DEAD & BREAKFAST

DEAD AND BREAKFAST
By Aine

From the trailer you would think this is a horror film set in a small hick town, but it’s really a comedy in disguise. You’ve got a group of loser 20 somethings in an RV heading to the wedding of a friend. Of course they’re lost and they decide to stop for the night. After asking an annoying hillbilly gas station attendant, who also likes to perform country music for directions, they end up at a bed and breakfast.

They are greeted at the door by a cranky Frenchman played by The Drew Carey show’s Diedrich Bader. Once inside they meet none other than David Carradine, I guess he needs money these days. After slinging insults back and forth with Diedrich Bader everyone goes to bed. One of the drunken guys (Erik Palladino) decides to go searching for food and sits down to eat a blueberry pie that he finds in the fridge. When his girlfriend walks in and turns on the light she discovers the butchered body of the cranky Frenchman. What takes place is much screaming and comedy, as Erik Palladino spends several minutes slipping on the blood trying to get away from the body.

In the meantime David Carradine is upstairs telling one of the girls about his “box.” It seems it has some kind of mythology to it, and a drifter in town is the only one who knows the truth about the box. Amusingly enough, the girl Mr. Carradine tells this to is his niece, Ever Carradine, daughter of Robert. I could go on but I’d get bored if I did, you know the rest anyway.

Someone gets into the box, becomes possessed, then the whole town is overrun by a zombie curse, etc. The most perplexing thing was the country singer who popped up every few scenes and sang an annoying song about what had just happened. The country singer narrator bit was not as funny as they seemed to think it was. The only part that was cool about it was when all the zombies starting doing the Michael Jackson “Thriller” dance while the singer rapped.

I can’t really say much more, the film suffers from trying too hard to be funny. It had some good moments but mostly it was a typical horror formula that tried to be a spoof and it just came across as tired and uninteresting. With all the name actors I would have expected better, or at least mediocre, Dead and Breakfast offered neither. Rent this one at your own risk.