Movie Review: Bong of the Living Dead (2017)

Bong Of The Living Dead is a comedy/horror film directed by Max Groah. This is his debut feature as director and not a bad effort for a first feature film. The film has a lot of good characteristics, and some that didn’t quite hit the mark, but overall, it did manage to come out ok. The film is about a group of friends in Ohio, who all share a love for weed and zombies. They find that a zombie outbreak has occurred in their town, and decide to do something about it, or not, or kind of?

The concept for this film wasn’t anything new, obviously, but they had a lot of cool moments where they put their own spin on things, and a lot of cool moments where they kept it classic with the zombie stuff. The writers were clearly up to speed on the zombie genre, as some of the main characters are on the porch near the beginning of the film discussing Romero zombies and other zombie films and just zombies in general. This was refreshing to see, as most people in zombie films are oblivious. It was a nice meta.

The production quality of this film was fantastic. They only managed to raise about $3700 during their Indiegogo campaign, so we weren’t quite sure what the budget was, but they did a fantastic job working within it in this indie production. The cinematography, sound, lighting, and most other production-related things were pretty good. To add to that, there were also a healthy amount of scenes with some nice practical gore for the zombies, and they did a great job with costume design for them as well. Even the CGI blood wasn’t what we would call “intrusive”, which even some later Romero films were guilty of.

What we liked:
– Zombies! There was a healthy amount of them, and it was appreciated.
– Great production value. Everything was nicely done in that department, and Groah has good intuition and did a pretty good job directing this as a debut.
– Swords and Bitches. (Why is this not a thing? Is it a thing?)
– The acting was fantastic. Everyone across the board did a pretty good job for an indie production. Nice practical and CGI gore. The cuts to the news anchors were pretty awesome and a nice touch.

What we thought could have been better:
– The writing was a bit weird in some spots. The Christ drumset scene and a couple of others didn’t make a lot of sense in the flow of the film. Also, they had some emotionally-charged scenes which didn’t quite fit in given the amount of comedy throughout. It’s hard to go into too much detail without spoiling anything, but some important scenes were overshadowed by the fact that most of the film was spent with people making jokes and getting stoned. It seemed like it would have been better to have a better balance there. The ending was really powerful, but it relies on the viewer having an emotional connection to the characters. They had all known each other since they were 10 or so, but they only had a couple of short flashbacks to this instead of building a backstory for them first.

Overall:
Bong Of The Living Dead is a nicely-executed fun comedy/zombie film, that had some writing hiccups but was an otherwise ok zombie film that stayed true to the genre. Because the film is mostly about the characters getting stoned and joking around, and smoking weed, the scenes that are serious didn’t seem as believable. It was still nice to see, as they added a lot of their own flavor to the film that isn’t common in a lot of other zombie films, and the number of zombies was definitely appreciated. We would recommend watching this one if you are a fan of less-serious zombie films.