REVIEW: Keg of the Dead

“Via YouTube: Student film on 16mm shot at the TKE house @ UC Berkeley. Features former TKE President Tom Bell as a killing zombie. The film is about a dick fraternity who doesn’t pay a pizza delivery boy, and get eaten alive by zombies. The pizza boy becomes a hero and kills all the zombies. Yay.”

Don’t let the description of the movie fool you. Though it sounds like a student wrote it and though students filmed the movie, it’s actually not bad. I go to a film school and I have seen a lot of films that were good but mostly bad. Very rarely have I ever seen a good student film… that was shot on film! Keg of the Dead was shot on 16mm so that leads me to believe they must have used a Bolex, Keystone, Beaulieu or something a little better, so as I was watching this I couldn’t believe how well it was made. For a movie that was entirely shot on film, and knowing how hard it is to shoot on film, the lighting was fantastic. All the weird colors, the exposure, the consistency were handled very well.

As I watched the absurd sound effects, the way the entire party just randomly transformed into a hoard of zombies, the zombie band and the lone pizza delivery boy spraying beer on the zombies… I couldn’t help but think that it was homaging Night of the Creeps and From Dusk Till Dawn. Or perhaps they weren’t but it seemed like it. I loved the sound effects because it made me feel like I was watching a Lucio Fulci film, the gore was great and the absurdity was through the roof. Give it a watch below. All I can say is that if this film was aired in my class people would hate it because it doesn’t look David Lynchian but to the general viewer it’s a fun little zombie movie and nothing more.