2.0 out of 5 stars
Better than its sequel, February 7, 2009
Living Dead Lock Up (Mario Xavier, 2005)
I made the mistake of seeing Living Dead Lock Up 2: March of the Dead first, though to be honest I didn't really miss anything except the buildup of the relationship between the two main characters from both movies. And while this one, really, is just as bad as its sequel, I cannot help but recommend any movie that has the line, "I thought I was dying. I thought that was the tunnel. But it was your face." I about lost my lunch I was laughing so hard. I'm relatively sure that it wasn't meant in the way I took it.
I will say from the start that I commend Mario Xavier and Mike Hicks, who co-wrote, co-directed, and co-starred, for the effort, and I will also say that a lot of the stuff that just came off as cheesy in the second film for some reason works better here, maybe because they did some things in much smaller amounts in this movie than they did in that one. (For example, the trippy background colors during scenes of zombies walking, which only crop up once in this flick.) That said, Living Dead Lock Up does have its own set of problems. For one thing, do you really, really need stock footage in a sixty-two-minute-long movie? And yet how many times did I see that scene of Hess-Wesley-as-zombie stumbling his way down the hall?
The movie starts off with the hostess of one of those unsolved-mystery style shows giving us the rundown on weird things that happened at a Florida prison in the forties. We then cut to the present day, where Jared (Mario Xavier) is sentenced to two years in that same prison for stealing a car. After some of the usual new-fish hazing, he gets to be friends with his cellmate Miguel (Miguel Angel Novo). When weird things start happening in the prison, he asks his girlfriend Rachel (Natalie Morales) to do some research; she uncovers the same information we got in the beginning. Jared and Miguel start thinking that something very, very weird is going on... right around the time the prison is overrun with zombies. Well, okay, I'm exaggerating; "overrun" is kind of hard when the initial infestation is made up of twenty-seven zombies (of which we only actually see four). But still.
Make no mistake, this is an amateur production, made on a brutally small budget (IMDB reports the budget for the film as two hundred bucks; that has to be wrong, doesn't it?), and it has all the hallmarks of same. The special effects are ludicrous, but in that fun sort of way they can be in low-budget movies. The acting is bad, but not uniformly so; Morales (who unfortunately had to be written out of the second film when a prior commitment kept her from appearing in it) is quite competent in front of a camera, though she doesn't get a great deal of screen time, and the script does strike a nice balance between the overly-sanitized conversations one normally sees in movies and the real-life conversations that tend to work so badly when put on film (viz. The first five minutes of Primer), probably more so than all but a handful of movies I've seen recently. Still, when the movie slips up, it does so in grand style; Amanda Healy was exactly the wrong person to cast as the newscaster in the initial scene, for example, given her wooden delivery and rushed lines, and Mario Xavier himself, while having the most experience of anyone involved in the film, tends to emote at the worst possible times, and with the worst possible lines (for example, the "it was your face" line I mentioned in the opening paragraph). He's not a bad actor by any means, but he just didn't seem to mesh too well with the material. (Co-star Novo, on the other hand, has a lot of fun with his role--though one does wonder, in one memorable scene, why it is that the prison's resident Jesus freak is prone to swearing.) Still, for all its shortcomings, I have to say that I really did enjoy this, given that I'd seen the second one and I knew to take it for what it is. If you like low-budget horror movies with very little gore, than you could do a lot worse than to give Living Dead Lock Up a go. **
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