The Zombie Chronicles DVD Review
In The Zombie Chronicles, a young woman journalist is trying to reach a town that is not on the map. She runs across an older man, Ebenezer Jackson, and agrees to take him where he’s going, to the same town, if he’ll show her the way. She’s trying to do a piece on the ghost stories of this town and as luck would have it the old man is full of them. He spins a yarn about an ex-drill sergeant on vacation with his girlfriend. They experience car trouble. He runs off into the woods to find a gas station and later comes across his girlfriend who has been kidnapped by the ghost of an old soldier he once killed. Ebenezer then tells a story of 3 campers that enrage the ghostly family of Wild Jim Conklin, the meanest, craziest gunslinger in the west. Each story, including the story of the reporter, ends with a “spooky zombie twist”.
The acting in The Zombie Chronicles ranges from atrocious to subpar. I would say it was shot on someone’s home video camera, but since it is shot in 3-D it must have been the inexperience of the camera man or the director that made this movie so poor looking. The dialog in the movie is really cheesy and uninteresting, especially that of old Ebenezer Jackson, who seems to have gone to John Lovitz’s Master Thespian school of acting.
The whole movie seems to be a showcase for someone’s haunted house grade special effects make-up skills. Again, this could be the low skill level of the effects person or the low skill level of the camera man/director, but the man behind the curtain, so to speak, is very apparent in every bit of special effects. The zombies look pretty cool, but as the camera lingers they look worse and worse. And how does it linger! This is why I say it seemed like a showcase for the special effects team.
Calling this movie The Zombie Chronicles seems to me to be a misnomer given that the stories deal mainly with ghosts of sorts, or at least restless spirits in bodies that rise from the dead. There is no zombie uprising, no turning humans into zombies or anything like that. They seemed to have thrown some bona fide zombies in at the end, but the meat of the story deals with single or a couple dead folk that come back for revenge of sorts. The end zombies seem to be a way to end the movie with some sort of bang.
There are some funny continuity problems in The Zombie Chronicles. The most glaring one is when Ebenezer starts his story with something to the effect of “Back in 1971…” as the scene dissolves into a shot of the couple driving a brand new Kia Sportage (i.e. NOT made in the 1970’s). I’m crapping you negative! Another one is when a man tells this scared woman to “run towards the setting sun” to escape the woods and their assailants. The thing is, the sun is glaring in his face, head on as he points to his right (which would be north logically, assuming that this takes place in the PM, which it seems to) and directs the woman to run in that direction. It’s this kind of painstaking attention to detail that shows you the level of quality that the creators of The Zombie Chronicles were striving for.
The Zombie Chronicles in a high school project level movie that somehow made its way into being distributed by major discount stores. I spent all of $3 at Meijer on this movie brand new. Nate tells me he spent the same amount shortly after its initial release. I think we both got ripped off. There is no reason why anybody would need to watch this movie unless you know someone that was in it and want to have a chuckle at their expense. It could have been neat had it come with the 3-D glasses which aren’t the standard red and blue ones), but getting those would probably double the amount of money I would have wasted on this crap.
Don’t bother.
