What’s worse than a bad zombie movie? A bad zombie where the zombies are painfully easy to kill. How can you be terrified of zombies that can be killed by drum sticks and golf clubs? It’s also a lot of fun when the director can’t seem to decide if his zombies are shamblers or runners. Sometimes they run, sometimes they shamble around in a sleepy haze. Sometimes they bite relentlessly, but when lunging at our characters, they’re easier to fight than a toddler with a full diaper. Which is a shame, because nine times out of ten, the zombies look creepy as all hell, while director Logan McMillan manages to paint a pretty atmospheric apocalypse. For the first fifteen minutes, at least.
With cleverly cut stock footage of riots, along with recorded news casts, the opening paints the picture well. The world has ended thanks to a zombie apocalypse, and humanity is over. And then we’re forced to watch three very annoying and dumb protagonists survive and put up with one another day by day. I guess this can be classified as comedy, but I never found anything remotely funny about what was happening. It also becomes apparent that McMillan is trying to pad the run time, so we’re put through some really pointless scenes. There’s a raid inside a music store that amounts to nothing, and one of the characters raids an abandoned building when he’s sure he spots a woman on the roof.
After dispensing of the zombies single handedly, it’s all an abrupt waste of time. In one scene McMillan seems to be leading somewhere, as the trio of guys invade a music store (because that’s a necessity in the apocalypse) and leave their weapons behind as they look through the aisles. You think this is going to be disastrous, but once they’re attacked by a zombie hiding in a store room, they seemingly pull their weapons out of thin air. Whether this is bad editing, or just bad writing, I’m not sure, but it’s terrible. There’s also not a lot of reasoning why we should like these guys. Sure, they’ve managed to secure a giant compound of some kind (I was never sure what they were living in, really), but they do nothing but moan about boredom and relentlessly insult their friend for being Gay.
Mid-way after raiding a church for some reason, they conveniently come across a woman who happens to have a cure for the Zombies. After what seems like an endless fight scene in the church (including really bad zombie make up on a priest), they decide to follow her and help her. Why? Maybe they want to save the world or perhaps they want to sleep with her. It’s explained that it’s been three months since the world ended, so I’m not too sure why they’re so antsy. “Last of the Living” really could make good use of its low budget, and explore the doldrums and tedium of living during the end of the world, but it fails on every level to be scary, funny, interesting, or original. Characters shopping in an empty market for food set to music, wow, I’ve never seen that before.