20161117: Comedy Review--Night of the Living Deb

Name: Night of the Living Deb (2015)
IMDb: link to Night of the Living Deb page

Genres: Comedy   Country of origin: USA.

Cast:

Maria Thayer as Deb Clarington, Michael Cassidy as Ryan Waverly, Chris Marquette as Chazz Waverly, Ray Wise as Frank Waverly, Syd Wilder as Stacy, Julie Brister as Ruby.

Directed by: Kyle Rankin.  Written by: Kyle Rankin, Andy Selzer.

Deb and Ryan

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux:
In Portland, Maine, Deb and Ruby are at a bar the night before the American Fourth of July celebration.  Ruby encourages Deb to hook up with the tall fellow at the bar.  Deb does that.  But after hitting on Ryan, Ryan's fiancee Stacy shows up.  Stacy is not pleased with Deb's presence.

Deb wakes up in Ryan's bed.  Ryan is on the phone trying to figure out how to separate himself from Deb.  Deb and Ryan have a rocky conversation, then decide to split up, to see the people they expect to see, and do the usual July 4 activities.

Unfortunately, there are a huge number of zombies about town.  All the parties seem to have been cancelled.

Delineation of conflicts:
The zombies like to eat regular humans.  Humans don't really care for this.

Deb and Ryan look for news and help.  Both are hard to find since the Internet is down, the local television station is down, and the local radio is down.

Their attempts to connect with people fail until they make it to Ryan's father's house.  They soon discover the source of the zombie infection, but have little idea of how to survive the outbreak, despite Ryan's father's wealth.

Resolution: This is a comedy, and there are a lot of unexpected outcomes.

One line summary: Comedic take on the zombie apocalypse.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 10/10 Well shot.

Sound: 8/10 The dialog was easy to hear.  Music was not much of a factor.

Acting: 5/10 Good grief.  Ray Wise did what I expected in terms of acting, and I appreciated that.  The other actors seemed insistent on delivering the lines like they were meant to be taken seriously, which was off-putting to say the least.

Screenplay: 6/10 I laughed fairly regularly at the one liners and the bizarre situations.  The light approach was taken throughout, so I tossed this one in the silly hipster apocalypse bin.

Final Rating: 6/10 I watched this once on Netflix; that was probably enough.