I’ve never been much of an industry-watcher, which is why Charles Gant’s box-office digest in Sight & Sound magazine, and online at the Guardian, is so valuable. As well as being a witty read, there’s the secondary but entirely pleasant sensation that someone else is doing my homework for me; Gant gets on with all the number-crunching so that this two-time maths flunkee doesn’t have to.
There are usually some interesting stories in the figures, as it transpired recently when a friend emailed me to draw my attention to a striking detail in the UK box-office chart. Way down the list at number 89 in the tally for the weekend of 29 April to 1 May was something called Zombie Undead, a British horror movie which had passed me by.
What makes it so distinctive, apart from its tautological title (aren’t all zombies undead?), is that it took just £10 during that three-day period. It didn’t even have the excuse that it had been hanging around the charts for several weeks or months: we’re talking £10 on its opening weekend, £10 from two screens. I’d love to find the two people who rushed out on that first weekend, almost as much as I’d like to know which cinema charges a mere £5 for a cinema ticket.
Perhaps it wasn’t two people. Perhaps it was the same person seeing the film twice. Was it the director, or one of his friends, relatives or pets? If you’re reading this, and either of those Zombie Undead opening-weekenders was you, or — even better — if both of them were you, please do get in touch. I’d love to know what you thought of the film.
A cursory look at some of the reviews suggests that it may not figure prominently in next year’s Bafta nominations. Total Film called it a “no-budget, no-brains outing.” Time Out found it “laughably inept” and singled out the “uniformly, enthusiastically dreadful” cast, while conceding that the film boasted “a small handful of . . . so-bad-they’re-hysterical moments.” But, hey — any publicity is good publicity, right?
Most of the newspapers, as far as I could tell, didn’t review the film. A search on the Guardian website asks me: “Did you mean Bobbi Undead?” Woah, I think to myself. Did I mean Bobbi Undead? What on earth is Bobbi Undead? That sounds intriguing. A vision of Bobbi Flekman, the “hostess with the mostest” who presides over the Smell the Glove launch party in This is Spinal Tap, materialises in my mind’s eye. Except that now Bobbi is a blank-eyed zombie, foaming at the mouth and carrying a severed arm between her teeth. (Somehow this image is more comforting than the real, non-zombie Bobbi Flekman, of whom Tap’s guitarist Nigel St Tufnel later said: “If she hadn’t been a cheat, a liar and a bitch, she would have been a great girl.”) So I click on Bobbi Undead. Disappointingly, it returns 0 results. Guardian website, you are such a tease.
I’m sure someone will rush to correct me if I’m mistaken, but it looks very much as though Zombie Undead could be the lowest-grossing film on record. Certainly it appears to have taken less at the box-office than the previous record holder, the 2006 thriller Zyzzyx Road, which starred a pre-Knocked Up Katherine Heigl alongside that Hollywood scandal magnet Tom Sizemore (who was arrested for violation of parole shortly before filming began), and boasts the tagline: “What happens in Vegas . . . gets buried on Zyzzyx Road.” Entertainment Weekly has the full, gruesome story (and it’s a good one) of why and how the film came to take just $30 after being seen by six people during a week’s run in Dallas:
One of those paying customers was Sheila Moore, a Dallas-based make-up artist who had worked on the film. “I thought it was a little odd,” she says of the film’s debut. “I thought it was a joke at first. Yeah, right, of all places they’re gonna premiere this in Dallas, so far from where we filmed it? I figured they’d do it in Los Angeles.” Moore and a friend were the only people in the theatre. “We got popcorn and a drink from the same lady that took our tickets,” she says. “It was kind of surreal. She looked at us like, ‘You want to see what?'”
That film achieved notoriety for a time, helped no doubt by the fact that Heigl went on to bigger if not always better things. The best that the makers of Zombie Undead can hope for is that the same fate befalls their work. So-bad-they’re-good pictures are a niche market in themselves, notable “successes” in the field including Plan 9 from Outer Space, Battlefield Earth, Gigli and the recent Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Much rarer is the so-bad-that-nobody-goes-to-see-it movie. If I were overseeing PR for Zombie Undead, I would recommend an immediate theatrical re-release — except that there’s always the chance it might jeopardise the low takings which currently represent the film’s USP.
Zombie Undead is released on DVD on 30 May
Content from our partners
Related
