Review: Festival of the Living Dead
By William Pattison
Ok, I just finished watching the
Soska Sisters latest film, Festival of the Dead. I might post a more detailed
review later on my blogs, but I thought I’d share my initial thoughts on this
Tubi TV original film.
First off I thought the film was
very watchable. It was by far more watchable than their two hour S&M film
that they filmed on their IPhones. This film actually had professional audio.
Congratulations girls! You actually had a professional film crew with you that
made this film look better than a first year film student. Shit, they even had
drone shots!!!
The story is about a girl who
treats her longtime friends and her little brother like shit because she has
decided she wants to fit in and be a shallow self-involved asshole like her new
friends and her Chad boyfriend and his rich buddy.
She ends up leaving her little
brother with her unappreciated best friend and her unappreciated best friend’s
wheelchair bound boyfriend to go to a rock festival in the forest with her new
social masters. Amusingly when they are going to park at the event they end up getting
into an accident when they hit what they don’t know is a zombie. The main
character and the Chads go off to get medical help and leave the two femaie
socials behind because they are hurt, how truly social of them. So they find
the first aid station and find it all messed up. They run into a girl who is
having a bad trip on mushrooms. Rich Chad steals her mushrooms and amusingly
gives them to Main girl and her Chad.
Then they hear music and
amazingly forget the social girls and go to the main stage to party. At the
main stage Main girl starts hallucinating and see the Soska Sisters dancing,
because she is a Soska fan. Her living room, which was shown earlier had a
bunch of Soska film posters all over its walls. Anyway, the imaginary Jen and
Sylvia blow smoke in her face. Then she starts to see zombies in among the
crowd, and guess what? The zombies are real and start attacking people.
Anyway, they have to escape the
zombies and Main girl’s abused friends and little brother show up to add to the
potential body count.
So, I found the main character
rather confusing because she acts all strong argumentative and knowledgeable
about guns and fighting with her unappreciated friends and her brother yet she
cows down initially with the Chads and the social girls. This makes her very
much an annoying Mary Jane character. She does go through a story arch and
realizes the error of her turning her back on her friends and being so abusive
to her brother, but this is at the expense of people’s lives.
I find it rather amusing that it
is the Soskas that are writing a morality tale about the evils of choosing a
petty, shallow, self-absorbed life over what matters when Jen and Sylvia have
burned bridges and stabbed anyone who supported them in the past in order to
gain false power in horror through The Horror Socials. In fact it seems a bit hypercritical
in my opinion, and I’m one of the people who had been a “friend” of Jen and
Sylvia and learned the hard way how little the two of them really respect
friendship and those who have helped them.
Anyway this film is a watchable
zombie film that doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It has a few Easter eggs to Romero’s
Dead films, so fans of those films and the Return of the Living Dead films won’t
be completely disappointed.
So there you go. There is my
honest opinion. Now the Soska fans can mouth off and say I’m wrong and this is
a masterpiece of zombie cinema. Ugh, I taste bile…
