But I will say this. I'll take an earnest, on-the-cheap parody movie over big budget Seltzer/Friedberg pop culture masturbation any day. Those films weren't so much parodies as they were excuses to quickly capitalize on whatever celebrity or viral video was hot that year. They were meant to have zero shelf life. The Walking Deceased however, despite being shoddy, has better legs since it's an actual attempt to zing the genre.
I do have a problem though with film parodies of comedies. It always reminds me of when MAD magazine unleashed its parody of The Naked Gun (his name's Frank Drubbin, get it!?). It's totally pointless to skewer a project that was already skewing the genre. So you can't make fun of Zombieland. Or Warm Bodies. Or Shaun of the Dead. Those films were already thumbing their nose at the entire subject matter while also trying to do something new and inventive with it. So there's a weird split in The Walking Deceased.
The Walking Dead parts, featuring Sheriff Lincoln (Dave Sheridan) and his son Chris (Mason Dakota Galyon), are goofy and ridiculous. Lincoln's a cartoonish, arrogant twit who'll shoot at his own s*** in a toilet bowl. Sheridan's heightened and over the top (and the only one sort of doing an impersonation) while the rest of the movie is sort of low key and more grounded in actual traditional comedy. In fact, those are the parts that are the best. When the movie's not trying to make fun of another movie and just allows the characters to have funny conversations, there are actually a few chuckles.
If the makers of The Walking Deceased just went for a funny zombie movie, like Zombieland was, they might have stood a chance. Because - and I'll say this - there was a sitcom that debuted this week that was terrible. Just amazingly bad and unfunny. The Walking Deceased actually got more laughs out of me, during some of its non-parody moments, than the sitcom. Which had big stars and was on a major network.
The actual story here is unimportant. Chicago and Green Bay (Joey Oglesby and writer Ogletree) and a pair of sisters (Sophia Taylor Ali and Danielle Garcia) meet up with the Sheriff (who calls his son "CAWWWRLLL" the entire time even though it's not his name) and try to make it to "Safe Haven Ranch." The Walking Dead's hospital and farm settings are involved along with Dawn of the Dead's shopping mall. Troy Ogletree, doing a Nicholas Hoult in Warm Bodies routine, joins up with them while a Book of Eli-style warrior (Trenton Rostedt) roams the wasteland.
There's also a Daryl type lurking about, named Darnell (Andrew Pozza). And like Lincoln, he's a boob while everyone else is more or less normal. And, yes, the actual ineffectiveness of a crossbow in a zombie apocalypse is (overly) called out though this little exchange did make for the best moment in the film.
Darnell: "You know what's the sixth most dangerous weapon? A crossbow."
Lincoln: "You know what's number five? A spoon."
As mentioned, after a half-hour or so, you'll really struggle to press forward. Plus, the second half is filled with lengthy, numbing sequences (one involves some of the group getting high in a barn) that act as a clear signal that the entire project should have been a short.