Crew
Director/Screenplay – Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell & Yoann-Karl Whissell, Screenplay Collaboration – Michael MacKenzie, Based on the Graphic Novel The Zombies That Ate the World (2004- ) by Guy Davis & Jerry Frissen, Producers – Laurent Baudens, Didar Domehri, Christian Larouche, Gregoire Melin & Gael Noualle, Photography – Jean-Philippe Bernier, Music – Le Matos, Special Effects – Blood Brothers FX (Supervisor – Carlo Harrietha), VFX Makeup – Avatar/FX, Production Design – Sylvain Lemaitre. Production Company – Borsalino Productions/Christal Films/Maneki Films/Humanoids/Wag Productions/Sodec Quebec/Telefilm Canada/Crave/Eurimages/Kinology/Les Films Opale/Sofitvcine 9/Le Banque Postale Image 15/Le Banque Postale Image 16/Cofimage 33/Cofinova 18.
Cast
Alexandre Nachi (Karl Neard), Derek Johns (Freddy Mercks), Megan Peta Hill (Maggie Neard), Vincent Leclerc (Seth McKenna), Benz Antoine (Hannity), Rosemarie Sabor (Jane/Zelvirella), Carlo Maestroni (Don), Guy Nadon (Bob Coleman), Patrick-Emmanuel Abellard (Stanley), Marc-Andre Boulanger (Rocco), Clare Coulter (Mrs Neard), Stephane Demers (Otto Maddox), Teneisha Collins (Chelsea Lee), Michelle Leblanc (Dr Judith West)
Plot
The dead have returned to life everywhere. Karl Neard, his sister Maggie and friend Freddy Mercks act as rogue collectors of the dead. However, their activities raise the ire of official collectors whose bounty they are stealing. Two collectors Rocco and Stanley are despatched to stop them. Rocco and Stanley snatch Karl and Maggie’s grandmother and demand that they bring them the $50,000 in lost service fees. The performer Otto Maddox offers the three of them $50,000 if they will dig up the corpse of the actress Zelvirella. However, as they do so Zelvirella’s body collapses. Their only hope seems to be to convince Jane, Karl’s favourite camgirl, to pose as Zelvirella.
We Are Zombies was the third full-length film directed by Quebec-based trio of brother and sister Anouk and Yoann-Karl Whissell and Anouk’s boyfriend Francois Simard. The trio had made a host of shorts before they made the six-minute T is for Turbo (2011) as an entry in the open submission call section of The ABCs of Death (2012). This sufficiently impressed ABCs producer Ant Timpson that he backed them to expand it to feature length as Turbo Kid (2015). The three next went on to make Summer of 84 (2018) where a group of kids believe that a neighbour might be a serial killer and subsequent to this the horror film Wake Up (2023). We Are Zombies is adapted from the French graphic novel The Zombies That Ate the World (2004- ), which first appeared in Metal Hurlant and then several independent releases.
The zombie comedy has been with us going back to the 1990s and the likes of Return of the Living Dead (1985), Nudist Colony of the Dead (1991) and Peter Jackson’s epic Braindead (1992). The genre hit a new high during its revival of the 2000s with the popular hit of Shaun of the Dead (2004). In the wave of zombie films that followed, there were dozens of zombie comedies, gonzo mash-ups and weird titular collusions with the likes of Zombie Beach Party (2003), Zombie Cheerleader Camp (2007), Zombie Strippers! (2008), Attack of the Vegan Zombies! (2009), Santa Claus vs. the Zombies (2010), Bong of the Dead (2011), Cockneys vs Zombies (2012), Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (2016) and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016), among others. (For a full listing see Zombie Films).
Having waded my way through quite a substantial number of 2000s zombie films and comedies, I have reached the 2020s with the feeling that the zombie genre, comedic or otherwise, has started to run out of creative ideas. We Are Zombies arrives with a tone not dissimilar to Shaun of the Dead – the dead are back but they are not so much flesh-eating than an annoyance. (This could be Shaun of the Dead’s world maybe a year or two on from the end of that film). Similarly, the film follows a duo of slackers, more a trio (like Simard and the Whissells, the trio are two male friends and a sister) and their comedic mishaps as they get wound into a situation.
All of this feels like a zombie comedy that has come out a decade too late and is straining to have any relevance, let alone has anything new to add to the mix. There is something mildly amusing to the satiric notion of zombies having just become the bottom feeders of society – employed as short order cooks, weather girls, or are homeless beggars. A similar idea that was hinted at the end of Shaun of the Dead and gained a much more substantial flowering in the serious Miss Zombie (2013). We even get Mother Theresa resurrected as a zombie at one point and a camgirl who pretends to be a zombie to deal with people that have a zombie fetish.
I struggled to find anything in We Are Zombies that was funny. It felt like an earnest wannabe made by well-meaning amateurs, which Simard and the Whissells are certainly not by now. It’s either that or they just haven’t watched enough films in the recent zombie genre. The characters – the male leads anyway – seem like the sort of losers we are meant to find amiable and cute in their gauche nerdiness but just come across as flat caricatures and their humour as forced repartee. The story reaches an abrupt and incomplete ending that feels like it has been left open for a sequel.
Trailer here