Dug Up

Not a masterpiece. But it has a few funny bits. The best was early on when the sheriff is at the location of a deceased man, and it's a sight gag that you might miss if you look away. There are a few other funny bits and the movie knows what it is and does not take itself seriously. Decent zombies, goofy, and for what it is, in its class, it's a solid 8. Well, what else can I say about it? The effects budget was certainly decent. The characters are stereotypes, but so what? The whole idea of the main male character visiting his sister at work was disturbingly hysterical to me and I'm really out of things to say. If you like bad movies, you'll like it a lot. Even though its on the cusp of just being good dumb fun.

This movie was filmed in Vermont, but would have been right at home in a backwoods hillbilly area. In fact, the actors do a great job of being clueless and stupid. Unfortunately, that can only go so far. The sheriff of the town is always busy doing extracurricular horizontal activities. An old man dies, and it was rumored he had gold and treasure hidden, and Trevor decides he will try and find it. Instead of gold hidden in a grave, they find a box, and inside is a dial and a medal. In turning the dial, they cause the dead within 100 miles to rise out of their graves. And the zombies can be quite fast. It is low budget and it shows. It is also fairly goofy. But it also wears thin after awhile.

As a zombie movie afficionado, I had high hopes for this one based on a 6.5 rating and one of the reviewers saying that it was better than Zombieland. It was not. This is obviously one of those movies with fake reviews skewing the rating. It's borderline unwatchable. The acting is terrible. The fake southern accents are the worst I've ever heard. The set-up was ridiculously long.

Just don't.

DUG UP is your usual indie zombie comedy which feels a little better than some of the braindead efforts that this genre conjures up. The reason for that is that the script isn't totally mindless and the main three actors do seem invested in their roles. The story takes a while to get going and the first half is too obsessed with showing skin to get on with the plotting, but the low rent zombie nonsense in the second half is a bit better. There's the requisite cheap gore effects and some mannered acting bringing to life characters that are more caricature than real person. By the standards of mainstream cinema it's not very good, but by the standards of an indie it's not so bad.

Seriously? It says it's a zombie movie but it's the furthest thing from that. This is basically the early start of the, all southerners are white supremacists/hicks. The accents are just so far over the top that you want to rent a trailer just to say you've got good coverage on the white stereotype that seems to be common these days. The acting is unbearable, the girls are just, yuck. And the guys are basically what you've seen in movies like Deliverance. I mean what's the point? Nobody believes this is real American culture. There isn't any town in the USA that behaves this way. But of course a zombie movie wouldn't be complete without a bunch of Neo-Nazis right? I mean seriously?