The Zombie Wedding is the first film from Weekly World News Studios and is based on the interactive play Zombie Wedding. Directed by Micah Khan in his feature length directorial debut and written by Greg D'Alessandro, this is a light hearted slice of zombie mayhem that never takes itself seriously, but whose humour always fell flat for me.
Ashley (Deepti Menon) is overjoyed when her long term boyfriend Zack (Donald Chang) proposes to her, even the threat of an ongoing localised zombie outbreak isn't enough to take away her excitement. That all changes when during a meal, the undead break into the restaurant they are eating at and Zack ends up bitten. Horrified at what he has become, Zack calls off the wedding, but Ashley decides that even as a walking corpse she wants to spend the rest of her life and his undeath with him. News of the first ever zombie-human wedding gets the attention of a reporter, who decides to cover the story hoping for fame and glory.
As you can tell from the synopsis, the zombies of The Zombie Wedding are not your typical brain-dead monsters. Aside from poor motor functions and slurred speech, these undead retain their intelligence, despite slowly rotting and having an intense hunger for human brains. The make-up was passable, with it only really being the faces that have had make-up and prosthetics applied to them, often with the make-up not extending to the rest of the body. This is all perfectly fine as some of the background undead not quite looking fully the part is made up for with the number of zombies. In this world being bitten and turned isn't the shocking end it might otherwise be, and over the course of the film, outside of Zack, many of the cast end up infected and transformed with not too much difference to how they act. There was never a feeling of horror to this, that wasn't the intention, with the story very much on the drama between Ashley and Zack as they try to break new ground with their wedding. Characters don't take themselves seriously, all are over the top and zany people, and all for the most part are fine. I did really like Ashley's dad - Buddy (Kevin Chamberlin) but that was about it. The rest of the characters were on the main inoffensive, but I can't truthfully say I liked any of them.
Being a comedy horror it was important that the humour was something that appealed. Unfortunately it just didn't. The jokes were middle of the road and bland, with it often feeling like the 'crazy' situation of a human-zombie wedding was where the start and the end of the comedic ideas happened. I can't say I found a single part of the movie funny, but I did appreciate that the jokes remained low level, nothing about sex or bodily functions at least. I appreciated how the film began, showing the mad chaos at the zombie wedding itself before going back in time a few weeks to show how events led up to that moment. Always a good way to set out a film in my opinion. The horror was slight, though there are a couple of moments of CG blood spurts and purposely fake looking severed limbs being thrown around the place. A couple of scenes of almost horror when it comes to the background character zombies who act much more like the real thing, like the humans, these zombies exaggerate their movements, with arms going everywhere.
Truth be told, I was getting bored of The Zombie Wedding by the time it got to the wedding itself. Having found none of the jokes funny, and finding many of the characters flat and unexciting I was just waiting for the end credits to roll. I couldn't say I entirely enjoyed this, but it still worked as a piece of escapism from this seemingly ever more dark world we live in currently. The Zombie Wedding debuted on VOD and select screens on September 13th.
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