Plot
Army deserter Elmer Winslow and local
cowboy Luke Budd find themselves on the run after breaking out of jail and
robbing the sheriff. With the sheriff and a posse in hot pursuit, the duo
cross paths with the niece of the great Apache warrior Geronimo. She warns
them of a curse that he put on the white man which has turned all of the
local people into zombies!
Review
The zombie circle is coming around full once again. The
circle always starts off seriously with one landmark film and then slowly fades
as the genre saturates itself. Once there is nowhere left to go, it turns
itself to comedy, self-parody and goofiness before dying a slow death for a
few years. It resurrects itself again with another landmark film before the
circle starts again. Its happened before and plain to see. Romero kicked
things off with Night of the Living Dead but the market quickly
became stagnant with countless rip-offs and Italian clones flooding the
market. Along came Return of the Living Dead to shake the genre up
with it's comedy horror approach before the whole thing died out in the late
80s when guys in masks killing teenagers became the norm. Then along came
28 Days Later which made zombies popular again and got the genre back on
it's feet (come on, it is a zombie film in everything but actual zombies).
Every hack in Hollywood and beyond then cashes in on the popularity with
scores of clones, rip-offs and straight-to-DVD rubbish. The sub-genre is on it's
downward spiral again so the best way is for the genre to poke fun at itself
and turn to comedy to stop the rot. There's been Shaun of the Dead,
Fido and now Undead or Alive. Where does the genre go from
here? Well it's about time it had it's rest period as I'm just a little
tired of watching the same old shindig every time I slap a zombie film into
my DVD player.
Thankfully Undead or Alive is not your
typical zombie film. It's a zombie film set in a western and the two
unlikely genres make a quality pairing. It's fresh, original and definitely
not something you'll have seen before. There isn't a lot you can do with
zombies anyway but at least this film gives it a go by giving us the western
spin. You've got the hallmarks of a great western - a mysterious stranger, a
bad ass sheriff, bank robberies, jailbreaks, shoot-outs and saloons. However
this isn't played straight in the slightest and what you get is a goofy,
cornball movie which works as well as it has any right to be. The film looks
gorgeous it has to be said. Shot in beautiful 16:9 widescreen, it looks like
a multi-million dollar western with blistering wastelands, rolling
mountains, creeks and streams stretching for miles in some of the backdrops
and, of course, a very bright sun. But once the film starts rolling and the
characters begin doing goofy things, it turns into Blazing Saddles
with zombies! The zombie element isn't meant to be scary so you get the
zombies talking, thinking and acting like normal people, only with a taste
for flesh instead. The make-up effects for the zombies
are a little cheap and a lot of the gore is CGI and a bit cheesy at times.
But the splatter and gore aren't the main focus of the film - this isn't
meant to be scary in the slightest, it's meant to be fun and that it is.
Chris
Kattan is annoying. He plays the same whiny character in all of the films
that I've seen him in and it grows old fast. His smart-ass wisecracks just
aren't funny and soon begins to grate on your nerves. For some bizarre
reason, his character is the one to get the love interest side plot
usually reserved for the main hero. James Denton (from TV's
Desperate Housewives) is
great as the straight man hero or at least that's the way he appears to
start the film. His deadpan performance to everything that happens works in
his favour as the comments and observations that he makes are genuinely
funny. Navi Rawat kept me watching with her gorgeous looks. The character
was a bit throwaway but who cares when you are this smoking hot?
The three main characters all work well together and play off each other.
They have a nice "odd couple" chemistry to them where they shouldn't click
but they do. And it's to the film's credit that you do want to see them all
get out of their predicament alive.
Verdict
Undead or Alive is refreshingly original with a
decent slant on the rather stagnant zombie genre. It may be a little too
silly and goofy for it's own good at times but the western setting really
gives it that added kick. I wonder what John Wayne would have thought if he
knew that the genre he helped make popular has become overrun with zombies!
