See this is why I love Asylum Films.
Asylum Films, the studio that rose to success by making cheap knockoffs of blockbuster hits, has invented its own new genre. It has elements of camp, except that by definition camp has to be unintentional ("failed seriousness"). It has elements of parody but it's not outright parody. It's comedy on a level that makes the audience think it's failing at comedy, and that itself is the comedy. (Huh?)
Well with a title like The Coed and the Zombie Stoner you know exactly what you're going to get. It's a mashup of 3 genres that appeal to the lowest in all of us: brainless fraternity house comedy, stoner flick, and zombies. They even throw in a cheesy romcom plotline, but I guess if they added that to the title it would be too many words for the target audience to read.
What makes this flick fun aren't the juvenile sight gags (of which there are plenty) or the gratuitous nudity (plenty again), or ridiculous gore (you can guess), but surprise it's the actual story itself. It's just so bizarre that you gotta ride it out til the end. A hot babe "nerd" (we know she's a nerd because she wears glasses) stumbles on a zombie hunk who's been hiding in the freezer since 1985 when he got stoned and accidentally walked into an immortality machine thinking it was a shower, fusing his DNA with weed as well as a cat that slipped into the machine with him (The Fly anyone?). But in the zombie universe, weed gives him the anti-munchies meaning he doesn't have an appetite for human flesh. So he's a "good zombie" as long as they keep him stoned. Our babe nerd, who's being threatened with being kicked out of her sorority if she doesn't get a frat boyfriend in 24 hours, decides that this guy will suffice. But first she has to get him into a fraternity. Are you keeping up? This is all in the first 10 minutes. We haven't even gotten to the zombie apocalypse yet.
From there it goes absolutely ape nuts with so many awesome sideplots, like the sorority sister who's obsessed with becoming a zombie because it's good for the complexion ("I'd rather be dead than ugly!") or the jealous plot to break up the nerd-zombie couple because they become so popular, or the weird school nurse whose sideplot I still haven't figured out except that she does nasty things to her patients. And who doesn't LOVE the Mad Max "Zombie Killer" machine they weld together out of a 4 door sedan in the final minutes of the story.
If you're a fan of all the awful lowbrow comedies of the 80s you'll recognize at least a dozen sendups here. It's pretty clear that Asylum Films just threw a bunch of money at a crew and told them to make a movie--the same formula that gave us Easy Rider , Silent Running , American Graffiti and Citizen Kane --and this is the glorious result.
