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"Boy Eats Girl" DVD
Okay, brace yourselves,
folks...because sitting here in my hot little
hand is a relative rarity, but one we've seen before with good
effect. What I'm referring to so deliberately vaguely is nothing
less
than an Irish zombie movie. The Euro-horror market has been less
than stellar these last couple years, with only a relative handful
of
titles reaching American shores. It's been gravely overshadowed
by
the Asian film market, which as we all know has been flooding
the
market with titles for like the last thousand years.
Anyway, this time we
get Irish zombies, and the high school kids who
must take them on and attempt to survive the incursion. One of
them,
you see, is going to die in a surprising accident, and his mother's
going to use some assorted what looks like voudou to bring him
back
to life. With marginally predictable results.
Now, let's start with
the problems this sucker's facing going in.
We're short on star
power. Samantha Mumba is their big name and she
was huge back in, what, 2004?
We're short on budget.
The DVD menu is basically the box art with fog effects.
And we're clearly short
on runtime. 80 minutes, kiddies...80 minutes.
That's only slightly longer than an episode of "One Tree
Hill" for
crying out loud. When the WB can put up a dozen pieces of crap
that
are just barely outmassed by an actual feature film, you know
it
doesn't bode well.
Thankfully, however,
despite a pedigree that makes it look like it
should be put down promptly before it can breed and run a generation
of horrible little bastard puppies all around the neighborhood,
"Boy
Eats Girl" manages to recover itself on the weight of sheer,
blinding
hilarity. There will be plenty--plenty!--of moments in which you
will chuckle, chortle, or outright guffaw and be unable to restrain
yourself. In short, this sucker's a funny Irish zombie movie.
Well, occasionally,
anyway. There's really nothing funny about
people getting eaten, and that will happen more than once around
here. This is, after all, a zombie movie, and you can't have a
zombie movie without the living getting lunched up.
And, as is usually
the case with the more recent zombie films,
there's one big problem. Too much buildup, not enough zombie
apocalypse. For an eighty minute zombie movie, the fact that only
the last twenty-five, thirty minutes or so actually has zombies
in it
is just downright inexcusable.
Which isn't to say
it's bad, mind you...it just needs more zombies.
The ending is actually
a step up from the opening, if for no other
reason that it's where all the zombies are. And that gives it
a lot
of extra force that the opening didn't have. That and there's
plenty
of action going on, which also lends force.
The special features
include audio options, English and Spanish
subtitles, a making-of featurette, and trailers for "Werewolf:
The
Devil's Hound", "Skinwalkers", "Fido",
"Invasion", "Night of the
Living Dead 3D", and an advertisement for Fearnet.com.
All in all, there are
vastly worse zombie movies than "Boy Eats
Girl", but that's still not saying very much. It should at
least
prove halfway decent, however, and that in the end is worth more
than
you'd think.
Boy
Eats Girl
***
DVD
Directed
by Stephen Bradley
Written
by Derek Landy
Starring
Laurence Kinlan, Tadhg Murphy, Sara James, Samantha Mumba
Produced
by Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe
80
mins
2007
R
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