Turbo Kid filmmakers take a fresh bite out of ‘living impaired’ genre with We Are Zombies
We Are Zombies. // Courtesy Screambox
For fans of Turbo Kid or the bleak serial killer romp Summer of ’84, the highly stylized genre work of RKSS —the Canadian filmmaking collective composed of François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell—should be familiar. If their filmography is foreign to you, RKSS always turns in something that hits hard for who it hits, and for audiences that aren’t on board, it’s still always original and memorable. So we at The Pitch were stoked to hear they were adapting a comic book series into a new living dead adventure. The film itself may have been the first time RKSS has bitten off more than they can chew, but it still delivers fully on the promise of something both familiar yet altogether other.
We Are Zombies. // Courtesy Screambox
We Are Zombies takes place in a world where the big bad virus has spread and the dead walk the earth. Unfortunately for all involved, this zombie apocalypse is missing the apocalypse part, as the living impaired have no interest in eating or attacking the living—they’re just sort of… still walking around. And that lack of the deceased staying deceased has made life difficult, in terms of overpopulation, employment, and maintaining a bottom line at evil megacorporations.
Karl Neard (Alexandre Nachi) and Freddy Mercks (Derek Johns) have found their way in this new world by working as illegal zombie hunters—providing removal services for folks who can’t continue cohabiting with their rotting loved ones, then selling the same meatbags to an avant-garde art collective that experiments in extermination with a visual flair. Maggie (Megan Peta Hill) is the hacker who helps guide their operations, and the three friends manage to bumble through life, miraculously one step ahead of the professional extraction squads that actually do this work. When some of the corporation’s henchmen wind up on the hook for a botched job, the trio’s grandmother is kidnapped and ransomed, leading to a long series of hijinks including D&D, a zomb cam-girl, lucha libre wrestling, and unimaginable fleshy horrors.
While there’s a lot of fun worldbuilding to be had here, the first act shambles along in a series of missteps that starts to feel like this film seems uncertain of itself. Our three leads have a sort of annoying banter mixed with equal parts nerd references and failed romantic pursuits that feels squarely set in a sort of early 2000s, Kevin Smith-y vein. These characters are supposed to be losers, but we spend a lot of time stuck in just establishing that they’re kinda shitty and annoying without then also giving us a reason to care about their plight, and a convoluted turn with debts to be paid and a kidnapped grandmother don’t do much to elevate this above a lower tier horror comedy you might stumble onto over on Shudder, give 20 minutes to, and then move on.
To bail would be a mistake because Act Two finds its footing, and we’re golden from this point forward.
We Are Zombies. // Courtesy Screambox
As our crew coalesces around a mission, so too does the banter suddenly click from cliched to chemistry. Karl and Freddy evolve from comic book store jerks to more of a Venture Brothers-esque set of good-hearted dunces, and Maggie becomes more than just a pithy quote machine. Internal disasters at the evil mega-corp and the rise of several side characters start to build a flow of hilarious, fascinating sequences that you feel lucky to be able to ride along with.
Genuinely, it’s one of the most significant spins from slog to showstopper I’ve seen in recent years.
Once the pace picks up, and the violence cranks to 11, you can really see what the filmmaking collective was going for here. It doesn’t dive much further than surface-level zombie horror comedy tropes, but the way they’re delivered in the world built around it is more than enough to fit snugly into that cult-hit territory alongside the rest of their filmography. Another stellar soundtrack from Le Matos doesn’t hurt either.
We Are Zombies hits SCREAMBOX, streaming everywhere on August 13.
We Are Zombies. // Courtesy Screambox
