I feel as though I’ve been here before. Not just because there was a film called Bong of the Dead a few years ago, which my co-editor Ben reviewed, nor indeed because this very day he has reviewed another stoner horror (4:20 Massacre) but also because I’ve also reviewed a film which sounds very similar to Bong of the Living Dead – and can remember absolutely nothing about it, not even the damn title (edit: Deadheads! It was Deadheads.) All I really recall is that I thought it was basically harmless fun, though would benefit from being watched with a group of people, rather than solo (and sober). Would the same be true of Bong of the Living Dead? And incidentally, why are there so many films which marry zombies with weed? Alcohol seems oddly underrepresented for a substance which itself causes users to become shambolic, angry and hungry. I can only really think of Redneck Zombies (1989) at this moment in time, though I’m sure there are more. Still, on we go with another zombie stoner movie…
I’ll admit I was a little confused by the start of Bong of the Living Dead. At first, when our ragtag band of Clintonville, Columbus protagonists have a minor scuffle with what look like jock/cheerleader types, I assumed these were meant to be teenagers, though obviously older than that, in a Beverly Hills 90210 kind of vibe. But then other members of the gang have grown-up jobs like doctor and video store guy (they still have video stores in Clintonville) as well as beards, so my bad. The humour, the weed and the possible ramifications of a mystery bite are discussed early and loudly, and all of this even before the 80s-worship opening credits roll. You don’t win any prizes for guessing that the mysterious bite turns people into zombies, and soon the undead are walking around, as they are wont to do.
Funnily, as diehard horror fans themselves (as we’re told…oh god, are we told) the oddball gang of friends who end up holed up in a house watching events unfold are actually quite pleased that it’s the end of the world as they know it. They like zombies, They know zombies. They start strong, attacking the undead in their street and talking technique. The thing is, in practice, once they’ve offed a few, they actually find the zombie thing a lot duller than they’d expected. It’s just not as full on as they thought; there are still loads of people alive, and even TV hasn’t changed that much, with the same stuff running: in fact, the only sense of threat they are really aware of is via the TV news skits which run throughout the film – incomprehensibly incorporating a glimpse of one of our key character’s old notebooks, which we see in flashback during a different scene, into the news opening credits. Hmm. Anyway, they sit back, fill up their bong, and wait for a while. Actually, for a long while. An hour of screen time passes.
Eventually, the zombie thing intrudes a bit more forcefully into their home when a zombie gets to one of them (and it’s not as if they’re walled in, by the way – one of the characters pops in and out whenever he wants). This darkens the mood rather suddenly. To dispel the fairly static scenes which preceded this sudden spike in drama, Bong of the Living Dead now dispenses with the loud, wild-eyed intonation which came before and tries to segue into sentimentality for a while – something which just doesn’t mesh well.
Having spent over an hour doing very little, the film affords itself around 15-20 minutes for this change of direction, when really the only thing I could envision that would work here is an OTT splatter fest. Obviously constrained on the budget front, the film does incorporate some gore, via a blend of middling SFX (latex pieces with visible seams/masks, by the looks of it) and some CGI, but things never get all that grisly – which is the opposite of what I expected, after all.
The director/writers Max Groah and Tim Mayo obviously know a lot about the zombie horror genre, penning and shooting lengthy stoned chats their characters have about the likes of Fulci and Romero, and I could imagine that this sort of thing – particularly at a horror movie festival – could go down a storm. Indeed, the press release for this film speaks of the film winning an award at the Nightmares Film Festival in the US, and lots of other festival screenings lined up. Other features of Bong of the Living Dead also seem tailor-made for crowd approval, but perhaps less so for home viewing: for example the character Hal, who is by far the most wired out of a bunch of fairly wired people, shouts lines like “KICK AAAASSSS!” which would probably get a laugh from a crowd; all the scenes of people getting stoned, ditto – the film is full of glee at its own stoner sequences, though at least at the last minute this takes on some relevance to the plot.
I suspected that this was a risky venture for a solo, straight-headed viewing and I’m afraid this was the case – again. Bong of the Living Dead is harmless enough, but all rather thin and protracted, with too many regurgitated lines from other horror movies, too much in the way of time-filling domestic sequences and sadly, more lulls than laughs. Whilst it’s nice to see a filmmaker who utilised so many local extras in the film, obviously tailoring the end product towards the people who had seen the project get off the ground until, some years later, getting this release, this just isn’t enough for me as a general viewer, and people who have seen a million of these films over the years may struggle to see anything noteworthy to distinguish this one.
Bong of the Living Dead is playing select film festivals during the course of 2018.