Zombie Movie Review: Boy Eats Girl

This is a zombie movie for those of you that like the typical teen movie. Unfortunately, that was not me. Not the worst movie I had seen, it just isn’t the kind of movie I am a fan of. This is the type of movie you have to go into, knowing your are not going to get a zombie apocalypse fix. It is more of a guilty pleasure zombie movie. The gore was barely there until the near the end of the movie. At least they did a good job with the gore once it finally came. The movie did have it’s funny parts, but I wouldn’t really call it a comedy. If you want to watch a zombie movie, but your significant other can’t stand zombie movies, this is a good compromise, they can follow the love story while you watch the zombies.

Voracious D’s Review:
To pair a phrase from ol’ Ziggy Freud, sometimes a movie’s just a movie. The movie in question is Stephen Bradley’s 2005 “Boy Eats Girl.” I’m not gonna lie, it wasn’t bad; it just wasn’t extraordinary. It was at least better than “Zombie Strippers” which isn’t saying much, I know, but trust me when I say that’s a definite step in the right direction. I mean, what’s not to like about a film that gets a ban from the Irish Film Classification Board for something other than porn? Plenty, if we’re using the word “like” the way a potential significant other uses it to signify that she’s, well, just not that into you. I came into this movie expecting a teen drama mixed with a zombie movie. Y’know, “Sixteen Candles” meets “Dawn of the Dead.” In some regards, that’s accurate. I guess my biggest gripe is that the former was done better than the latter. The teen drama stuff was pretty stock: you got the outcast and his two funny, but less attractive chums, the object of his affection, her interloping father, the popular girls, one of whom will invariably come on to the protagonist, and the jocks, one of whom will be the boyfriend of one of the popular girls and will want to beat the crap out of the protagonist. Standard stuff. Just Irish. And, to a lesser extent, zombie. Excluding what had to have been the best use of a tractor/thresher I’ve seen, the zombie scenes were not particularly scary or interesting. On the whole, I didn’t really buy the zombies. I could handle patient zero, Nathan, being some bastardization of a voodoo zombie and the more common re-animated flesh-eating corpse, especially since the circumstances of his death were almost poetic in their dark hilarity. The rest of the undead cadre, however, were a mystery. In fact, watching the final showdown toward the end of the film, I’m not entirely convinced the screenwriters knew exactly where they were going. The ending seemed abrupt, to me, because of some pretty serious loose ends, but it wasn’t the worst way to end a movie and it was surprisingly refreshing given the bleak apocalyptic tenor that most zombie movies seem to be colored with these days. Diggs and Henry (played by Tadhg Murphy and Laurence Kinlan, respectively), Nathan’s pals and the comic relief, were pretty amusing at times. The whole movie had patches where I was definitely amused, not engrossed, but absolutely willing to continue watching. If you don’t come in expecting “Shaun of the Dead” or “Night of the Living Dead” as imagined by Judd Apatow and starring Michael Cera, then you’ll find “Boy Eats Girl” to be worth watching. Consider it a mid afternoon aperitif to a more hard-liquor variety zombie film.