AnythingHorror Central

Attack of the Vegan Zombies! (2010)

Posted by anythinghorror on January 3, 2012 · 2 Comments 

Take a quick second to read the title again.  Go ahead; I’ll wait.  What kind of film would you expect to get with a title like ATTACK OF THE VEGAN ZOMBIES! that has the tag line, “Zero trans fats has never been so deadly”?  Me, I was expecting a horror-comedy blend that poked fun of both vegans and meat-eaters alike.  Hell, even the IMDb page uses the plot keywords “campy” and “B horror.”  What do we get?  Unfortunately we get a humorless film that really has nothing to do with ‘vegan zombies’ and even less to do with clever writing.  As I’ve said time and again, just because your film has a low budget doesn’t automatically make it a “B horror” movie, and it certainly doesn’t automatically make it campy.

Husband and wife Joe (Jim Townsend) and Dionne (Christine Egan) run a winery but are having another really shitty crop year.  One more bad year and they’ll be way in over their heads in debt and will lose everything.  What’s a poor couple, who have a passion for making wine, to do?  Well luckily Dionne’s mom (H. Lynn Smith; and yes, she is simply known as “Mother” in the credits) is a witch.  A powerful witch who casts a spell over the winery to ensure they have a bumper grape harvest next year.  We also learn that Dionne, when younger, was apparently a ‘prodigy witch’ but turned her back on her faith.  Aahhh forget I even mentioned this subplot … writer-director Jim Townsend did!!

Shot of the entire cast. Can you pick out the nerds??

After the spell is cast and we then join Joe and Dionne the following year.  They are having an incredible grape harvest (please hold your gasps of surprise until the end of the review) even when the surrounding farms are having their worst year ever.  There are so many grapes to harvest that they get some volunteers from the local college to help them with the harvest.  Throw in a nosey neighbor and then screw everything up with a wandering plot that can’t focus on what it wants to be and you got yourself a really disappointing film.  Simply put, ATTACK OF THE VEGAN ZOMBIES! misfires on every cylinder.  What went wrong?  Let’s start with the characters and the cast.

Okay ... this zombie doesn't look too bad ...

The film is full of amateur actors/actresses who look like they’ve never been in front of a camera before.  With the exception of Christine Egan (Dionne), I felt uneasy watching the actors on screen.  Egan, I was surprised to learn, had no prior acting experience.  She does a really good job and is obviously a natural in front of the camera.  Let’s put the acting aside and look at the characters.  Two of the students that come to help out with the harvest are Ray (John D. Kelly) and Louis (Watt Smith).  And if ya can’t figure out that they are nerds simply by looking at them (big, oversized, thick-lensed glasses, pocket protectors) then you’ll realize it when they open their mouths (high-pitched, whiny voices, they scrunch up their noses when they talk).  And if you forget they’re nerds have no fear; we get endless conversations from Louis and Ray discussing and debating STAR TREK … over and over and over again.  We get it; they’re nerds!!  Throw in a few (very) thick & chunky, unappealing college coeds and you have yourself one unattractive cast.

... unfortunately THIS is what all the other zombies look like here.

Now let’s look at the story and script itself.  The main problem here is that everything is played out so seriously.  There’s zero humor in the film and the writing just isn’t that good.  The dialogue is terrible.  In one scene when Dionne is confronting her mother about the spell she cast the mother actually says that everything would’ve been fine if it wasn’t for those “meddling kids” (referring to the nerds Ray and Louis.  They were taking soil samples).  Seriously??  Scoody-Doo dialogue??  And when one character is passed out on the floor from what the others think is due to over drinking, Mother again chimes in.  She tells the others that she’s a nurse and “it’s just a simple case of alcohol poisoning” and that she just “needs to sleep it off.”  What?!??  Alcohol poisoning can kill you.  This lack of humor and witty dialogue really shoots this film in the foot.  At a short 77min run time, the writing needed to be crisp, witty, and clever to establish this as a horror-comedy.  If it wasn’t for the filmmaker and the IMDb page telling me this was a horror-comedy/campy film, I would’ve never known it.  As I said above, this film has no humor in it.

I have no idea what's happening in this scene!!

When we finally get down to some “action” and an explanation of what’s going on, it’s a mess.  First off nothing really happens until the 55min mark (and remember that this has a run time of 77mins).  And when the “action” happens it’s muddled and pretty damn boring.  The spell Mother cast ended up creating killer grape vines.  The vines attack the group and turn them into some really lousy looking zombies (think the Green Chick from  the original STAR TREK series).  Then the ‘zombies’ attack the others.  But their vegan zombies, right?  Yes, but they attack the cast because “vegan zombies crave red wine” and everyone was enjoying red wine at lunch.  What??

I’ll be honest with ya; I’m definitely in the minority here.  ATTACK OF THE VEGAN ZOMBIES! has gotten a lot of really great reviews.  Maybe those other websites got a different version than the one I saw.  Other reviewers talk about how campy and funny and witty this film is.  What??  If this film ever reaches “cult status” I’m gonna throw in the towel and become a fucking accountant!!  This film, people, is a bore.  Nothing happens and we get perhaps the most unappealing (brief) sex scene ever:  The two chunky coeds have some fat, bacony lesbian sex.  Blech!!  I get the whole micro-budget thing, but there’s a lot of indie, micro-budget films out there that do a lot better with what they have to work with.  I can let a lot of things slide in an indie horror flick as long as the film is fun and engaging.  But ATTACK OF THE VEGAN ZOMBIES! commits the one sin that I just can’t forgive:  It’s boring and dull.  Pass on ATTACK OF THE VEGAN ZOMBIES! (which is being released on January 3, 2012 from Midnight Releasing).

My Summary:

Director:  Jim Townsend (& writer)

Plot:  1 out of 5 stars

Gore:  1 out of 10 skulls

Zombie Mayhem:  .5 out of 5 brains (do killer vines count as zombies??)

Reviewed by Scott Shoyer