Zombies By Design

Directed by: Dave Wascavage
Written by: Dave Wascavage

Every once in a while, I reminisce about back in the day when my friends and I would make little movies spoofing Jerry Springer with puppets and creating commercials about Excedrin and Creatures From The Creek for the breaks. It was a fun time, meant only for us and our parents to laugh at. Watching Zombies By Design was the perfect reminder of those movies.

What’s the gist of the movie? Actually, it’s kind of a creative idea. A regular husband/mad scientist creates a way to turn dead people into remote-controlled zombies (Halloween make-up-ed friends from down the street) so that the military can use them. His plans of raking in millions goes sour when a general thinks the idea is grotesquely stupid (no pun intended) and insults the man by calling him a “mad scientist.” Needless to say, the general dies. So does his guard.

The creativity ended there. The juicy plot thickens when said mad scientist tricks a TV home repair show crew into going to his house to film. There, zombie madness unravels as many neighborhood fans of the show die at the hands of the remote-controlled undead. Apparently, once someone dies at the teeth of a zombie, the zombie knows to implant a chip into the victim’s head, thus making it controlled too.

It’s hard to tell whether this film is horrifically fake and cheap on purpose or just because it truly sucks. I’m not dead certain of this, but I’m 95% sure that a regular handy-cam was used to film this movie. The actors and extras had to have been friends of the writer/director/producer. The line delivery was so quiet, half of the movie was unintelligible. I’m positive that I recognized Doom sound effects for the guns. The “special effects” were so comedic, I enjoyed their outlandishness more than the movie itself. If creator Dave Wascavage has something really going for him, it’s his ability to use a green-screen.

In place of unwanted scenery or unavailable environments, Mr. Wascavage inserted graphics most likely animated with a 1995 Macintosh. Rivaling only the graphic likes of old-school Wolfenstein, these cut-away’s did little to send eerie chills up my spine. Nothin’ like a 2-D computer animated shot of a hotel in a forest in an otherwise totally live-action movie to raise your goosebumps, right?

The special effects were just plain worse from there. I wander a guess that the gore/special effect budget was about $150 at a Walgreens Halloween isle. When zombies attacked people, all they really had to do was accidentally bump into the victim to knock him or her to the ground. A simple tug on an arm, hand, or leg was enough to tear it completely and cleanly from the screaming victim’s body. Oh, and when shirts were ripped off of the screaming victims, I guess their skin went with the cotton because all that was seen was blood and guts of either the said-Walgreens prosthetics variety or the trusty-old green-screened computer graphics.

The blood-pumping scenes of the movie were by far the most entertaining, mostly for their comedic qualities. At one point, the buff, Hispanic, dew-ragged carpenter of the show has to escape the zombies chasing him through the front yard. Amidst weakly running into the zombies to get them away from him, he finds objects on the ground to fend them off as well, such as rakes and gigantic sledgehammers. The sword-fight-with-the-programmed-zombie part of the scene was an interesting idea…had it been done with quality in mind. It definitely did not involve Star Wars caliber choreography with its cliché-est of cliché parries. Watching 2-year-olds pretend to swordfight with carnival-quality inflatable swords would have been far more interesting to occupy my time with.

Alright, I’ll lighten up. I have to admit that with as many shots as the movie had and as long as it was (about an hour and a half), it took a lot of work and dedication to make. Here’s to the Wascavages for their efforts. I understand that not every project can have a $1000 budget and it’s not always easy to have everybody at the right place at the right time. You get an A for determination, guys. My question, however, is this: is Zombies By Design meant to be taken seriously, or is it meant to be a long, dreary joke? If it is, in fact, a joke, I’m afraid I don’t get it.

If any of you out there absolutely adore cheap, poor quality, awfully acted, low-budge films (much like Texans adore high-school football), perhaps you may enjoy this movie. However, even if you do like those things, you probably won’t like this one.

~Portrayal.