Boy Eats Girl

Nothing says romance like rotting zombies.

They want you to think of Boy Eats Girl as something along the lines of Shaun of the Dead, but with an Irish accent and much hotter chicks. Check the brogue (you might need captions) and the lovely lady (sexy Samantha Mumba stars as the ubiquitous "girl", Jessica), but aside from a zombified plot, there is little in Boy Eats Girl to compare with the pretty much incomparable Shaun of the Dead.

This low-budget teen pleaser follows the story of unfortunate, undead high school nerd (Nathan, played by David Leon) and his herd (Henry and Diggs, played by Laurence Kinlan and Tadhg Murphy) in their pursuit of chicks and chow (either/or… it doesn't matter. The zombie boys like their meat like they like their women: raw).

The whole mess begins when suicidal Nathan's mom (Deirdre O'Kane) accidentally precipitates his death after Jessica stands him up for their first date. Guilt-ridden, Mom goes to the church where she volunteers and finds a handy-dandy voodoo spell hidden in the basement. She brings Nathan back to life, but the tail-side of that coin is an unending death for half the sophomore class.

High jinks ensue, brains are eaten, and a good time is had by all. Well, all but the viewing audience… Boy Eats Girl is a cute flick, but it wears out its welcome far sooner than its end-credits roll.

Undead or Alive

Undead or alive, this movie is definitely not wanted.

Why on scorched earth Chris Kattan or James Denton would have agreed to star in this period Western/horror humiliation is anybody's guess. Kattan is genuinely funny (see: Saturday Night Live) and Denton is on a hot show (see: Desperate Housewives), so all I can surmise is, writer/director Glasgow Philips knows more about blackmail than he does making movies.

Denton plays the soft spoken hero-type, while Kattan is the mugging, annoying sidekick, and at their center is midriff-baring, deerskin-wearing babe, Navi Rawat as Geronimo's niece. The three team up amidst a zombie plague after the two male misfits rob the corrupt sheriff of a cow town, and the Indian princess gets the better of them.

At first, their relationship is adversarial to say the least (in a particularly cringe-inducing scene, poor Denton and Kattan are stripped naked and made to ride double on horseback with Rawat as their quipping captor). But eventually, the trio realizes that in order to survive the brain-eating cowpokes and tenderfoots that meet them at every turn, they have to rely on one another. Lesson? United we stand, devoured we fall.

In comedic scenes that probably would have wound up in the circular file in the writer's room of Hee-Haw, the actors struggle through with pained expressions, but nothing can quite describe the misfires on the horror and zombie side of the story.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson