Hey, remember when the dense, zany parody was a beloved genre? Classics like Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and Top Secret! roamed theaters, incorporating the MAD Magazine style of sight gags and puns with a unique deadpan humor featuring respected actors saying very silly things? Yeah, this is what it’s been reduced to: The Walking Deceased.
As discovered by Topless Robot, the trend of mindlessly lumping together anything a teenage audience might vaguely recognize as a pop culture reference continues apace:
The story follows a group of survivors from all walks of the apocalypse – an idiotic Sheriff with definite coma-induced brain damage, his hardass son and a hobo with only a crossbow to stave off the walking dead, four squabbling friends forced to survive this zombieland together, and a lonely zombie who just needs love to fully regain his warm body – who leave their once-safe mall hideout in search of the rumored Safe Haven Ranch, a refuge untouched by the zombie virus that has ravaged humanity… THE WALKING DECEASED rips the flesh off the spoof genre and infects it with a virus too hilarious not to spread.
I took the liberty of removing the movies and TV shows they listed off as parodying. Certainly the zombie genre is no stranger to spoofs and parodies, but this movie wants to mock two of them, which is a bad sign in of itself. Also, the fact that the writer and director both prominently feature stints as production assistants in their IMDb bios doesn’t fill us with a lot of hope.
But, who knows? Maybe these guys are undiscovered comic talents! Maybe we’ll be eating our words at some point! Either way, they do have one thing working in their favor: At least they’re not Seltzer and Friedberg.