You know a movie is going to be good, or at least funny, when your first thought is, “Why is he wearing a bra?” There is a lot of humor present in Stag Night of The Dead. A lot of the time horror comedies about zombies will have the undead do funny things. It’s gotten a little old, but luckily this film reinvents this small, but played out clique. Some of the more comical zombies in Stag Night of The Dead are zombie on bike, grandma zombie with walker, and blessing nun zombie.
The plot of Stag Night is a mix of Shaun of The Dead, Ghost Busters, and Paintball. It’s Dean’s bachelor party (or stag night) and his friends Marky, Sanjay, DJ Ronny, TC, and Gordon have a bunch of festivities planned for the night. Lots of beer, lots of shenanigans, and even a stripper! However, the most exciting part of the night comes in the form of Zomball – a paintball-esque type survival game. Instead of shooting each other with paint balls, you shoot zombies with taser blasters. There are four simple rules to follow. Of course, something goes wrong and now the seven humans must face off against a butt load of zombies.
I always look at production values when it comes to any film. CGI is used a lot throughout the film. I tend to frown upon CGI a lot, but I was mostly just impressed that this independent feature could pull off better CGI than those SyFy Original films that you see every other week. So, while it’s a love-hate kind of thing, I do give them props for pulling off excellent CGI. The audio was really good too. It’s hard to capture decent audio when so much is going on, but the audio was definitely flawless in Stag Night of The Dead. Usually when there is a low budget/independent feature it has what I call a “glassy” quality. That’s pretty much a nice way of me calling it cheap looking. There was no “glass” here. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the camera used in this horror film was above average. The interior shots looked great, except that the picture was a little washed out in the limo scene. The exterior shots looked great, too. Again, in my opinion, Stag Night of The Dead was put together more expertly than a lot of other films with a bigger budget.
Another interesting piece of the puzzle is this is one of the few horror films where the cast is 9/10 male. I think the UK is leading the charge with this new casting and script choice. I can think of two other zombie films from the UK that are mostly male dominated. Are the screams better from women than from men? Well, no. Women scream and die. Men just tend to die. Gore fans win in the end anyway! I mentioned the script above and I should probably touch on that now. Stag Night is a zombie-comedy so you would expect a below average script, right? Nope! Not here. The script is actually well written and has a major plot twist and a couple reveals that I honestly did not see coming…and I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands, of horror films. I think other viewers would be pleasantly surprised too.
I would definitely recommend that anyone reading this should hop on over to the official website for Stag Night of the Dead and pay $1.99 for the 3 day HD stream. It really is worth it. I don’t have the money to pre-order the DVD now, but I’ll definitely keep my eye out for the release further down the road. Check out their website for a 5 minute preview. That way you can see the hot stripper who closely resembles Ryan Starr…and hopefully the preview will be enough to make you watch the whole thing.
Click here to visit the official website of Stag Night of The Dead
I just got a screener of this one and I will check it out tonight. It sounds like my low expectations were unnecessary.