Stag Night of the Dead - Movie Review

This micro budget British effort shows us a UK that has survived a pandemic that turned people into zombies (a fact that seems to have been well hidden from the population at large). Rather than attempt a serious take on this idea writer/director Neil ‘Napoleon’ Jones throws us in with a group of lads taking their friend Dean (Sebastian Street) out for his stag night. As part of the day they and, for some reason I’m not really clear on, the stripper they’ve hired (Sophie Lovell Anderson), head off to a deserted military base where they engage in a game of Zomball – a sort of mix of Laserquest and Paintball, only rather than shooting at your mates you get to attack Zombies. Predictably, things soon go wrong and the Zombies attack, will Dean and his mates make it to the wedding? For that matter will they live through the day?

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Stag Night of the Dead takes a while to get going (which isn’t really something you want to be saying about an 85 minute film). The first twenty minutes feel like a bit of a chore, as when we meet them Dean and his friends are a bunch of drunken, and not especially entertaining, arseholes. The self aggrandising Ronny (Joe Rainbow) and Tourettes afflicted T.C. (James G. Fain) are particular irritant during the car journey to the military base,as they appear to compete to discover who can be less amusing. However, the film soon picks up, and once it kicks into gear as the guys arrive to play Zomball it’s on a continual upward curve, becoming more fun with each passing scene. It feels almost as though the film was written in sequence and Jones became more and more confident in his tone as he got deeper into the script.

It would be a lie to suggest that any of these performances are of award winning calibre, even given the genre, but the acting serves the film well enough for the most part. Joe Rainbow danced on my last nerve early in the film, but he becomes tremendously entertaining when Ronny falls for a Zombie during the game (leading to a very funny courtship scene) and his character continues to evolve in amusing ways throughout the film. Sebastian Street makes an effective decent, stoic hero and, while her presence is hard to explain, and I wish she were allowed to be a bit more kickass, Sophie Lovell Anderson is sexy and capable as Candy (and it’s nice to see that the movie doesn’t have its single female character along purely to be rescued). The rest of the cast are all fine in their very broadly drawn roles, I even started to warm up to TC by the end.

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The Zombies are quite well done, given what must have been a microscopic make up budget, but they are just very standard issue zombies, with little to mark them out bar the repeated – nonsensical – warning that you should never humiliate a zombie (why? Cause they’ll get undeader?) and the attacks, reasonably well mounted and fun though they are, also fail to break any new ground. There are other problems too, at times the budget and schedule restrictions are visible and audible (I missed a good few lines thanks to lousy sound work) and the overly broad villains running the Zomball arena aren’t very funny or very threatening.

On the whole though, nobody is coming to Stag Night of the Dead for much more than a fun little beer and pizza movie (or, if they are, they are a soon to be disappointed idiot), and while it’s no Shaun of the Dead, this delivers in that respect.

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It may get off to a bumpy start, but it becomes, and remains, fun, even when it’s a bit stupid. I can forgive the occasional technical problems and continuity issues too, because the film entertained me in spite of them. I can’t pretend it’s an indie horror classic, but I suspect you’ll have fun with it.