“It’s just a movie, not real life.”
This is one of the opening lines to Joey Boy’s feature film debut, Dead Bite, and it’s the perfect type of line that should precede any B-rated horror comedy just in case people can’t figure it out not to take it seriously.
After one of their Gancore concerts goes bad, Joey Boy and his hip-hop crew bash their manager for their crappy gig. Their manager tries to make it up to them with a simple video shoot on a boat full of sexy bikini-clad women and alcohol. While cruising around, everyone decides to take a trip onto Mermaid Island for some land based fun but then, out of nowhere, a group of dirty and wild island inhabitants butcher everyone they can at the request of their leader, an evil goddess of sorts. To make matters worse, when it starts to rain a plethora of zombies emerge from the ocean killing even more people and turning them into zombies. The movie follows the surviving members of the band as they battle zombies, evade crazed locals and make an attempt to escape the deadly island.
For those of you who don’t know, Joey Boy is a Thai hiphop star who is part of the hiphop crew Gancore Club, they are the guys who co-star alongside him in his debut feature. Armed with this knowledge of the filmmaker, I expected a gangsterlicious slasher comedy full of hot chicks, bad acting, a ton of blood, and a basic story. What I got was a film with amazingly hot Thai women, a decent amount of blood, mostly bad acting and a simple story chock full of unnecessary plot points and random scenes that added no comedic value to the film.
The B-rated juice is what makes these movies flow but once we get about a third of the way through the hot chicks pretty much disappear, which is a shame because they were the ones keeping me engaged. The lack of lust throughout the rest of the film made the rest of my b-movie experience a little less special. You’d think that when they left something else would entertain you, right? From the get-go you knew all of Joey Boy’s friends were going to die, but there was only one moment after the chicks disappeared where I was actually enjoying myself. It was a scene where two of the group members ate a random mushroom (that looked like a Mario mushroom) and started hallucinating and pretending like they were in a Super Mario game. It was a terrific scene and made we wish there were more moments like it.
What I did like about the film was its creative spin on Zombies. Rather than having the zombies everywhere at all times, they lived in the ocean and could only venture onto land when it rained. So between the crazy inhabitants of the island who butcher tourists and the Creature from the Black Lagoon-looking zombie
s at sea, you knew everyone was going to be screwed which was an exciting feeling. The final battle at the end was pretty epic and surprisingly intense, it was the action sequence you had been waiting for throughout the entire film.
I never took this movie seriously from the start and, as such, wasn’t expecting any sort of realism throughout, but there is no way in hell that Joey Boy could have survived. SPOILER At the end of the film he is eaten by a great white shark but is somehow swallowed whole rather than chewed. Eventually the shark is captured and gutted and Joey Boy somehow survives. END SPOILER I didn’t understand how this was possible. I know I shouldn’t ask questions but this wasn’t even a laughably bad scene and didn’t enhance the story at all.
Overall, Dead Bite is the kind of film that I find very difficult to say no to. I couldn’t resist watching it since it had all the essential elements that a “sit down with your buddies and drink some beer” film should have, except that it plays out like a valley. The first 30 minutes are great and the final 20 minutes are just as awesome, if you discard the extreme crappy dip in the middle you’ve got yourself a really fun film.
Rating: Skip over the middle and you’ll have yourself a 50 minute blast, but don’t expect a lot of gangsta flair (4/10)
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