2005, United States. Starring Kurly Tlapoyawa, Ross Kelly, Diva, Billy Garberina, Kristin Hansen, Devin O'Leary, Andrew Vellenoweth, Bryan Gallegos, Dickie Collins, Liz Johnson, Tanith Fiedler, Alan Cordova, Bob Vardeman. Written and directed by Scott Phillips. Buy it now from Amazon.com.

Given equipment and modest funds, the aspiring micro-budget horror film director is going to make one of three types of horror movie. The two likeliest candidates are either a killer in the woods film or a zombie film. Running a distant third are the directors who set out to make a mopey goth-industrial vampire film, which are rarer owing to the fact that, unless the director is already friends with a lot of gothy types, he's going to have to spend a lot of money on frilly Renaissance Faire shirts and long leather trenchcoats that have been cinched in at the waist. Of the two leading candidates, I almost always prefer the zombie films, not just because I like zombies more than slashers, but also because…no, it's just because I like zombies more than slashers, and as such, find bad, boring zombie films to be more tolerable than bad, boring slasher films. of course, good zombie films are even better. Well, sometimes. Is there really anything better than Zombie III?

And if, like me, you are a friend of bad, boring zombie films, than this is truly a belle epoque for you. The rise of digital video filmmaking has seen a dramatic increase in the number of microbudget zombie films that get made, and the rise of cheap distribution through DVD and online rental shops that are more open to stocking any damn thing that comes their way means that there has, since the dawn of the new millennium, been a massive increase in the number of homemade zombie films being made. This is a good thing, provided you value the quantity of readily available zombie films over the quality, because most of the movies are still pretty bad. They may boast better editing and film quality than we enjoyed in the old shot-on-VHS days of Zombie Bloodbath, but very often the advances stop there, and we still get phenomenally awful acting, pacing, and scripting.

Recently, however, more filmmakers seem to be realizing that the standard Night of the Living Dead formula -- barricade a group of people inside a house and watch them argue and die for the next eighty minutes -- has very little to offer beyond what's already been done. So they try to come up with something new that still operates within the confines of the traditional definition of the zombie film. Shatter Dead, despite sundry flaws, was one of the first movies I remember that made an earnest attempt to place a different spin on the zombie film. I, Zombie was another one, but I seem to remember what that movie did differently was prove how phenomenally boring a zombie could be. Since then, we've seen a fair degree of "variation on a theme." It doesn't always work -- in fact, it rarely works, but hey, at least the effort is being made to come up with some new ideas.

Microbudget zombie film The Stink of Flesh is one of the movies that tries to come up with a different spin on the age-old story of the dead returning to mash pig entrails and raw meat against their face for the camera. Based on the title, you may think that this is a film about zombie hygiene, which I freely admit is a topic that goes largely unexplored. This is probably because there are few actors who can work with lines like, "Braaaaains...and Pert!" And yes, I assume zombies use Pert, because being reduced to the basest utilitarian instincts, a zombie is going to recognize the efficiency of having the shampoo and conditioner combined into a single product. Or maybe I'm confusing zombies with Germans.

Anyway, it doesn't matter, because this is not a movie about zombie skin care. What it is, however, is a unique take on the zombie scenario: what are a couple of swingers to do when a zombie crisis continuously dwindles the available supply of potential sex partners? The idea is as promising as it is absurd, but my initial fear was that it would be an exercise in tedium as I was forced to sit through countless scenes of some chintzy goth type expounding on some sex and death philosophy of sensuality that would sound like it was conceived, well, by some pretentious teenage goth rocker. I got enough of that when I was a pretentious teenage punk rocker with pretentious teenage goth rocker friends, and that was back when being a goth was a lot simpler and more affordable than it is today. All you needed back then was a Joy division t-shirt and a willingness to sit through the extended version of Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead." I don't know when Klingon boots and leather trenchcoats and big, ugly nose rings like cows have got thrown into the mix. Of course, the person I knew who rambled on endlessly about "the sensuality of death" didn't look like those cute goth girls you see in movies or on Suicide Girls these days. She was a little more like...well, it wasn't the same. Let's just leave it at that.

Much to my delight and, I will admit, surprise, The Stink of Flesh steers clear of that sort of ponderous dialogue and manages to deliver a film that is actually pretty good, and certainly miles better than its micro-budget ilk. The writing is actually accomplished, the characters are developed (well, most of them), and it strikes a good balance between blood-spurting action and plot development. After wading through so many bad films, I was just about ready to give up hope that the micro-budget horror scene would ever produce a movie I wouldn't get grumpy about. And just as email was starting to come in telling that if I didn't like these movies, I shouldn't watch them and make fun of them, along rambles this one and proves my point: it's not that I don't like micro-budget horror films; I just didn't like your micro-budget horror film.

Not that I warmed to The Stink of Flesh right away. I was going in with a chip on my shoulder and the assumption mentioned above that I was going to have to suffer through lots of cut-rate philosophizing about sex and death. The introduction of our hero didn't help matters, purely because his name is Matool, and I think the hoary old act of naming the characters in your horror film after famous horror directors or stars -- or in this instance, locations -- is played out. Everyone's already done it, so lay off, man. Despite the name, however, my opinion started to change quickly once we learn a little about the man who his Matool and the world in which he lives.

There has been, needless to say, a zombie outbreak. No explanation is given, and honestly at this point, do we even need one? The drawn-out process of explaining the outbreak of zombies always strikes me as wasted time since it usually just ends up being, "meteors" or "toxic waste," which isn't an explanation worth spending much of a movie on. No, here we're dropped into the thick of things and expected to already get it. After all, who but zombie film fans will even bother watching this movie in the first place? Matool (Kurly Tlapoyawa, who you won't recognize from anything), having nothing better to do, cruises the backwaters of America and starts fist fights with zombies. For some reason, I really like that. Sure, he usually seals the deal by driving a big nail into the zombie's skull, but he spends the bulk of his zombie encounters engaged in fisticuffs. He's like a zombie bully.

He's also craving a little companionship, if you get my drift, which I think is a perfectly legitimate urge to explore even though it's been ignored by most other zombie films (Day of the Dead touches on it in a tangential sort of way). When he rescues a woman (Tanith Fiedler) from a zombie attack, one of his first thoughts after getting her to the relative safety of a creepy old pedophile's cabin (the pedo won't be interested in her, after all) is to try and get a little action. It may seem a callous misstep by Matool or the script, but think for a brief moment about the situation. If you live every day expecting that you could be killed in a horrific fashion at any moment, then just about every sensation becomes hyper intensified, and this usually includes the sex drive, especially if you haven't gotten to use it in a long time. I'm reminded by a scene from Babylon Five where Garibaldi hooks up with an infantrywoman right before she's being shipped out to a big battle where high casualties are a foregone conclusion. When he tried to pull the sensitive guy "we should take this slow" card, she gets irritated and basically responds by saying she's most likely going to be dead by this time tomorrow, and she doesn't want a loving relationship built on a solid foundation of caring and understanding. She just wants to fool around and feel alive one more time before she gets gunned down.

I don't think The Stink of Flesh communicates the sentiment quite as effectively (but then, Babylon 5 did it by just having a character spell it out), but as a man possessed of profound insight as well as ample experience with the heightened sense of life and passion that comes from a life of constant danger and adventure, I understand what's going on. Of course, the girl doesn't really share Matool's sentiments, and before to long her attempts to get away from Matool's clumsy advances and the creepy pedophile (Bob Vardeman) with his two young wards result in zombies crashing the party and having a gory chow-down. Only Matool and one of the kids (Bryan Gallegos) escape, but no sooner are they outside and on the run than Matool finds himself nailed in the head by the door of the pick-up truck. So it is that he finds himself in the company of swingers Nathan (Ross Kelly), and Dexy (whose credited name, Diva, sounds even more like a character name than her character's name). Matool's job is to get it on with Dexy while Nathan peeks. In return, Matool gets to relax for once and enjoy a steady stream of free food and safety. All in all, he's not too upset with the arrangement, even when Dexy's weird sister Sassy shows up to whack him on the ass and talk about her horrid little conjoined twin (not really the best realized special effect).

Things get complicated, however, when a group of soldiers show up. One of them has been bitten, and all of them are happy to take turns with Dexy, who hasn't had this many playthings in years. Unfortunately, Nathan has had about enough of things, and we learn he's not as decent a guy as we think he is (something to do with a murder and a naked zombie chick he keeps chained up in his shed). Folks start fighting over who "gets" Dexy, and the soldiers drag Matool into the bickering even though his reaction is basically, "Dude, I don't really care. I'll split. This is a weird scene anyway." Once again, internal breakdown results in a zombie stampede.

What The Stink of Flesh does right is be cleverer than most other zombie films, especially most other micro0budget zombie films. Other reviews have played up the sex angle of the story and tagged the film as a softcore porn romp with some zombies thrown in,. They must have watched a different movie than me. Although we're served up a gratuitous lesbian kiss and boob shot, and one naked zombie chick, the rest of the film's meager amount of nudity is presented in the form of Matool's bare ass, and guys bare asses are like a dime a dozen. You're lucky we ever even put the thing away. Although sex is an important part of the plot, it hardly burns up very much screen time, and you get much more nudity from the average Italian zombie film than you get here.

Parts of the film are somewhat dialogue heavy, but it never got especially tedious for me, usually because there was a zombie run-in waiting in the wings to spice things up. Plus, the characters are all actually pretty well developed. Matool is the rough and tumble average Joe who finds himself stuck in between the weird scene of a zombie plague and the weirder scene of a couple of swingers in the midst of a breakdown. Nathan starts out as a genuinely likable guy with a simple sexual kink, but we quickly discover there a lot more evil to him than we suspected. Rather than dwell on "isn't all kinky," the swinging aspect of the relationship between Nathan and Dexy is presented as being a relatively normal thing. After all, most everyone has their own weird kinks, and they only pretend not to be into something a little freaky. Witness: pretty much anyone on a morals-based committee in Congress. For our purposes here, Nathan is just a regular dude (well, at least he seems so at first), and Dexy is normal, too. Oh yeah -- Dexy, played by Diva (should anyone really be allowed to name themselves "Diva?" I don't think so), also turns in a fair performance as a woman who seems to be using her sexual kink not even so much as a means of enjoying herself as it is a way to forget the horror of what's going on outside.

In fact, this is ultimately less an examination of sex than it is simply a look at people desperately trying to cling to some recognizable vestige of their lives when everything has been turned upside down. in that sense, it shares a common theme with both Dawn of the Dead and to an even greater degree Land of the Dead. Although the set-up of trying to be a swinger when everyone else is dead sound humorous, the end effect is more chilling, as it becomes a look at people desperately clinging to something, anything, that will make them feel like at least some tiny corner of the world hasn't gone completely insane. This often comes, unfortunately, at the price of vigilance, as one gets so obsessed with the minutiae of creating a false sense of "regular life" that one tends to forget that there are still zombies out there, and not everyone has Matool hanging around in the den, ready to punch zombies in the face and hammer nails into their skulls..

The soldiers are even decent guys rather than the usual foaming mad psychopaths with which zombie films usually present us. And then there's the little kid, who doesn't do much acting but steals the film with his creepy grin for the final shot of the film. His role may be a largely silent one, but the plot ends up hinging on his actions in a way I really didn't expect.

The acting is uneven but never all that bad. As Matool, Kurly Tlapoyawa is understated but totally believable as the sort of Ultimate Fighting championship watching Hispanic guys I used to sit in the parking lot with, drinking corona and talking lucha libre. He strikes a nice balance between being energized by picking fights with zombies and just being tired of the whole zombie thing. He's also the inventor of a new scale of judging the attractiveness of women with the implementation of the "she'd be hot if there a zombie outbreak" classification. The rest of the cast surrounding Tlapoyawa aren't accomplished thespians, but they're decent actors inhabiting believably real characters who actually behave in a way that reflects how real people might behave, rather than the often illogical and idiotic way characters in a horror film behave because the scriptwriter was bad.

Speaking of the script, it's pretty good. It manages to be a variation on a theme. We still have a group of survivors holed up in a farmhouse and proving they are more dangerous to each other than the zombies amazing outside, but it does enough things a little differently that it doesn't feel like a tired old retread of previous, better films. And the film's exploration of sexuality in extreme conditions is well-executed and never becomes tiresome or domineering of the film's action. There are some plot points that are introduced and don't seem to go anywhere -- specifically the mention of fast-moving "hyper zombies" that seem thrown in simply to explain how a group of soldiers could be overcome and wounded by them -- but these prove to relatively minor missteps in a script that, for the most part, stays on course and focused. I'd rather have a couple dangling threads left over than sit through a movie with no plot at all, comprised of nothing but 90 minutes of people running through the woods.

It's obvious that writer-director Scott Phillips put some effort into the script, and for that I almost want to collapse prostrate before him and thank him endlessly. You see, micro-budget horror film makers? You see what can happen if you put some genuine effort into your story instead of dashing off a script in ten minutes because you are excited to get out into the woods and film people in gore make-up mashing pig innards against their faces? You get a movie that is actually good is what you get. Phillips' script may be clumsy in spots, but big deal. He has a script! He came up with an interesting hook, then made it work in a way that is actually intelligent. He worked on it, put thought into it, and has some talent for writing.

Phillips also has some previous experience with writing a script. In 1997, he penned the script for a modest little action film called Drive, starring Mark Dacascos (China Strike Force and Iron Chef America for some reason) and directed by effects wiz Steve Wang (Kungfu Rascals and those live-action Guyver films that thought it would be a good idea to have a jive-talking Jimmy walker in them). Drive remains largely ignored in the United States (it was unavailable on VHS or DVD for years), which is a shame because it was a damn good film. Since then, Phillips has worked primarily in the direct-to-DVD micro-budget horror ghetto, but frankly, he's a welcome member of the population, because he shows what is achievable if only you put a little work into the writing.

All this talk of plots, characters, and explorations of what to do with your sexual urges when most of the world has turned into unattractive zombies may make you think, as I feared before watching the film, that you're going to have to sit through something ponderous and talky. But Phillips also delivers the grue zombie film fans have come to expect from their beloved shambling mounds of rotting flesh. Kurly Tlapoyawa handles action scenes well, and there is plenty of spurting blood, oozing goo, and dangling gut stuff to remind you that this is still a zombie film. They are, for the most part, the same sort of practical effects we've been getting in low-budget zombie films for years now, but it's amazing how much better these effects are when they are surrounded by a good movie.

Finally, the music is pretty damn good. It seems we have exited the era of the metalhead dude zombie film director (fare the well and Godspeed you, Todd Sheets), and entered the era of the rockabilly dude zombie film director. I honestly have no idea if Scott Phillips is a rockabilly, but he certainly packs his film with plenty of garage rock meets dusty border town twang, which is a welcome respite from generic thrash metal. If rockabillies have become the stewards of the zombie film (another mcirobudget feature, Enter...Zombie King relies on a similar mix of garage rock and south of the border-tinged surf guitar, and need I even mention the rock 'n' roll zombies of Wild Zero?) and this is an example of the results, then the future looks bright. Well, brighter. You had your chance, metal dudes, and you blew it.

I don't know how much my glowing praise for The Stink of Flesh comes from the film itself and how much of it comes from the fact that, after sitting through so many awful and awfully boring films, finding one that is pretty good sends me into fits of hysterical glee. It's probably a mix of both, but all that matters at the end of the day is I finished watching The Stink of Flesh and was pleasantly surprised. Dawn of the Dead? No, not really, but even George Romero himself can't seem to match that one. The Stink of Flesh proves that being a micro-budget horror film is no excuse for being a bad film. And while I can sit here, in one review after the other, and harp on this fact, The Stink of Flesh does me one better and leads by example.

Labels: Horror: Microbudget, Horror: Zombies, Year: 2005