Spoofy rather than spooky, Zombie Town is no good at all if a proper scaring is what you want but a wholly different proposition if you’re after the sort of knowing salute that Ghostbusters made to drive-in horror all those years ago.
Dan Aykroyd, yes, Dan Aykroyd, is one of the stars, and one of the joys of the film is that he doesn’t just blur on, say something corny, and, cameo over, blur off again. He plays Len Carver, a reclusive horror-movie legend who hasn’t directed a film in decades, so famous that the town where he lives has been named after him.
But he comes out of retirement for a hometown premiere of his latest opus, Zombie Town, a film so full of juu-juu and woo-woo that it literally turns everyone in Carverville into zombies. All except Mike (Marlon Kazadi) and Amy (Madi Monroe), a couple of kids protected from zombiedom by the runic magic eye painted onto Zombie Town‘s film canister.
Everything in this film is knowingly familiar, from the friend-zone relationship between the hopeful Mike and the unwitting focus of his desires, Amy, to the jocks-and-plastics high school they attend, to the smalltown vibe of a place where there’s still a movie theatre with an old-school projector and phones with dials.
Drive-in tropes abound, and that includes elaborate reaction shots by anyone told anything new (the corollary to characters painfully slow on the uptake), and zombie make-up that’s cheap but effective (because shuffling is always really enough already). At one point Mike says “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for all this,” as is written in ancient lore, and director Peter Lepeniotis treats us to the bizarre music choices you often get in drive-in movies, where rights cost money and the budget is already spent – Elvis Costello’s Pump It Up, mock-bafflingly, in one zombie attack scene.
There’s countercultural critique from the jaded Carver himself, whose lifetime in horror has left him disdainful of the genre and everyone who watches it – zombies, he calls them, in one of the film’s little “cinematic reality loop” jokes. RL Stine wrote the original story, and it is true to his brand of knockabout horror (he even gets a cameo over the end credits).
Aykroyd is really good, warm and engaging, and there’s also Chevy Chase making a genuine “not really in it that much” cameo, as a sort of Indiana Jones figure from Carver’s movies who knows the what and the wherefore of zombiedom. Chase, also, is warm and engaging rather than the curmudgeon of legend. The on-set pictures of the two guys shows them leaning back in their canvas chairs and looking on benignly, and their performances are similarly laidback and good-natured.
Kazadi and Monroe carry it, though, he a likeable star on the rise who you’ll know if you saw Ghostbusters: Afterlife, she a graduate of the university of TikTok with a kick-down-the-doors attitude. Are they a plausible couple in waiting? No. Does it matter? No.
Henry Czerny, as the cinema owner who also becomes a zombie, gets some of the best jokes, both as a human and as a zombie, and also adds to the cosy old-guy vibes being given off by Aykroyd and Chase.
It is all very good fun, especially if you have watched a lot of the sort of film that this is aping. If you haven’t, you could be forgiven for bracketing it with other undercooked cheapo horror movies. But that would be to miss the point. This is pastiche, very expertly done, nicely played. At least I hope it is.
Zombie Town – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
