Who do you call when rock star zombies (what’s the difference?) attack your house? Steve Perry. Seriously. A couple of “The Darkness” loving yuppies arrive home one day to find their home under siege by the living dead. Living Dead Rock Stars. It makes sense. You like “The Darkness”, you should be killed.
Either way, when they find themselves outmatched by the walking corpses of Eric Carr, Keith Moon, and John Bonham, Steve Perry arrives to kick their asses. “Journey of the Dead” is an occasionally cheesy, and pretty damn funny homage to really bad taste that I had fun with. Whether it’s the drawn out zombie scenes, the above par gore, or the slapstick, it’s hard to hate it. Hell, it’s even fun to watch Perry go Bruce Lee on these zombies while saving the couple from enjoying their crappy music for one more day.
What ensues is a tirade of an evil Freddy Mercury, force lightning, Perry’s call to the audience to help him battle Mercury, over the top performances, and a unique ode to rock in any form. It’s a tough feat to create comedy, which is why I rarely ever try to write fiction with comedy intermingled. “Journey of the Dead” succeeds for the most part, but it suffers not because of poor performances but due to the over the top performances.
It’s a common rule that the best comedy is played with a serious attitude towards it, and “Journey of the Dead” is much too concerned with spoofing that it never becomes focused enough to give the audience a laugh. Though it suffers from way over the top performances, “Journey of the Dead” is an original and pretty funny spoof that you would really only find in an episode of “South Park”. I enjoyed it.
I remember watching this way back when. Its not online anymore sadly. Would love to get a good copy of this short. My kids actually loved it.