A Little Bit Zombie (2012) [REVIEW]

It’s a zombie movie, but it’s a comedy! Some might say that A Little Bit Zombie is a zomb-edy! Guys, do you get it? They took a classic horror movie monster and decided to give it a clever little twist to poke fun at it! Are you still with me? On the one hand, it’s kind of sad how frequently there are comedies made that use zombies as a punchline instead of any other type of horror movie monster. Then again, if people weren’t making comedies with zombies, we wouldn’t get things like Shaun of the Dead and we’d get more things like Stan Helsing. Either way, it just seems like no one takes zombies seriously anymore. I’ve seen a few terrible zombie comedies (Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!) before that are offensive to both zombies and comedy, but I’ve seen some (Zombie Honeymoon) take things in a slightly different direction and they can end up being somewhat entertaining. Turns out that A Little Bit Zombie wasn’t really either of those, but, then again, it did have Stephen McHattie, so it had THAT going for it.

For a guy named “Stephen McHattie”, he’s definitely wearing like, ZERO hats.

A couple of badass zombie hunters (Stephen McHattie and Emilie Ullerup) are using some orb thing to attract zombies to be executed in the middle of the woods. The problem is that a mosquito sucks some zombie blood and turns into a zombie insect! Almost like what happens in the beginning of Zombie 3, but not with birds. No, that’s not the one with the subtitle of “Killing Birds”, but–SHUT UP I’M GETTING SIDETRACKED. This mosquito splatters onto the windshield of a car taking a couple who are planning their wedding (Kristopher Turner and Crystal Lowe) to a cabin along with his sister (Kristen Hager) and her husband (Shawn Roberts). Obviously a zombie mosquito can’t be killed so quickly and soon the happy husband-to-be is showing signs of being a zombie. Whether it be detecting the heartbeat of things nearby or uncontrollable drooling at the mention of the word “brains”, he is trying to keep things quiet from his controlling fiancé. This only works for so long, but luckily this fiancé, along with his sister, are willing to seduce a victim whose brains he can eat. Unfortunately, his sister’s husband tries to help by contacting the zombie hunters to take care of the situation. Stephen McHattie says there’s only one way to handle this situation, but his partner, upset with the destruction of her mysterious orb, tries to offer a different solution, while his fiancé his a plan of her own. What happens? Well, if you’ve read this far, it’s worth spending 90 minutes to find out, at least while it’s on Netflix Instant.

It wouldn’t bleed so much if you could just keep your finger out of there!

Okay guys, I’m not here to try to defend this movie or anything, which should be obvious as you might have already noticed it is categorized as a “bad” movie, but there were still a couple of things worth pointing out. The scenes where the main character involuntarily drools all over himself were some pretty funny bits of physical comedy. We’ve seen other incarnations of this lust for brains, but I’ve never seen it handled in such a goofy way, which was entertaining to see. In addition to that, the last scene in the movie also has a couple funny bits of physical comedy, but were I to give them away now, they’d be completely ruined and there’s no way you’d find them funny. Central to that scene would be McHattie, which brings me to another point; how awesome is Stephen McHattie!? I hadn’t really made note of him until I saw Pontypool, but every time I see him involved in any movie in any capacity, I get pretty excited. To see him taking on a role that could have easily been filled by any other typical genre actor but giving it is own brand of McHattie-ness was great to see. In fact, I’d say that the whole cast and their portrayal of characters that slightly broke traditional genre molds is what made this movie worth sitting through. We saw a relatively “wimpy” leading man who was blinded by the love of his controlling (without being obnoxious) wife, while also getting advice from his muscle-head best friend who explains his sister was the closest he could get to actually marrying his friend. Maybe it was because I had set my standards so low once I realized it was a horror comedy that I was surprised that this movie didn’t really use gratuitous nudity or violence to entice viewers that it felt it had its own sort of charm to it, but it’s not something I could ever see myself watching again. Or at least, not something I’d watch on purpose.

Wolfman Moon Scale