Directed by Justin Powers
Expectations: Low. It can’t be anything great.
On the general scale:
On the B-Movie scale:
“Careful, it’s got a bit of creep on it.”
Likewise, unwary mainstream viewers that happen upon this one while browsing Comcast’s On Demand channels will need to be careful. If I say “independent, low-budget movie” and you think of Juno, this is not for you. If on the other hand, you’re a Troma fan and you are watching this one knowingly, Pot Zombies will provide a fair amount of entertainment. Don’t expect anything else from it, and it will deliver. I’m not saying it’s great, or even good, but it is watchable, and that’s something to be said for such a low-budget, obviously labor of love endeavor.
So with each vignette being a variation on a theme, they do have the tendency to be rather similar to each other, but the filmmakers actually did a pretty good job of making them stand out from one another. For instance, the classroom scene is memorable for the shot of the notebook with a metalhead’s bored drawings of the logo for his band, Scrotum of Defiance. A later scene becomes “that one with the body-hook dude that gets hung up by zombies,” and another scene features Lloyd Kaufman as a retarded pizza man. It’s all rather silly (which fits in perfectly with the standard Troma blend of gratuitous gore and fifth-grade comedy), but more jokes hit than I expected so I enjoyed it for the most part.
On the subject of bad CG, though, I’d be remiss not to mention the zombie’s eyes. See these are radioactive pot zombies so not only does their skin turn “Lou Ferrigno as the Incredible Hulk” green, it makes their eyes glow with a neon green hue. And that lovely neon green hue is added via the wonders of digital technology. And really, no matter how much I hate digital FX and I think they’re ruining film (even, and perhaps especially, low-budget ones), these CG eyes are HILARIOUS. Take everything you know about computer FX and throw it out the window. Now try to imagine computer FX if they were like handmade crafts you could buy on Etsy, and then have your completely computer illiterate Grandma animate them. They’re great! Seriously, those fucking CG eyes gave me more enjoyment than almost anything else in the film.
The technical aspects of the film are well done for this level of filmmaking, but are not without some oddities. Many of the shots look like the director never even bothered to look at what he was filming, as many close-ups of characters cut off their eyes throughout the film. That’s something that I can buy happening once or twice, and I can understand having to use what you got because you don’t have the luxury of re-shoots, but over half of the fucking close-ups suffer from this. Jesus Christ. Thankfully, every time I’d really get annoyed at this, the scene would move into the “zombies eating the person” section, and those were always adequately filmed.
I don’t recommend Pot Zombies to anyone but stalwart Troma fans, as all others won’t be able to wrap their heads around what they’re experiencing. Even with this tempered recommendation, the film is still a little overlong and it’s only 55 minutes! I’m just glad that these filmmakers don’t take themselves too seriously and only made the amount of movie they had, instead of padding the runtime with boring shit to achieve a traditional feature length. So while other reviews might bitch about the length, I’m glad it’s only 55 minutes. The Tree of Life was 139! I wish that shit was only 55 minutes!
The whole movie! For Free on Youtube! Troma is awesome!