User Reviews

Despite finding him good value on chat/panel shows,I have never had a "propah" Danny Dyer experience,due to almost all of his films looking.."dire." With October coming up,I decided to do a thread on IMDb's Horror board for Comedy Horror recs.Catching me by surprise,a fellow IMDber told me that they had seen a Dyer Horror Comedy that was actually good! Finding the movie at a local DVD shop for £1,I got set to go to Danny Dyer's doghouse.

The plot:

Wanting to escape their women troubles,mates Vince,Neil,Mikey,Graham,Patrick and Banksy decide to run off on a "lads weekend" to a village packed with pubs,and where women outnumber the men 4:1. Hiring a mini van,the guys travel to the town. Running to the pubs,the guys are shocked to find no staff behind the pub,and no girls in sight. Looking round the empty village,the guys find all the men laying on the floors dead. As they start to fear that their night out plans are over,a women appears,who turns out to be a murdering,man eating zombie.

View on the film:

Going for a night out with the lads to zombie town,the screenplay by Dan Schaffer makes the dialogue a perfect fit for the blokes,with their blue coloured humour capturing the banter of the guys,even as they are trying to outrun killer zombies. Travelling to the village in a jolly mood,Schaffer turns the jokes down to give the title an unexpected dark Horror side,spilling from some of the main characters meeting their dogs dinner,as Schaffer gradually builds the bond between the friends,with the zom-women getting their hands on the immaturity of the boys.

Taking on any man or zombie that challenges him ,Stephen Graham gives the movie a working class grit as Vince,as Graham smoothly hits Comedy pot-shots with Noel Clarke's wonderfully nervous Mikey,whilst making sure Vince hits the zombies with a ruthless punch for survival. Unknowingly going on the pull for a zombie girl,Danny Dyer gives a far better than ever expected performance (nice one guv!) as Neil,thanks to Dyer getting Neil to show concern for his pals,and also waking up Neil with wide-eyed fear,as the lads start to fear that they are going to meet their end in the doghouse.

I don't expect much from your average zombie comedy horror. Give me lots of gore, a few laughs, some creative kills and maybe even a sardonic comment on todays consumer society if you feel you have to. What I also expect is at least a character or three I can invest some empathy in along with a script that doesn't feel the need to treat the viewer like they're an idiot. This film fails badly in that respect. It's has pretensions at being a British 'From Dusk Till Dawn" whereas 'Carry On Zombie' is much closer to the mark (down to the requisite cross-dressing scene).

This is full of moments which feel like they've been literally lifted straight off a Benny Hill skit. If like a bit of Benny in your horror cinema then you will have been well and truly served. I myself found the 'idea' of the scene much more comedic than the 'actual' scene. Comedic as in "Who on earth green-lit this script and why did they think it was worth filming?". The pacing & timing of most of the film is so clumsy it makes the interview Sarah Palin did with Katie Couric ("I can see Russia from my house") seem astute.

None of the characters in this movie are worth caring about. You have no one to root for to survive this ordeal because they are on the whole, either immensely unlikeable or are so light on development that they're just chalk outlines to begin with. Stupid does not begin to describe this bunch. As a group they appear to be so bereft of braincells that I figure there are plankton who could beat them in a game of Snap hands down. Danny Dyer's part is such a misogynistic scumbag he's the least enthralling of the bunch, and that's saying something. By films end I found myself hoping the zombie-chicks would get them all. Possibly that's why it ends on the open note it does because maybe, just maybe, they do. Oh for happy endings such as that.

There are plot holes so big you could drive a chauffeured minibus through. There are moments (many moments) so brain dead as to be an insult to the intelligence of the average modern moviegoer. I mean really, do they expect us to buy this stuff? To be amused by it? Or even less likely, be scared by it?

This just barely got a 2 out of 10 from me. The best thing I got out of it was the knowledge that I would actively avoid watching the next thing this director & his production team puts out. Don't buy it. If you have to watch it, rent it or better still wait until it's on Pay. You'll be glad you did. That you won't feel so bad changing the channel the minute you undoubtedly get sick of it.

Doghouse (2009): The Good, the Bad and the Nasty

Synopsis: A British film about a group of men having a "get-a-way" for a member of their pack that is getting a divorce. They rent a tour bus to take them to a remote town to drink away their troubles with hopes of encountering the opposite sex. What they find is undead, unholy and fully man-hating.

The Good: I thought that the cast of guys did about as well with this script as they could. You kinda liked (or hated) most of them because of their character... which is a good thing. You were rooting FOR them as a group, not against them. I can't tell you how many schlocky horror films I watch where I just want the characters to die some agonizing death just to be rid of them. Not here. You could tell they were a tight-knit group and it felt genuine... even when the scenes were of disagreements and hostility. Each character was unique and fit within the group. Nice job casting and it made the movie bearable.

The Bad: Unfortunately, there's a lot more bad than good. This whole thing has been done SO MANY times. There was nothing new aside from the "man-hating" aspect to it. So a virus turns ONLY the women into zombies and they in turn are now man-hating flesh eaters. Okay then. The only thing to make it more cheesy would be to involve the army... oh wait. Well, there goes the originality. There's a fair amount of gore and action, but it gets stale fast. I found myself checking Facebook a lot in the last half hour. Snooze. It's just one long chase scene with the same female zombies. Again, the dialogue between the guys is somewhat interesting and you ARE rooting for them at first, but you sort of lose your fervor for it after about an hour. You just end up not caring. And if I recall correctly, not caring while watching a movie is a bad thing.

The Nasty: I guess this town was made up of weird axe-wielding strippers and hairstylists who also specialized in S&M, hey? The zombies just came off a little odd. So you put chicks in sexy outfits and then make them nasty ugly and vomit black stuff and that's supposed to be enticing or appealing? Pass.

Vince is having a difficult time adjusting to the fact that his marriage is over so his mates decide to take him off on holiday outside London in a little village known as Moodley to get drunk and have a good time. What the gang doesn't expect is that Moodley female populace have been turned into bloodthirsty zombie savages thanks to a military virus. Fending off the flesh-eating monster women will not be an easy task as there become few places to hide or escape because their travel vehicle has been "confiscated" by the female driver who herself was infected by the virus.

Director Jake West(Evil Aliens)assembles a fun cast who spend almost the entire screen time running from building to building, warding off zombie women( unrelenting in their persistent search for man meat)while stuck inside the village of Moodley.

Danny Dyer is the womanizing Neil, who attains and discards the birds like a modern-day Alfie. Noel Clarke is Mikey, the one who convinced the others to take the trip to Moodley, knowing that his Gran would be on a cruise for two weeks(or so he thinks). Mikey's marriage is on the rocks, paralleling Vince's situation almost. Emil Marwa is the gay man of the group, Graham, who gets in an exchange of words with his male lover who feels slighted for not being invited along. Lee Ingleby is my favorite of the characters as a comic book/sci-fi geek, Matt who runs a store those at Comic Con would appreciate. Keith-Lee Castle is Patrick, often listening to self-help recordings which help to calm the soul during moments of great stress(his wife nags him incessantly, not appreciative to the idea that Patrick is leaving on a trip when her parents come to London to visit them). Patrick has a mean golf swing which definitely comes in handy. Stephen Graham is Vince, the brokenhearted divorcée who must pull himself together and lead his boys out of their sticky problem. Neil Maskell is Banksy, the electrician who suffers from Murphy's Law(and wears a T-shirt with a center bullseye, not the brightest choice of attire for this particular day), arriving into Moodley at the most opportune time when his friends need a ladder. Rounding out the male cast is Terry Stone as the remaining soldier, Gavin, still alive after the village of women had run havoc all over the place eating all the male locals.

Such funny bits include three of the group dressing in drag(in order to move among the female zombies), a remote control monster truck with a severed head in its back used to gain the attention of the monster women, the use of a sonar control which can stop the zombies in their tracks(Neil has fun toying with the zombie women, pushing the button on and off, teasing the creatures), Mikey's unfortunate run-in with a female butcher with a hatchet while attempting to hide in a meat shop, Neil's capture at the hands of a rotund female zombie with an affinity for "finger foods", and the mishap regarding a water gun and nitrol fluid(used for fueling the remote controlled trucks)which results in the explosion of Vince and Matt's hiding place, the store with few weapons to assist them. Lots of prosthetic effects, such as the ghoulish make-up for the female zombies(with ugly teeth and misshapen faces), body parts, and one doozy of a scene involving the Colonel over the military outfit, hanging on a fence with his chest open, his heart still beating. West and company have fun characterizing, as Romero would, the zombies such as one from a beauty salon with two pairs of scissors and a bride in a wedding dress armed with an ax. DOGHOUSE is essentially about a tightly knit group of buddies who have remained close friends over the years, no matter what troubles are in each member's life, and they must band together if they are to somehow survive.