Boy Eats Girl
That worked much better than it had any right to. It's the age-old tale: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy dies in a bizarre drunken accident, boy is resurrected by his well-meaning mother, boy craves the taste of human flesh. You know how it goes. As zombie comedies go it's certainly no Shaun of the Dead, but it's also not Warm Bodies so let's chalk that up as a win, shall we?
This Irish production is full of charming, funny performances (and Samantha Mumba is a stone fox on top of being charming and funny) and for a movie about ravenous zombies the humor is nicely low-key, at least until things go all Grand Guignol in the last act. About that last act, it's filled to the brim with silly, fun, PRACTICAL splatter. This is the rare movie made in the 2000s with no discernible CGI, which makes me love it that much more. If I hadn't already been in its corner, that last act would have firmly put me there. It doesn't quite reach Re-Animator or Dead Alive heights of delirium in the final act, but it still has quite a bit of fun squickiness up its decaying sleeve.
At a brisk 80 minutes, not only does it not overstay its welcome, it actually suffers a bit from being too short. Once Nathan (the boy of the title) accidentally kills himself, the resurrection takes place immediately over a montage so there's about a minute between him dead and him sitting at the kitchen table, there's not much room for any of it to sink in. That's a fairly minor quibble, though, as the abbreviated running time helps the movie stay funny and not get too sidetracked with anything resembling actual human emotion. That may sound like a slam, but it's not. Sometimes a silly little lark like this is exactly what you need in the middle of Scary Movie Month, and it fit the bill nicely.
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