Shacked Off

I don’t usually like to get all navel-gazery, but when it comes to one of these things, I like to stick to a certain minimum level of quantity (quality, as regular readers will know, is another matter entirely). I’m aware you’re giving up some of your precious and limited lifetime to read and assimilate my thoughts (or, and all choices are equally valid, try to make sense of the pun in the title, skim the first paragraph, look at the picture and then leave) and I feel obliged to provide a certain degree of heft. Only in exceptional circumstances, these days, does anything of less than 1000 words get released here – the only exception I can think of is the showy-offy review for Victoria, which (for formal reasons) largely took the form of a single 600-word sentence.

This time, though… I’m not sure if I can find a grand of words to write about Drew Cullingham’s Shed of the Dead, to be honest. ‘Steer clear’ repeated five hundred times? It would have a certain bravura directness to it. Yes, this is not so much a review as a caution, for Shed of the Dead rests comfortably near the very bottom of the list of films I would willingly watch again. (The fact the film was shot in 2015 but didn’t get anything like a release until 2019 should tell you something, possibly that it’s not just the film that should have been shot.)

This is, as you’ve probably guessed, yet another addition to the glut of zombie films we have been bombarded with for twenty years now (if Danny Boyle ever does get back to the project which kick-started all of this, he’ll probably be able to accurately call it 28 Years Later). There is a bit more going on here, though, as we shall see – more proving to be less, on this occasion.

Spencer Brown plays Trevor, an everyman protagonist who is clearly meant to be a loveable loser. The loveable part they struggle with, but the fact he is a loser is coded by the fact that he is unemployed and spends most of his time in an allotment shed painting wargames figures (I imagine Games Workshop’s lawyers were swooping around this project on their winged fell beasts, sniffing for possible IP infringement, but the film-makers weren’t that dumb). When not doing this, he’s round at the house of his slovenly mate Graham (Ewen MacIntosh), actually playing wargames. Both of them are apparently emotionally retarded and incapable of engaging with the real world in any meaningful sense.

Well, where do you start here? Full disclosure: yes, I don’t just get obsessional about cult movies, I play Call of Cthulhu, and I play wargames too (though not as often as I’d really like to). Does this surprise you? Please refresh your memory as to what this blog is actually called. While it’s true that many people who enjoy RPGs and wargaming are living their lives some distance from what the consensus agrees to be the mainstream, they are still mostly nice, intelligent, well-adjusted people, albeit with occasionally questionable political views (hello there, Jock, if you’re reading this). So on one level this movie does seem to me to be an extended act of defamation.

Anyway, as the allotment is a mess, the other users attempt to get Trevor evicted. Their spokesman is a Canadian emigre named Mr Parsons. Why is he Canadian? Mainly because they wanted Kane Hodder to play the part. Kane Hodder, for the uninitiated, played Jason Voorhees in several instalments of Friday the 13th, in addition to a huge number of other culty roles. This is in-jokey stunt casting, and not the last instance of it in Shed of the Dead: other cult actors who turn up in small roles are William Moseley and Michael Berryman. Trevor is unhappy about this and in the ensuing argument Parsons falls onto a rake and brains himself. Trevor hides the corpse in his shed.

Meanwhile, of course, the dead are rising, and this extends to Parson’s corpse – which leads to a lengthy death-struggle in the confines of the shed itself. Trevor eventually finds himself holed-up in the home of his estranged wife (Lauren Socha) and her friend (Emily Booth). Can they survive the unfolding zombie apocalypse, and will you actually care?

Well, the answer to the second part of that question is ‘almost certainly not’. Just getting to the end of the film was a challenge, but you need to put yourself through the fire sometimes, right? It’s not just a cheap, unfunny, lazy film, it’s… well, come to think of it, calling it a cheap, unfunny, lazy film is probably accurate enough. What makes it particularly egregious is the fact it is cynically angling to cash in on the success of a much better film – 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, obviously. Wikipedia lists Shed of the Dead as an actual remake of Shaun of the Dead, and while Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg would probably be within rights to seek legal advice if the makers of Shed described it as such, you can see the similarities.

Apart from the total lack of anything resembling functional jokes, the difference is in the way the characters are depicted without any sympathy or warmth: none of them have any redeeming features, with the two female characters especially problematic – they are essentially sex objects, although Socha’s character also has a streak of vicious shrewishness in her. It all put me horribly in mind of… well, it’s not so much a remake of Shaun of the Dead as a mash-up of Shaun of the Dead with the horrendous Sex Lives of the Potato Men, widely considered one of the worst films ever made. Shed of the Dead would probably be challenging it for that position, if it were more widely known.

The participation of Booth is interesting, as she was for quite a few years the face of the largely-gone-but-not-entirely-forgotten Horror Channel in the UK. There was a degree of thrashing around for content on the old Horror Channel, during the twelve hours or so every day when it was actually allowed to show modern horror movies; some really dodgy films turned up in the small hours of the night just to keep the channel on the air. Emily Booth’s presence here seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that an obscure cable channel at 2am on a Wednesday morning is the natural home for a film like Shed of the Dead.  It really doesn’t deserve any better. Steer clear.

(What do you know, 1100 words. Who’d’ve thought it?)