p e n g u i n d e v i l

Oh, how could I?

A week ago today, April 8th, was the Penguindevil’s 5th anniversary! With nary a posting to be found. As it is both finals week and tax week, my annual picks and summation post will have to wait a few more days. Sigh…

But I can bring up a funny little movie that I watched this week. While having one of those “fall asleep in front of a movie” evenings, I selected something suitably mindless for that… Hide and Creep! Oddly enough, I didn’t fall asleep once… Which means two things. One is that I only ended up with about 4 hours of sleep that night, and two, I actually watched the movie from beginning to end.

While I wouldn’t say that I recommend it, I also wouldn’t suggest avoiding it, either. Hide and Creep is a super-low budget (the production company is aptly named “Crewless”) zombie movie. Being also a bit of a comedy, with a bit of UFOish goings on, it was fairly entertaining. Starting off with two storylines, one the tale of a video store clerk beset upon by what is possibly the cheapest rendition of a zombie that I have ever seen (but so unapologetically lame and cheap of a zombie that it seems forgivable), and, two, a poor fellow who wakes up naked in a tree (where we are forced to start pondering either drunkenness of abduction, or both) who sets off in pursuit of his clothes and his “’64 and a half Mustang” (and potentially the girl he was with)…

These two tales converge in this small hick town in Alabama where zombies (yes, more of the same type as above) start appearing everywhere and the non-zom population begins to decline rapidly. Sadly, the sheriff is on vacation and the deputy is stuck in Florida so two groups of non-zom civilians struggle to make it through this mess. One group is the above mentioned folks who are “joined” by Barbara, the bitchy (but still somewhat charming) girl who works the phones at the police department and a Federal agent (again, the worst rendition of a federal agent that I have ever seen) who parachutes into town, and a second, more motivated group, consisting of Barbara’s brother and his hunting pals who end up driving all around the place shooting all the zombies that they can find in the head.

Hide and Creep is a fun and entertaining (and low-expectation) movie that features the requisite naked ladies (naked lady zombies, that is), references to anal probes, hordes of hungry zombies, corny newscasts, dopey hicks with guns and an arrogant video store clerk.

While it does have all of that going for it, and it most certainly does qualify as a zomedy, Hide and Creep is not (as “Kevin Smith” is quoted as saying on that poster over there) “even better than Shaun of the Dead”. Not in the slightest, really.

Nope.