For an invigorating swig of high entertainment with undead side effects, reach for the refreshing Australian blend of comedy and horror found in Zombucha!, directed by Claudia Dzienny and written by Emma Leonard. Maddie (Emma Leonard), a former musician who is now a special FX make-up artist, has just lost her zombie movie gig. Her husband and former musical partner, Leo (Ryan O’Kane), has just walked out of his corporate benefit-laden advertising job, despite the baggie of cocaine his boss, Hopper (Jackie van Beek), slipped him to keep him working. Freed from all shackles, the young couple, who want to have a child, realize how f****d they now are.
Maddie gets an ominously close look at the strange brew in Zombucha!
“The desperate couple decides to get into the beverage industry by bottling their own kombucha…”
The desperate couple decides to get into the beverage industry by bottling their own kombucha, made from a culture Leo steals from a booth at a fair from cutie pie Kai (Stephen Madsen). Leo then snatches a mysterious herb from the yard of their wacky neighbor, Blanche (Brigid Zengeni), to add to the mixture. This results in a kombucha with remarkable restorative powers, with bottles soon flying off the shelves. However, Maddie and Leo have no idea that after their customers have ingested enough of the drink over a period of time, they will become homicidal zombies. While they definitely have a secure customer base, people tend to stop spending money when they are dead, so these two have a problem…
I have never drunk kombucha, as my wife once drank some and said it tasted like wet dog hair. Zombucha! tastes a lot better than that nasty drink ever could. First off, with the zany title topped with an exclamation point, I was expecting Zombucha! to be a party movie in the same vein as Sewer Gators or Caddy Hack. It would be so easy to make a bad movie on purpose with this concept, but Dzienny and Leonard aimed way higher. Instead of making an excuse for a movie to get trashed in front of, the director and writer have made a clever examination of economic anxiety in the modern age. Yes, Virginia, Zombucha! is a real movie, a really good movie.
"…one of the most fun movies made about the apocalypse going on in your wallet."
