A young man is wandering through Bubble-Lens Alley after midnight. He is jumped by a gang of skunk-striped punks with incredibly bizarre facepaint--thankfully, he is saved at the last minute by a mysterious beer-drinking interloper. It turns out, however, that said interloper is a zombie! Cut to the apartment of Mike Taylor and his roommate, former doctor Bill Johnson. Johnson is depressed after losing his license to practice following "the accident," and spends most of his day clipping the leaves off of ferns. As we meet Mike and Bill, we also learn the story of John West and Willie Boxer, two ex-wrestlers--the former wants to get back in the ring with his old partner, while the other just wants to sit in bed and smoke. Eventually Mike is abducted by aliens, who cut him open and rub bubble gum on the back of his neck. Okay, that stuff on his back isn't actually bubble gum--it's more that the skin on the back of his neck (and his whole back) is beginning to rot off. And the same thing is happening to Willie, which is the source of his lethargy, in fact. Bill and John join forces, along with Bill's geek neighbor Max, in a desperate struggle against the extraterrestrially-powered living dead. It is this struggle which will consume the rest of the movie until the inevitable downbeat ending.
Plaga Zombie may be Argentina's first zombie film, and if the efforts that follow this one are anything like it, my world just got a little bigger and brighter. It can be tough to watch a lot of horror comedies, especially from the '90s...and especially if zombies are involved. That even the analysis of the idiocy of the scores of thousands of bad zombie movies made over the years is now exhausted is a sign that unless someone does have that startlingly-good fresh idea, the genre is beyond dead, and indeed beyond any sort of topical joke about undeath as well. The one mercy of being bludgeoned with so many of these awful movies is that I've gotten used to knowing when exactly to turn something off. Plaga Zombie, however, looked like a positive outing at first glance, and I'm glad to say it lived up to my initial optimism.
The first realization I came to after watching the movie was how exactly it accomplished its blend of horror and comedy so nicely--besides being just an hour long, that is. Unlike the makers of a lot of horror comedies, directors Parés and Sáez are aware that the best horror comedies are ones where the comedy breaks the tension, and logically plays off of the story the horror parts set up. Rarely are there asides in Plaga Zombie--compare it to Poultrygeist, which will gleefully interrupt its own non-narrative just to bring us a close-up shot of a greasy butthole shitting on the camera. The goofiness comes out in the form of slapstick during the fight scenes, or the actors mugging; sometimes we do cut to something else, but it's always brief, like the cutaway to the zombie giggling stupidly as it tazes itself in the face with a defibrillator. As a result, the movie is actually funny. It doesn't explain its jokes; it doesn't repeat them until they lose all coherence; it doesn't dwell on any one bit for an uncomfortably long time. If you laugh, you laugh. If you don't, you wait for the next part. It's plain and simple.
While the movie never succeeds in being actually creepy, it is still an extremely professional effort. Plaga Zombie was made for a shocking $120, and it contains more actors and extras than movies I've seen made for a thousand times as much. If Parés and Sáez were not film students, they were auto-didacts from having watched a tremendous deal of movies, one of which was almost certainly Evil Dead. The cinematography is almost always appropriate in framing and mobility, and it's one of the few movies I've seen that uses a bubble-lens in a way that works. And the effects are suitably grotesque, as well. Partly-melted Neopolitan ice cream makes surprisingly impressive zombie vomit, while a lot of filmmakers could learn from how cake frosting can be used to make undead face-paint. There wasn't a single moment where I wasn't entertained by the movie, and that's not even getting into the weird shit.
There's one "weird shit" scene in particular I want to highlight, which is Max's introduction. Let's just that as much as this movie threw me, I wasn't expecting to hear Leonard Nimoy rasp out the "Final Frontier" speech as presented in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. What's confusing about this scene is that Max is in a chatroom on his computer, talking to someone named "Kirk"! These circumstances don't really justify themselves outside of establishing that Max, a mathematician, is nerdy, which is funny because Max has a relatively small role in the film.
But of course I'm ignoring the main thing I liked about Plaga Zombie: more than any other Kids Goofing Off movie I've seen so far, it reminded me of the movies I used to make with my friends. All those silly half-comedies about ninjas and bigfoot and Sausage Kings...those were the days. We knew what sort of movies we wanted to make ours like, but it was impossible to ignore putting in our own idiosyncracies as well. And in the case of the movies of my past, this meant a lot of dumb inside jokes which were nonetheless pretty hilarious at the time. But the makers of Plaga Zombie, as I've said, took a very professional approach to their work, and consequently their output is more soberingly fluid than anything I put together.
The production company responsible for Plaga Zombie, Farsa Producciones, has been generous enough to put the movie and its two sequels up on YouTube, so you have no excuse to miss this. I will probably never recommend a zombie comedy ever again, so this is a pretty big deal!
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