Zompire: The Undead Film Festival

[May 7th, 2008]

“When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth,” says Ken Foree’s nerve-addled survivor in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. So what should we think when we see blood-smeared ghouls outside the Hollywood Theatre, or in eveningwear on Hawthorne? Have we reached the end of days—or just the work week?

Now in its third year, Zompire: The Undead Film Festival is a two-day celebration of bloodlust—a Halloween-costume party in May, crammed with enough torn limbs and bad acting to satisfy any undead cannibal. This year, the fest even includes Saturday’s Zombie Prom at Mount Tabor Legacy, inspired, perhaps, by the fest’s winking and necrophilia-rific short film, Prombies .

In a post-Romero cinematic landscape, the dead are damned to a clichéd wasteland—and rightfully so. For every Shaun of the Dead there are 20 House of the Deads. Zompire at once acknowledges the death of the modern reanimated and celebrates its evolution. The festival’s two banner films—the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez Reservoir Dogs-meet-vampire-strippers misfire From Dusk Till Dawn (9 pm Friday, May 9) and Zak Snyder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake (9 pm Saturday, May 10)—might represent a horror shift, but they prove new beasties are always lurking.

Zompire’s indie flicks take that spirit and run. The fest’s standout is Wasting Away (11 pm Saturday, May 10), told from the perspective of undead dipshits who haven’t realized they’re dead. Despite its clunkiness, the film’s running gag—the zombies think they’re superheroes fighting ultra-fast enemies—offers another splatter of hope for the genre. If Wasting Away is a step toward a smarter dead, Brain Dead (11 pm Friday, May 9) is, well, brain-dead. Director Kevin Tenney humps every horror trope imaginable—a cabin full of eager-to-strip babes, low-budget ghouls, cartoonish kills—and packs them into a camp-fest whose only mistake is thinking we care about the naked blonde’s back story.

Zompire’s shorts program (7 pm Saturday, May 10) offers some prime cuts, including a Danish zombie-puppet Western, brain-and-cheese tacos and a new take on “Christ is risen.” Sure, some of the films are rotten, but Zompire offers an interactive gross-out extravaganza worth its pound of flesh—and beyond.