One A Week Reviews #37: The Walking Dead Girls!

If you're a fan of Horror cons you're gonna like this one. If you like cute girls who have tattoos, it'll also be up your alley. This review for dvdsnapshot covers a film with a lotta flaws... and a lotta zimbies!

THE WALKING DEAD GIRLS!

Official Synopsis:

The Walking Dead Girls is a behind-the-scenes look into zombie culture in the United States and the obsession into "Sexy Female Zombies." What is it about Zombie Bimbos or "Zimbies" that are starting to gain the worlds (sic) interest? Why are zombies now in mainstream culture and seen in advertising from JCPenny and Sears? With interviews with zombie master maker George Romero and cult movie star Bruce Campbell from ZomBcon 2010 and so much more. Also with a rare look into the making of a Zombie Pinup Calendar, behind the scenes of "Stripperland." "The Walking Dead Girls" is a sexy look into the zombie phenomenon created by George Romero that is 40 years in the making.

Our Take:
 
Calling this a "documentary" may be a tad generous, but any movie that opens with Lloyd Kaufman doing a PSA to warn the world of Stripper Zombies can't be all that bad.  However, the sparkling sit-down interview with "Uncle Lloyd" is the high water mark of The Walking Dead Girls. This is a weird mishmash of interviews with zombie genre vets and tattooed cheesecake models posing for a zombie-themed calendar.

The recent glut of zombie movies and books have lead to proms, walks, and societies dedicated to planning a response for the evidently yearned-for zombie apocalypse. That's touched on here as some kind of connective tissue to string together the interviews. Kaufman, George Romero and a surprisingly restrained Linnea Quigley hold court for sit-down conversations, most with the quite game Luna Moon, while other actors are restricted to the convention floor. These are interspersed among conversations with the models of a hybrid Fifties cheesecake-zombie calendar. A lovely bunch of actresses and exotic dancers, hold forth charmingly while painted to look like rotting zombies. One, an adult film performer named Lilith Eve, is the most personable and charming of all the interviewees.  Her charm keeps the surprisingly sour Bruce Campbell - here playing Devil's Advocate in an uncomfortable conversation that'll remind you of the William Shatner "get a life" sketch from Saturday Night Live.

Jay's One A Week Reviews #25: Vamp Vixens (with a surprising twist at the end)

Read to the bottom, as that's where I "Buried the Lead," as it were...

Vamp Vixens 

 The kind and lovely people over at MVD Entertainment Group saw my review of their recent release I Am Virgin and most generously proceeded to send me a big ol' box of fab DVDs for my perusal and review. Typically, I took that opportunity to flake out for a month and am only now turning my weary, bleary little eyes back to their box of delights.

What can I say about the oddity Vamp Vixens? As it launched from a menu featuring a gal with plastic fangs and silicone implants and into credits that state it's "Hosted by Mistress Luna Moon" (her given name, I'm sure), I wondered what was in store.

What I didn't expect is a woman in a leather getup and Betty Page bangs lisping around her mouthful of fake vampire teeth introducing a series of vignettes... which turn out to be all the sex scenes that felt shoe-horned in to I Am Virgin. It's no wonder they felt so awkwardly injected into that film's storyline, as they're a kind of multi-purpose semi-porn. She has a "pet" man on a chain and aims for the witty aside, a la Elvira, but doesn't add much spark to the dire, simulated, and very unconvincing scenes of (ahem) "erotica."

Ok, seriously, it does take marketing balls to sell this as a separate item. Kinda smart to repackage these soft-core sex scenes featuring tattooed, kinda "Suicide Girls"-style strippers simulating sex with each other or a couple of nondescript hunks who don't have much more presence than the gals do. Even in terms of appealing to those with the fetish for vampire-play or the near-"Rollergirl" look, I find it hard to imagine Vamp Vixens delivering for them.

Slowly paced and, yes, almost depicting intimacy on occasion, on the whole the aesthetic is just off. Dime-store Halloween fangs added to shot on video soft-core do not make it somehow hotter. Also, even though they have discretely labeled this DVD as being "Rated X," this is definitely soft-core. If you're going to watch adult programming designed with fetishes in mind, and something this completely lacking in storyline, you may as well go "balls out," as it were, and watch the real hard-core thing.

Awful, awful, awful. Sorry, folks, there's just no point to this flick.

And now, the "surprising twist"...
In the end, I suppose you could play this in the background at parties and bars, but the only thing really recommending this DVD is the "special feature." Surprising and timely, the "Also from Brookland Brothers" link leads you first to the trailer for Palin: Erection 2008, a satire-porn featuring Stephen Hill, AKA Steve Driver, the porn actor who murdered a coworker and attacked two others with a prop samurai sword and then fell to his death off a cliff June 5th, 2010 after a 9-hour standoff with police that ended in a tasing that may or may not have contributed to his fall. A surprising coincidence to see the same day on a DVD in my home I'd received a month before. Ah, coincidence...