Aziz (Yahya Gaier) was a lowly office drone whose sole source of hope that something interesting might happen to him was one of his co-workers, the alluring Tess (Nadia Polesa Poeschmann), who asked him to meet up with her when they were arranged to be staying late. Unfortunately for Aziz, his brother Mo (Mimoun Ouled Radi) insisted on calling him at his desk over and over to tell him what a great time he was having partying, and his boss noticed. The result? Aziz is fired that day, he doesn't get to see Tess, and when he gets home he tries to stop a fight at the party which lands him in jail.
All of which is a way of setting up how Aziz, Mo, and the two bodyguards they were scuffling with - Jeff (Sergio Hasselbaink) and Nolan (Uriah Arnhem) - wind up at the police station when all hell breaks loose in Amsterdam as a crashing Russian space station lands in the city. As you may have guessed from the title, changed from the too in-jokey for international audiences original of Zombibi, this breeds a bunch of zombies who shuffle their way through the streets munching on the uninfected, not the most imaginative premise for a movie, but this was not the most imaginative of movies. In fact, it was yet another Shaun of the Dead-inspired comedy horror, itself the spawn of Night of the Living Dead.
The way these zombie flicks were spreading like a rash across international cinema was something of an epidemic itself, but as long as people were fascinated by the idea of the flesh-consuming undead, it seemed that there was no stopping them, not even with a bullet to the head. If anything, the more zombie movies there were, in spite of there being very little to distinguish them by this late stage, then the further it encouraged low budget and blockbuster moviemakers alike to film even more, leading to a vision of the greater part of DVDs available across the globe being zombie movies, in all their variations. Well, both their variations: intended to be serious and and intended to be funny.
This little item was a low budget, intended to be funny variant, and if it failed to raise much in the way of solid laughs, then at least it was approached with enthusiasm, even if that vigour might have been better applied to a fresher concept. For Dutch directors Martijn Smits and Erwin van den Eshof, this was their first major feature after mostly shorts, and they displayed some skill in working with their limited resources, keeping the plotline barrelling along with a sprightly spring in its step. After our motley crew of four misfits are freed from their cells, they emerge to find the walking dead littering the surrounding area, though find an ally in the cop who tasered them, Kim (Gigi Ravelli), who's naturally more capable than the blokes.
Not that this stops them entering into the spirit of the thing and doing their best to immobilise the zombies as they try to get to the safe zone. Well, that's the idea, but Aziz has just received a call on his phone from Tess, who's stuck in his old office block which happens to be the one hit by the space station. Come and save me, says she, the zombies are trying to get me! Being a gallant sort, Aziz sets off for the block no matter that the others want to rob a bank (except for law-abiding Kim), and though it seems to be about a hundred yards away from him, it takes the hero the whole movie to reach it. OK, it's a short movie, but there's a lot of distraction packed into its eighty minutes or so of adventure, and with the jokes mostly of the slapstick and pop culture reference variety (Jeff is interrupted from his Tony Montana impersonation, a Dutch celeb is met a la Bill Murray in Zombieland), it's up to the cast to keep this entertaining. They succeed to a degree, but you really had seen it all before. Music by Matthijs Kieboom and Martijn Schimmer.
[Kaleidoscope's UK DVD has no extras, but zombie addicts could do worse.]
