The RKSS collective, formed by François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell, is back in force this summer, almost ten years after its international success Turbo Kid (2015), the first local film to be adapted into a video game. Not only will the trio present their latest feature film, Wake Upnext August 3 at Fantasia, but in addition, his bloody comedy We Are Zombieswinner of the audience award for best Quebec film at the same festival in 2023, is being shown this week.
However, although this adaptation of the comic book series The Zombies That Ate the Worldby Jerry Frissen and Guy Davis, may please some fans of artisanal genre films, with its burlesque gags and its assumed kitsch artistic direction, it does not reveal itself to be up to the standard of the collective’s previous works.
Indeed, the plot, already complex, is confused in a succession of interludes with dubious humor, more irritating than effective.
Let’s try to summarize. In a capitalist parallel universe, humans coexist with harmless and docile zombies, who are used as cheap labor by all sorts of companies. A multinational pharmaceutical company, Coleman, also collects those whose families can no longer take care of them to use them as guinea pigs. Karl (Alexandre Nachi), his sister Maggie (Megan Peta Hill) and his best friend Freddy (Derek Johns), small-time criminals, therefore pose as Coleman employees and recover zombies that were promised to the company in order to resell them to others.
One day, real pharmaceutical employees realize the scheme and kidnap Karl’s grandmother, demanding a ransom to compensate for the losses incurred by the zombie thefts. Karl, Maggie and Freddy must then find $50,000 in 24 hours.
Your juvenile
The story may be convoluted, but on the face of it, it holds up. It is mainly the dialogues and the juvenile tone of the actors that raise eyebrows. For example, Karl and his best friend argue all the time, about everything and nothing, so much so that we end up losing sight of their initial quest. Karl’s love story with a camgirl undead is also unbelievable, as is the flirting between Maggie and Freddy.
The simplistic and almost moralistic scenario, full of good feelings, does not offer us the opportunity to understand the characters in depth or to particularly like them.
That said, RKSS, which doesn’t take itself seriously, offers us good entertainment. Despite its obviously small budget, some gore scenes don’t disappoint, like the one where the heroes’ car hits a zombie and the latter’s intestines wrap around a moving wheel…
We also curiously enjoy seeing well-known French-speaking Quebec actors, such as Guy Nadon and Vincent Leclerc, acting in English, the language in which the filmmakers have shot all their other films. Especially since we find ourselves recognizing transformed locations in the Montreal region, including the enigmatic complex that is 1000, avenue Saint-Charles, in Vaudreuil-Dorion, which has become Coleman’s head office.
Continuing the RKSS’s colourful, DIY style of staging, We Are Zombies still inaugurates well the marathon of genre films to come in the coming weeks on the eve of Fantasia, while leaving us hope for Wake Up a more rigorous and nuanced proposal.