Undead Review Country : USA Year: 2005 Genre: Horror/Zombie/Comedy Format: Theatre (limited) Running Time: 104 minutes Distributor: Lions Gate Taking shelter from hordes of flesh-eating zombies, a young Australian beauty queen and her cohorts discover that the nightmare is only beginning.... Credits Written and Directed by Michael and Peter Spierig. Starring Felicity Mason, Mungo McKay, Rob Jenkins, Lisa Cunningham, Dirk Hunter and Emma Randall. If you are a horror fan and you haven’t seen Undead, you seriously owe yourself something. This movie will blow you away. A comedic horror splatter fest, brothers Michael and Peter Spierig reinvent the zombie genre with their own wacky, Peter Jackson-esque style. Undead is the story of the peaceful, rustic town of Berkeley, a charming fishing community where life is sweet and the people friendly. But all that is about to change. After losing her childhood farm to the bank, local beauty Rene (Felicity Mason) decides to leave town and head for the big city. Suddenly, an avalanche of meteorites races through the sky, bombarding the town and bringing an otherworldly infection. Departing is going to be much more difficult than she had planned. The living dead are awakened and Rene is now caught in a nightmare of zombies hungry for human flesh. She manages to find salvation in a small isolated farm house owned by the town loony, Marion (Mungo McKay). There she is met with four other desperate survivors. Together they battle their way through a plague of the walking dead and discover that there is more transpiring than just an infection (plot summary from the IMDB). It is at this point where Undead distances itself from zombie flicks both homegrown, as in Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, and epic, in the vein of Dawn Of The Dead. Using perverse, grotesque, gruesome, slapstick humor and a solemn but hilarious lead performance by McKay, Undead achieves the unthinkable--it creates its own universes and doesn’t rely on any other film to make it work. It even incorporates an element of sci-fi that really works. Aliens in a zombie film? Yep, I had doubts myself, but it works. Next to Land Of The Dead, this may simply be the best zombie movie in a long time!!! Each action set piece tops the next until we are treated to the film’s final act, a gloriously no-holds barred explosion of zombies, aliens, acid rain, crazy cloud cover, and hilarious flashbacks. The final third of this film will have brain oozing from your ears. The Spierig brothers amazed me with their visuals, and low budget guerilla style filmmaking that is seemingly a thing of the past these days. The ending leaves this wide open for a sequel and I really hope we are treated to another journey with the Undead. In the age of the mainstream horror film that feature scary little girls, haunted VHS tapes, remakes of all the classics, and PG-13 ratings....none of these films reach the delirious heights of, quite simply, the most original and ambitious film that has graced the silver screen in a while. Sadly, this only got a few hundred (if that) theatres and you won’t see it until it hits DVD. My suggestion when it comes out… OWN IT! Undead is unbelievable, hilarious and stunning, and it can lay claim to this title as well: possibly the most kickass horror/comedy/sci-fi film that has been made in a while. OFFICIAL SITE Review by John Gray, for Pitofhorror.com