Have You Been Watching...? Zombie Night (2013)

  

Syfy/Asylum studio movies can be a bit "hit and miss". Apparently the studio have never made a loss on any of their flicks. Yes, they are cheap with lousy effects, but sometimes they have a charm that encourages a level of forgiveness for trying to achieve something. Zombie Night, a SyFy movie from 2013, is not one of those.

Someone, somewhere thought it would be a good idea to put 80s icons such as Alan Ruck (Ferris Bueller's Day Off), Daryl Hannah (Splash) and Anthony Michael Hall (Weird Science and The Dead Zone TV series) together in a film about zombies that exist for one night only, and then handed the production over to some people who should never be let near a film again.

I was not expecting much, but that bar has never been so low. Our story begins out of nowhere with zombies suddenly appearing out of the ground, which is fun, but the scene itself is prolonged and our cast running about doing absolutely nothing to get away. It's embarrassing for them.

This is a problem throughout the film. Set pieces take place and the cast make increasingly poor and illogical decisions simply to put them into further jeopardy and pad out this abomination of a movie. I don't think I've ever watched a film shouting "They deserve to die!" at the screen. 

Sometimes, I will say a script could do with another polish, another point of view, but this one needs something poured on it and set on fire, then put in a bin to make sure the fire doesn't go out.

Hall, Hannah and Ruck do the best with their characters, and they are so good, but I just felt sorry for the cast having to read these lines and act these scenes with some kind of conviction. There's an elderly lady who just moans and whines, a neighbour who joins the group for reasons of plot, cries and moans, a little bit who moans. There's more moaning from the cast of characters than all the zombies put together.

Even the Zombie "rules" only come into play when it suits. A character get bitten and turns into a zombie. Other characters get bitten and absolutely nothing happens, or they take forever to turn, when it suits the story. Sometimes the zombies are slow, other times they're so quick the cast can't react. It is just so inconsistent it takes the pleasure away. Daft decisions include characters mistaking the yellow flashing of a construction crew lights for...., wait for it...., the blue and red flashing of police lights. They even go into a GREENHOUSE to get away from the zombies. Then there's a whole "thing" about trying to get past some vines in a tunnel which ends up taking no effort whatsoever.

I like to say something positive about a production even if it is terrible. So, in this flick, there ARE some decent zombie effects. That's it. Nothing more. It's a horrendous film and should be consigned to the bargain basement of Doom. Save yourselves. Avoid this. It's just under 90 minutes of my life I'm never going to get back. I've wasted them on this travesty.

Rating: 0/10

Year: 2013

Availability: I won't tell you. I don't want you to seek it out. It's out there, that's all you need to know...