On the piss. On the pull. On the menu.Is there anything that adding a British accent to zombie mayhem won't make funny? First there was Edgar Wright's brilliant buddy comedy Shaun on the Dead starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Kate Ashfield. Then there's the much lower-key Doghouse directed by Jake West. Although fans here in the US may not be as familiar with West (Evil Aliens), he's very much in the same vein as Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson (pre-Lord of the Rings).
Eschewing horror with a high dose of happy pills, Doghouse is a fun (if not somewhat dim) romp through the zombie genre that features a small cadre of men trapped in a remote village that's chock full of hungry, ravenous zombie women. While there are the occasional absurd antics to be found, West manages to keep everything fairly well grounded (unlike Phil Claydon's much more outrageous Lesbian Vampire Killers) and it works.
Where the film fails is toward its ending as, slowly but surely, the pack of men begins to thin. Although West tries to give the viewer (especially men) a reason to pull for the protagonists with their machismo and average guy personalities, I felt myself generally uninterested in the casualties due to a lack of progression in their character development. There's no real message that one would expect from a film with its subject matter being a clash of gender. In the end, sexy female zombies or not, the guys are pretty much the same people... there's just less of them.
A wackier Shaun of the Dead. Can't wait!!