The October Zombie-Thon 2009 - Day 13: Dead & Breakfast

Posted by Trevor Snyder on 10.13.2009

An all-star cast! (By zombie movie standards)

DEAD & BREAKFAST (2004)




Directed by: Matthew Leutwyler
Story by: Matthew Leutwyler, Jun Tan, & Billy Burke
Screenplay by: Matthew Leutwyler
Country: USA


Dead and Breakfast stars Jeremy Sisto, David Carradine, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Diedrich Bader, and Gina Phillips (Jeepers Creepers). That might not seem all that impressive in terms of your average movie, but compared to most Zombie-Thon films, it's an all-star cast on par with a Robert Altman film.

The movie begins, as so many horror films before it have, with a group of young friends on a road-trip…in this case, on their way to a wedding. If the horror genre has taught me anything, it's to never go on the road with a bunch of your buddies – nothing good can come of it. Especially if you take a wrong turn and get lost, like this group does. Figuring they are too far off course to make it to their destination anytime soon, they decide to spend the evening in the small town of Lovelock, where they have ended up.

Of course, horror movie small towns are never known for their abundance of 5-star hotels, and Lovelock is no exception. So the group has no choice but to make their way to the local Bed and Breakfast, run by a Mr. Wise (played by David Carradine – and I promise right now to try and resist any tasteless jokes about Carradine and hotels). It's a nice enough place, I suppose, although things go a little sour when the rude French chef is found murdered, Mr. Wise dies of a heart attack, and one of the group accidentally opens a box containing an ancient evil spirit. Well, could have been worse. I mean, at least Carradine died naturally with his clothes and dignity intact (oops, sorry – my bad).

Anyway, the group now has to deal with both the suspicious town sheriff (Morgan) and their friend who opened the box, who is now possessed by the evil spirit and rapidly turning the rest of the town into murderous undead fiends. One of those problems is obviously bigger than the other, but when it rains it pours. Meanwhile, a mysterious drifter seems to understand what is actually going on, and soon both he and the sheriff (not to mention the most bad-ass Town Records Clerk in cinema history) have teamed up with the group to battle the horde of resurrected baddies. Eventually, it all culminates in a Night of the Living Dead-type stand-off, with our surviving heroes forced to barricade themselves in the Bed and Breakfast while the reanimated townsfolk try to get in and finish them off.

If it seems like I'm going out of my way to avoid the word "zombie" in the previous paragraph, that's only because I'm trying to be nice and throw the movie a bone. This is one of those zombie movies that doesn't want to call itself a zombie movie – the drifter pooh-poohs the word, insisting they're not zombies but are instead "stuck between the living and dead" – whatever that means. Personally, methinks the movie doth protest too much. I know a zombie movie when I see one, and in both concept and execution this is, at heart, a zombie movie. Just because the "zombies" are technically possessed by an evil spirit, or remain intelligent, or actually discuss and enact plans with each other, or even sing and dance (more on that in a bit), it doesn't change the fact that they are the reanimated corpses of the dead, or the fact that the movie rigidly follows certain zombie movie guidelines. Yep, this is a zombie movie.

Actually, more specifically, it's a zombie comedy, so a great deal of its success rides on whether or not it is actually, you know, funny. The answer is something of a mixed bag. The zombie movie is the one horror sub-genre that lends itself best to goofy, slapstick comedy, and Dead & Breakfast works best when it is exploiting that avenue – the more over-the-top the humor, the better. For instance, the film's best reoccurring gag involves the lead zombie turning the severed head of one of his friends into a twisted version of a hand puppet, and I also loved Diedrich Bader's hilariously over-exaggerated Frenchman as the chef. But along with truly funny bits like these, there are also plenty of jokes that either don't register or fall flat on their face. So it's a case of taking the good with the bad…which I guess is a little easier than normal to do when one of the "good" moments is a group of zombies doing a choreographed dance and singing "we're coming to eat you, we're coming to eat you."

Oh, yeah, that's right – I said I'd get back to that, didn't I? You see, Dead & Breakfast isn't just a zombie-comedy, it's also a zombie-musical. Well, sorta. Unlike most musicals, where every character can bust into song at any moment, the singing here is contained to just one character (except, of course, for the aforementioned zombie jam session). That character is gas station attendant/rockabilly band leader Randall Keith Randall, played by former Attack of the Show co-host Zach Selwyn. Randall serves as the film's narrator, popping up from time to time to move the plot along with little exposition musical numbers. It sounds like it could be a terrible idea, but Selwyn (who wrote the songs himself) is a talented enough musician and comedian, and the songs are actually quite amusing. It ends up being a nice little touch that definitely separates the movie from its peers.

A little more typical of a zombie movie, though, is Dead & Breakfast's fairly large gore quotient, which is always welcome in a flick like this. No, it's not wall-to-wall guts – in fact, it takes quite some time for the crimson to finally start flowing. But once it does, the movie makes up for lost time with a gleefully blood-soaked final act. It's a little easier to forgive the hit-and-miss attempts at humor when the film's last half-hour rewards you with all sorts of chainsaw, axe, and homemade-shotgun mayhem. And, thankfully, it looks like the film's budget wasn't completely blown on the cast, as the gore FX are pretty darn good.

None of this is to say this is a spectacular film, because it isn't. And I certainly don't want to fall into heaping the same amount of unworthy praise onto it that some other critics do – as the DVD case denotes, an Ain't-It-Cool-News reviewer referred to Dead & Breakfast as "the U.S. answer to Shaun of the Dead," a ridiculous statement that, if taken at face value, seems to concede that American comedy just isn't as funny as English comedy (never mind the fact that the two films aren't even that similar, thus making the comparison even more pointless). This is definitely not the best American zombie-comedy ever. It's probably not even in the top 10. But it does offer a good time if approached with less discerning demands, thanks to some genuinely funny scenes, catchy songs, and a talented cast.

FINAL SCORE: 2.5 out of 4 Bubs (Mildly Recommended)