Stag Night of the Dead [DVD]

The DVD cover shown on Amazon is a misleading one. To get straight to the point, there is little if any nudity in this production - the cover shown makes the movie look more like a carry on film!

Anyway, this is a reasonable zombie movie with a few funny twists. There are a couple of good performances and an interesting plot.

The story involves a typical stag party involving drinking, a stripper and a unique version of `paintball'. Enter the zombies as part of an innocent game. But things quickly go wrong.

I won't spoil the plot but you can imagine the chaos that results. There are some interesting areas such as talking zombies, thinking zombies and a nice subplot with the stripper and groom.

I enjoyed this obvious b-movie. You know what you are going to get. Don't go here for classic dialogue and Hollywood standards but it's still a solid British zombie flick, with a hint of Shaun of the Dead about and some excellent zombie make up...

!!!WARNING. MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. !!!

Potential viewers of 'Stag Night Of The Dead' could be forgiven for thinking that this is yet another zombie film on the lookout for a gimmick. In fact, this low budget, highly satisfactory British horror has enough laughs, gore and nice little touches to set it apart from the flock.
The plot, concerning a stag party deciding that Zomball, a sort of paintball involving zombies, would be the perfect climax to their fun. Some nice satirical touches here, as the living dead, victims of a Bird Flu pandemic, are being used as a money making enterprise by a shady American businessman. Anyway, it all starts off fine, with the boys having quite a ball shooting up the shambling dead. However, when the hunters become the hunted, things aren't quite so enjoyable anymore. The best man is revealed as a coward and a love rat, one of the party falls in love with a very comely zombie lass, and soon everyone is fighting for their lives.
The characters are on the whole well rounded and likeable. There is one big exception. Ronnie. Ah yes, Ronnie, possibly the most annoying character to grace a British horror film. However, once he recieves a love bite and becomes an unofficial spokesman for the Zombie Party, Ronnie improves a lot.
The acting is very good, the standouts being Sophie Lovell Anderson as novice stripper Candy and Doug Grant as potential father in law Gordon.
The main thing is that 'Stag Night Of The Dead' is just so bloody enjoyable. The zombie film needn't worry, for as long as films like this continue to be made, there will be plenty of life in the old, rotting corpse. Plenty of extras on this release, including an informative 'making-of' featurette, and the highlight for me, the 'bollocks' out take.
5 out of 5 for the whole package, a great entertainment.

If you enjoy zombies, comedy, guns, and girls (and not necessarily in that order), you'll be genuinely glad that you checked out "Stag Night of the Dead."

The plot of "SNotD" is a fun one: set in the U.K., the story follows soon-to-be-wed Dean and his stag party (better known as a bachelor party to us Yankees across the pond), with a stripper in tow; they move from the ho-hum, routine stag party goings-on of strippers whipping the near-naked, upside-down groom to the more exciting, exhilarating, and dangerous activity of Zomball, a secretive and probably-not-totally-legal extreme sport where the participants shoot zombies for recreation. A couple of catches with Zomball, though: the guns used to shoot the undead are electric-pulse rifles (one of the characters even references the weapons as "Stargate rejects") that only stun the zombies for 5 minutes, even though the rifles take 10 minutes to reload; and there are three main rules of Zomball ("Stay together," "Look out for the Recharge Stations," and "Never humiliate a zombie"), all of which the stag party members manage to break pretty damn quickly. As you might guess, things start to go awry, and the party starts to lose members (in more cringe-inducing ways than one).

"Stag Night of the Dead" is a one-of-a-kind zombie viewing experience: a movie that dares to be different, and the result is infinitely enjoyable. It is easily a movie that could be ripe for a big-budget Hollywood remake, as Hollywood so loves to do with "foreign" movies it likes. If you like to watch zombies on film and feel conflicted because you're laughing as you're screaming, this one should be right up your alley.

Feel free to visit The G.O.R.E. Score website for the full review, including the four-category G.O.R.E. synopsis.

--Tony Schaab, author of The G.O.R.E. Score Volume 1: A Review Guide To All Things Zombie and Reviews of the Dead: 25 Zombie Movies to Die For