Coming
to the Anchorage Film Festival December 5 '09 at the Bear Tooth
at 10pm
Here's what the festival's founder Tony has to say
about it: It's a Political Zomedy. Not much to say besides that
it's funny, political and made in the Northwest. The zombies are
as traditional as can be: slow, lumbering, instinctively and relentlessly
hungry. They stumble about, decorated in the undead war paint
of bloody gashes, torn limbs, and rent flesh, as they take big
bloody bites out of the hapless human snacks that populate the
ever-shrinking pool of the living.
It's the heroes who are different in ZMD: Zombies
of Mass Destruction: an Iranian-American college girl and a young
gay man who has yet to come out to his mother. And then there's
the setting: Port Gamble, Kitsap's picture-perfect mill town.
Beneath the surface calm of white picket fences and tree-lined
streets are roiling forces of religious hysteria, anti-Islamic
paranoia, homophobia, and patriotic rhetoric. All of it is played
for big, bright, bloody laughs.
It's political satire meets gory horror farce, Night
of the Living Dead as a 21st-century neocon comedy, in which a
zombie plague is interpreted as a terrorist attack or the End
of Days. Maybe both.
It's not a subtle film, but with blood spattering,
limbs flying, and dozens of gray-faced undead chewing human flesh,
subtlety isn't the point. ZMD is instead a midnight movie that
ridicules intolerance and nationalist arrogance.
That's exactly where local filmmaker Kevin Hamedani,
a recent UW grad, wanted to take the film. "I'm Iranian-American,"
he explains. "I never really thought of myself that way, but after
9/11, that sort of changed." His friendly neighbors up in Edmonds
eyed him with a new suspicion, he says. But his epiphany came
while flying in the weeks after 9/11. "I remember sitting there
on the airplane and looking at every Middle Eastern–looking passenger,
thinking 'What's in that suitcase?' And then I went to the restroom
and looked in the mirror."
It inspired him to write a script, first as a serious
drama. Then Hamedani, a lifelong horror-movie fan, reworked it
through the fertile ground of zombie cinema, with echoes of George
Romero, Sam Raimi, and Stephen Colbert's right-wing spoofery.
"I think what sold me was the title," confesses John Sinno, the
Seattle producer of James Longley's Oscar- nominated 2006 documentary
Iraq in Fragments. Hamedani contacted Sinno to help raise funds
for what he essentially saw as a underground film. He ended up
with a producer, one who also understood zombie-movie tradition.
"It's one of the most political genres we have,"
says Sinno, "because you have a system that's breaking down. And
when the system breaks down, you have a look at the underpinnings."
The
Zombie Walk on 9/19/09 was a big success.
Check
out the YouTube's Part
1 and Part
2.
Zombie
Make Up Class
On September
4 Candace and Rachel turned some zombie wannabees into the real
thing. All it took was some gashes, gore, skin flaps and liberal
amounts of blood, oh, and a number 2 pencil to the head ...
