Review: The Walking Deceased

This juvenile horror-comedy spoof is primarily, if unintentionally, a cautionary tale about the perils of allowing brahs to make movies. Witless even in comparison to the collective work of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, The Walking Deceased braids together ostensible parodies of The Walking Dead and Warm Bodies for the purposes of trumpeting above all else the filmmakers’ straight bona fides. In lieu of satirizing the equally poignant and self-serious philosophical ruminations of the Walking Dead TV show, the film transparently recasts the events leading up to the arrival of Rick’s group at the Greene family farm as grist for a litany of misogynistic and homophobic freak-outs. In an early scene, the unbelievably but tellingly named Green Bay (Tim Ogletree) and Chicago (Joey Oglesby) struggle not to hurl at the sight of Sheriff Lincoln (Dave Sheridan) exposing his buttocks to them through his hospital gown. Even the more clever reinterpretations of Walking Dead lore, as in Lincoln’s son shooting his stripper mother in the head instead of helping his father to chop off her zombie-bitten breast, are rooted in a contemptuous view of class and gender and a cavalier disregard for life. And once Lincoln’s group arrives at the righteous Abraham’s (Richard Lukens) farm and sets up shop there, the film largely abandons all pretense to satire and proceeds as a dim-witted comedy of ill manners. If what it means to live and die in the age of the zombie apocalypse doesn’t seem to matter to the filmmakers, it’s because the verities of the spring-break-forever cultist—weed rules, Justin Bieber sucks, bitches be crazy, and putting anything in your butt is going to hurt—will ostensibly persist come hell or high water.