Well, I guess I get what I deserve. After criticizing both H and Samaritan Girl, two reasonably well-made films, on intellectual grounds, I am given Zombiez, a film completely devoid of intellect. Here is a film that’s laughably inept; jaw-droppingly bad; and, worst of all, a complete bore to sit though.

What little story there is concerns Josephine, a worker at a construction site that’s “twenty miles from functional plumbing,” which apparently means it is isolated. While standing around randomly one day (Waiting for a bus? I thought she was in the middle of nowhere. And come to think of it, why does it look like she’s standing in the middle of a town?) Josephine sees a guy playing basketball (apparently these construction workers don’t work much, or perhaps he’s wandered over from that plumbing 20 miles away) get attacked by a maniac.

Walking over to investigate, she finds a guy pulling intestines from under the kid’s shirt (apparently he’d had them cached in there), and she’s soon being chased by this dollar-store-plastic-scythe-wielding oddball. Taking refuge in one of the complex’s buildings, Josephine sees a couple of coworkers from the site get murdered before the zombies / maniacs are scared away by the arrival of the police. Of course, since Josephine had been having an argument with these coworkers before their deaths, the police suspect her of disemboweling and eating them (an understandable reaction to a heated altercation); however, since they’ve no solid evidence, the police let her go (probably want to make that 20 mile drive back to the working plumbing—perhaps via the freeway overpass clearly seen during the earlier chase).

Returning to her rather vast and well-furnished home on the construction site, Josephine calms herself by taking a nap with her boyfriend (who has her strip down to her bra and panties to calm her nerves); however, she is soon awakened by some scratching at the door. Terrified, she has her boyfriend check it out and he’s promptly dragged outside. Her survival instinct at its peak performance level, she decides to poke her head out the door too, perhaps to see if there are still zombies...er...zombiez out there. Yup, there are; and they club her on the head and take her to an abandoned warehouse.

Waking up in the warehouse, Josephine sees one of the zombie / speed addicts prodding some poor soul with a stationary drill bit. Being a proactive individual, Josephine manages to loosen her fetters and dash past a naked girl (real cheap T&A here, folks) and out into the nearby forest, where she spends the next 45 minutes wandering around endlessly and occasionally running into “zombies,” before she’s finally recaptured and taken to a building that looks a lot like an abandoned office (yet which is sitting on the isolated construction site) and forced to confront the leader of this army of the walking, plastic-cleaver-wielding dead.

Well, unless you’re as dim as these characters, you’ve probably gotten it through your head by now that Zombiez is not exactly a captivating cinematic experience; in fact, it’s downright agony, which is a bit of a same because buried somewhere deep under this muck is a vaguely decent idea.

Perhaps you are wondering why none of these zombiez/s look like rotting corpses. Well, the answer is that Zombiez is working off a slightly different definition of the word; and, in the interest of playing fair, it lets us know that it’s talking about zombies like those that voodoo practitioners are supposed to be able to raise for use as mindless slaves. This idea has potential; however, it’s a potential that Zombiez quickly and thoroughly squanders. Instead of treating these “walking dead” as robotic killing machines, the film instead treats them more like PCP addicts with rabies who run around snarling and slashing at people with plastic scythes.

Any and all potential for suspense or terror, too, is squashed in so many ways it’s difficult to keep track. First, almost every scene takes place in broad daylight, which eliminates any chance of a “boo!” kind of shock since you can see the “zombies” coming from yards away. Secondly, since all the characters are as stupid and insufferable as they are underdeveloped, we don’t really care whether they live or die anyway. Around 20 minutes into this thing, if Josephine had been killed and the final hour of the movie had consisted of a blank screen, I’ve got to say I really would have been as emotionally-stimulated (and probably as interested, too).

The fact that every single killing is completely unconvincing in its fakery also contributes to the movie’s utter failure. Really! When every single murder consists simply of (a) zombie(s) hacking away at some poor extra with a plastic meat cleaver, things get boring really fast. The film’s not even kind enough to throw a little fake blood on the victims, either. They just have to roll around on the ground halfheartedly screaming while a madman hacks toward them with a plastic implement and the camera shakes like it’s being humped by an oversexed jackrabbit in a vain attempt to hide the fact that nothing is happening to the person being attacked!

Indeed, this shaky-camera business is a rather sore point with me, as most of the movie is shot in this style. Josephine running through the woods for the umpteenth time? Why not liven it up with the shaky-cam? Another unconvincing fake murder? Shaky-cam hides all! (Note: It really doesn’t.) Occasionally, in an apparently rare moment of lucidity, the film’s perpetrators will realize the fallibility of the shaky-cam and see fit to stuff a few feet of sausage under some poor actor’s shirt for the zombies to pull out; however, such rare moments of begrudging respect for the audience come few and far between.

In summation, Zombiez is an abysmal travesty (and I haven’t even mentioned the random dancing man in a chicken suit), the only really scary thing about which is the fact that it got distribution—and from Lion’s Gate, no less! I can’t imagine what the executive in charge of this acquisition must have been on when he made that choice, but it clearly must have been just as psychotropic as whatever this film’s creators must have been experimenting with when they thought this was a marketable piece of work. I guess this is what we should expect, though, from a director who refuses to even sign his film with a real name and who won’t even do his viewer the honor of double-checking the spelling of his stupid, pretentious intertitles. Shame on you, “ZWS,” for creating such a crap-a-thon, and on you, Lion’s Gate, for picking it up and giving it a cover that will fool the unsuspecting into watching it.

Well, as though it matters, I’ll make brief mention of the quality of the DVD itself. Video, presented full frame, which seems to be the SOV feature’s proper ratio (not that it matters), is fine—too fine, in fact; for you can see every cheesy effect in its utmost crappiness with crystal clarity. Sound, similarly, is good enough, and is presented in both 2.0 and 5.1 mixes, which are all the better to hear the same four hip-hop cues that pervade the entire movie with.

Extras are limited (thank merciful Christ) to a rap video (from which they pulled one of the aforementioned four music cues), the film’s trailer (which combines the minute of usable footage in the film into something resembling a professional movie), and a “trailer gallery” for six other Lion’s Gate releases that have to be miles better than this one (yeah, even Alone in the Dark).

Anyway, to sum things up, Zombiez (as though you’ve not gathered this already) is an absolutely abysmal 83-minute waste of a viewer’s life that is only more disgusting in that it has been released by a professional film company. Again, shame on ZWS for putting what appears to be zero effort into it and on Lion’s Gate for being cruel enough to release it when there are so many other, much more deserving independent films out there. Now please excuse me while I beat myself over the head with a plastic meat cleaver...