Editor’s Note: Thanks again to Jef Porkins for reviewing yet another low-budget zombie film. I certainly hope that you enjoy his way with words and his ability to turn even a bad movie into an entertaining read. There will be much more coming from Jef in the future so make sure you come back for more of his reviews!

Dead And Breakfast (2004)

Six friends on the way to a wedding in a Winnebago get lost and end up in a rural town called Lovelock. They check into a Bed & Breakfast run by David Carradine and his French chef played by Diedrich Bader. They wake up in the middle of the night to find the two murdered. All of them are suspects according to the sheriff, but none are arrested. Instead the keys to their Winnebago are confiscated so they can’t leave town, which is standard police procedure as I understand it. One of the friends accidentally releases an evil spirit from a magic box. After being possessed by the evil spirit, he sets out to build an evil army out of the citizens of Lovelock. To do this he needs to put a part of the victim inside his magic box; hair, blood or body parts all will do to possess the victim. Mayhem ensues and our protagonists hole-up in the B&B against their possessed former friend.

I guess this movie is supposed to be funny, but I’d have to say it falls short. Most of the time when something that’s supposed to be funny is said, the person on the receiving end of the joke stares at the joker in disbelief (or discomfort) the way someone might if they were giving canned laughter time to die out on a sitcom. But there’s no canned laughter or even real laughter. Most of the jokes are based on the belief that rural dwellers are idiotic bumpkins with odd ritualistic tendencies or just ham-fisted slapstick. When the sheriff tries to verify that the local doctor has not been possessed, he asks about their annual cow pie tossing contest. To which the doctor replies that the cow pie toss is every other year than the greased pig catching contest. I’m pretty sure that was an attempt at humor.

If you think that special effects gore is pretty funny, then it might get a laugh out of you. Shotgun head shots are a plenty, as are all manner of tool and farm implement jutting out of the undead as they meander about. At one point a heroine paints the walls red with a chainsaw while cornered on a stairwell by a mass of the undead. While the gore was pretty good, the make up was lacking. The undead are marked merely by a paling of the face and a bit of gray shadow and blush. They look a little on the side of the 80s New Romantic wave.

The undead in this movie aren’t quite zombies, just sort of possessed by an evil spirit. While it’s still necessary to destroy the head for them to stay dead, they still talk and reason and whatnot. They do mention the Z-word, only to be denied as something else.

The scene are interlaced with a narrative in the form of country songs sung by the character Randall Keith Randall or “R.W.” He shows up now and again the way Waylon Jennings used to on the Dukes of Hazzard.

All in all, Dead & Breakfast isn’t a bad movie, it’s just not a particularly funny comedy, nor particularly scary horror flick.

-Jef Porkins

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