Eat the Parents

Saw this film before Poultrygeist at the Toronto After Dark film festival.

Eat the Parents takes the idea behind Meet the Parents, and mixes it with the gore/comedy style that Tales from the Crypt was so famous for. The film stays true to the Tales from the Crypt concept, the main character uses voodoo to play god, gets carried away, and in the end gets her just deserts. And what a fine desert it is!

The film is completely over the top in terms of acting, camera work and gore, which makes for a pretty entertaining 10 minutes. The only thing missing here is the Cryptkeeper!

Eat the Parents has a brilliant premise: a zombie twist on the parents-meeting-future-spouse scenario, that has been done in countless comedy films, such as Meet the Parents, Guess Who, etc. However, within a few seconds of the film, it becomes apparent that filmmaker Jason Zukowski is still learning the art of film and has made what would be passable as a student film, but is definitely not something that anyone would want to view on their own time.

The writing is dull, and neither funny nor scary. I caught the film before the main feature at a horror-themed film festival. Zukowski was in attendance and introduced the film as his tribute to "Tales from the Crypt", although this film seems to have nothing in common with the television series. The series often had a mixture of oddball humor and disturbing content. None of that is evident here; the film is more in line with a SNL skit and all the humor is derived from lame gore gags (i.e. the zombie sticking a straw in his eye, the zombie sticking a knife in his hand, etc.).

The direction is lazy as well. I could almost predict every shot. The camera goes in for pointless close-ups after every 3 or 4 seconds and whenever there is a gory scene, there is a different shot in which obviously the actors were fitted with some make up/latex or something else of the sort.

To sum it up, everything from this film looks as if it were from a mediocre student film. The writing is uninspired. The jokes are lame. The gore is unconvincing. The actors are wooden. The shots and editing are random, as if they just felt like cutting to a different angle for no apparent reason. It's shocking that it got into a festival!

Note: I posted this review about two months after the premiere of the film. Keep in mind it's not a very well known film and not many people visit this page. Within a week of my review being up, it was rated not helpful by 3 people and a rave review was put up by someone with no posting or comment history, saying the exact opposite of what I said. So basically the director is trying to make it look like people are putting up good reviews.