Now Streaming Exclusively on Tubi.
The Soska Sisters hit absolute rock bottom with what is possibly one of the dumbest zombie movies released in the last few years. It’s dumb, and when you think it can’t, it finds new ways to get dumber and dumber. The Soska sisters are usually a very talented pair of directors, but with “Festival of the Living Dead,” everything wreaks of pure amateurism, but exploiting “Night of the Living Dead” for fan appeal, to the painfully stupid script, and just downright terrible acting. To make things worse, the premise and concept takes such leaps and bounds to connect to the universe of “Night of the Living Dead.”
And it’s only “Night of the Living Dead” since that’s the only movie in the series in the public domain.
So, the movie very much wants to convince us that “Festival…” is within the universe and some sort of meta-story branching off from the original. Even if none of it adds up. Are we really supposed to believe that main character Ash is Ben’s granddaughter? Wasn’t Ben well within his twenties when we met him in “Night of the Living Dead”? How does that work, exactly? And why would they hold a celebration for that dreaded night that would have likely been as covertly covered up by NASA and the government as possible? In either case, a lot of the “Night” lore is tacked on for a goofy coming of age, teen melodrama set on the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse.
Ash is a girl stuck babysitting her brother, and her best friend Iris wants to also celebrate their friendship after Ash is admitted to college. But Ash’s new friends convince her to go to the Festival of the Living Dead, which is like Burning Man, but with about fifty people attending, and in the middle of the woods. Because it’s a good idea to have a big burning effigy in a massive wooded area. After a mysterious comet crashes down, it infects the recently deceased, causing a massive rising of the undead. Now Ash has to figure out how to get a car to get back home, but that proves to be very difficult. Because of the zombies, you see. “Festival…” is so contrived and ridiculous, and so dull that I couldn’t even really soak in how badly made it was.
I nodded off twice and this is for a movie barely clocking in at seventy minutes, plus commercials (because Tubi). Nothing in this movie makes a lick of sense, character choices are entrenched in pure stupidity, and the script works overtime to pander to the Tik Tok crowd. Even when it aims for camp, it really can’t even do that correctly, with a lot of the dark humor flopping hard.
“Festival of the Living Dead” is a part of the long, sad legacy of bad indie movies exploiting George Romero’s original horror film; it’s embarrassing that there hasn’t been a good ode to the 1968 film since 1990.