 |
||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
American Zombie
A Review by Geoff Bough
American Zombie is the brainchild of acclaimed documentary film maker
Grace Lee whose 2005 documentary The Grace Lee Project was well received.
The Grace Lee project chronicled Grace Lee’s quest to contact women
all across the country with the same name as her in an effort to bring
to light societal prejudices towards Asian American women.
Quite a departure from her previous works, American Zombie finds Lee teamed with John Solomon (an investigative reporter), who both play themselves in the film to document the lives of an undead community in Los Angeles. The two quickly find that a virus, brought on by a violent death, is turning members of the community into zombies.
The film candidly follows the sordid lives of 4 highly functioning “Revenants”: Ivan (Austin Basis), a convenience store clerk who creates a zine in his free time, Lisa (Jane Edith Wilson), a florist who designs funeral floral arrangements and subtly longs for the peace in eternal rest, Joel (Al Vicente), who is the founder of Z.A.G (Zombie Advocacy Group,) an activist bent on ensuring equality for the undead, and finally we have Judy, a timid Asian American zombie in search of the happiness of true love.
With the virus and notion of zombies being relatively new, each of the zombies represent their own sort of social struggle in a community that has not quite yet accepted them as equal. It’s widely known that utilizing the undead as a vessel to express or raise social awareness can be quite profound. This is certainly the case with American Zombie as those of us who are socially conscious can identify with them. It also draws many parallels to social/political scenarios and inequalities plaguing society today.
The documentary approach of the film has its pros and cons, which some people may weigh differently. I felt that through candidly following the zombies, the situations and character struggles had more of an impact because they weren’t glossed over. They were grittier real world scenarios. However, the pacing of the film was dreadfully slow at times. Grace is more concerned with documenting the struggles of the zombies with focused attention, while John is fanatical about discovering if they do in fact eat human flesh. The two often clash in comical arguments which later become overused.
The film then takes an unnecessary journey to the zombie social event Live Dead, a sort of Burning Man for the undead. Here we see the zombies interacting en masse as the human outsiders seem to be ostracized. Their mission to further document the zombie culture intensifies and John’s suspicions of the zombies is proven true.
I was caught off guard by the conclusion of the film because the entirety of it was building up the zombies as these fun-loving, misunderstood, vulnerable creatures that we were beginning to feel sympathetic towards. That had to be completely disregarded as we now learn that they are indeed the malicious, murderous dispositions that John pegged them as. Just as the film was really making you think about what issues the zombies were representing in our own society, I got this all-for-not feeling that left me as if I was being chastised for caring about the plight of the zombies.
American Zombie is a very ambitious and thought-provoking film but the ending really throws off the groundwork the film had built thus far. What could have been a brilliant socio-political satire was more of a tepid, comical expose of social downfalls. American Zombie was an obvious departure for Lee so I applaud her for exploring her film canvas and I will certainly pay attention to her future works. I do recommend American Zombie at least for it’s crafty use of documentary film making and zombies to encourage social awareness, something we’re looking forward to seeing from Diary of the Dead as well.