big thing - the character has more to say about Star Wars (it's in the same pile) as he's currently faced with a "look out for yourself, or help your friends" decision as Han Solo was in the first film. Plus, when they're talking we're less likely to be pummeled by the faux Carpenter score - we really need to give this brand of homage a rest for a while I think. Same goes for the signature Carpenter font, though here they actually go with the Halloween credit font specifically, instead of the Albertus "Carpenter" one, so I have to give them a pass on that out of loyalty to my favorite movie.
I also really loved a rather inessential bit where our heroine stumbles across a band who is recording a double album. She's incredulous that they're bothering considering the zombie issue, but the band explains that when all the zombies are gone and normal civilization occurs, folks will want new music and there won't be any - just the old stuff they had before everything went to hell. I always wondered, particularly in the Romero films, when exactly these kind of things stopped happening - like in Night of the Living Dead, it's just started and kind of a localized problem, so I'm sure people in Hollywood kept on making movies for a while. But when did they finally decide enough was enough? Ditto for pretty much everything - were the folks who make microwaves still going to work, or did they figure it was pointless and stay home? I would love to see a zombie movie where everything had a specific frame of reference for when the world "stopped" in a general sense; it fascinates me for some reason. Indeed, a lot of the references here were from 1997-1998 (there's even one about The Postman!), so I wonder if that was intentional or just coincidence. Probably have my answer if I saw the first film.
The Blu-ray I was sent came with a novelization, which made me very happy and I instantly put it with all my others, which I really need to organize someday. It's a fitting "gimmick" for the film's 90s worship (the hero is an ex-video clerk, in fact), as it seems every movie that came out in that decade had a novelization (if you want proof I'll let you borrow my copy of Stepmom). I'd like to read it, but I feel I should put more energy into finally watching the first film, because these are the kinds of indie horror films I want to see more often. I may not love them, but I can see that they actually care about what they're doing and have a "let's put on a show" attitude that I am unable to detect in the average found footage flick (hell, they even hand-painted the poster instead of doing some shitty Photoshop thing - see below!). As I find less and less time to watch and review something just for the sake of doing so, I don't want to waste more of my life on cynical "Let's join the party" junk. I want to feel like the people behind it were less concerned with finding distribution in the current market than they were with simply making something they could be proud of down the road.
What say you?