Zombie Planet

It's always so embarrassing to get caught in the middle of pigging out.For some reason several of the hillbillies invite Kane to come along with them as they leave the safety of their compound to wander around the outside world for a while. As they're wandering around what looks surprisingly like a well-kept suburban neighborhood, they run into a band of thugs working for Adam. "Thugs" might be too strong of a word, however, because besides one big guy with crazy eyes and crazier teeth, the thugs all weigh about 130 pounds and probably couldn't pull the wings off a zombie fly. One of the thugs, "Stiletto," further dispels any menacing aspects by being a pudgy little guy with a high whiny voice and what appears to be eyeliner. Stiletto screeches at the Dregs for a while before going up to one of them and throwing some food in his face. Kane, who had never met any of these people more than twelve hours prior, absolutely freaks out at this show of disrespect and runs around throwing food at thugs and grabbing their shirt collars before the giant crazy-eyed thug grabs him by the throat. "He doesn't know you like we do!" plead the other Dregs. "Please don't hurt him!" Stiletto laughs, his face dripping with some sort of disgusting liquefied dog food, and lets them go unscathed, because we all know that bullies are really cowards at heart.

Having had their fill of excitement for the day, the band of Dregs start heading back to their fortified compound. When they get there, they all turn to the stupid one. "Where's the key?" one asks. The stupid hillbilly feels around in his pockets, his face twisting into a mask of despair. "I had it right here!" he bawls. "I swear I had it!" One wonders how they survived as long as they have when they entrust their most important possession to the retard of the group, who is too busy stroking his dolly to form coherent thoughts, much less be in any position of responsibility.

Instead of banging on the door to get the attention of one of the many people who are still inside, all the hillbillies begin freaking out. The sun is going down, after all, and the instant the sun dips below the horizon, zombies are going to spring out of nowhere and consume them all, so time is of the essence. Luckily Kane keeps his cool. "I need a piece of metal!" he yells, and someone immediately hands him a long thin pick which he begins poking at the locking mechanism. The rest stand around uneasily. "I need another one!" Kane shouts, and as luck would have it, someone happened to have another lockpick handy. As Kane works furiously, the hillbillies look around and then all turn towards one young hillbilly that has never been onscreen before. "Jason!" they shout. "Go over there and distract the zombies!" Jason, consigned to his fate as sacrificial redshirt, nods meekly and runs off to jump up and down and wave his arms as an army of zombies begins to flood out of the shadows.

Kane finally manages to wiggle the lockpicks enough to open the door and then all dive inside save Jason, who is still "distracting" the zombies. Since the zombies are cogent enough to be able to discriminate between different kinds of meat, one wonders why they would all head for one guy waving his arms instead of twenty other people all huddling together nervously. It's simply a mystery of the zombie mythos, I guess. Jason is soon overpowered and gang chewed, which is like gang rape only with teeth.

Evil warlord Adam at his evillest. Note the bad teeth, even on the rubber mask.A little later the Dregs are sitting around and Kane conveniently asks how all of this came to pass. The others look at him incredulously. "You mean you don't know?" they ask, and he shakes his head, giving them the perfect opportunity to fill in the backstory. Turns out it all started around 2008 when a high-protein diet fad was in full swing. (Much like "Law & Order", "Zombie Planet" was ripped straight from the headlines.) Scientists managed to develop an enzyme called "Carbtryhydrine" or something that completely eliminated a person's craving for carbohydrates. Despite being a horribly bad idea that any nutritionist would instantly veto, the drug became wildly popular overnight. "It was the biggest selling drug of all time," one says, and everyone was happy, until one of the original test subjects suddenly bought ten pounds of raw meat, ate it all standing up, then moved on to eating the family poodle as her confused husband looked on.

Soon scientists discovered that the drug made people crave endless protein, and a brief montage shows beef prices skyrocketing to $150/lb. Then people started eating each other and turned into zombies. Kane is confused. "Wait, what?" he asks, and the Dreg leader again repeat that people just somehow started turning into zombies. This plot point seemed a little muddy so I went back and transcribed the dialogue to make sure I didn't miss anything important:

Dreg Leader: Those taking the drug had to have protein in any form they could get. Cooked, raw, living, dead... the zombie plague had begun.
Kane: But... that still doesn't explain how these things can keep going after they're dead.
Dreg Leader: Well, then the unexplainable happened.

THAT'S IT. In an entire movie based around zombies, there isn't even a half-assed attempt to explain why zombies exist. Perhaps unbeknownst to the director, there already is an affliction in which people start eating the flesh of other people. It's called cannibalism, and it has a long and celebrated history in the horror genre. If you really must insist on having zombies, here you go: some sort of virus spread and turned people into the living undead. There. I'm getting sick of writing people's plots for them.

The next day Kane and a bunch of Dregs go to pay tribute to the warlord Adam, who lives in a school gymnasium. Apparently it's time for the "festival of death," and Adam decides that Kane must battle one of his thugs to prove his worth, or something of the sort. This involves everyone clearing a circle in the middle of the gymnasium while various blunt and bladed weapons are tied to ropes and lowered from the ceiling into the newly formed arena, basically like Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome only with more eyeliner.

As Kane and the random thug square off I was going to take a bathroom break but soon I was pleasantly surprised at what a surprisingly good fight scene the movie puts on with the fighters grabbing various weapons and actually making a concerted attempt to pretend like they're trying to kill each other. Let that be a lesson to any future aspiring moviemakers: you too can put on a decent fight scene, though it probably means spending all your resources to the point where you forget the difference between a zombie and a cannibal.

By this point we're only halfway into the two hour movie but everything quickly slides downhill as Kane returns to the Dreg compound and then everyone wanders around in various combinations, occasionally being attacked by zombie cannibals. There's a love interest, and a jealous rival, and ten minute flashback sequences, and various rival factions, but none of it matters because the movie simply has no ending. Before the credits roll Kane has suddenly decided to leave because he feels "there is something more out there" although there's no explanation given for what the hell that is supposed to mean. Then, it turns out the warlord Adam's girlfriend was secretly conspiring against him and slits his throat. At about this point, as Kane is saying goodbye to his love interest over the strains of a power ballad, this screen appears:

And the credits immediately roll. If you're going to make a bad movie, at least have the decency to actually end it and not torture us with even the slightest prospect of having to sit through another one. Plus the fact that Adam got his throat graphically cut open in the last two minutes of the movie makes me wonder what the hell kind of revenge he is planning... unless he is really a zombie? Wait, I'm writing their movie for them again. Never mind.

– Andrew "Linguica" Stine