STAT SHEET
SUB-SUB-GENRE: Musical Comedy
QUOTES: “Frenchie wasn’t liked much round here. Covering up the true nature of food with his fancy sauces and what not” – Redneck
“I thought you were a Vegan” – Johnny
BEST ZOMBIE: Foaming at the mouth zombie girl (no zombie variety in this one, they’re all generic hillbilly zombies)
IS IT SCARY?: No, but it wasn’t trying to be.
SO IS IT FUNNY?: Absolutely
PAIRED COCKTAIL: Mexican Bladder Infection – Tequila & Cranberry (R.J.'s Special!)
Dead & Breakfast attempts to blend together musical screwball comedy and good ol’ blood ‘n guts horror. It succeeds by starting with a foundation horror archetypes we’re all familiar with and building off those archetypes in weird directions that makes the clichés work for them instead of against them. You’ll recognize all the stock characters: mismatched teens on a road trip (naturally played by actors not in their teens), hard-ass small town sheriff, the lone drifter, back woods rednecks, even a snooty French chef. What makes these characters work so strongly is a combination of good casting and the film’s sense of self-awareness. The cast doesn’t treat their roles as serious characters, but rather caricatures of the archetype, intentionally over acting, emulating a B-movie. This film knows exactly what it is, and wants you to know that the laughs are purposeful, not accidental, like in the films to which it is paying homage. However, making an intentional B film is double edged, while it allows the audience to relax and enjoy the ride, it also lets the viewer turn off their brain and stop looking for subtext. Of course, there is no subtext, and on one hand it’s fine for a film to be made for its own sake, but what made me enjoy the reigning zombie comedy, Shaun of the Dead (a comparison made on the DVD cover for Dead & Breakfast) was the comparison between the living dead and Shaun’s stalled life.
It’s unusual for me to enjoy the performances of everyone in a film, but this cast was solidly over the top. I particularly enjoyed Erik Palladino (E.R., U-571) as the greaser character David. He’s got the jaw line of an action hero coupled with the ‘Rebel-without-a-cause’ demeanor. He easily stole some funny moments away from other actors, including one of my favorite underused comedic actors, Diedrich Bader, whom you’ll remember as the neighbor from Office Space and Oswald on The Drew Carey Show among other things. Ironically, one of the big weaknesses of Dead & Breakfast was how under used both Diedrich and David Carradine were in the film. They only have two microscopic scenes each in the opening act. This is probably one of the situations where the filmmakers where looking for better-known faces and names that they can get in their film for a scene or two, then milk their name for what publicity it can get. In fact, I would bet David Carradine is only in this because his niece, Ever Carradine, is the star.
Oz Perkins also gives an interesting performance as Johnny, the compassionate, pacifist who becomes the leader of the zombies. He plays a typically shy nerd, but when he transforms into the films antagonist he metamorphosis’s into a (again) larger than life talking (or yelling) alpha corpse. He reminded me a lot of Jim Carey in The Mask. Very exaggerated, very animated, and it played well against the other zombies, who were the usual un-emotive shufflers.
Dead & Breakfast opens with hand drawn pictures to accompany the credits. The stills evoked the drawings of Edward Gorey, and add to the macabre comic book feeling of the film. They also use the stills to do transitions in the film. The most interesting use of this device was when the soul box first possesses Johnny. I liked that they chose to show this with the illustrations instead of coming up with hokey lighting effects. The stills, black with white drawings and red filler, also provided color contrast to the soft blue lighting favored during the B&B interior shots. It foreshadows the slaughter to follow by smacking you with the vibrant, but not blood colored, red.
The shot composition of Dead & Breakfast also adds to the graphic novel feel, specifically the shots involving the murder of the deaf/mute gardener. As the murder plunges down on the victim, the camera looks up at a silhouetted murderer with the house framed in the background. The music rises to familiar violin shrieks, an obvious homage to Psycho.
Many of the sound effects are as exaggerated as the acting. Pulling out a piece of paper is accompanied by a loud whoosh, knives are pulled out with a metallic shink. My personal favorite, hair is ripped out with a sickening splotch sound.
You really can’t discuss Dead & Breakfast without talking about the music. All the songs are in the diegetic world, being sung by a Rock-a-Billy Troubadour who doubles as a narrator and bar entertainment. I enjoyed this in the beginning, but once the zombie assault starts on the B&B, we really didn’t need him to remind us of what was going on. I felt like they put these in because they had already established this gimmick and had to follow through on it, but you don’t need a narrator to tell you what you just saw a minute ago in the film.
Then there’s the musical number. Actually, it’s more of a music video. A number implies a certain amount of flamboyance, which this was lacking. It was more of a spoof of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, complete with zombie choreography. The initial shock when it started made me laugh, but the routine is unimaginative, and the song itself is an awkward mixture of country and hip-hop, and was the only song from the film I didn’t like.
The zombie creation idea was very original. You become a walking corpse when the head zombie gets a little piece of you, hair, nail, blood, and puts it in the soul box. Then you’re under his control. I thought this idea of capturing a small piece of someone’s DNA worked really well. There was a scene towards the end when the heroes are holed up in the B&B, and one character has to watch as the creatures fight there way up the steps to get at a small puddle of his blood. The character gets turned from the safety of indoors; a nice twist on the standard idea of becoming ‘infected’ from a bite.
The zombies are rather plain looking, but that works for this film. These aren’t week old corpses, but people who where killed an hour ago. The make up is applied pancake style, giving everyone a thick pale white face; they make you very conscious of the make up choice, almost like kabuki theatre. And even though the level of rot is down, there is still plenty done to the zombies: decapitation, eye gouging, chainsaws, and all the good stuff.
Even though they have trouble balancing the movie between comedy and horror at the end, this is a very enjoyable film. The filmmakers drop you into very familiar territory for horror fans, and then build off of those familiar stereotypes to create a movie that is both homage to the films that influenced it and an original creation.
4 out of 5 on the decomposition scale
copyright © D.L. Noah 2007
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