Corona Zombies 2020

 

 

Goddamn it Charles Band, you have stoked the fires of our love hate relationship once again and to make matters worse you did it in the middle of a global pandemic while poking fun at the very same pandemic. And I didn't hate it.

Corona Zombies is mostly a pieced together Frankenstein version of a horror comedy but at least he MSTK's all the dialog from Hell of the Living Dead. The parts taken from Zombies vs. Strippers was used as is. The rest of the film is a few short new scenes made for the film and actual news footage mostly taken from news conferences from the beginning of the pandemic from March/April of 2020. Which gives us a clip of Trump reassuring the country that we will all "probably be all right" even if we were to get the virus.

 

 

 

There are so many jokes and one liners dubbed over the original Hell of the Living Dead, several of which pay homage to previous zombie films. Some of the jokes are hits but some miss. We find out some of the "footage" of the zombies attacking strippers is to from the Tits and Giggles strip club in good old downtown Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Now as someone who literally lives in the next town over from Cherry Hill I have to say this is a misstep as there isn't nor has there ever been anything closely resembling a strip club in Cherry Hill. That's what Pennsauken is for! Anybody from southern New Jersey knows that! But I'll give him a pass for that and chalk it up to another jab at Joisey!

Yet another jab comes from the Scrambles Soup Company, where the virus originates, after they roll out their new variety of soup: Bat. Scrambles of course is a reference to Campbell's Soup company which has it's headquarters in Camden, NJ which is another of the towns bordering my own.  Cripes, according to Charles Band, I live right in the middle of ground zero for this version of the pandemic. 

 

Now, I want to add something new here for the 2023 year and that will be the addition of the Taitometer. What the hell is that, you ask? Well, I'll tell you. My Horror Homie Cerpts (here on blogger: http://landofcerptsandhoney.blogspot.com/ ), the Horror Honey, and I get together and watch movies (mostly horror) and we always make a point of checking to see how long it takes for the first flash of a bare breast to grace the screen. 'Cause you know, what good is a cheesy, low budget horror film if it can't feature a few sweater puppies being freed in their natural habitat (or is that habi-tait)? It's called the Taitometer because us being Jersey boys we see a woman topless and the first thing we yell is "Hey look at the taits on that!" in the best stereotypical Garden State accent we can muster. So for Corona Zombies we have the inaugural Tait-O-Meter (maybe that's a better way to feature it, hey it's still a work in progress and I also apologize for all of this chauvinistic behavior which, yes, we know it's chauvinistic behavior, do we care? not one bit we are poking fun, not parting of) score and that is 12:30. Yes, at approximately 12 minutes and thirty seconds into the film we get our first flash. A modest showing for a horror film even more modest for a Charles Band horror film. I've seen some that scores mere seconds into the film.
 

Scoring the film is a little bit of a mine field this time for me as it's mostly a clip show of recycled material which I usually hate. I especially hate it when cartoons do it, but at least here, this is a little different in that all the lines (at least from Hell of the Living Dead) are re-dubbed with different dialogue to repurpose the original scenes. Think What’s Up, Tiger Lily? and you're on the right track. The news scenes are ironic, the new scenes are mostly meh, and the stuff used from Zombies vs. Strippers is OK, I've never seen it so I'm not sure how impactful those scenes were if the situation was different. I liked Hell of the Living Dead so it has that going for it, a couple of the new lines made me laugh out loud, the new scenes had a few good moment (who showers with a bra on though, that was a bit odd), and the first half of the film is way better than the second half but the film clocks in at around an hour so twenty five minutes isn't too painful to sit through at least once. When I do all the math (and there's more than you might think I'll tell you) I come up with something in the neighborhood of three Wuhan ("I love that group!" ~ Barbie) viruses out of five. Be forewarned that with this one the term "Your Mileage May Vary" carries substantial weight.