“Aaallrighty, my flockers,” the Rev intones at the “first ever” marriage between a human and a zombie, punctuating his sentences with random James Brown howls. “The zombie apocalypto is upon us!”
But first, there must be “The Zombie Wedding.”
“Dearly bi-partisans,” let the bride, dolled-up to perfection, and the groom — a zombie — take their places.
“Love knows no race nor color,” The Rev sermonizes. “Love knows no rich or poor. Love KNOWS no living or DEAD. Love knows NOTHING.”
Wait for it.
“Love…is an IDIOT.”
The Rev, played by “Walking Dead” alumnus Seth Gilliam, touches on the tone that this Micah Khan/Greg D’Alessandro comedy wants to hit. A lot of famous faces — and a few faces obscured by this latest variation on zombie makeup — take their best shots at making a half-assed “Tony & Tina’s Wedding Goes Zombie” script funny.
Heather Matarazzo (“Welcome to the Dollhouse”) is a “zombie control officer.” Cheri Oteri of “Saturday Night Live” and Siobhan Fallon Hogan (“Seinfeld”) go at it as zombie mother of the groom vs. Arkansan mother of the bride.
Mickey Dolenz of “The Monkees” is the wedding DJ (zombified) booked for the Vineland, N.J. occasion.
And Aijay Naidu plays the Weekly World News editor — “The world’s ONLY reliable news!” — whose interview frames the story and provides (unfunny) narration.
But no big names or small names in the cast can save this corpse of a comedy from sliding into rigor mortis.
The plot sees a zombie virus outbreak interfere with the Vineland wedding plans of Ashley (Deepti Menon) and Zack (Donald Chang). But after the slaughter, the inane news coverage (by Christine Sprang and Mu-Shaka Benson) and family fighting over the wedding venue, the zombie groom and his groomsmen will be theref, and the bride and her menacing, not-to-be-trifled-with bridesmaids will show up to close the deal.
What could go wrong? Or funny?
For years, it wasn’t uncommon for me to sit at traffic lights in eastern Orlando and notice that the car next to me was stuffed with zombies. The for-profit Full Sail University and its cash college students who couldn’t get into “real” film schools were always making zombie movies.
They’re cheap, easy and fun…to be in, at least. No wonder film school students flock to the genre. Sometimes they can even be fun to watch.
But comedy is quick and “The Zombie Wedding” lumbers, staggers and stumbles up to the wedding, and flails like a tortoise sinking in quicksand after the “I do’s.”
“Hey, it’s supposed to be ‘The WALKING Dead!’ Get a move on!”
Actors hit lines they expect to play as “funny” hard enough to draw blood, but not laughs.
“We’re dead Americans, and we’ve got rights” could have been cribbed from the later seasons of the interminable zombie-genre-killing “Walking Dead,” but it was never going to be a funny one.
That kills this zombie apocalypse before the first joker in whiteface can yell “BRAINS.”
Rating: unrated, comic gory violence, innuendo
Cast: Deepti Menon, Donald Chang, Aijay Naidu, Christine Sprang, Mu-Shaka Benson, Siobhan Fallon Hogan,Vincent Pastore, Heather Matarazzo, Seth Gilliam, Mickey Dolenz and Cheri Oteri.
Credits: Directed by Micah Khan, scripted by Greg D’Alessandro. A Freestyle release.
Running time: 1:42




