Whenever I have a week off of work my best friend is always saying I should get a bunch of horror films reviewed to break out in case of emergency. For well over a decade I've owner a collection of short zombie films on a DVD titled Ultimate Zombie Feast. What had put me off watching this was due to the excited tagline stating there were over 5 hours of zombie films on the disc. It only really occurred to me earlier this week that I didn't have to watch this in one go for a review, instead I could treat each of the films to their own review. The first of these was 12 minute short Zombeer, the title I was unsurprised to find existed before any idea for what the short would be about existed. This was co-written and co-directed by Barend de Voogd and Rob van der Velden.
After being found drunk on the job one too many times, the head brew master at a Dutch brewery is told that going forward he is only to work nights at the place. This turns out to be fateful for the alcoholic as alone at night he accidentally tumbles into a giant vat of beer. Of course the man drowns, but he also somehow gets infected by the boiling beer, and the process turns him into a zombie. The next day at the brewery it is business as usual, but the batch of bad beer soon begins to spread and turn all who consume it into flesh hungry ghouls.
Zombeer is a prime example of how it isn't really important to have the biggest budget when making a zombie film. This does everything you would want, though the zombie part of this did come slightly too late into the film. The undead are plentiful and look great on screen (as always there isn't much need for complex make-up effects), but the best part is relegated to an end credits sequence. Weirdly, this begins with a Japanese news report that hadn't been translated - no idea what that part was about. It then goes into a neat found footage segment showing an unfolding zombie outbreak in daytime city streets. It was a shame the very best part of the short took place over end credits.
The story is functional, and the acting is purposely a bit exaggerated, but fitted the events that never took themselves too seriously, obviously realising the silliness of the situation.
Zombeer didn't outstay it's welcome, and for a zombie short it was a lot of fun. The brewery location was one of the best things about this, and I appreciated the special effects were practical rather than CG. Worth a watch, fun in that neat brain-dead type of way that only indie films about the undead seem able to succeed at.
SCORE:
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