Dead Shack
“Dead Shack” is the story of Jason, his best friend Colin, Colin’s sister Summer, their drunk and useless but loving dad Roger, and Roger’s drunk bitch girlfriend Lisa. They take a weekend trip to a cabin in the hills and the kids witness the neighbor drugging and murdering a couple of deserving frat boys. What they don’t see is that she is feeding the douchebags to her family who just happen to be zombies. When Colin fucks up and draws her attention to them, things get a little dicey for the campers. The kids have to stick together if they hope to survive because all of the adults are either killing people or completely fucking worthless.
Since we are celebrating women in horror this month, I want to take a second and talk about the strong female characters in this movie. From the beginning of the movie Summer is probably the most responsibly member of her family. She’s smart, tough as fuck, witty, and knows how to take control of a situation. Her leadership qualities and overall badassery continue to develop through the movie and in the end she is what holds the boys together and keeps them from getting turned into zombie chow. The Neighbor is a pretty badass woman as well. Sure, she feeds motherfuckers to zombies but it goes deeper than that. She has a bunch of zombies in her house yet there is no outbreak of the undead. She has managed to not only preserve and care for her family but also literally save the fucking world from a zombie outbreak. Oh, also, it is revealed that she has been doing this for ten years without being bitten. Ten years of not only feeding zombies but being zombie food and living in the house. That’s like a giraffe keeping a bunch of lions in its house. If that doesn’t qualify her as a badass in your book you can just get the fuck outta here.
Overall the character development in this movie is great. You get to watch this group of teenagers go from a handful of stupid ass kids to a team of zombie slayers who can keep their shit together under a ton of pressure. Jason goes from a giant pussy with a huge awkwardly obvious crush on Summer to a warrior with a huge awkwardly obvious crush on his best friend’s sister. Colin finally pulls his head out of his ass, and like I said before Summer just becomes a better leader. Sure, there’s a couple touching moments with Roger but he’s just kind of a piece of shit throughout the whole movie. The only thing that I am left really curious about is the back story on the Neighbor and her undead family. I would watch the shit out of an origin story on them. For real.
This movie really checked all the boxes for me, the pacing, acting, storytelling, and characters were all on point. There were some great kills and some pretty good laughs too. Seriously, if you have Shudder and haven’t watched “Dead Shack” you’re fucking up and you need to correct that shit.
