ATTACK OF THE SOUTHERN FRIED ZOMBIES: What a B-Movie Treat!

We are reaching a wall, in the subject of zombies it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell a story that no one has already told before, but sometimes it turns out that there is no need to weave the living dead into the prose of Jane Austen to capture the viewer’s attention. It is enough to reach for proven schemes and dress them in an entertaining form, and the time spent in front of the screen immediately turns out to be properly used. Attack of the Southern Fried Zombies it is.

The South of the United States of America is a place of particular specificity. James McBride in Kill ’Em and Leave, a biographical book telling the story of James Brown, wrote: There is no place in this country that would be harder to fully understand or grasp […] The South is simply a riddle. It is like an old-fashioned, faithful wife, a housewife who for forty years has watched her husband spend Sunday afternoons sprawled on the couch watching a game, and who finally blurts out: I never liked your father, pulls out a knife and once and for all ends her spouse’s football season.

We know zombies from this region very well, for example from The Walking Dead, but the AMC series is precisely that old-fashioned wife, while the creators of Attack of the Southern Fried Zombies grab the knife and shout straight into the face of every viewer in turn: We never liked your fathers, your entire families, and you as well.

The pace is standard for a horror film without artistic ambitions – at the greeting a few moments of terror, later the calm life of a small town, and somewhere in the background bad people plot their vile plans. The living death grows in strength gradually, first its victim is a fisherman who in the States would be described as a redneck, later the plague spreads to a rural fair resembling Polish events organized on the occasion of the harvest festival, except that instead of a disco polo band there performs a clichéd southern rock band, and instead of a Volunteer Fire Department truck one can admire a monster truck.

The second act is the outbreak of the epidemic in full force. With a face rotten and full of pieces of brain. An elderly lady overpowering the starving plague with a cane or an overweight mayor fighting with an electric guitar is entertainment comparable to pea soup or cotton candy – not necessarily refined, but in the category of guilty pleasure delicious.

This specific folklore combined with brutal scenes makes Mark Newton, until now only crawling in the low-budget industry, grow to the rank of an exceptionally efficient creator. His talent has already been appreciated – Attack of the Southern Fried Zombies won in the Goriest Film category during the Fantastic Horror Film Festival in San Diego.

Bites, tearing out entrails and rubber masks present themselves as solidly as class Z cinema can look, it is a pity that they are accompanied by not very successful computer effects. Digital blood and terribly looking flames hurt the eyes and it is difficult not to feel longing for the times when the budget had to obligatorily include funds for buckets of corn syrup.

The visual side in fact is more than satisfactory. Newton – contrary to his surname – is a supporter of using exclusively natural light, which adds naturalness to the film and allows the colors to be exposed in an unusual way (especially green, which is of key significance for the plot).

Let us add to this pop culture jokes (for example the dying female professor’s call get to the choppa borrowed from the famous line spoken by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator), a few post-credits scenes as in productions of Marvel Studios, and an unexpected ecological message (zombies have a tendency to transform into plants), and the result allows one to believe that the living dead have not yet breathed their last and will not soon surrender the throne of kings of contemporary horror.