Pot Zombies

In the 1980s and 1990s Troma had the art of the intentional B-Movie down. Since the new millenium started, however, the studio seems to just be acquiring anything they can get on the cheap from any old hack with a camera that sounds like it might even have a chance of somehow sticking with some kind of audience.

Pot Zombies might be one of those movies you are supposed to be high for, I don't know. But I think that's demeaning to the intelligence and discerning taste of potheads. This isn't funny-bad or campy-bad. It's just bad. It's like that inevitable group of stoner kids from your high school - who had either a ska or punk band that never got farther than stapling flyers to telephone poles - were handed $2,000 and a mid-range consumer video camera to make a movie with.

I'll give this much to the movie, it does deliver exactly what the title promises. Some redneck hunters stumble into a patch of weed out in the woods and light up. Unfortunately it's been tainted by radioactivity or something, and it turns anyone who smokes it into a green zombie. That's basically all the story there is, the remaining 50 minutes of running time just jumps between vignettes of various un-named slouches and slackers lighting up, turning into zombies, and then brutally killing someone who happens to be nearby. The "gore" is about as low-budget as it gets, with the special effects appearing to have been entirely purchased at Safeway. Stew beef cubes stuffed under peoples shirts to look like guts being pulled out, Capri Sun taped to their bodies for arterial gushes, etc.

The humor doesn't work, the gore doesn't work, the movie just literally has nothing. It's all played as a self-aware parody on zombie movies, but the humor and writing is C-grade at absolute best. In desperation for some sort of lurid interest there's a brief topless make-out scene with some teenage goth lesbians, but even that manages to come across as boring. If this were someone's college cinema class project or something it would have been cute enough, but when you start asking for $$$ for your work you are subjecting yourself to a whole new set of standards, and by those this film is just not worth paying any amount of money to see.