Picking up the brain-addled antics where ELECTRIC ZOMBIES left off is the 2004 shot-on-video movie ZOMBIEZ, directed by Zachary Winston Snygg (who churns out "urban" styled rotgut horror like VAMPIYAZ AND BLOODZ VS. WOLVEZ, and apparently loves the letter "Z"), hiding here under his initials. After seeing this confusing mishmash I can't blame him for wanting to stay anonymous.
What's it about? Good question. I sure as hell don't know, and none of the actors involved in this mess bothered to summarize it on IMDB for our convenience, probably because they don't know either. Snygg most likely made this up as he went, if the drastic shifts in tone and story are any indication.
Nor do I think Snygg knows much about zombies, since he opens his film with a crawl explaining the origin of the undead (he likes explaining things, so much that he breaks the movie into little segments, headed with pretentious definitions of simple words--i.e. fear, lost, etc.), but he gets it wrong; "traditional" zombies, those induced into death-like trances by the use of hallucinogenics, don't eat people. Romero kinda added that when he made NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, as anyone who slept during Horror Ed 101 will tell you.
Jenicia Garcia stars as part of a demolition crew working out of either a run-down industrial district or the edge of a forest, depending on where the story needs it. After sickle-wielding zombies kill her supervisor she heads home, only to have her husband abducted by them once she gets there. She then gets waylaid in a HOSTEL-like torture chamber before embarking on a loooooooooooong foot chase through the woods and running into a clan of cannibals in order to get him back.
Like I said, it's a bit jumbled.
If there had been a shred of sharp direction or skilled dramatics on board it might not've been so bad, but ZOMBIEZ comes up empty in either department. Nor does anything happen, since the plot prefers to go in circles rather than move forward, burdened with some of the worst dialogue I've ever encountered. (Snygg's idea of a police interrogation is to repeat the same question without variation five or six times, and his attempts at slang are clumsy at best.)
Worse, Snygg tries to inject some humor into the proceedings, but he handles comedy as sloppily as he does horror (what the hell is a man in a chicken suit doing in this thing?). Of course, that's not to say you won't be laughing during ZOMBIEZ, because there's plenty of ineptitude to chuckle at.
Yikes. Just yikes.
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