Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker DVD Review
Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker is the story of an annoying pop culture junkie and her escapades on Halloween, with some zombies thrown in. Mulva meets some strange characters while trick or treating, and for reasons never fully explained, zombies attack.
This review is especially difficult for me to write. I just don’t want to think about Mulva anymore. Clocking in at just 60 minutes, I watched it during my lunch hour. It was so much work watching the damn movie I was relieved when my break was over so I could return to my job.
Based on the cover art for the Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker DVD, one might think that Mulva is a stylish, mini-skirt wearing zombie ass kicker, but the truth is the woman on the box art is nowhere to be found in the movie. Instead the “real” Mulva is a short, irritating, syrup-drinking girl with a voice more annoying than Borat and Napoleon Dynamite combined.
The plot is a loosely strung together set of events so mind-numbingly stupid they make my head hurt. The opening scene is about 10 minutes of Mulva waking up, eating breakfast, and having a telephone conversation. I’m certain most viewers give up on the film before Mulva even leaves the house, and I really can’t blame them.
Finally Mulva and her friend Cassie leave to go trick-or-treating and they run into their neighbor, who is absolutely the worst stereotyped African-American man I’ve ever seen on film. Obviously they couldn’t get any real black people to act in this piece of shit so he is played by a white guy in black face makeup with a Don King wig. Classy.
Then, a Benny Hill style montage of zombies in fast motion set to “Yakety Sax”… for NO REASON AT ALL.
If you still have the will to live and haven’t turned the movie off yet, you’ll watch Mulva meet a couple of strange people at a house (to be honest I had no clue what was even going on at that point in the movie) and meet up with what are apparently her arch-nemeses. The voice for one of them doesn’t sync up properly like in a kung fu movie. This is done for seemingly for comedic purposes, but it’s not funny.
Eventually the zombies start attacking, and there are more montages of zombies shambling around and doing things like break dancing, hand stands, and other non-zombie things. A few low budget gore effects later the credits roll.
Please don’t mistake my review for one of those “so bad it’s good” films. I could get into the bad lighting, terrible editing and poor camera work but even a professional film crew wouldn’t be able to save this disaster of movie.
The “black-face” bit…ouch. Why does that ever seem like a good idea??? Also, 60 minutes in length, that’s not even feature length!
The idea of zombies break dancing sounds like an awesome idea, if done right in a good film.
What is “feature lenght”, by the way?
I read somewhere that a “short movie” is up to 45 min in lenght. What does a movie become when it’s longer than that? If it’s not a “feature”, what is it then?
Pork-Eater: I love a good film, no matter the length. But I was being good and picky since the cover said “Double Feature”, meaning two feature length films, which by the length of Mulva, they’re not. A feature length film, in the U.S., is considered to be at least 80 minutes in length (according to the Screen Actor’s Guild, among others). I know some older film societies, in the U.S. and Europe, consider anything over 40-50 minutes a feature, but with the average length of films these days being longer, I would consider the SAG definition more the norm.
Off the subject: Do you have any good horror conventions in your area that you know of? I’ve been looking for more cons to post about outside of North America and hitting a wall with shows outside of mostly the UK area. Thanks!
Nate - here’s a screen-grab just so you can see how offensive it was.
Benny Hill scene:
I found the girl from the cover! She’s also in the Benny Hill scene.
Nate: I’m kinda struggling to find a good definition to use on my own blog, you see. I’m not interested in reviewing or covering short films, but does that mean I only should deal with “features”? So what I’m getting at, I suppose, is what you call a movie that is neither a short or of feature length. Any ideas, anybody?
As to conventions and stuff, I really don’t keep track of these things. They’re mostly abroad anyway, since I don’t think there are that many here in Sweden. There are a few, though, but I tend not to visit them. Especially since they don’t have a zombie theme.
Also, the whole “double feature” thingy – aren’t that sort of movies (I’m thinking about the grindhouses and drive-ins of old) typically about one hour long? I wasn’t around back them myself, and we never had those back in the Old World, but I think I’ve read about the double features somewhere…