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As many others before me have no doubt said, we live in an age ripe for parody; we are bombarded with nonsense from both reality TV shows and shops which sell lingerie to children. We’re scared witless by the prospect of religious extremism and degraded by the West’s response to the same. At the time of writing this review, there is a particularly unpleasant collection of lunatics in the USA who are pledging to burn the Koran in order to ‘celebrate the memory of those who died’ in the attacks on New York which took place on the 11^th of September. Apparently, alienating vast swathes of the population - and inflaming the vicious and insane - is a fitting tribute to thousands of slaughtered innocents.

Meanwhile, the UK is run by a cabal of ideological monsters who would gladly grind up and snort the poor if they thought that it would save them a few quid, paranoid adverts encourage people to shop their neighbours for keeping to themselves and airport scanners are sophisticated enough to tell whether you’ve been circumcised.

In short we live in an age of witless paranoia, gross stupidity, aggressive ignorance and rampant consumerism. In times like this, a well-crafted zombie film is a shortcut to social satire - Charlie Brooker’s Dead Set was a wonderful take on the zombie genre and a damn fine piece of social commentary.

However, if you wanted to be really clever, you would write a satire that parodied the genre itself. Standard tropes and clichés would be invoked and subverted, raising questions about the times we live in whilst also poking fun at the medium itself, highlighting its clunky and heavy-handed critique of the modern world. “Look!” the film would say, “Look at how ridiculous the world is! It’s stupid. Don’t think you get off lightly either, buddy boy, you’re a fool for thinking that watching a schlocky horror film somehow puts you above everyone else.”

You could do this and make an unforgettable piece of film. Or, if you’re director Kevin Hamedani, you could make Zombies of Mass Destruction: an 89 minute-long series of flashes and bangs that actually manages to diminish humanity’s cumulative artistic achievement.

A film which bills itself as a parody of the zombie genre, Zombies of Mass Destruction wheels out laboured and lazy stereotypes in a feeble attempt to wring a chuckle out of a bored and apathetic audience. Oh look! A man from a Muslim country has a thick accent! A gay man has a bossy boyfriend! A woman with long and frizzy hair hates guns!

Side-splitting.

"The film leaves the impression that the viewer has just witnessed an attempt to highlight important issues – sexuality, the West’s response to the rise of Islamic extremism, and so on – but the attempt was so clumsy and misguided that nothing gets said at all"

The opening scenes strive to establish these wafer-thin characters and introduce the viewer to their lives. Unfortunately, every scene in the first ten minutes feels like a hollow shell. The dialogue falls flat, the characters offer nothing new and in no scene does it feel like anything is being accomplished. This sets the standard of inadequacy which the rest of the film proudly lives up to. No scene in the movie really seems to matter - it all feels so directionless and vague that it’s hard to believe that the script was actually written rather than, say, being clumped together from the contents of a shredder. There are lines which are either wildly out of character or hugely inappropriate within the context of the scene, yet these remarks appear to be completely ignored by the other actors, leaving the viewer with the suspicion that there was originally a satirical point to be made before the idea was abandoned entirely.

The film leaves the impression that the viewer has just witnessed an attempt to highlight important issues – sexuality, the West’s response to the rise of Islamic extremism, and so on – but the attempt was so clumsy and misguided that nothing gets said at all. There is one particular scene, in which a girl of Iranian descent argues with her all-American boyfriend, where the film’s attempt at dealing with race-relations is like watching a drunken horse deal with a fold-out ironing board.

All this is a tremendous pity. Some actors work hard with the tripe that’s been written for them, while there are times when the special effects are really rather impressive. There are even, amazingly, rare moments where the film approaches humour! At one point I actually felt something resembling a chuckle trying to escape from deep within; sadly it didn’t have the will to live outside my body.

The film, as a whole, is hugely misguided. Tired and lifeless stereotypes act in wholly predictable ways (apart from, of course, when they inexplicably break character), while events conspire to leave the viewer feeling somehow stupider by the time the credits roll. The only possible way I could recommend this film to anyone else is as an opportunity for them to marvel at the mouth of lead actress Janette Armand - a mouth so distractingly, terrifyingly huge, that any given moment I expected her to dislodge her lower jaw and consume an entire bus without breaking a sweat.

Blu-ray quality

Thanks to the wonderful powers of Blu-ray, you get to experience these terrifying mandibles in glorious high definition and thrilling 7.1 surround sound. However, apart from presenting a gaping maw in eye-watering detail, the crisp visuals are actually welcome when watching in HD - it allows the viewer, halfway through the ordeal, to begin to contemplate the disparity between the excellent presentation and the appallingly low quality of the thing being presented. At this point, desperate for any stimulation, the audience will begin to suspect that the filmmakers have done something rather clever and presented the entire movie as a satirical masterpiece with an important point being made about looks, image and presentation and how these aspects of life are being celebrated in our society above all else. Desperate to confirm their suspicion of genius, the audience will leap to the ‘Special Features’ on the disc and avidly watch the ‘making-of’ documentary...

Within the first fifteen seconds of watching the grainy, standard definition footage, the audience will be told that it was the director’s intention to comment on the West’s hysteria following the attacks of the eleventh of September, 2001. The only sane response to this is to curl into a ball and rock back and forth until the mini-documentary comes to an end.

The only other special feature on the disc is a trailer.

For the film that you’ve just suffered through.

A trailer.

Not an exceptional use of the capacity of the Blu-ray dics, but following the film and the making-of, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Zombies of Mass Destruction fails as a satire, as a parody, as a comedy and as a horror. The only way in which it excels is as a coaster for my drinks, and an expensive one at that.

Director: Kevin Hamedani,
Writers: Kevin Hamedani, Ramon Isao
Running Time: 89 mins
Certificate: 18
Starring: Janette Armand, Doug Fahl, Cooper Hopkins

Zombies Of Mass Destruction is released in the UK on 18th of October.

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