Virus Undead (The Beast Within) (2008)
Studio: Granada Ventures
Release Date: November 3, 2009
Directed By: Wolf Wolff
Cast: Philipp Danne, Marvin Groenen, Anna Breuer, Nikolas Jurgens & Birthe Wolter
Review By: Annie Riordan

Despite the Sham-Wow guy’s claims to the contrary, the Germans don’t always make good stuff. Like, for example, sauerkraut, oompah bands, and this movie.

A big important scientist guy is found dead in his home and his wayward son must return to clean up the mess. For some reason, he brings along his two best buddies: a sweater vest addicted dweeb with a bad emo hairdo and an irresponsible bad boy who doesn’t seem to realize that the James Dean greaser look went out of style in the mid-fifties. After stopping by a gas station so that the hero can reconnect with his ex girlfriend, the bad boy can hook up with the slutty cashier, and the dork can load up on frozen fish snacks (?), a party is planned at the dead guy’s isolated estate. All that pesky funeral planning bullshit can just wait. There’s booze to drink and girls to fuck!

There’s also some drunken, lawless hillbillies wandering around in the woods with a mutated strain of avian flu in their bloodstreams. Wait…are there hillbillies in Germany? Because, try though the filmmakers might to convince me otherwise, this clearly isn’t America. The street signs and bad dubbing kinda gave you away, guys – sorry.

But anyway, the mutated avian flu is turning everyone it infects into zombies. And the zombies have surrounded the mansion, trapping the partying kids inside and blahblahblah, tepid sex scenes, predictable deaths, Cabin Fever meets The Birds meets Night Of The Living Dead, but despite all of its lofty ambitions, it still manages to be one of the stupider and more boring zombie films I’ve sat through since I made the mistake of ‘flixing Platoon of the Dead last summer.

This movie had potential, especially in these days of zombie pop-culture and H1N1 hysteria. But the partying-teenagers-in-peril scenario is as cheesy and overused as the Wilhelm Scream, which is also featured in this stinkbomb. Gott In Himmel, stop using that fucking thing already! Yeesh!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue in order to clean the taste of this flaming load of zombie shit right the hell out of my psyche.