The Coed and the Zombie Stoner – 0 out of 5
October is over but, as I kiss my favorite month goodbye, I thought I would treat myself to a weekend of some zombie movies. Zombies are great all year long and can be enjoyed even in the month where we are supposed to be giving thanks. Instead of turning my attention to a zombie film that might actually be good, I decided to watch one that I pretty much knew was going to be bad but had the real potential to be fun with its badness. I decided to watch The Coed and the Zombie Stoner; a film I discovered completely by accident on a zombie-based blog I subscribe to. With its title, I knew this movie was just going to be a collection of awful jokes and gratuitous nudity and all to the extent that would make a bad movie but I really wasn’t prepared for how bad this one was going to be. It’s been some time since I gave a movie a score of zero.
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| Gaze upon the dignity and depth that is The Coed and the Zombie Stoner. |
Chrissy (Catherine Annette) is a smart college student trying to do her best but after her boyfriend breaks up with her for her sorority sister Bambi (Jamie Noel) she finds her college life in crisis. Now she’s forced to find a new boyfriend or risk being kicked out of the house. Later, while working in the lab late one night (but not in a monster mash way) she discovers that her professor; Dr. Avon (Louis Dezseran), has been hiding a secret. That secret is that his best student ended up becoming a zombie and he’s been hiding him for years by using marijuana to keep him quiet and docile. Chrissy does what any normal girl would do and decides to make the zombie (Grant O’Connell) her boyfriend but, after Bambi and Chrissy’s ex antagonize this zombie, he attacks some Frat boys and accidentally unleashes his sickness across the student body. Now Chrissy must team with her zombie boyfriend, her brother Spike (Andrew Clements) and two of her sorority sisters; Bibi (Lena Young) and Bunny (Dora Pereli), so she can find a cure and save the campus.
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| Chrissy is basically the girl in the 90s romcoms that was called ugly by the rest of the school until she took her glasses off and let her hair down. |
You pretty much know what you are going to get when you watch this movie but what really struck me was how bad the writing was. I wasn’t expecting greatness when I sat down with The Coed and the Zombie Stoner—in fact, I was expecting bad writing but bad at a level where it’s fun. The writing in this film just felt lazy as it can’t quite figure out what to do with its characters, can barely introduce said characters and then steals a lot of stuff from movies and pop culture. For example, a scene in the movie is “inspired” by the viral sorority girl letter (that was immortalized by Michael Shannon in a hilarious sketch on Funny or Die) and pretty much uses it word for word in a scene. It’s one of those moments that crosses the line of being an homage and becomes just outright theft. And speaking of homage, I’m sure George Romero really appreciates the “shout out” as the production named the cat in the film “Romero.”
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| Sorry, guys, Michael Shannon did it WAYYYYY better. |
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| When your production somehow can't afford Ray Wise... Seriously, God's Not Dead 2 could afford him. |
After watching this, I took a look at the cast and crew and saw it was written by Scotty Mullen and directed by Glenn Miller. Now, those names don’t immediately jump off the webpage at me but looking into their work, I saw they directed Zoombies—a cheesy zombie comedy about a zombie outbreak in a zoo. Now, if you remember my review (which you can check out here) I thought the film was very dumb BUT it was dumb in a way that was incredibly fun to watch. I genuinely had a good time watching it and, in retrospect, this one should have been the same but, sadly it wasn’t. Zoombies, with all its problems, has some logic to it, the plot progressed as expected and, while it wasn’t an example of great writing, everything about the script and dialogue made sense. The Coed and the Zombie Stoner had none of this and it made for a viewing experience that was hard to endure. The jokes just aren’t funny and feel forced, the dialogue is atrocious and sometimes makes no sense and often I found myself wondering what the hell the actors were thinking with their reactions. For instance, Bibi and Bunny learn that the zombies are captivated by breasts (because of course they are) and won’t attack if they see some of that naked boobage. They yell this information to another girl nearby and she proceeds to take her top off. So far, all of this makes sense in the logic of The Coed and the Zombie Stoner. Then the woman decides to flail about like a fish flopping around on a dry lake bed. She’s doing these weird semi-karate, semi-possibly seizure moves in front of the zombie and I stared at my screen in utter bewilderment over the fact this was in the movie and the reality that director Glenn Miller never said, “Cut, what the hell are you doing?” and then immediately did another take. My reaction was repeated a lot as the film progress as lines of dialogue made less and less sense and it became clear that the film was just padding itself out to a somewhat decent running time.
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| This film also has some really glorious continuity errors. Like in this scene we see Spike with a black X-Box controller... |
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| After a brief cutaway, we return to see the controller has become white. Another great continuity error is how Bunny's t-shirt changes from gray to white constantly. |
Surprisingly, the performances in TCatZS aren’t that bad. Granted, no one in the cast feels like they will have a career outside of schlocky films like this but, for the most part, everyone is fairly decent. O’Connell as the zombie stoner boyfriend (named Rigo, in case you were dying to know) isn’t too shabby and Catherine Annette is actually really good as Chrissy. Other performers like Jamie Noel, Lena Young and Dora Pereli work for the characters and the type of feature they are playing in but there are members of the cast that are really hard to endure. A lot of the extras are strange (like the girl doing weird spastic moves after her top comes off), Louis Dezseran as Dr. Avon has an accent that comes and goes, and, for some reason, a lot of the actors who become zombies feel the need to stick out their tongues all the time when they become the walking dead. I guess being hypnotized by breasts and constantly poking your tongue out is just the rules for the undead in this reality.
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| Why? Why did he choose this for portraying a zombie? |
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| Seriously, why? |
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| My desire to kill zombies is always running high but the tongue thing just makes me want to kill them more so...thanks, I guess? |
In a couple of my reviews and on various movie discussion groups I take part in, I’ve been called a snob because I take the stance that just because a movie will show a naked woman doesn’t mean the movie is in any way, shape or form good. In fact, I think gratuitous nudity is annoying and, if my movie must have nakedness, it’s got to have a point. The Coed and the Zombie Stoner isn’t watchable just because it throws in a lot of boobs. The acting may be serviceable but the writing is so bad that I wasn’t even able to make fun of it because I was too busy saying, “What? That’s really what they were going for?” I was hoping this feature would have been “so dumb it’s fun” but with its bad dialogue, its really forced and woefully unfunny humor (it’s essentially the kind of humor that resembles the stuff that unfunny friend of yours does when they want attention and they think they are super hilarious), and a story with a plot that hangs by an ever weakening thread, the film is just “so bad that no amount of pointless nudity can make it watchable.”
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