My Fair Zombie

Beating the inevitable Pride and Prejudice and Zombies film adaptation to the gore-soaked punch, Ottawa b-film maestro Brett Kelly is back with his own blood-soaked take on a classic public domain work. This putridly playful horror musical–Kelly’s first zombie film since 2006’s My Dead Girlfriend–inserts brain eating ghouls into Pygmalion by way of the 1964 Hollywood classic My Fair Lady. And why not? In Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, star zombie Bub isn’t so much different from Eliza Doolittle, when you think about it. This time, expert linguist Henry Higgins (Lawrence Evenchick) makes a bet with Colonel Pickering (Barry Caiger) that he can’t turn a low class flower merchant into a well-spoken English lady. That is, until her throat is ripped out by a zombie, and Higgins decides that a walking corpse will work just as well. Capturing the undead Eliza (Sacha Gabriel)and working carefully to teach her to enunciate words besides occasionally grunting “brains,” Higgins’ painstaking instruction generally works–leaving behind just a few dead bodies and projectile vomit stains, Eliza comes into her own and even falls for a clueless socialite (Jason Redmond) as the plague of the living dead claims more victims. Kelly’s film is a modest presentation, with sets and staging that often feel like live theatre, but it still works considering the material at hand. After making movies for more than a decade, Kelly’s a sure hand at the helm, and he never lets the story sag–occasional blasts of gore and clever comedy elements help propel everything along, and as a delightfully bloody jest this is hard to not enjoy, or at least admire. It also helps that the film features a surprisingly good cast led by Gabriel and Evenchick–experienced local theatre actors, one would assume–that manage to pump a great deal of life into this undead comedy .Even those who may be put off by the idea of mixing classic musicals and brain munching might find themselves sucked in by this infectious romp.