Review of Woke Up Dead (2010)
Official Blurb
In this Shaun of the Dead style zombie comedy, Drex Greene (Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder), a confused zombie who can’t be any deader, tries to solve the case of the mystery pill that left him drowned in a bathtub. With the help of his wannabe filmmaker roommate Matt (The Daily Show’s Josh Gad) and the sexy med student Cassie (Breaking Bad’s Krysten Ritter), who first discovers Drex as he unzips himself from his own body bag, the three begin to uncover leads about why his death didn’t stick, why a mystery online chat buddy is after him and why he’s starting to show signs of superpowers. Will they figure out why Drex is only sort of dead? Will Cassie discover ancient Zombie secrets? Will Matt get a film career out of it? Or is falling in love actually what Drex needs to do to stay alive? Woke up Dead co-stars Wayne Knight (Seinfeld) and Jean Smart (24, Frasier).
Review
Woke up Dead is the creation of John Fasano who has a slew of titles under his belt for writing, producing, directing, and acting. While I haven’t seen most of what he has worked on previously there are two movies he’s written that I HAVE seen – Darkness Falls and Another 48 Hours. Not too much on the horror front but this one is more of a comedy than a horror film. Of course with the main star being Jon Heder I doubt anyone figured it would be anything but hilarious (unless of course you hate Heder.)
Woke Up Dead originally was ‘aired’ in webisode format on Crackle and I was a bit surprised that the film was put together so well. As I mentioned it started as webisodes. 22 4 minute webisodes put together into a feature film which is now ready for you to enjoy.
The story begins with Drex Green (Jon Heder) whose heart was broken and ends up wanting to take a cold bath. The only problem this cold bath ends up with him being under water for 15 minutes and ‘woke up dead’ after.) His best friend, a film student named Matt (Josh Gad) discovers him and has the recorded proof that he was under water for too long and wants to make a web series about the While at first that’s a bit of a stretch he’s hit by a bus soon after and with no heartbeat is tossed in a body bag and discovered by a medical student named Cassie(Krysten Ritter) who has dreams of turning his undeath into her ticket to money and fame in her medical profession.
Drex, once a loser and now one of the undead tries to return to a normal life after he’s been dead. Yes he’s returned from the life and has a hunger for brains. In fact the only thing that he CAN eat is brains without getting sick. Pretty much everyone who annoys him turns into a brain chewing fantasy in his mind. Aside from that there are no ‘zombie’ activities that happens. Drex gets super strength, heat vision, improved healing, and all kinds of random ‘powers’ with a strange man stalking him.
This is not your typical zombie film in any way shape or form. While Drex is technically a zombie he’s an intelligent zombie (has been done) and can eat animal brains instead of humans (can be done.) It’s not a horror film (even with a zombie) but unlike films like Fido which was also low on gore with a zombie as one of the center characters you can’t exactly call it a comedy since it wasn’t that funny. It was however interesting in that different type of film kind of way. It’s not a comedy but has a lot of comedians, it’s not a romantic comedy but it has Drex trying to get interested with Cassie, it’s not a horror film though it does show Drex fantasizing about eating zombies. I’m not sure if I can suggest buying it but I would say renting would be a plus. The only part of it I could say is a ‘problem’ is that there is a HUGE cliffhanger at the end and we have no idea if there will be a sequel released. So sitting through it won’t give you all of the answers, just a few. If you do need to own everything zombie related though it is available at Amazon
