Dont wake the dead (2008)

Ok, so someone has given Andreas Schnaas enough money to make a movie again... what is the world coming to? I will forgive him for the Violent shit trilogy and Zombie 90, these are tongue in cheek flicks which shouldnt be taken seriously whatsoever and they have given me lots of entertainment back in the days when the world focused on vhsdupes of uncut movies. His Anthropophagous 2000 was better than I expected but then came the awful Demonium and one of the worst movies I have ever seen - Nikos the impaler. These are awful pieces of digital bits that are supposed to resemble movies and I swore to never watch a Schnaasmovie ever again. Until now.

So why did I let myself do such a horrible thing? The answer is - The trailer. From looking at it (once) Dont wake the dead appears to be nice little homage to Amando De Ossorios Blind dead movies and (yet again, from looking at the trailer) actually looks like a movie. The little kid in me rejoiced - zombies and gore. How can you fail? Well, actually you can. The movie starts ok with a flashback full of gore where a group of templars are killed by villagers in a small town. Flash forward to present day where some nice looking ladies are going to an old mansion (yes, where the templar buria l ground is located) to help a friend renovate. A german punk/metalband are gonna provide some entertainment and all looks well until a weird guy appears, performing some sort of ritual and presto, the dead awake (along with some nazis that tried to kill them during the war - now servants to the undead templars). So, the rest of the movie follow the usual patterns. Tits - gore - tits - gore. Should be a winner, right?

Wrong.

The first problem is that Andreas Schnaas still isnt a good director who doesnt know how to stage a coherent narrative. The result is a string of gorescenes loosely connected by an excuse for a plot, nothing we havent seen ten times before. It doesnt really help much that acting is pretty mediocre, though I suspect that that owes more to the fact that the actresses arent speaking in their native language. But the worst crime of the movie occurs about an hour in, when the punkband returns from the dead to have a concert in the mansion with all the templar zombies headbanging to the music. WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU SCHNAAS?!?! If you want to shoot a musicvideo for some of your friends, do that and include it in the extras if you really have to BUT DONT PUT IT IN THE FUCKING MOVIE! It stops the movie dead in its tracks, is intercut with the footage of the zombies stalking their victims and fits in the whole thing like, I dont know, a decent narrative in an Andreas Schnaas movie?!

You know, i wanted to like the movie more than I finally did. The movie is pretty quick with introducing the zombies (and you get several gorefilled flashbacks before that even happens) and you dont have to wait very long between the numerous (and decently designed) gorescenes. The actresses do a decent enough job even though they are struggling with the language and most of them have nudescenes which is a plus. I've seen worse, lots worse movies. But then came the concertscene. It's just... retarded. One second you're seeing the survivors being hunted down in the cellar by one of the former, now zombiefied friends and next you're wathing her dance in front of the stage in that FUCKING concert. Are you guys trying to be fucking Lordi?!?! Aaaaargh. This scene totally killed the movie for me, and I'd rather watch Violent shit 1 on a blurry vhs before ever watching this again.

If Schnaas ever decides to edit out that scene in a directors cut and perhaps tighten up the flow a bit, then this could be a decent enough little goremovie. But as it is today, I can only recommend this movie to fans of metalbands in monstermasks.

And who designed that poster? Stevie Wonder?