Dead & Breakfast (2005)

If anything, Dead & Breakfast's heart is in the right place -- with its gore-splattered insanity and slapstick leanings, this horror comedy tries hard to be the next midnight cult fave, which it very well might become despite its pedestrian stabs at wacky hijinks. In distribution hell for almost a year, the flick occupied its own place in 2003-2004's indie zombie horror triumviral that included the U.K.'s Shaun of the Dead and Australia's own Undead, all of which share the love for the genre in their own distinct ways. Breakfast's stamp comes in the form of a goofy style of humor that throws as many jokes to the wall as it does appendages. Though the joke-by-the-minute approach certainly isn't the best, you can't say that the filmmakers didn't try to do something different. With its inventive use of comic-styled illustrations and a hillbilly honky-tonk musician narrator, Dead & Breakfast certainly tries to do something new, even if the filmmakers' ideas are often loftier than the eye-rolling outcomes (look no further than the dreadful redneck rap musical number for proof). On the upside, the movie does embrace its 35 mm stock to give a better-than-DV quality to it and there certainly are plenty of blood buckets for the fans to slop up, so at least it can be easily devoured by the genre masses despite its bitter aftertaste. ~ Jeremy Wheeler, All Movie Guide