Review by Quin
There is certainly no shortage of film titles consisting of puns. These films tend to either be porn films or comedies; but more accurately, parodies. Edward Penis Hands. Shaun of the Dead. Womb Raider. Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. You get the idea. Well, now you can add Night of the Living Deb to the list. I guess it’s a horror parody, but not a very funny one. Fortunately, it’s not all bad, and I’m sure some of you will enjoy it, but I’m afraid to say I found its rapid fire non-jokes (A.K.A. regular things said with a rhetorical rim shot at the end) not at all funny, and the rest of it derivative and boring. But, don’t fret, I’ll tell you what I did like about it too. After all, I didn’t hate the damn thing.
Deb and her friend Ruby are out at a bar the night before the 4th of July. Deb is sort of hipsterish with her jean jacket and pins, while Ruby is her figurative “wing-man” wearing a seemingly ironic bad Christmas sweater (yes, on the 4th of July). They spot a good looking guy amongst a group singing “America the Beautiful” (probably un-ironically), and Ruby convinces Deb to go talk to him. His name is Chaz (ugh). After an agonizing first conversation filled with mad-cap misunderstandings (i.e. Deb is really not too perceptive, and maybe she drinks too much, but to be fair, Chaz seems like a thoughtless prick) the scene fades and next thing we know Deb is waking up in a bed that one could easily surmise is her new friend Chaz’s. He quickly tries to get rid of her, but she keeps talking and talking and talking. When they finally do part ways, Deb checks her voice mail, only to hear a strange message from her friend Ruby that ends in growling and screaming. It doesn’t even occur to Deb that this is out of the ordinary. She even sees a guy beating another guy with a baseball bat and all she has to say is, “The parade’s really gone down hill this year.”
Deb and Chaz quickly reconnect, realizing that they might need each other because as they were so slow to realize, it turns out there’s a zombie apocalypse going on. First they visit the Christmas themed shop where Ruby works called Yule Mart (which explains the out of date sweater from before) then they move on to Chaz’s dad’s house. He’s a rich conservative who runs a company that is putting some unknown chemicals in the water to make it drinkable. It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s turning people into zombies. The good news is that the rich water tycoon is played by Ray Wise. The bad news is that Ray Wise has done a lot of low budget garbage since Twin Peaks. However, you can always count on him to be that Ray Wise character. He’s always great. And as hateable as his character is, he still makes you smile.
If you saw the 2009 film Zombieland, and I’m sure you did, there is really no reason why you would need to see Night of the Living Deb. Zombieland pretty much did the same thing that this movie does, but it did it first and it did it better. It did it with Bill Murray in a Ghostbusters uniform. The zombie genre has already been deconstructed, and we are all aware that zombies used to trudge along slowly – or as this film so eloquently puts it, “That’s one of the old-school Cerebral palsy variety” – and now they sometimes run. That quote sums up nicely how this film made me feel. It leans toward the mean-spirited as well as the glaringly unfunny.
This brings me to my final point – the casting. The acting in this film is actually quite good. And there is a final scene that is way better than what the rest of this movie deserved. Maria Thayer as Deb and Chris Marquette as Chaz reminded me so much of Julie Klausner and Patrick Wilson, which only made me long for them to be in this. Julie Klausner is the creator and star of a new show on Hulu called Difficult People, which is about how awful people can be. It’s brilliant because she and her friend Billy remain likable through the awfulness. Deb and Chaz are mostly just awful and they should have turned into zombies right away. Now I hope Difficult People ends with a zombie apocalypse.
Night of the Living Deb is available now on VOD in the UK, via FrightFest Presents.