Melvin

531 Productions (2009)

R1 DVD

Revenge of the Nerds with zombies and power drills?

Three years ago a young nerdy student, Melvin, was bullied by a group of local thugs. The bullying got out of hand and Melvin was accidentally killed. He wants revenge.

Norton Pincus is the gang’s current target. He is another nerdy type, but one night while walking through the cemetery Melvin rises from the undead and confronts Norton and tells Norton he has chosen him “to set things right”. He bites Norton and Norton becomes a night-time zombie. During the day Norton is still the nerdy mild-mannered student, the butt of everyone’s jokes, but at night with Melvin in control of his body he seeks revenge on Melvin’s killers and his own tormentors. His revenge is, naturally, bloody and savage and utterly predictable.

This independent film is a kind I would usually avoid. Every independent producer seems to think they have a zombie horror film that’s worth making, and they usually make it look like a real amateur-hour production. This film has every cliché in the book, the decapitations, the buckets of blood, the conventional characters, power tools and so on, but it’s done really well and with a certain level of dark humour that makes it all work. Perhaps it’s because of its sheer conventionality that it succeeds – it is almost a parody of itself.

It is short at 64 minutes and this means that the scenes have been tightly edited and well produced, and you don’t get any one scene long enough to get bored. Melvin is a lot of fun – why not give it a try?

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