Monday 27 March 2017

IBIZA UNDEAD

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

And still they come: the zombie comedies shuffling and shambling along like the undead themselves. Haven't we reached saturation point on these things yet? Folklore, literature, and cinema itself have so many neglected and/or unexplored demons and evils to tap into, surely we could give the tired old zompocalypse a rest for a few years and try something else? This particularly wretched example isn't merely a low point in revenant cinema, but in its crossbreeding with the imbecilic teen sex comedy genre it has mutated into something truly hateful: a film that's not just an insult to zombie movies but horror movies, British movies, movies, Ibiza, Spain, Britain, humanity and the very concept of sentient life itself. Even the zombies themselves would remain unimpressed.

Three repugnant teenage simpletons head to Ibiza for a lads' paaaaartyyyyyy holiday of sex and booze, now that the island has been deemed clear of zombies. They're deeply misogynist imbeciles whose only terms of reference for women are "sluts", "bitches" and "my sister", so it's a matter of profound regret that none of them get ripped to pieces by hordes of flesh-eating undead. Inevitably (and as a direct result of the morons' own stupidity) the zombs get loose again and our three main characters, armed only with a level of intelligence that makes The Three Stooges look like The Bloomsbury Group, have to get back to the villa to rescue the sluts girls and get off the island....

Everything about Ibiza Undead grates horribly. The lads' relentlessly sexist comedy banter gets boring astonishingly quickly, to the extent that you actually want to clamber inside the screen and punch every single one of them repeatedly in the head until your fist stops bleeding. To be fair, the bitches women are scarcely portrayed any more deeply: they seem just as interested in drinking until they're sick and copping off with lads they've just met, but in the absence of anyone to care a hoot's worth about you're at best a dispassionate observer of events and at worst actively on the side of the zombies to hurry up and kill everyone.

Eventually someone who used to be in The Bill about twenty years ago turns up as a cheery barman and the wretched thing stops. There's a reasonable amount of gore (for a 15 certificate) but it's really not worth plodding through all the tedium and foulness to get there. Enough with the knockabout zombiegeddon, enough with the blokey misogyny, it's time to grow up and do something - anything - better than this worthless, witless dross.

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