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 ou would be
forgiven for having lost all faith in the very niche genre that is no-budget
zombie movie making. There hasn't been anything good to emerge from the genre in
recent memory, which is somewhat embarrassing considering the low expectations.
And then along comes directors chuck Hartsell and Chance Shirley, whose
low-budget zombie opus "Hide and Creep" hails from Alabama, and will
surely rekindle your love affair with zombie moviemaking on a budget. Even with
its wandering script, semi-pro actors, and sometimes amateurish production
values, "Hide and Creep" is nevertheless some of the most entertaining
stuff to come out of the low-budget rabbit hole in a long while.
Clocking in at a brisk 85 minutes, I would have liked
"Hide and Creep" to be a little bit longer, simply because I believe a
longer length might have smoothed over some of the film's narrative
shortcomings. In any case, the film introduces us to a disparate group of
characters in the small rural town of Thorsby, which has only two cops on the
force -- the police chief, who is on permanent vacation, and a deputy, who is
lost somewhere in Florida. When the dead begins to rise, it's up to bored video
store clerk Chuck (co-director Chuck Hartsell), bitchy police dispatcher Barbara
(Melissa Bush), and Barbara's ex-beau, Chris (Chris Hartsell), to save the day.
Or at least keep from killing each other long enough to watch a football game.
Help shows up in the form of the mysterious Agent F (John
Walker), who is parachuted onto the roof of the police station and promptly
carjacks Barbara's car. There's also a guy name Michael (Michael Shelton), who
woke up in a tree and spends half of the movie providing gratuitous (and
extremely unsightly) nudity. Then there's the town Reverend (Barry Austin), who
gets bitten by a zombie and spends the rest of the movie looking for
forgiveness. Failing that, he decides to get drunk, and then later chastises his
congregation for their lack of attendance. Capping off the large cast is Keith
(Kyle Holman), who runs a gun club and spends his time in the woods watching
porn until the zombies crash the party, forcing Keith and his fellow
gun-wielding rednecks to go on a zombie safari.
Filled with foolishness and camp humor, "Hide and
Creep" is extremely funny and completely devoid of common sense. Then
again, one doesn't expect very much in the vein of logic from this particular
genre. (We later learn that the zombies actually have an unexpected Achilles
Heels -- they're afraid of the dark!) As such, just about anything "Hide
and Creep" attempts, it could get away with simply by winking at the
audience. To its credit, the film gets away with lots, including a sequence at a
supermarket that might just be the funniest damn thing I've seen in a decade or
two.
Which isn't to say "Hide and Creep" hits on
all cylinders. Its biggest problem is too many characters and too little running
time. Eighty-five minutes is simply not enough time to accommodate over half a
dozen main characters and their parallel stories. At one point, Chuck ends up
left behind at the police station; while Chuck's reaction to the TV pre-empting
his football game for breaking news on the zombie epidemic is funny, it still
leaves you wondering what the point was of coming back to him every 5 minutes or
so. What it all comes down to is that you wish the film had found a central
hero, put some supporting characters around him, and stuck to their plight
instead of running off to see what everyone else in town was doing.
Another
surprisingly aspect of "Hide and Creep" is that it actually looks
quite good, especially the outdoor scenes in the woods. Hartsell and Shirley
puts the filmstock to good use, but does run into the same trouble that most
low-budget filmmakers run into when shooting indoor scenes. Specifically the
fallback on dull frame compositions and inability to escape drab surroundings
that results from poor lighting on real locations. Another noticeable, albeit
minor, quibble is with the sound effects. The biggest disappointment is the
foley work for the gunshots, which sounds like someone stepping on a wet paper
bag. Those tiny "pop-pop" things my nephew throws around during July 4th
celebrations sounded fiercer than the gunshots in "Creep".
True to its declaration as a zombie comedy, much of
"Hide and Creep" is played for laughs. In one hilarious scene, zombie
killer Keith hesitates to shoot two zombie strippers when he realizes they're
engaging in zombie girl on zombie girl action, a momentary lapse of judgment
that almost gets him eaten. Other gags don't work quite as well, including a
long scene where Keith has a conversation with his daughter about the rules
concerning the shooting of intruders. Also, the UFO and Chinese spy plane
subplots only succeeds in cramming the film with too many ideas and not enough
room to explore them all. When a character literally falls out of the sky,
naked, and lands in a swimming pool, it plays onscreen as odd, but completely
superfluous. And in a film that's already too unfocused, is one more subplot
about UFOs really necessary?
Nevertheless, "Hide and Creep" is one of the
better zombie movies, regardless of budget, out there right now. The fact that
it doesn't have 1% the catering budget of recent Hollywood zombie films like the "Dawn
of the Dead" remake only makes what Hartsell and Shirley have managed
to accomplish all the more impressive. To be sure, the film has a few nagging
problems (the loosely structured script being chief among them), but with the
resources they had to work with, there's little doubt these Alabama boys
succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
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