"Boy Eats Girl"
Short and very slight horror comedy from Ireland that does perhaps skip along too fast as far as any real, even obvious, dramatic scenes go as they simply don't exist.
For example...in a 75 minute film the main character (a teenager who is brought back to life by his Mum) is a zombie 18 minutes in...BUT the scene that contains his mother finding him dead, grieving, deciding what to do and then doing it is a 5 second quick cut montage!
I kid you not. Imagine that huge part of the plot of "Pet Semetary" with Gage dying, the grieving and the choice of reanimating him happening in just 5 seconds flat with no dialogue!
As such there is a perhaps unintentionally funny aspect to this part of the film simply because such massive events are brushed so outstandingly skipped over.
There's also a 'hold on..what about all the rest of the zombies around the town who were not in that finale' plot hole at the end.
Now this sounds like a negative write-up...but it's not!
As despite these faults (or quirks) the film is actually very enjoyable, well made, often very funny (with two very likeable and well played dweeb friends of the lead character) and has one of the most undervalued (indeed totally forgotten) gore sequences in horrordom!
When the cute Samantha Mumba (one time pop singer and her of "The Time Machine" remake) climbs into a tractor equipped with a huge grass cutter we can only hope good things happen as she trundles towards the zombie horde (or as horde-ish as the budget allows)...and we are not disappointed.
Forget the weak CGI-combine harvester sequence that was much touted around the web in the awful "Evil Aliens"...This (though smaller scale) sequence with the tractor is the zombie slaughter splatterfest we should be familiar with!
With gleeful abandon buckets of blood and loads of body parts fly around and get stuck, flopping, everywhere. Which is fun enough.
But a couple of moments showing some very well made full zombie bodies (with NO CGI rubbish anywhere) being literally mulched and exploded in full view of the audience as the blades hit them (as well as some great legless/ headless, aftermath corpses stumbling around), as well as a top notch squashed head, mean this sequence truly delivers the gorehound funstuffs.
It lifts the entire, already enjoyable, film to another level.
"Boy eats Girl" may be simple, slight with some less than successful screenplay choices (and the strangest 'zombie cure' ever seen), but it's also funny, fast paced, gory, well acted, well crafted and extremely enjoyable.
A sadly forgotten Irish pot o' gold.
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