Comedy is difficult to impossible to achieve. That’s a tried and true rule of the creative process that comedy is almost always a failed endeavor, because not only is it subjective, but also a skill that’s rarely achieved by most, and mastered by only a few. “The Mad” proves that rule as an awful utterly laughless horror comedy about zombies, for lack of a better word, that surround a dad and his family after some bad meat strikes a local village. Very few zombie comedies manage to succeed in pure wit, and hysterics that “Shaun of the Dead” did, but that’s not stopping almost every studio from trying. “The Mad” is not so much a bad movie, as it is a movie that tries too damn hard. Mixed with really bad editing, “The Mad” really has no idea what to do with itself.

At one point, Zane’s character attempting to fight off a zombie looks more like he’s dancing with it, a scene too reminiscent of the choreographed beating set to music on the bartender in “Shaun of the Dead,” to be funny. Characters are virtually unaffected by the deaths of their loved ones, this small village of innocence bystanders that eat these rabid burgers suddenly go missing, and we only see about four zombies at a time, and characters are introduced for no clear reason at all. We even bare witness to a flat gag involving a hapless hotel patron who is interrupted during his sex with a plastic doll, only to see him massacred by the zombies creeping around. “The Mad” then completely dismisses any of the aforementioned story, only to tediously meander into a story about the farmers that created the meat, and then just completely loses all sense of its identity dissolving into a father and daughter melodrama. “The Mad” is simply all over the place, and lack of any of the laughs, or terrors it seeks.

Kalanagis' horror comedy is a laughless, tedious, awful attempt to mimic the sensibilities of "Shaun of the Dead" and fails in almost every respect. Billy Zane looks bored, the movie's pacing and editing are sloppy, and "The Mad" is an all around waste of time.

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