Crew
Directors – Jen & Sylvia Soska, Screenplay – Miriam Lyapin & Helen Marsh, Producer – Tara Cowell-Plain, Photography – Mirza, Music – Rich Walters, Visual Effects Supervisor – Edward Douglas, Visual Effects – U-FX Studio, Special Effects Supervisor – J.R. Wilson, Makeup Effects – G. Lindala, Production Design – Michael Nemirsky. Production Company – Enlighten Content/Living Dead Productions/Twisted Twin Productions.
Cast
Ashley Moore (Ash), Camren Bicondova (Iris), Andre Anthony (Ty), Christian Rose (Blaze), Shiloh O’Reilly (Luke), Gage Marsh (Kevin), Keana Lyn Bastidas (Destini), Maia Jae Bastidas (Lindsey), Troy James (Jamie), Ryan McEwen (E-Boy), Sophie Chikara (Alisha)
Plot
When her boyfriend Ty offers tickets to the Festival of the Living Dead concert, Ash very much wants to go but is stuck babysitting her younger brother Luke while her parents are away. Her friend Iris offers to babysit Luke in order to allow Ash to go to the concert. However, a meteorite has struck at the festival site. Ty takes a backroad entrance to avoid queues only for them to end up crashing. With one of the girls wounded, the party split to go and get help, only for those left behind to be attacked by a zombie created by the meteorite. Meanwhile, Iris’s friend Blaze has a way for them to go to the concert and sneaks in the backway in his delivery truck. However, they arrive only to find the entire festival grounds being overrun by zombies.
A few years ago, Canada’s Soska Sisters, Jen and Sylvia, appeared with much fanfare. They became It talents for a time because of their dark, subversive take and enthusiasm for genre material as evidenced by their debut feature Dead Hooker in a Trunk (2010) and in particular their follow-up the extraordinary American Mary (2012). Their name has faded somewhat throughout the latter half of the 2010s with the likes of See No Evil 2 (2014), the T is for Torture Porn segment of ABCs of Death 2 (2014), Vendetta (2015), the remake of Rabid (2019) and the as-yet-unseen On the Edge (2022) having failed to create as much buzz.
Festival of the Living Dead was made as a homage to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). At least that is what the film announces itself as being. It was originally intended to be released for the 55th anniversary of Night of the Living Dead, but ended up being held up in release and didn’t come out until the following year. It was released to the Tubi streaming network.
The opening montage locates Night of the Living Dead in the context of film clips of protests, missiles being launching and rock concerts of the era, which looks a promising effort to sociologically root this in the 1960s period given that the original was very much a work of its time. On the other hand, any actual references to Romero’s original in the rest of the film amount to no more than Ashley Moore having a picture of Duane Jones on her wall and referring to him as her grandfather. Throughout his successive sequels to Night of the Living Dead, George Romero created an apocalyptic world where the zombies had overrun society until there was nothing left. By contrast, for all that Festival of the Living Dead calls itself a continuation of the 1968 film, it is as though the original outbreak never occurred – life appears to have continued on with no difference. It is a film where you could remove any reference to Night of the Living Dead and change nothing that happens.
It is sad to see the Soska Sisters making a film like Festival of the Living Dead. For a time, they were seen as edgy and boundary pushing – their production company is named Twisted Twins Productions and going by their early work you get the impression that they fully intended to live up to the name. On the other hand, Festival of the Living Dead is the exact antithesis of that. It is a work of safe horror. The opening scenes cast Camren Bicondova as a champion of anti-authoritarian attitude, only for the middle of the film to then have her lecturing Christian Rose on responsibility “We just can’t do what we want … It’s irresponsible, it’s immature,” while elsewhere we get a bunch of unlikeable teens bickering about every step of the survival process and abandoning each other.
The Soska name gets you in the door watching, while the whole Night of the Living Dead homage is a good hook, but that only serves to show you what an utterly lame disappointment that Festival of the Living Dead is on every level. It is sad what an utterly predictable and unadventurous film it ends up being – it is the Soska Sisters making another teen horror wannabe and an utterly generic zombie film no different from any other. There is the odd flash of Soska barbed humour – the teenager who broadcasts herself to TikTok from the backseat of the vehicle with a wounded leg because “When CJ So Cool poses pictures of his gunshot wounds, he went viral.”
The absolute nadir of the film is surely when Camren Bicondova starts comparing her relationship ideal in terms of wanting it to be “more like Ross and Rachel.” A Soska film that has to make cutsie Friends (1994-2004) references surely kills off for good any edgy image the sisters once had. And then there is the ending – nothing can demonstrate how utterly short of the mark Festival of the Living Dead falls than when the original’s bleak coda where Duane Jones is shot by the sheriff’s department thought to be just another zombie is replaced by the teens driving off as a pop song plays on the car radio – Loser (2021) by Fake Shark – with lyrics “I feel like a loser/I wish I was cooler, baby.”
Trailer here