EZMM 2015 Day 4: Stalled (2013)

It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.

For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, and 2014.

[Due to technical difficulties, we had to drop Flight of the Living Dead from the schedule. Maybe next year…]

Die-Spy Wednesday

Stalled (2013)

Director: Christian James

Writer: Dan Palmer

Well, that was a surprise!

If you just read the description of no-budget UK zombie comedy Stalled, you might just pass it by without a second look. I mean, here’s the Netflix description: “A sad-sack janitor, appropriately named W.C., is cleaning the ladies’ room when the zombie apocalypse breaks out at the office Christmas party.” Or here’s what you get on IMDB: “A janitor gets trapped in a women’s restroom and encounters an all-out attack by a horde of zombies.”

DON’T PASS IT BY.

But don’t get me wrong. Those descriptions are pretty freaking accurate if you’re just talking about the basic plot. Trust me. There’s more going on here than just a few cheap jokes.

The trailer does a better job of getting across just what’s going on here:

Okay, there are some cheap jokes, too.

Written by and starring Dan Palmer, Stalled is a wonderfully quirky independent comedy from the UK that takes a very simple, but effective, idea and spins it into gold. It is easily the most entertaining and ambitious film of this year’s marathon and I can’t recommend it more highly.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect going in to this one. The only other zombie film I’ve seen that involved toilets (aside from the awkward sex scene in Dead Snow) was the very entertaining, but very disgusting, Japanese film Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead.

This is nothing like that.

Stalled is the story of a man with nothing, having a very bad last day on the job. He’s not a hero by any means. He’s just a normal guy who has lost pretty much everything and ends up in a ladies’ room during an office party at the building where he was (until earlier that evening) a janitor. There’s some back story that doesn’t really affect the plot, but serves instead to establish W.C.’s character. He has few redeeming qualities, we discover, but thanks to Palmer’s charisma and likeability we’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Sure, he probably stole that tool box full of money, but he clearly isn’t happy about what he did.

The good news is that pretty much nobody at the office Christmas party going on down the hall is much better. In fact, nearly every person we meet from the office is kind of a piece of shit. Which makes the bathroom setting all the more appropriate.

The opening ten or fifteen minutes of the film are practically silent and if the film didn’t have other thematic points it wanted to make, could have gone silent (aside from zombie groans) for the full runtime and still have been just as successful. As it is, though, W.C. turns out not to be alone in the restroom — or is the woman two stalls over a figment of his imagination? It’s a nice bit of ambiguity that plays well both before and after you find out what’s really going on.

What we end up with is a mostly single-setting zombie film in the tradition of Night of the Living Dead (taken to absurd extremes), shot in fifteen days with practically no money, and it’s far more satisfying than anything I’ve watched during this marathon so far. It’s clever and inventive, and while it gets a bit sentimental in its finale, it doesn’t come off as too sappy thanks to the groundwork put in by Palmer to make W.C. relatable and sympathetic.

This is the good stuff!

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