A much-anticipated wrestling match is interrupted by a zombie outbreak in The Manson Brothers Midnight Zombie Massacre, a horror-comedy hybrid that is tepid about its horror elements and often tasteless as a comedy. Other than those two caveats, the film is also pretty dumb. Screenwriters Mike Carey and Chris Margetis clearly want to capitalize upon the influx of zombie comedies that seemed to dominate theatrical distribution a decade or more ago, but they seemed to have missed the memo. These genre mashups went out of fashion only a few years after they peaked, and it doesn’t help that director Max Martini has no new ideas to give us in this effort.
Well, that’s not entirely true. The framing device of the story is a flash-forward involving a gruff and rough-looking father telling his boy about the infamous Manson Brothers, sibling wrestlers of some renown. The tale-within-the-tale is featured in a comic book, and the tale proceeds as a bedtime story – a gruesome and pervasively violent one that has no business being told to this young man by any reasonable standard. Anyway, that is the one element of Martini’s film that could be called refreshing, though the performances from the actors involved are pitiful, to say the least, and the style of filmmaking, which can be diplomatically called “attention deficient,” is established pretty quickly, too.
From here on, it’s business as usual for a supposed romp that happens to feature the undead. Carey and Margetis, in addition to having written the screenplay, star as Skull and Stone Manson, respectively. They’ve arrived as a wrestling venue, and no sooner have the festivities begun than a rival wrestler (Bas Rutten) injects a mysterious substance, sent his way from China, into his arm. Yes, the country of origin is a sign that the filmmakers are trying to be taboo with their sense of humor, though it isn’t the first: The opening title card is a quote by Nietzsche offering grave warnings about masks, neither in the strictly political context that has no doubt come to mind nor entirely outside of that context.
Then again, later on, there is a lengthy and crass “joke” involving the gender of a sex worker who may or may not have been hired to perform a service for one of the brothers. Maybe this is not the film to look to for respectable humor. It isn’t even a movie that can reasonably use some of the recognizable faces among its cast – D.B. Sweeney as the venue’s owner, Randy Couture as another rival wrestler, Adrian Pasdar as a substance-abusing doctor – for more than turning them into zombie fodder. The plot follows Skull and Stone through the halls and offices of the venue as they and their friends, Captain Marvelous (Jayden Lund) and The Crippler (David Meadows), navigate an army of undead, while a deadly storm rages outside.
There is a lot of grisly, gory violence, executed with no style by Martini or even makeup effects that are more than the passable kind to which an amateur theater production might lay claim. The humor is the kind of intrusive snark or quippy quasi-wit that grates on the nerves rather quickly, and the actors seem to have been directed to recite their lines of dialogue in one take (the exception is Couture, who has a bit of fun with his image by never actually engaging in combat with anyone, living or dead). The Manson Brothers Midnight Zombie Massacre is as uninspired as it gets.
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