Dir. Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, & Yoann-Karl Whissell aka RKSS (2023)
Three zombie delivery professionals must face off against an evil corporation, a magician, and a couple of kidnappers in order to save their grandmother.
I'm an enormous fan of RKSS, the directorial minds behind Turbo Kid and Summer of '84. Both of those films blew me away with their creativity and guts, showing the world that this group of filmmakers were willing to present something actually new to the genre. I got the chance to check out their upcoming film We Are Zombies, coming to Screambox, and it's everything I could've hoped that it would be. A new and refreshing take on the tired zombie genre, We Are Zombies is hilarious, gory, and a rip-roaring great time from beginning to end.
The zombie apocalypse didn't quite look like we thought, as the undead currently populating the world are just the re-animated corpses of once alive people who desire to go about their lives as if they still were, well, alive. They don't eat flesh, they're viewed as less-than by many members of society, and they've even been given a more politically correct moniker by those looking to signal their virtue in this new world: living impaired. An evil corporation has made their fortune by capturing and experimenting on these down-on-their-luck zombies, offering to take people's deceased loved ones off their hands at a price to be used in their laboratories. Enter Karl (Alexandre Nachi), Freddy (Derek Johns), and Maggie (Megan Peta Hill), three broke scammers that intercept these house calls and deliver the undead to a third party, keeping the money for themselves and undercutting the mega corporation. When the real "delivery men" are forced to pay back their lost wages, they kidnap the group's grandmother, holding her hostage for an exorbitant ransom and forcing the trio into a high stakes game of zombie madness that goes balls-to-the-wall insane in one of the craziest finales in recent memory.
That's a whole lot of plot, but there's a whole lot more to it than that. I don't want to give too much of the film away plot-wise, but suffice to say that this one is just so much damn fun. Nachi, Johns, and Hill are absolutely delightful, each bringing the funny and the action in unexpected ways. I can't say enough good things about their performances. RKSS does a stellar job with every piece of this film, from a soundtrack that is reminiscent of their Turbo Kid to some truly excellent gore and creature effects. It's tough to make zombies feel new, and there really haven't been too many breakthroughs since Romero's Night of the Living Dead (except for "what if zombies weren't slow?", which is hardly to be lauded as an inventive twist). We Are Zombies may not create a brand new design, but it does its best to break the old one in creative ways.
The humor in the film is on point, with lots of laugh-out-loud lines of dialogue and some hilarious physical comedy thrown in for good measure. It avoids a lot of the pitfalls that come along with zombie films, removing a lot of the attempts at being scary and leaning into just being a rad-as-hell zombie comedy instead. It felt a lot like Deathgasm with its dedication to gore once things began to kick off, and it did a great job of alternating between the typical "zombies are bad but man is the real villain" deal that so many films try to explore and a much more peaceful zombie "apocalypse" than we're used to seeing as horror fans.
Screambox has been on fire lately with their pickups, and this one is no different. I was already a big fan of the streaming service and their choice of films, but if you're not already subscribing there, you're wasting a great opportunity to see some of the better films being released today. I'll never talk bad about Shudder, Screambox's main competitor, but I will say that their film selection has suffered a little lately with all of the drama going on at AMC. Screambox is gladly picking up the slack, releasing new and new-to-you films on a monthly basis that are an absolute blast. We Are Zombies is one of the best examples, and you definitely need to check it out.
Who this movie is for: Horror comedy lovers, Zombie movie fans, Porn chat customers
Bottom line: RKSS are an incredibly talented group of filmmakers, and if you like the types of film they produce, you're going to love this one. We Are Zombies is fun as hell, completely hilarious, and a super enjoyable ride through a different kind of zombie outbreak. This one will be streaming on Screambox 8/13, and you owe it to yourself to watch it.
