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STUDIO: Lionsgate
MSRP: $26.98
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 80 min.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
- Eating Out: The Making of Boy Eats Girl
- Trailers
The Pitch
It’s My Boyfriends Back meets 28 Days Later
The Humans
Samantha Mumba, David Leon
The Nutshell
Diggs, Henry and Nathan are three teenage friends in Ireland. On the night that Nathan decides to profess his love for Jessica, he dies. His mother uses a ritual that brings him back from the dead. Unfortunately he returns with a taste for the flesh and soon the entire town is overrun with zombies.
The Lowdown
Over the last few years the horror comedy has made a comeback in the form of smaller independent films. With wonderful films such as Shaun of the Dead and Slither as well as smaller hits such as Fido and Flight of the Living Dead, there have been quite a few very good movies in this quite original subgenre. Boy Eats Girl tries to be another notch in that belt and almost succeeds.
It is very similar to the plot line of My Boyfriends Back. Nathan is a teenager who is secretly in love with his close friend Jessica. On the night he decides to finally profess his love for her he sees her in a precarious situation and makes the wrong assumption. He returns home where he gets drunk and decides to stand on a chair and tie a noose around his neck. Before he can remove it from his neck when he changes his mind, his mother bursts into the room and knocks him off the chair, effectively killing him.
When she sees that he has apparently committed suicide, she retrieves some mystical books she found at the old church she cleans and uses rituals outlined in the book to return him from the dead. Unfortunately, he returns to life with the thirst for human flesh. However, he is still human and only when attacked does he fulfill this carnal desire. This causes a problem because the kid that he bites comes back with the typical insatiable desire for flesh and soon the entire student class becomes infected with bloodthirsty zombies.
The rules of the zombie films are ignored here for the most part. First, the zombies do not really have to die, only be bitten and infected to become bloodthirsty. They are quite fast and many seem to be able to figure out ways to overcome problems and have a keen sense when it comes to finding new victims. They are less typically undead zombies and more like the infected creatures from 28 Days Later. Also, you never get a sense of what it takes to kill one of these zombies as nothing seems to work and they are only killed sporadically with no explanation as to why.
The movie continues on with Nathan and his friends having to figure out a way to hide from and/or defeat the threat surrounding them. What makes the movie fail is that, despite the humor, it remains a simple, ineffective movie. While a movie like Sweden’s Frostbitten has enough humor to offset the simplistic nature of its horror story, Boy Eats Girl is only slightly humorous and that means that without a deeper, more effective story, it is easily forgettable.
The gore is wonderful in spots. It is so cheap looking and that adds to the charm of it. Some of the attack scenes are also very good, although not as original as the filmmakers would have you believe. There is a spot in the movie where one of the antagonistic teenagers gets what is coming to him, it works both as a script point as well as a great kill. The movie is also very irreverent at points, such as a death scene that takes place at a church. These good points are really offset by a weaker script.
The movie is a low budget film and therefore deserves a little slack when it comes to judging it, but the most important thing for a low budget film is the script, where this movie is lacking. Boy Eats Girl could work if left to its own merits, but with all the above average and great horror comedies released since Shaun of the Dead it is really a disappointment. With less humor and a simpler story than its competition, it is not a movie that you will remember anything about after viewing.
The Package
The picture is very nice for a low budget film. It is transferred in 16×9 Widescreen and is nice and clear. The sound is in 5.1 and 2.0 Dolby Digital but the music seems to be a little off when compared to the dialogue. It is not bad, but it could be better.
There is one featurette over the making of the movie but it is as slight as the movie itself. There is really nothing in the featurette that tells you anything special about the making of the film. Very disappointing.
4.6 out of 10