The first 5 minutes of the film is spent trying to introduce us to “the lads”, and show us that they are each individual guys with differing personalities and issues of their own.
I made the mistake at the time of writing them all down, so in honour of my stupidity I am determined to pass the names along.
Vince, Neil, Graham, Mikey, Patrick, Matt, Banksy, Ruth the bus driver.
The reason why none of that matters is that there are only that many characters so some of them can get killed and others can grow up and have life changing experiences.
Mostly though you hope they get killed.
I might have been a touch more friendly to this if it hadn’t been shamelessly trying to mine the same vein pioneered by Shaun of the Dead, and then copied far less successfully by Lesbian Vampire Killers. Though in the life game of rock, paper, scissors a rubbish movie with a hint of boobie (LVK) trumps a rubbish movie without… which brings us to Doghouse.
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One guy has divorced from his wife and is sad. Awwwww. So his longtime mates, now scattered all over the place over the years have banded together to take him on “a kick-ass weekend away to drown his sorrows in a no-holds-barred fashion, so that Vince can redicover his inner-bloke”. At least that is probably what they would say on the back of the DVD cover, I didn’t look.
So they go to the town of Moodley (driven by a cute bus driver who takes far more shit than any bus driver in real life would from a bunch of dicks). Moodley is a sleepy backwater town in the UK with seemingly no inhabitants, initially… Not to be too precious, but a bunch of female zombies show up, all walking like they are doing the robot and wearing easily identifiable outfits:
- – The Nurse
- – The Nun
- – The Bride
- – The bondage outfit girl
- – The fat chick (Ha-Ha)
Well Yo-Ho-Ho and a bottle of Who Cares?
The lads are suitably distressed and alarmed, and when they run into a fellow gent who is on the run from attack he tells them to stay in town, as the woods are even more infested.
There isn’t really much more than that, the guys run around, make “woooahhh” faces, there is some eye candy gore for the teens to say “gross”, and some attempted humour that I would describe as juvenile, except sometimes juvenile is funny, but not here.
And just when you thought that things couldn’t get any worse, they try to shoehorn a reason for the infestation. They are zombies people, if the audience goes along far enough to believe they exist, then it shouldn’t matter where they come from should it?
So on and so forth for the last 40 odd minutes: “ere’s anuva one” kill it, “ere’s anuva one” kill it.
This is a movie with aspirations of being “Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels crossed with From Dusk Til Dawn”, only it comes across as a quickie cash in aimed at teenage boys with forgiving palates.
Final Rating – 5 / 10. It’s too easy to say this should be left in the doghouse, but in this case it is very true.