Zombie film unique in that it takes the point of view of the Zombies. A lone motorcyclist intercepts a military transport shipping toxic materials, causing a car wreck which results in a lone keg getting to a bowling alley and mistaken for beer. Mike uses the "beer" to make alcoholic soft-serve ice cream, and shares it with ex girlfriend Vanessa, fellow bowling alley employee Tim and his girlfriend Cindy. They all pass out, and wake up only to discover everyone else is speaking in a fast high pitch and has gone homicidally insane. Also, brains are ridiculously delicious, and drunk people are not hostile and can be understood.The film deals with the quartet trying to survive a world gone mad against them, and the army trying desperately to kill them all.
This film provides examples of:
- Body Horror: Chunks of them fall off, even when they see themselves as essentially human, much to their confusion.
- By the Eyes of the Blind: Or rather, the drunk.
- Crazy Survivalist: Cindy's parents, who shoot at Tim and Cindy when they go so Tim can ask them to let them date.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The "real world" is in black and white, but "zombie vision" is in full color. This helps distinguish what the main cast are seeing and what the humans do.Tim: Does it look green?Mike: It's just the light.
- Detachment Combat: Despite being severed, Mike's hand still obeys his commands.
- Emergency Transformation: With a big chunk of pragmatism. After running out of booze and being forced to kill a bowling hall full of sober people after they attack the main cast, they decide to reuse the alcoholic/toxic waste soft serve ice cream to make more zombies to help them overpower the army and escape the city.
- Good Versus Good: A few of the fights with people who see them as dangerous zombies, like the people in the bar.
- Granola Girl: Cindy, which makes her Horror Hunger really shocking to her.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Nick and Mike.
- THOUGH apparently Nick was captured by the army, so it crosses over into Strapped to an Operating Table and They Would Cut You Up. And this is after the army figures out how to communicate with him and know he's fundamentally still a person.
- Horror Hunger: They're hungry for living flesh, but aren't crippled by it and go most of the movie without obsessing over it. Brains still taste good though.
- Just a Flesh Wound: What zombies think about most wounds, including having a steering handle in the chest.
- Karma Houdini: Colonel South and Dr. Richter caused the whole mess and take delight in mocking and trying to kill zombies they know are still sentient and neither is punished.
- Losing Your Head: Mike.
- Missed the Call: Nick laments how he's never been in combat before and kept missing opportunities to do a real service for his country due to a limited number of troops being deployed, health problems and such.
- Not a Zombie: Inverted, the zombies don't see themselves as such, and think everyone else is psychotic.
- Psycho Serum: The green toxic chemical by itself seems to create regular unthinking zombies. At one point in the movie the head researcher and general try it on a test subject and he goes crazy, at another there are unintelligible zombies (even to the main cast) fighting the army. Combining it with booze and soft serve ice cream seemed to make it into something closer to what was intended.
- Run for the Border: Just substitute Mexico with "toxic waste dump". Mike cooks up a plan to flee to "Zombie Paradise", a toxic waste valley where no human will ever venture and they can live in peace.
- Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: They're stuck at a somewhat stable type 1, they decay and can't heal, but so long as the head is intact...
- Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror: Pretty much in the comedy end of things.
- Splash of Color: The toxic waste looks an evil green even in the black and white real world.
- Super-Soldier: The toxic materials was originally meant to be a super soldier type serum, but it went Horribly Wrong.
- Super-Strength: The zombies, especially women zombies, who seem to take a level in Badass post change.
- Sympathetic P.O.V.: Pretty much the point of the movie; it paints zombies as misunderstood humans who are unduly on the receiving end of fear and hostility.
- Tainted Veins: Happens to the army volunteer during the intro, once he's injected with the zombie serum.
- Van Helsing Hate Crimes: Zombies are still the same people they always were, and don't really suffer from Horror Hunger leading them to kill.
- Then again, it may just be that only the zombies made by eating the toxic waste soft-serve ice cream are sane. The army private who volunteers at the beginning pretty much does go psycho, as do a lot of zombies seen in the background.
- Weirdness Censor: The quartet see themselves as human, instead of slowly decaying corpses.
- Zombie Apocalypse: What the army is afraid the spilled toxic waste will cause. It does appear to have gotten people infected other than the main cast, and they get re-killed.
- Zombie Infectee: Played for Laughs by pairing it with Weirdness Censor, the main cast have no clue they're zombies so don't engage in classic denial. Once they do figure it out, they cope fairly quickly.
