Sometimes independent movies are truly creative, because they need to be to stand out. At other times they just follow every cliché in a futile attempt to find an audience.

Spoilers, even though if you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, you haven’t paid attention. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit. There are a few good character moments, but they are a few and far between.

A high school is having a prom, while the local power plant causes the local cemetery to rise up as zombies.

How do people finance something as seriously out of touch as this? Never mind that most of the story is just a hackjob of stolen ideas from movies the creatives assumed the people who would see this movie wouldn’t otherwise have seen (they would be very wrong). I guess this was just one more attempt to get some movie production to some specific area of the country.

Then there’s the problem with how the movie sees geeks. While Marvel wasn’t such a cultural juggernaut yet and Game of Thrones as a phenomenon was still several years off, this was 2008. Matrix and the Lord of the Rings trilogy had already come out and attitudes regarding geek culture had definitely changed.

What’s worse is that the movie doesn’t seem to know who’s side it wants to be on in this matter. The real assholes are given heroic moments while the people the movie is supposedly trying to set up as the heroes are often just bystanders. People that would get killed in such movies in general are actually the saviors. Like the guy who just out of nowhere suggests that a girl who deigned to talk to him should give him a blowjob is actually just part of the team by the end of the movie. No repercussions for his sexism.

In many ways the movie feels like some 50-year-old re-enacting the “fellow kids” -meme, but the director was actually quite young. At least according to Wikipedia and IMDb, both of which seem to have been written by himself (although apparently he forgot to include his birth date).

All in all, the movie is just above the so bad it’s good line, meaning that it’s just competent enough not to be funny (neither is it funny otherwise), but everything is just so bad otherwise that I just can’t get behind it.