I've had somewhat of a morbid curiosity about spoof zombie film The Walking Deceased (also known as Walking with the Dead). On the one hand, it looked terrible, on the other hand however I had a terrible nights sleep and had a splitting headache, and so wanted to watch something that I wouldn't have to focus on too much (at the time of typing). Where this Scott Dow directed comedy horror fails is its choice of things to spoof, and the unmistakable fact that mainly this just isn't funny.
Twenty nine days after zombie apocalypse swept the world, Sheriff Lincoln (Dave Sheridan - The Devil's Rejects, Scary Movie) awakens from a coma to discover everything has changed. Him and his son, Chris, (Mason Dakota Galyon) team up with a group of survivors, including among them Green Bay (Tim Ogletree - Supernatural Activity) and Chicago (Joey Oglesby - Supernatural Activity), and together they decide to head for apparent safety at a remote farm untouched by the zombie plague.
Spoof movies don't have a great track record, especially in recent years. Even relative greats, such as Scary Movie eventually got bogged down with worse and worse sequels. My biggest complaint with The Walking Deceased is its choice of media to mickey take. The film is two fifths The Walking Dead, specifically the second season of that show. The spoof works as the show is super serious. This is also however, two fifths Zombieland, and one fifth Warm Bodies. The spoof aspect fails at this point as it is trying to poke fun at comedic films which did their own comedy a billion times better than what is achieved here. At best this does a poor impersonation of those, and it was almost embarrassing how unfunny this was compared to those. Zombieland was a very funny film, the attempts here to make fun of that fail for the simple reason that it was a comedy itself.
Outside of the film taking place for half its run time at a farm that seemed very similar to Hershel's from season two of The Walking Dead, the main way for this to spoof other films is via the use of similar characters. Thankfully the best character here was Sheriff Lincoln, with actor Sheridan really nailing the way that Rick Grimes speaks in a way that was kind of funny. The recurring joke of him constantly referring to his son Chris as 'Carl' was nearly amusing. I also found that the side character Darnell (Andrew Pozza - Supernatural Activity) had occasionally vague smile worthy moments, the character being an obvious stand-in for Darryl from The Walking Dead, whose constant attempts to kill the undead with his tiny crossbow always ending in failure when the arrow pings off them ineffectually. Galyon was perfectly fine as the Carl stand-in, but he didn't do too much to stand out. On the other side of the spoof you have Ogletree and Oglesby doing their best to channel the spirit of Columbus and Tallahassee respectively, but failing due to the actors for those two characters doing far better jobs.
There are plenty of undead throughout, but they don't really feature in many action scenes, the whole farm part in particular was mostly zombie free. The make-up effects were fine, a bit random, but passable. It was the humour and the story that really made this fall flat. If this had been funny but plotless it would have been much better, and if this hadn't been funny and had a decent plot it would also have benefitted. This median line of unfunny and lacking plot was what led to its downfall.
Usually, even with the worse spoof film there are one or two genuinely funny moments. Here I never managed more than a hint of a smile. Looking past the badly aged homophobic and sexist jokes, and ones about bodily functions and sex, this was at its best when it was channelling The Walking Dead, but whenever it swerved back to trying to out-funny Zombieland this really began to show how much of a worse thing this was. The Walking Deceased can currently be streamed on Amazon Prime Video, but I can't really recommend it.
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