BONG OF THE DEAD (2009)

Bong Of the Dead is an ultra low budget, gore filled romp set in a world over run by the living dead. And the heroes?...two stoners just looking for some weed dude, Check my review for this great Canadian Stoner horror comedy....

Ive seen a lot of low budget zombie films in my short time on this planet, and while some have been absolute trash, others have had a more polished look and a lot more care put into them. Ones that spring to mind are ZMD: Zombies Of Mass Destruction, Automaton Transfusion and to a lesser extent, the Asylum's I Am Omega, These films had a sense of quality to them so I was pleased when I was contacted by Canadian film Maker Thomas Newman, his film Bong Of The Dead was selected for the Cannes Independent film festival. When I found this out I was intrigued and did a little bit of research on the film. I discovered that this really was almost a one man show, Shot in 15 days with one camera on a budget of $5000 and it got selected for cannes. Thomas asked if I would like a screener copy so I jumped at the chance. Well I sat down and watched it and unlike the last low budget Zombie film that played at Cannes (Colin) I actually really enjoyed Bong Of The Dead.

The Title immediately tells you this is no ordinary zombie film, you know straight away this is gonna be a comedy and for a film made on a budget of $5000, it's actually really funny. I review a lot of films on the site and one of my favorite kinds of comedy is the stoner comedy, Films in which the main goal of the film is to get some weed, BOTD is exactly that, Two stoner dudes want to grow super weed so head off to get some special ingredients. Now I do not condone drug use, and I don't want to be an advocate of buying weed because it is illegal, but man do I like watching people in films getting high.

When you think of Stoner comedies, you always have a double act, a comedy duo. Bong Of The Dead has this double act in the form of Edwin and Tommy. Edwin is this kind of Tommy Chong inspired hippy throwback with his long hair, denim waistcoat and bandanna wrapped around his head where as Tommy is more of the Skater stoner, baseball cap slung to the side, his ears pierced and he's pretty dumb. They work well with each other Edwin is the brains and Tommy is..well, Tommy just smokes weed all day. The two of them reminded me of the double acts in previous stoner comedies, most notably Cheech and Chong and Coop and Remer from BASEketball. These kinds of movies need a good double act if it wants to succeed and Newman does with these two characters.

Lets take a look at the plot.

The film opens with a a meteor shower bringing to earth a virus or something I guess, well the meteors infect people and turn them into flesheating zombies...

Fast forward and it's now the apocalypse, Edwin has created a sort of green goo that makes weed grow really fast. He shows Tommy and they end up smoking all of it in 20 minutes. How did Edwin make the goo? He ground up zombie brains. When they realise there is a shortage of zombies in their area, they decided to hit the road and head for the dangerzone, the place with most zombies to collect some zombie brains to make some zombie weed.

Along the way they get kidnapped by Alex, a sort of hybrid of zombie and human, he's dead but he can talk and proceed to tell E&T about his plans to create an unstoppable army of the dead, The two manage to escape and hit the road again only to run out of gas. They meet fellow survivor Leah and

decided to all go to the dangerzone togther in Leah's modified truck but they come up against zombie Alex and all hell breaks loose.

Now I don't want to give away to much of the plot because there would be no point in watching it then and the whole fun of watching a film is to find out where the plot goes.

The cast consists of three main characters, Edwin, Tommy and Leah. Im said abit about the characters of E&T but im gonna look at they're performances. Lets start with Tommy, played by comedian Jy Harris, he's the doofus of the two, it's though he has the mind of a child but he's really just an idiot. Harris, being a comedian has great comic timing and gives a good performance, he's a coward at the end of the day until his friends are in trouble and he steps up albeit in comedy fashion .

Edwin is played by Mark Wynn, and he's very funny as the brains of the two, with his laid back attitude he comes across as the sort of guy who really couldn't give a damn that world has been taken over by zombies aslong as he gets his weed. His interaction with Harris is spot on, they have great comic timing between them and he kind of turns into a mini badass at the end.

Finally out of the three we have Leah, played by the georgeous Simone Bailey (SG1, The L-Word) who is the more accomplished actor of the three and her character is very well written by Newman. She has this tough Ripley-esq quality about her. She handles a shotgun well, she can fix cars, and she looks hot in her white tank top. The is a particually good scene involving all three after a night of smoking weed and drinking vodka where they're all on the come-down and she tells them how she became the surviving member of her family and what she had to do to survive. This is a very well written monologue and credit due to both Newman for his writing and to Bailey for her performance in this scene.

Now to the direction and making of the film. As I stated the film was shot in 15 days on one camera and with a budget of $5000 and every penny was thrown at the screen. Newman's debut features some brilliant camera work. The opening credits have a wonderfully animated intro that leads into a close up of a record player and it's lit well, there are also good uses of tracking shots, angles of the camera are spot on, sometimes with low budget films you often see that a) it's a really bad cobbled together set or b) the shot is in the wrong posistion as the filmmakers have never used a camera before but here everyshot works which give the film a much more professional look which is what raises this above most low budget horror movies. Another great aspect of the film is the visual FX, created without any prior knowledge of VFX, Newman creates some great images from the shot of the meteors hurtling towards earth to the additional bloodspray on top of the actual prop blood used.

His screenplay consists of the usual 'Dude' 'fuck' and 'shit' which you'd find in most stoner comedies, but the rest of the dialogue flows really well and there are some subtle references to other films and TV shows, I distinctly recall a news report at the beginning about a sighting of ManBearPig which is a reference to South Park which is great because it's one of my all time favourite shows....

So to end this review, what was my overall impression of BONG OF THE DEAD?

I absolutely loved it, it had buckets of gore, limbs flying everywhere and had a great funny screenplay. I enjoyed watching the characters and how they end up and it's just an all round fun film. My only gripe was the post production sound recording as it was unnatural and sometimes it seemed out of sync but i got used to that after about 20 minutes. I hope he does get the distribution he deserves as it would be a shame for this film to go unrecognized. And I hope Thomas Newman is given more money, a bigger crew and chance to make bigger even better movies...