The Coed and the Zombie Stoner (2014)

I’ve been a fan of what The Asylum has been doing for a few years now.  It’s not because I think the movies are outright good.  Most of them are not.  The main crop of movies released by The Asylum are made to cash in on the popular movies being released around that time.  Snakes on a Train was meant to capitalize upon the potential success of Snakes on a Plane.  Nazis at the Center of the Earth was meant to try and make money off of the release of Iron Sky.  Paranormal Entity was made so that the title would be confusing and people would get that movie instead of Paranormal Activity.  That’s just the way that The Asylum rolls.

Well, that’s not the whole story really.  There is another side to The Asylum.  It is a side that I hadn’t witnessed until this past week.  It is a side that I knew was there, but I never quite dove into.  This section of The Asylum is their sex comedy section.  I have long known that the studio has delved into sex comedies because I’ve seen the titles of some of the movies on blu-ray release lists.  They have a movie called MILF.  If that doesn’t shout sex comedy, I don’t know what does.  I decided that now would be as good a time as any to introduce myself to this other kind of movie from The Asylum, and boy did I find something interesting and equally not great.

The place that I began my journey into this blindspot of The Asylum was a movie called The Coed and the Zombie Stoner.  The movie told the story of Chrissy (Catherine Annette), a sorority sister in school studying science stuff.  She finds a zombie named Rigo (Grant O’Connell) in the lab and falls in love with him.  Eventually, he starts an outbreak of the zombie virus and Chrissy must find a way to stop it.  The solution comes in the form of her brother Spike (Andrew Clements)’s marijuana.

This movie isn’t based on anything that I am aware of, which is a first for a movie from The Asylum that I have watched.  Yet, I don’t think the movie is that much better than some of those rip-offs and cash-ins that I am used to the company producing.  Scotty Mullen set out to write a movie that was a mixture of a college sex comedy, a stoner comedy, and a horror movie and managed to succeed in that goal.  I respect that attempt and realization of the subgenre mixing within the movie.  There is a lot of good in that goal being reached.

I wasn’t sure in the beginning how the movie would shape up.  In fact, the opening scene of the movie had me worried.  The Coed and the Zombie Stoner began with a scene of mayhem as two naked sorority girls ran from zombies.  When I say naked, I mean completely naked.  No clothing at all.  Full frontal nudity.  It was nice to look at and all, but it had me worried that the movie was going to be all naked women and no actual story.

Also worrisome were the jokes in the first portion of the movie.  The comedy throughout The Coed and the Zombie Stoner was dumb.  At first I was really put off by it, but as the movie went on, I grew to like it more.  I wouldn’t say I had any audible laughs during the movie; however, the humor was not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.  The jokes tended to be rooted in the characters and their personalities rather than the situation they were in, which might not be the best way to go about it.  It still worked for the movie and made it enjoyable, albeit bad.

As for the horror, it worked in a comedy-horror sense.  The zombies were threatening enough to make you feel as though the characters were in real danger.  The main zombie set pieces all tended to be satisfying.  The climax is enthralling enough to keep you invested in what will happen to the characters.  And the horror is what brings on the romantic plot between Chrissy and Rigo.  He’s a zombie, so there has to be a sort of horrific element to the romance as a result of that.

All in all, The Coed and the Zombie Stoner works well as a zombie romantic comedy in the vein of Shaun of the Dead and Warm Bodies.  It is nowhere near as good as those two movies, but it manages to be entertaining enough throughout its runtime.  Plus, I don’t mind watching Catherine Annette run around for an hour and a half dressed up in cliché sexy nerd attire.  There are worse ways to pass your time than watching this movie.

And there are worse ways to pass your time than reading these notes:

• Jamie Noel was in The Coed and the Zombie Stoner.  She could previously be seen in A Haunted House.
• The Coed and the Zombie Stoner comes from The Asylum.  They also made Two-Headed Shark Attack, Rise of the Zombies, Snakes on a Train, the Paranormal Entity movies, Nazis at the Center of the Earth, and Bermuda Tentacles.
• Other zombie movies that have been in the Sunday “Bad” Movies are Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, House of the Dead, and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.
• Two other drug related movies I’ve seen are Hansel and Gretel Get Baked, Shrooms, and Evil Bong.
• Have you seen The Coed and the Zombie Stoner?  Did you like it?  What are your thoughts on zombie romantic comedies?  Stoner movies?  What are your thoughts on The Asylum?  You can leave any comments in the comment section.  I’d love to read them.
• If you have suggestions for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can leave them in the comments, tell me on Twitter, or email me at sundaybadmovies@gmail.com.  I take all suggestions into consideration and try to include them in future Sunday “Bad” Movie schedules.
• Last but not least, I’m trying to get a post made up for the end of November where I answer people’s questions about the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  If you have any questions you would like to see me answer, you can email them to me.  Thanks.