Kill Zombie! (2012) (DVD)

Eventually the way film culture is progressing, every country, continent, and region in the world will have their own zombie film. The problem is that the great zombie movies are so few and far between that we’re left with a lot of really terrible wastes of potential. “Kill Zombie!” is the perfect example of great potential and no pay off. Granted, the concept is creative, and the surprise ending is ridiculously clever, but the movie is much too tedious and uneventful to really consider the aforementioned elements redeeming factors. “Kill Zombie!” is the Belgium set horror comedy about the zombie apocalypse that channels a lot of its favorite zombie movies.

It copies “Shaun of the Dead,” “Dead Alive,” “Zombieland,” “Night of the Comet,” and “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,” but oddly enough forgets to copy the fact that those movies were entertaining. If you’re going to emulate your favorite genre pictures, emulate the rich characters and iconic horror comedy. “Kill Zombie!” has no idea how to balance its amalgam of various genres. It is marketed as a horror zombie comedy, but it’s primarily just a comedy, and puts the zombie menace in to the back burner. Aziz is an average office drone who is fired from his job when his slacker older brother Mo phones him repeatedly during his work hours. During a lavish pool party, Mo accidentally knocks out a groupie for a hip hop star, prompting the brothers to get in to a fight with his two inept bodyguards.

The four are jailed overnight by aggressive but gorgeous police officer Kim (Gigi Revelli), but things go horribly awry when a space station crashes in to a local skyscraper unleashing a mysterious plague. Breaking free, the foursome realizes a weird virus has consumed Belgium turning its population in to flesh eating zombies. With the help of Kim, they team up to save Aziz’s girlfriend, who is now stuck in the office with a horde of zombies lurking around. Much of what occurs isn’t the least bit spooky or creepy, as the zombies themselves are merely annoyances and never valid threats. They walk at snail paces, and at one point Aziz and Kim are briskly walking down a street as a horde of the dead slowly stagger behind them. How can we possibly fear a monster you can evade by walking a little faster than normal?

Much of the film is too heavily based on staging comedy and humorous situations, the writers can barely remember that it’s also supposed to be a horror film. And a scary one. The scenarios the characters are dropped in to are often generic, and the most interesting characters merely appear and disappear when convenient to the narrative. I would much rather have followed the pair of trench coat donning brothers who killed zombies with their fists after losing their food cart rather than Aziz and Mo. “Kill Zombie!” really should have taken the really clever surprise ending and used that to expand in to a great horror zombie comedy. Instead, it’s merely yet another abysmal zombie title in a sea of forgettable tales about the walking dead.