Many prominent film-makers have cut their teeth making low–budget horror movies. Undoubtedly, the ability to create elaborate visual environments using scant resources is appealing to producers and financiers. Big hitters including Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi and James Cameron kicked off their careers with splatstick flicks – involving aliens, demons and killer fish respectively – as did the German-born Australian film-makers Michael and Peter Spierig.
The Spierig brothers’ 2003 debut Undead was a hands-on affair; they shared duties in writing, directing, producing, editing and visual effects. Their self-financed budget totalled about $1m: an astonishingly small amount given the visually high-end result, on a par with the sophistication of many more expensive movies that come out of the Hollywood studio system.
Undead combines zombie movie tropes with alien invasion. The Spierig’s next two films also mixed and matched genre properties, a tradition that became one of their hallmarks. Daybreakers (with Willem Dafoe, Ethan Hawke and Sam Neill) put a vampire story in a dystopian future setting and 2014’s Predestination (with Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook) fused time travel with psychosexual science fiction.
A meteor shower hits the small Queensland fishing village of Berkeley, turning many of the populace into flesh-chomping freaks. There are survivors, of course, including “Miss Catch of the Day” beauty queen René (Felicity Mason), pilot Wayne (Rob Jenkins) and René’s former pageant rival Sallyanne (Lisa Cunningham).
The characters hole up, Night of the Living Dead-style, in a creaky house where they are joined by mysterious sharp-shooting stranger Marion (Mungo McKay) and two police officers. One of them, Harrison (Dirk Hunter), rushes into the building and in a hysterical huff delivers the film’s most famous line: “When I was a kid we respected our parents, we didn’t fuckin’ eat them.”
When the other officer, Molly (Emma Randall), hears somebody mention “zombie”, she exclaims that there’s no such thing. The next shot cuts to outside the house where about a dozen undead – all with the traditional emaciated and splotchy-skinned look – stagger towards the property. It’s clear the fellow closest to the camera is missing a huge chunk of his face.
These kind of wink-wink jokes, engineered strictly for the audience, come and go in various forms. The best constitutes a moment of national pride: René attaches a metal wheel to a broomstick and slices through a horde of zombies while the Australian flag, attached to the wall behind her, falls through the air in majestic slow motion.
For all tastes it ain’t, but the Spierig brothers bring gung-ho verve to Undead and an infectious sense of energy. At the time of the film’s release, the idea they would go on to work with much bigger budgets felt like a fait accompli. As another sibling duo, Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner, reminded us this year with Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, splatter pic film-makers have licence to be many things – silly, ridiculous, illogical – but never to be boring.
Dipping into cartoonish surrealism, including a memorable punch-up between Marion and flying fish, the film’s gnarly George Romero-esque setup is offset by lashings of humour. There are severed limbs aplenty but also wide and elaborate shots, including a spectacular scene involving a pilot navigating through a field of zombie aliens hanging motionless in the sky. It looks like something out of an expensive studio movie; amazingly, the Spierigs created most of the effects in their bedrooms using laptops and home computers.
