Zombiez (2005)

 

Director: Zachary Snygg

Screenplay: Zachary Snygg

Cast: Jenicia Garcia as Josephine; Jackeem Sellers as The Dr.; Randy Clarke as Steve; Raymond Spencer as Terry

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

I don’t want to hurt you…I just want to cut your fucking heart out!

Director “ZWS” begins Zombiez with the history of the undead explained over hip hop bears and white text on a black screen. The irony is that, with full spoilers ahead of time, these are not really zombies, eventually getting confused or suggesting that these members of the undead are the smartest in existence, when it reality they look like a horde of cannibals with a few with a severe case of decayed acne. I am not going to undermine Zachary Snygg for this – who has gone under multiple pseudonyms including John Bacchus, where he was a prolific director in the early DVD era of softcore that starred figures like Misty Mundane – though this will prove your tradition straight to DVD zombie movie that does not eventually stay a zombie movie.

Twenty miles away from the opening zombie attack, working for Purgatory Demolition Crew, is our lead Josephine (Jenicia Garcia), who already had to put up with being the one woman around male arseholes, but will eventually have to worry about cannibalistic figures chasing anyone in sight and playing with their severed organs, especially as these ones can run and use tools, somehow even in the middle of an industrial era finding sickles of all things, less likely to be found in brown land industrial environments unless an antique store was broken into than the woodland environment Josephine will eventually enter to find her beau, kidnapped by these evil hordes.

The one thing to note with Zombiez, and this could sound so patronizing to bring up, especially as the writer of this is a white male and realizes just how so it could be, is that this is a film with a predominantly black cast, including a rare case of a black female lead. This was still something that had to be brought up decades later as, even with voices like Jordan Peele directing films as a black genre filmmaker in the 2010s, representation in horror and genre cinema in English language films, from non-white directors/writers or just with non-white leads and largely non-white casts, was still not as common even if improving at the time. It really raises a perturbing thought of how this subject is still with a sense of a minority voice that I even have to bring this up, but credit to Zombiez, it is a film about a largely black cast, with a black female lead in Jenicia Garcia, regardless of how most people view it critically as a zombie film. Garcia, who stars in a trilogy of these films from Snygg – this, Vampiyaz (2004) and Bloodz vs. Wolvez (2006), alongside a crime film called Hood Copz (2004) – was an associate producer on this and Bloodz vs. Wolvez (2006), so there was an investment for her in general to bring these films to be. A director like Zachary Snygg is not brought up in talk in cult cinema, but his is a fascinating career with its pockets, from his late eighties no-budget oddities to his softcore career, with this period of low budget films with prominent black casts. With an obsession with ending titles in “Z”, these are interesting to point to, as much for the cast themselves here, and that this is a film with a predominantly large cast, with all the major roles, but no one has to raise this, entirely for the better that the tone is that of a zombie film where this is not a topic that even has to be raised.

The bigger concern instead is that this is still a low budget zombie film, which you will ever run away from like the plague or appreciate. Realizing Bacchus/Snygg made this, and it comes to mind that a zombie film and a softcore erotic film are not that different in that they have their tropes and narrative beats. There is no malice to these words but a growing appreciation for figures like him from the straight to DVD era of cinema, or his casts, who make their careers working over the decades in these low budget genre films, but there is an irony to how many films in both genres were being made at the time that zombie films, despite being less likely to be placed on the adult shelf in a second hand DVD store, are probably with a greater disadvantage for me now decades later. Softcore, and why it and hardcore is still being made on mass, least has the advantage that there will always be an audience for titillation, but zombie films, even with mind to zombie film obsessives collecting titles like this alongside big titles, have the issue that, from this period on, there was a boom period in zombies in pop culture even in Hollywood, and that also means there is a greater issue of how many tropes, clichés and conventions have been repeated in just a short period for one horror subgenre.

As a result, not a lot even in terms of micro budget zombie cinema is “original” here, more so considering how even more zombie films came long after this one, which was made at a time when it was Land of the Dead (2005), Danny Boyle’s “infected” running hordes in 28 Days Later (2002) and the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, not including straight to video or non-English films. By 2005 onwards when Zombiez would be released, the undead would slowly become a pop cultural phenomenon, one which refused to die over the decades on but with the added danger of malaise. Zombiez feels the weight of this now, even if you could appreciate its low budget schlock, entirely because so much of this films’ stock scenes of fleeing and zombie attacks would be found even in large Hollywood films, which is not something you would have to worry about with an Erotic Witch Project, just to given an example of another film from the director, which could be sold on its softcore scenes even if making a parody of the Blair Witch will leave a lot of confused audiences who are not old enough to have seen that 1999 film nowadays.

Unlike some films, and with credit to this one, this low budget film keeps shots longer than a minute, even with the camera in motion, which is distinct among the requisite dialogue scenes and would have been a potential obstacle to include on a shooting schedule. In fact the sense of hard work here, for a type of film which would have been casually dismissed over the years, can be found in how even the camera operator, let along the cast, have extended scenes of running. There is unintentional humour – accidentally causing a car to crash so bad someone’s already cut stomach slops out a few organs – and there is the curious decision ZWS had in having dictionary level explanations for terms. There is something weird about having a term like “fear” – “A passive emotion or passion excited by the expectation of evil and impending danger.” – which, with the white text over black screen, is could be seen as a weird creative decision from him, but also causes one to realize how many of us viewing the film, maybe even  Zachary Snygg himself, knew what this word we all instinctively “get” meant without opening a dictionary like someone did for these text sequences.

There are also a lot of scenes of actress Jenicia Garcia moving or fleeing onscreen which is likely to put people off this. This is not a hyper lurid film in terms of gore or anything else, even keeping in mind to the director’s background with very explicit nudity, as beyond imagining the one actress here happy to do full nudity but laid on a cold table with fake blood sloshed onto them, this is mostly a tame film. The violence is working around its limitations and barely exists, more fritters of meat and fake blood with the zombie extras having to pretend to chew a person’s stomach out. The fact, for the most part, these come off as ghouls in their nature, with few zombie makeup effects and more extras in regular street clothes, is going to disappoint someone who wished to have zombies. This is more so as, even before the boom that came to be in the 2000s onwards, you could have no-budget films in the period beforehand post-George Romero just thanks to figures like Todd Sheets in his hyper low budget films, made in the late eighties and nineties when zombies were less popular, where they had zombie makeup and more gore even if homemade and usually real butcher store animal guts.  I come to this film having viewed it an obscurity which is not seen as “good”, with thankfully the right frame of mind to appreciate this and enjoy it; just bear in mind that, for any film to actually get made, that is an achievement, but expect a lot of lengthy scenes of fleeing, and not a lot of luridness like an Italian zombie film, or, in mind to the weight now forced onto this film after all the zombie films and television shows made after, all the content even found in big mainstream productions which are surprisingly violent.

That it becomes more of a cannibalistic group who sell human meat as Smiling Daves meat pies will further a disappointment for quite a few people, but thankfully, just right at the end when the film has felt its length, suddenly Zombiez does develop a strange sense of humor, something again to bear in mind with its director. It comes out of nowhere mostly, which will baffle some, but from he who made an erotic Blair Witch Project and over two of the films had a man in a cheap gorilla suit as a reoccurring joke character, it makes sense for me myself. There is a sense of this once beforehand – zombies who throw rocks are unique and funny, as barring concussions and potential lost eyes, something so childish is not what you expect from flesh eaters – but it is as if the film openly shifts to the ridiculous. A person in a chicken suit as target practice, casually walking to and fro flapping their arms as real bullets are fired at them, an emphasis this, whilst this is not auteur theory, Zachary Snygg clearly finds people in cheese costumes funny, as he does bickering, in this case the lackey who demands an operation name and thinks “Operation Gumbo II” is cheesy much to the rage of the main villain. The fact that one musical track is xylophone and brass, as if suddenly turning into a Tom Waits song, makes up for a lot of padding to a film, which is mostly a straight-to-video low budget zombie film, struggling with limitations, who thankfully rewarded someone like me coming in with an open mind with this gleefully shift to quirk.