REVIEW: THE DEAD AND THE DAMNED 2

You know what we need more of? Zombie movies. 

Just kidding!

But people keep making them. Thanks a lot, "The Walking Dead."

The zombie sub-genre is hard to get right. That show I just mentioned (perhaps you've heard of it?) is currently getting it wrong, as is...well, mostly everything else that contains the Z word. It's been a while since one came out that was even worth valid analysis. But that doesn't keep filmmakers from trying to make them.

The Dead and the Damned 2 (I have not seen the first one, though I sincerely doubt that matters) weaves together a cast of different characters coming together in the wake of a zombpocalypse. One of them is a former military soldier on a mission to lay his family to rest; another is a deaf girl being victimized  by decidedly non-zombie threats (read: redneck penis); then you meet an old man named Wilson living in a train car; and then we've got the immortal Richard Tyson as a fatigued police sheriff - so fatigued, in fact, that he's barely awake for any of his scenes. Naturally, all these characters come together and begin to rely on each other to survive the zombie-infested landscape their world has become. (Well, maybe not Richard Tyson, who shot one scene and fucked off from the rest of the film.) Along the way, some of these characters will be eaten like today's fricassee, and the ones that survive we'll soon "care about."

The Dead and the Damned 2 is not a good film, but that doesn't at all mean you shouldn't watch it. Entertaining for all the wrong reasons, it was a film made when a bunch of people were probably at the diner when one of them asked, "What do you wanna do now?" and someone answered, "We could make a zombie movie?"

And then The Dead and the Damned 2 happened. And we're all the better for it. It's sort of like the Forrest Gump of zombie films. It means well, and because it does, you give it a pass, but you just know there's not all that much going on upstairs.

(Zombie.)

The Dead and the Damned 2 is charming in its execution, although it's not trying to be. It's one of those accidental glorious train-wrecks that has to be seen to be believed. With a score clearly aping bits of the one John Murphy created for 28 Days Later, the "putting the family to rest" concept from the excellent Exit Humanity, and seemingly the amusing over-sized zombie head design from Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror, The Dead and the Damned 2 is a combination of everything zombie-related that came before it, only getting everything wrong to such a degree that it validates its own existence because of the sheer ridiculousness it creates. There's even a scene in a shopping mall, because, why not?

Sledgehammers slammed into pudding-filled rubber skulls and charmingly stupid zombie designs await you, as does the most non-confrontational attempted rape scene ever committed to digital, dialogue so awkward and unnatural that it sounds like it had been run through an online auto-translator, and even a scene where our deaf girl strips down for bed and the camera pans down ever so slightly after its operator realized not all of her bare boobs were in frame. There, now they are.

The Dead and the Damned 2 is an excellent time waster. Don't expect good and you'll have a good time.

And that's all I have to say...about that.