Snow Day, Bloody Snow day (2005)

Written and Directed by: Faye Hoerauf & Jessica Baxter
Featuring: Justin Alley, Ben Dunn, Zach Adair, Ti Tate, Robert Boitor, Andy McCone, Gary Crawford
2005, 13 minutes
www.tangentproductions.net

Snow Day, Bloody Snow Day is one more extremely funny, and gloriously irreverent, zombie film to throw in the recent surge in zombie film parodies. Like Shaun of the Dead, Snow Day is both in awe of, and a cut above, it's predecessors like the Romero zombie trilogy and the films of Fulci. Though it's a low budget, amateur film, the concepts that underlie it are amusing and smart enough to hold the interest of any horror buff, or zombie-lover, for the entire 13 short minutes, and to get them talking about it after...

When a white, snow-like substance, soon discovered to be snow itself, plagues a town, the zombies decide it's a good day to come out and attack. Everyone is vulnerable, because of, well, the snow. The local newscasters couldn't be happier, however, because now they have so much to report on! A rag-tag motley crew of film geeks along with a can-do weirdo named Ellipses McGee must save the day by seeking out the local TV news station, though what they find there may turn out to be deadlier than the zombies or the snow!

And funnier, too. Hoerauf and Baxter have an extremely funny film on their hands. It's not funny in just the storyline; the dialogue and the cinematography work together to create an overall sarcastic, wisecracking tone. The direction is sharp and quick, keeping pace with the sense of humor. The special effects are not fabulous, but they're not the main focus of the plot or the gags. Most of the jokes come from placing the zombies in fascinating and comical situations.

Snow Day brings with it a fabulous wise-ass mentality that mocks and embraces the horror genre and the geeks that love it, a sort of "wink wink" to the audience that is rarely successful in short, independent horror films, but it works here.