Story Movie
Weasel-like worm-like creatures appear in the neighborhood of a college campus. They enter the human body through the mouth and turn people into zombies. The militia against the creatures is led by a humble student with a flamethrower and a gray-haired detective.
Review 4K Movie
From an alien spaceship in the 50s, a capsule containing experimental slugs that enter humans and animals through their mouths, turning them into bloodthirsty zombies, arrives on Earth. In the 80s, these slugs break free from a guy frozen in a university lab, who is accidentally defrosted by two students while doing an assignment to join the student body. The slugs sprawl across the campus just before prom, attacking people and resurrecting an axe-wielding maniac from the '50s at the same time. The night immediately ceases to be languid. A policeman who has a score to settle with both the slugs and the maniac takes on the case.
There is nothing in this movie, at first glance, that we haven't seen before. But what we've seen before - we've seen in different movies. How many movies have there been about contagions from outer space? Or contagions created by mad but tenacious scientists? Here it's two in one. A crazy maniac, who escaped from the asylum and chops all the people he meets and crosses with an axe, is also available. And classic characters of youth comedies: a timid nerd and his faithful friend, who helps to win the nerd's heart of the first beauty of the university. A girl wonderful and kind, but already dating the first beauty of the same university, an athlete, a leader and a narcissistic idiot, besides evil and cruel. And which of the rivals will dance with the beauty at the prom - not such a big intrigue for those who have watched a couple of such movies. Of course there are all sorts of stupid fraternity rituals, all sorts of Sigmas, Betas, and Omegas. I mean, you can't beat that. And then there is a brave policeman, with a deep wound in his soul: once upon a time a maniac slaughtered his favorite girl, albeit an ex-girlfriend. He got his revenge. But now a terrible secret and guilt do not let him sleep well at night, appearing in the form of intrusive nightmares. The cop is deeply depressed and inclined to suicide, but when the zombie apocalypse comes, he takes up arms and spares neither himself, nor his enemies, nor his friends.
In addition, the zombies multiplying with terrible force, breaking in doors and windows, pulling their greedy hands to the throats of their victims, bring their share of fun to this uninteresting night. And the slugs, slimy and slimy, like gnats, moving with great speed, penetrating into the mouths of the unfortunate victims, turning them into soulless creatures, breeding grounds for abomination and death. The slugs gather in an abandoned barn, their name is legion. And they gather there obviously not with charitable purposes for earthlings. All this has already been in many movies in one or another combinations and variants. It would seem that all this eclecticism, piled into one movie, turns it into a mess, where the ends do not meet, and the plot components contradict each other, preventing different pieces of the script mosaic from coming together.
But director Fred Dekker apparently knew the recipe to make a fantastic salad out of all these ingredients, where each product shades and accentuates the flavor of the other ingredients. He brought the level of all plot and genre components to the highest level of banter, mixed them into a diverse, juicy and tasty movie called parody, where he ridiculed all the templates and techniques of multi-genre horror, all the hackneyed characters and their characteristics, all the shabby plot moves, bringing them in some places to absurdity. As, for example, in the scene of mutual confession of policeman Ray Cameron and student-botan Chris Romero. Or Cameron's absurdly obsessive suicidal mania.
Even the names of the characters in the movie are themselves a mockery of the names of horror icons. In addition to the already named Romero and Cameron in the movie there are Gordon the cat, Sergeant Raimi, Detective Landis, lab janitor Miner, the first beauty is Cynthia Cronenberg, and Chris Romero's friend JC is James Carpenter Hooper. In addition to using the names of the genre maestros, the movie is scattered with homages to their works, such as a woken zombie bursting from the basement, a university dormitory building burning after a graduation party, a dog that turned into a creature, a thawed corpse that had been stored in ice for many years and was the beginning of all the night adventures. It turns out to be a fireworks movie that scares, entertains and amuses at the same time. Like a good comedian who knows how to make the viewer laugh while keeping a completely serious face.
I would like to note a wonderful, expressive makeup in the style of the old school, the level of “Evil Dead” and “Pet Cemetery”, which adds atmosphere to the movie, as it looks very impressive and repulsively creepy. In general, the movie is visually very winning just by its “scary” scenes with horrible decomposing zombies, with bloody skulls and hanging scraps of flesh instead of faces, skittish and nasty slugs, flying from heads split in two by gunshots, rotting and slimy animal faces with worms from eye sockets - all this is done at the highest level, at least for the time of the movie's release.
The director did not fail to laugh at the fashion for introductory prologues in the style of “how it was and where the roots came from many years ago”. There are two such prologues in the film, one even in black and white, emphasizing for the viewer how long ago it all happened. In the finale, no one will be surprised by the false happy ending after the iris kiss - another tortured cliché, which Fred Dekker mocks again, as if grinning and winking at the audience: did you expect something else? Is this in a parody?
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