★★
“Just because you can make a movie, doesn’t mean you should…”
To the makers’ credit, they are perfectly up-front about this being made for pennies, with home video equipment and edited on a laptop. But even though I’m not averse to that – heck, I’ve been involved with films on such microbudgets myself – there’s still too much here that’s avoidably bad. For instance, if you are going to put the President of the United States in your film, be sure you have access to someone with a grasp of English that extends past “D+, must try harder”. If you don’t, then leave them out.
Said President (Daubjerg) unleashes a zombie virus on Denmark, apparently confusing the country with Iraq [maybe this joke makes more sense in Danish?]. To finish the job off, he sends in Special Forces icon Bobo Moreno (Penstoft), to oversee the mop-up work. But against him are Yin and Yang (the other Penstoft and Louring), two opposing sides of the same lethal coin. One is dark, dresses in black and is an expert with firearms. The other is blonde, dresses in white, and wields a mean Samurai sword. They are Denmark’s last hope, and have to slice and dice their way through the zombies, to reach Moreno’s headquarters, where he and an amazingly over-acting mad scientist are holed up.
There are some elements of this which are not bad. Unfortunately, they do not include the acting, dialogue, action or pacing. The last-named is perhaps the worst offender, such as the scene where Moreno is basically reading the Yin/Yang dossier for what feels like 45 minutes. The girls certainly look the part, and since they get to do their acting in Danish rather than English-as-a-second-language, perhaps come off best. However, the fight sequences are poorly-staged and largely uninteresting, with very little being made of the light-side/dark-side which is carefully set-up, then almost ignored.
So, what does work? The zombie make-up is pretty impressive, and technically, it really isn’t as bad as I feared it was going to be. The soundtrack is strangely catchy, in an 8-bit games console kind of way, and the actual concept is…well, it was strong enough to lure me in, with its promise of hot chick-on-zombie violence. It almost entirely fails to deliver what it promises, but for all its faults, I can’t bring myself to hate this. The love for the genre and unpaid effort that went into it is obvious: if only the enthusiasm had been tempered with more skill.
Dir: Henrik Andersen, Bo Mørch Penstoft
Star: Line Penstoft, Sabine Louring, Bo Mørch Penstoft, Mads Daubjerg