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PLOT: She is just a loser longing for love. Then, after being infected by a zombie patient, Nurse Patsy Powers not only turns into a sex-crazed, flesh-eating, serial killer, she is suddenly the most popular hottie in the hospital.
A Great movie parody requires a lot of love and even more skill. You have to be able to master the genre you plan to mock, or your movie will die of shame.
It is obvious that the filmmakers behind Graveyard Alive: A Zombie Nurse In Love have the warm and fuzzies for the low-budget horror genre and at least a fondness for afternoon soap operas, which colour how the horror is staged.
The Canadian team of producer-writer-director Elza Kephart, co-writer-producer Patricia Gomez and producer Andrea Stark have collectively declared their admiration for the living legacy of George Romero, Sam Raimi and Canadian iconoclast Guy Maddin, whose dreamscapes fall outside the horror classification but still suggest a highly stylized approach.
So far, so good. These are great guys to pay homage to with a dead-alive parody. However, what is equally obvious in A Zombie Nurse In Love is a shocking lack of skill in delivering the goods. You suspect that Kephart & Company could not make a real horror movie, so they have no right to mess around with the form.
Mess they do, regardless. Merely parading bad actors spouting cretinous dialogue does not make a movie funny or effective. Striking a pose and chewing the scenery does not create a character on screen. Deliberately applying cheeseball makeup does not turn an actor into a campy horror zombie.
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The only attribute of real note is the lambent black-and-white Techniscope cinematography, an old-fashioned, high contrast look that earned this 2003 film an award at a Slamdance filmfest. I did say 2003: This movie took a long time to re-emerge.
The Graveyard Alive story line is basic pulp. Nurse Patsy Powers (Anne Day-Jones) is a mouse -- a patsy, if you prefer -- scurrying to win favour with a self-important surgeon, Dr. Dox (Karl Gerhardt). This preening fop is engaged to a virginal but come-hither nurse named Goodie Tueschuze (Samantha Slan), or Goodie Two Shoes, if you don't get the clunky joke.
Nurse Patsy is the butt of staff jokes at the hospital. But, when she is bitten by a patient -- a zombie woodchopper who arrives in hospital with an axe embedded in his skull -- she turns from a wallflower into a Venus fly-trap.
As the zombie virus takes hold, Patsy finds her femme fatale powers as a sex-crazed killer whom all the men crave, despite her nasty habit of eating human flesh. Keeping with the soap opera theme, Goodie gets all huffy when Dr. Dox turns his wandering eye to the newly created hottie. Somebody will surely die.
Jeez, that summary actually makes this sound like tons o' fun. And maybe it is for the core audience of zombie flick fans whom the Royal Cinema hopes to attract with a regular commercial run, starting today, plus Saturday midnight screenings all summer. The rest of us can stay home.
(This film is rated 18-A)