Movie Review: Undead or Alive
The movie opens with the famed Native America, Geronimo, casting an ancient curse on the white people who have invaded his homeland. Moments later, a kind faced zombie bites the head off a chicken, then follows up the meal by snacking on his wife and daughter. We never find out how this man became “cursed”, but it matters little. It’s all about the zombies and not how they came to be.
Welcome to Undead is a zomedy/western released in 2007 starring SNL’s Chris Kattan and Desperate Houswives’ James Denton. Denton plays a guy named Elmer who is on the run from his military unit. He finds a backwater town and within moments of entering the saloon, he gets himself into a fight with an overly sensitive Luke played to the hilt by Chris Kattan. Luke is a romantic who wears custom tailored clothes, making him look like a Roy Rogers wannabe. He really wants to be a cowboy, but has no skills. Elmer and Luke are both thrown into jail whereby they settle their differences and escape with the sheriff’s money. Alas, the sheriff’s deputy is bitten by the family eating zombie (now in custody). The deputy bites the sheriff, and pretty soon, the entire town is infected.
These aren’t your typical zombies. They walk and talk like ordinary people with the big exception being that they are dead and they like to eat human flesh. Head shots don’t slow them down. Limbs still quiver when removed from the body. In short, they are almost indestructible short of decapitation. Oh yeah … the eat brains too. They’re not fixated on them but they obviously don’t mind a good snack of it every now and then.
Soon after fleeing into wild, Elmer and Luke encounter a beautiful valley girl, er, Apache princess who’s only goal is to kill American soldiers. Played by Numb3rs’ Navi Rawat, she tells Elmer and Luke that she is related to Germino and that the only way to remove the curse is to actually eat the medicine man who casted it. I think you can see where this is going. Although Rawat is decked out in deer skins, she looks and acts like she were in west LA as opposed to the actual west. We learn that she was raised in New York which explains the fact she wears heeled shoes instead of moccasins. I kid you not, I expected her to snapping her gum while saying, “Oh. My. God. It’s so dirty out here.”
The movie is pretty funny but stumbles over itself in the third act. Trapped in a fort, surrounded by hordes of zombies, it was like the writer just didn’t know what to do. The true cock-up happens at the very end of the movie whereby Luke and Elmer sit side by side, and talk about what just happened. Mind you, you don’t see the most important part of the movie. You just hear about it like a telegram from the plot police. It would be like Han Solo and Luke Skywalker sitting in a bar, telling each other how they destroyed the Death Star.
Still, this is funny movie. It’s a flawed movie for sure, and you might walk away with a bad taste in your mouth, but there are some really good moments earlier in the film. I thought I was going to tear my eyes out when I recognized Kattan, but he does a really good job. He is nicely balanced by Denton who looks at home in the west. So if you need a good chuckle, and feeling for a zombie fix, check it out.
Verdict: See It!
