A Little Bit Zombie
A Little Bit Zombie, 2012, Canada. Director: Casey Walker.
Okay, this one you should look at. Remember how I said that this blog would be about picking my way "through the muddy, slimy, gooey terrain of B films to undertake a spoiler-filled search for those moments of brilliance"? A Little Bit Zombie is the kind of brilliance I'm talking about. The movie borrows a few pre-existing tropes for its foundation — zombies, young people at a cabin in the woods, monster hunters — but what it does with those tropes is unique and mostly brilliant.
A Little Bit Zombie is the story of the collision between a pair of zombie hunters, two couples heading to a cabin in the woods for R&R (mixed begrudgingly with some wedding planning), and one zombie mosquito.
Spoilers ahead
But only a few spoilers, because you should really watch this movie if this is the kind of movie you would like (Evil Dead 2/Army of Darkness fans, I'm looking at you). That said, since I'm actually telling you to look this time, I feel I should give you some warnings for why you might not want to look: A Little Bit Zombie is not for the squeamish, but this has a lot more to do with projectile vomiting (not my favorite thing to watch) and Pavlovian slobbering at any mention of the word "brains," and less to do with outright gore (there is a little bit of cartoonish gore, mostly at the very end). Our main character's brother-in-law is a chauvinist homophobe who, during an otherwise brilliant dream sequence, gives a very brief but close-up flash of what appear to be his genitals (I didn't rewind for a closer look to verify) and makes a reference to Bill Cosby that has not aged well — but the film doesn't try to gloss him over; the brother-in-law is presented as a buffoon. One of the zombie hunters is a crass, chauvinistic jerk, but, again, the movie presents him as such without trying to make him a hero. The bride-to-be brings her cute, huge, fluffy, white bunny rabbit along for the trip; things end badly for the bunny.
Never bring your big, fluffy bunny rabbit along for your trip to a cabin in the woods. That's just Horror Movies 101, people.
So there is all that. But then there are the utterly brilliant opening 12 minutes of the movie.
We start in the point of view a big, happy, exuberant mosquito as it takes flight through the night forest, gleefully buzz-humming along with the soundtrack music (actually buzzing, "Whee! Whee whee!" at various points). The mosquito finds the action where the two zombie hunters, Max and Penny (Stephen McHattie and Emilie Ullerup), are alternately bickering and fighting against circus zombies (!) who are modeled after The Return of the Living Dead zombies in their singular craving and resulting one-word vocabulary: "Brains!"
Seriously: Circus zombies!!
One of the zombies to come lumbering out of the woods is a bearded lady, and before Max can take her out, our happy mosquito lands on her neck, taking a good gulp of zombie-blood and treating us to the resulting image of a zombie pausing in her attack to slap at a mosquito.
She misses. The mosquito leaves the scene, but where the critter was all Whoopie! and glee before, now the mosquito-vision POV is tinted red and the mosquito makes angry buzzy-growly-snarly sounds, flying through the night in search of its first real victim, and then, look out—!
Windshield.
But don't worry (yet) — it's a zombie mosquito. It's only mostly dead. The mosquito rides in its windshield spatter-smear to the cabin where our two couples will be staying, and it manages to peel itself off the windshield, then flies around looking for a victim again. The first potential victim the mosquito finds is a garden gnome, and in a stroke of editing genius, the filmmakers switch us out of the mosquito's red-tinged, growly, snarly POV to a removed, normal-looking POV where all we can hear is a tiny, distant buzzing.
These screencaps do not do this scene justice. You've really gotta have the accompanying sound and then sudden lack of sound to get the effect.
The mosquito ultimately finds its way into the cabin. The brother-in-law, Craig (Shawn Roberts), is saved from infection by a giant, literally repulsive beer burp that forces the mosquito away to find more hospitable ground on the neck of our main character (played with lovable, goofy charm by Kristopher Turner). Steve slaps the mosquito, but it comes after him again and again, wicked in its tenacity, until Steve finally truly smashes it right in the middle of his own face, resulting in a ginormous spattering of gory goo. And that's the end of the story for our poor mosquito.
Beyond those first 12 minutes, the movie consistently keeps the creative gold coming. Some highlights:
Steve, newly infected by the zombie mosquito, has a black-and-white Leave It to Beaver-style 1950s sitcom dream that is punctuated throughout by (mostly) delightfully disturbing references to brains, starting with radio announcer Corey Cortex's morning greeting to his undead listeners "with all the brainformation a hungry mind can handle," and then continuing as Steve heads down to breakfast, where his fiancé, Tina (Crystal Lowe), cheerfully hands him a newspaper and offers him breakfast.
If it's too small to see, that there's a box of Raisin Brain!, and the cereal that comes out is, of course, brain-shaped.
Steve's sister, Sarah (Kristen Hager), and her husband and Steve's buddy, Craig, come in. Steve asks if Craig wants to go jogging with him, and Craig says he would, but "there might —— be rain" (spoken to sound like "beerain," see?). Tina offers smoothies, and Sarah takes a big sip.
You guessed it: She gets a bad case of "brain freeze!"
At which point, Craig and Tina "help" her out by sticking straws in her head and sipping away, all three of them murmuring, "Brains, brains, brains, brains...."
It's Pleasantville on zombie fuel.
A Little Bit Zombie pays tribute to its slapstick influences with a couple of specific nods to Evil Dead 2, such as the creepy dear head mounted on the wall—
—and a trip to the work shed where Steve outfits himself with potential weapons to head out and hunt critters (because he's so hungry for brains), a scene that's less of a nod and more of an outright high-five to the Evil Dead 2 scene where Ash outfits himself with a chainsaw for a hand and a sawed-off shotgun in preparation for fighting demons.
"Groovy."
Later, Steve and the gang, desperate to get some brain-meat for Steve, venture into a place called Cap'n Cletus' Creative Meats ("I didn't realize meat was a medium for expressions of creativity," Sarah remarks), where they meet Cap'n Cletus (George Buza)—
—who just happens to have on hand a special brain platter all ready to go. Oh, happy day for Steve!
Later still, Tina and Sarah dress up like hookers ("Who packs hooker boots for a weekend at the cottage?" an incredulous Craig asks) to head out to a local bar to try to reel in some kind of creep who won't be missed and on whose brain Steve can feed. ("Look," Sarah says at one point, "soul patch. That guy's a douche for sure.") The sequence features Tina trying to teach Sarah to be sexy, Sarah trying and hilariously failing to be sexy, and Tina using her pink stun gun to incapacitate the guy they pick to be Steve's dinner.
Sarah: "You have a pink stun gun?" Tina: "Yeah! It's cute, right?"
Which eventually leads to a scene where Steve discovers that actually eating the big guy's brains might be more difficult than he'd imagined, both logistically and just in the fact that he can't quite bring himself to open up the guy's skull.
Look, I'm just glossing over everything here — because if I tried to hit on every little piece of gold in this movie, I'd just end up writing the blog equivalent of a novelization. A Little Bit Zombie is a goofy, sweet, funny, sometimes gross, oftentimes brilliant little movie, and it's a movie that should be seen.
And with that, I'm pleased to designate A Little Bit Zombie as the winner of the very first Two Eyeballs Award (as in: "This one you should look at with both eyeballs!"). May there be many more to follow.
