The Graves / Zombies of Mass Destruction Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

The Graves / Zombies of Mass Destruction Blu-ray Movie Review

I'm pretty sure one of these films is supposed to be funny.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 3, 2011

There’s a very close relationship between fear and laughter, as anyone who’s gone to a cineplex to see a horror film will tell you. Nine times out of ten the scariest segments in any given film are met with shrieks of horror, which are just as frequently followed by gales of laughter. That same nervous energy seems to propel both emotions, and sometimes clever filmmakers are able to join these two siblings together in a sort of seamless Siamese twin whole. Unfortunately, just as often dunderheaded filmmakers manage to make horror films that are just laugh out loud funny for all the wrong reasons. You get one from Column A and one from Column B in this volume of After Dark Horrorfest. I’m more or less completely certain the intentionally humorous film is Zombies of Mass Destruction, a very clever and often hilarious sendup of zombie films, which is not culled from the comic book series of the same name. Just as funny, though probably not quite so intentionally, is The Graves, a film which posits two sisters lost in a backwoods Arizona mining ghost town which is home to a bunch of crazed townspeople, as well as a supernatural force the townspeople consider their “savior”.

Please note: the scores above are averages of the two films together. See below for individual scores on each film.

The Graves

Film: 2.5 stars
Video: 4.0 stars
Audio: 4.5 stars
Supplements: 3.0 stars

The Graves’ title refers, not exactly subtly, to the surnames of the two sisters, Megan (Clare Grant) and Abby (Jillian Murray), who are the heroines of this enterprise. They set off to see the world before one of them moves to New York, and end up in an abandoned mining town which is nonetheless surrounded by a host of murderous townspeople out to placate the local demonic force. Doesn’t every abandoned mining town have one of those? The Graves is a pet project of comic book icon Brian Pulido, and he invests this film’s heroines with a similarly geeky love of the comic book genre. But the problem with The Graves is it takes itself—er—deadly seriously while just serving up one deliciously awful, and therefore quite funny, scene after another.

The girls are first hipped to the fact that Unity, the backwater burg they find themselves in, isn’t exactly a picture perfect little town, when the bizarre Reverend Stockton (Tony Todd) walks into the diner where they’re having lunch, pulling addled Becka (Patti Tindall) along behind him. The Graves pretty much telegraphs everything in that moment. We know we’re dealing with a religious fanatic with some sort of secret. We know that Becka is really a good person, addled though she may be, and will probably be back later to help set things right after a long nightmare journey of mayhem.

The rest of The Graves plays out pretty much as you would expect it to. The girls are told to visit the “self guided tour” at the nearby abandoned mining town, where of course they’re set upon by all sorts of dastardly folk and the occasional supernatural force or two. This film lurches from sequence to sequence, often with no discernably logical segue, until most viewers probably just won’t care anymore. By the time the girls are tied up together, and become unhinged after smelling (yes, smelling) the supernatural force, thereby barking and trying to bite each other, you’re either going to be rolling in the aisles or reaching valiantly for your remote’s off switch.

Zombies of Mass Destruction

Film: 3.5 stars
Video: 4.0 stars
Audio: 4.0 stars
Supplements: 2.0 stars

Zombies of Mass Destruction is pretty much everything you would want in a comedy zombie film. It’s gruesome, but hilariously so. It’s also full of slothful, mumbling zombies who only want a quick bite to eat. But the film is also surprisingly sharp and smart, able to work in everything from chauvinism (the old-fashioned, jingoistic kind) to homophobia to the vagaries of Christian evangelism all in one bloody little package. The film may try too hard some of the time, but in its best moments, it’s both hideously gory and laugh out loud funny at the same time.

Iranian-American Princeton dropout Frida (Janette Armand) has returned home to the island of Port Gamble, a sort of upper crust, ultra-conservative place where every white picket fence is mathematically precise and all the townspeople know each other by their first names. Mayor Burton (James Mesher) is making the rounds drumming up support for his reelection and doesn’t seem to notice the policeman on whom he pins a campaign button is a blood covered zombie. And things only go downhill from there. Soon Frida is running from not just the zombies, but an insane redneck townsman who believes she’s an Iraqi terrorist sent to take over the town and, of course, later the world. The film places the zombiefication of Port Gamble within the context of a bio-terrorist attack circa September 2003, so the fear mongering is somewhat understandable.

Zombies of Mass Destruction plays all of its lunacy with its tongue firmly planted in its cheek, and it manages to get off several great zingers. There’s a gay couple returning to the island to inform one of their parents about their sexual preference, a parent who of course chooses that exact moment to transform into a zombie. “My father reacted exactly the same way,” the other partner says after they’ve dispatched the rabid zombie Mama.

Later, the two are holed up in the town’s church with the rest of the non-infected, when their gayness gets on the nerves of the Mayor, among others, who wants to cast them out to fare as they will with the zombies. The preacher goes on a long rant disparaging the townspeople for their bigotry, and then tells them it’s not necessary because he can “convert” the gays to proper heterosexuals. That leads to an over the top sequence where one of the gay guys is forced to watch a supposedly homoerotic film to cure his “sickness,” except that the film is not exactly pornographic by modern standards, and in fact puts the intended patient to sleep.

Writer-director Kevin Hamedani has a great visual sense and elicits some very fun and funny performances from this largely newbie cast. The entire film breezes along both merrily and with a fair amount of gore. Interspersed with the blood and guts are a good number of very clever and well written punch lines which keep everything properly balanced between those two related emotions, fear and laughter.

The Graves / Zombies of Mass Destruction Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Both of these films arrive with AVC encodes in 1080p. The Graves features an OAR of 1.85:1 and Zombies of Mass Destruction is in 1.78:1. Both of these films are among the better looking offerings in the After Dark Horrorfest Blu-ray line, though both are intentionally desaturated with more than abundant grain at times. The Graves suffers from occasional low contrast and softness in some midrange shots, but the close-ups are at times amazingly sharp and well defined. Overall I personally liked the nice filters and ambient lighting effects of Zombies of Mass Destruction, though the image quality of both films is comparably detailed, well saturated and sharp. Both films have minor noise issues in some of the darker scenes, with Zombies' being more prevalent. Colors are suitably bold in both films, with wonderfully lurid reds for all that blood.

The Graves / Zombies of Mass Destruction Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Both of these films feature great lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks, but in this instance, The Graves is probably the more impressive track, due to some very inventive sound effects with regard to the supernatural presence in the abandoned mining town. The buzzing of flies hovers in the surrounds and eventually gives way to a nice rumbling bit of LFE that should wake the neighbors if you have your home theater turned up loud enough. Zombies of Mass Destruction has some similarly inventive sound effects, including lots of gooey sounds as zombies chew into humans and humans penetrate zombies. Both films sport clear dialogue which is anchored fairly resolutely in the front channels. Fidelity on both of these tracks is excellent.

The Graves / Zombies of Mass Destruction Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Graves fares much better than Zombies of Mass Destruction in the supplements department on this two-fer:

The Graves

• Feature Commentaries, one with director Pulido, and the other with Production Designer Francisca Pulido and Director of Photography Adam Goldfine, are OK, but fail to address some of the flaws the film has. Director Pulido does seem to have a great sense of humor, which begs the question as to why this film takes itself so deadly seriously.
• Auditions/Script Reads (SD; 5:03) shows several actors who are in the film reading for parts they ended up not playing.
• Music Video (SD; 3:11) for "Vampires Don't Exist" from the film's party scene.
• Plan to Actual (SD; 5:46) is an odd little featurette which evidently shows some scenes being plotted with stand-ins. Nothing is explained, so it's kind of hard to figure this one out.
• Spot the Gnome (SD; 1:21) offers Pulido talking about his "contractual obligation" to include appearances by a gnome in all of his films. All of his films?
• The Graves: Behind the Screams (SD; 20:40) is a by the numbers EPK showing scenes from the film being lensed interspersed with interviews.
• Sound Designing The Graves (SD; 5:04) is an interesting, if brief, piece looking at the film's quite excellent sound design, with several before and after sequences showing what sound effects can add to the finished product.
• Trailer

Zombies of Mass Destruction

• The Making of Zombies of Mass Destruction (SD; 5:59) is a brief overview behind the scenes featurette.
• Trailer

The Graves / Zombies of Mass Destruction Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It probably doesn't matter if the humor is intentional or not, though the filmmakers may be prone to argue that point. Zombies of Mass Destruction is fun and funny. The Graves has two pretty girls in a variety of distressing situations, but once they're barking and biting at each other, it's funny, too. How can you lose? Recommended.