Movie Review: "Deadheads" (2011)

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Movie: "Deadheads"
Director: Brett and Drew Pierce
Year: 2011
Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

Mike (Michael McKiddy) and Brent (Ross Kidder) have recently woken up as zombies. Even though they are now the undead, they have the same mannerisms and intellect they did when they were alive. All Mike wants to do is get back to his girlfriend to tell her how he feels. So, Brent and Mike go on a road trip in search of Mike's long lost love, all the while being pursued by a research team trying to capture them.  

Booooooooooooooooooooooring.

Zombie themed horror comedies are quite common, going as far back as "Return of Living Dead" and probably even earlier. Some of them are very funny and some, well, not so much.

This one is not so much.

Mike, played by Michael McKiddy, and Brett, played by Ross Kidder, are zombies, but unlike most zombies who just stumble about stupidly with an insatiable desire to feed on human flesh, Mike and Brett are relatively normal other than the fact that they are dead. They are just as smart as they were when they were alive (which isn't saying much), they have most their memories in tact, and they don't even have the desire to eat people. The only thing distinguishable about them is they look decaying and gross. Mike just wants to get back to the woman he loved while he was alive so he can tell her what she meant to him and that he was going to propose to her but was thwarted from doing so, and Brett just wants to help him out on his journey. The zombie premise is flimsily interwoven into the scripts and in turn, becomes a zombie road trip movie. The only problem is Mike and Brett are being pursued by the genetics company that created the zombies for a military project and are trying to keep their activities under wraps. Really, the tension is nil. Because the characters are zombies, they are able to use some extreme slapstick where they can lose an arm or get shot and just keep going as if nothing happened. A lot of the other jokes here come from their old traveling companion who likes to talk about how sexually freaky his late wife was and how he carries her ashes around with him. Unfortunately, so much of this movie just falls flat on its face and isn't able to recover like the zombies can. The zombie aspect of the movie seems almost tacked on at the end, as if it made it better that they were zombies, because without this premise, this movie would be boring as shit, not that it isn't already. The lead characters lack the charisma and likability to really make us laugh at their jokes or make us care their redundant, played out quest because, let's face it, this premise has been done so many times over the years that "Deadheads" really needed to make it something special in order for it to stick out in ours minds, but instead, they managed to make the situations far less interesting by removing many of the character's natural zombie desires. In the end, the whole film is super forgettable and shouldn't be classified as a horror in the slightest.

My Rating: 4/10
BigJ's Rating: 4.5/10
IMDB's Rating: 5.4/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: ---%
Do we recommend this movie: No.
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Two years ago, we were watching: "The Changeling"

One year ago, we were watching: "Hell's Ground"