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Bong of the Dead! (2011)

Bong of the Dead

Bong of the Dead is a fun, low-budget, zombie comedy about a couple of stoner friends on a quest for zombie brains to make the world's most awesome marijuana fertilizer.  Writer / Director Thomas Newman cleaned out his bank account to film this movie on a budget of $5,000.  Although all of the filming was done with one camera in 15 days, Newman spent the next two years editing the movie to get the look just right.  Considering the budget, he did a great job with the film!  It may not look quite as polished as a multimillion dollar movie, but Bong of the Dead is certainly much higher quality than the majority of the films that I review here at Film Apocalypse.  Cool camera angles and great shot composition really help the overall look of the movie.  You can actually hear all of the dialog.  There aren't any problems with the lighting.  Overall, this movie was crafted extremely well for such a small cost. 

This film has one of the longest story set-ups of any movie I've ever seen.  It's almost like a film short that could exist separately from the rest of the movie.  The intro is about an old dude who paints garden gnomes and gets turned into a zombie during a meteor shower, then turns his wife into a zombie and the two eat each other.  It was filmed pretty well and there's certainly a lot of gore, but it's about 15 minutes before we meet the main characters of the story.  As a result, the intro felt kind of long.

After the opening credits, the rest of the film follows the exploits of two stoner buddies, Edwin and Tommy (played by Mark Wynn and Jy Harris).  Edwin and Tommy smoke a lot of weed.  If you've ever tried to get anything done with a friend who's stoned out of his mind, the first couple of scenes with this bumbling pair will be all too familiar.  The scenes were very well done, but much like your stoned friend trying to put on his shoes, everything takes a while to happen.  I kind of felt like saying, "Ok guys, lets get on with the story!"

Once they start out on their journey to score the zombie brains needed to grow their killer weed, the rest of the movie moves along very well despite the fact that, much like real stoners, they end up smoking a lot of pot and not really getting much done.  Shortly after Edwin and Tommy leave home, they run into their first zombie and successfully take him out, but are subsequently captured by the smallest zombie army ever.  After they escape, they run into Leah (played by Simone Bailly), another survivor of the zombie infestation and one seriously hot babe!  By the time Leah shows up, I was already into the movie and having a hot, charismatic actress added to the mix certainly helped to keep my attention.  From this point on, there's a lot of planning, talking and smoking pot until the climactic zombie massacre at the end of the movie which offers up plenty of zombie killing gore...and boobies!  This scene alone pretty much forces me to give the movie 5 our of 5 on the Gore-o-meter.

Overall, I thought this was a good movie.  Although my first reaction is to say that it would have been better if it were trimmed down by about 10 or 15 minutes, I will concede that in the case of this particular movie, the slow moving pace really does fit the theme of being stoned.  Mark Wynn and Simone Bailly are both great actors and did an excellent job in making the movie feel more professional by doing their jobs well.  If you like stoner movies and zombie movies, I would definitely recommend that you check out Bong of the Dead!

Visit the Bong of the Dead website for more info.:

http://bongofthedead

Gore-o-meter rating: 5 out of 5 (some gore at the beginning and a ton of gore at the end!)

Skin-o-meter: 2 out of 5 (two hot, topless zombies and two glimpses of Simone in the shower)