Die-ner (Get It?)

I dunno. This movie is just....boring. And trying too hard to be a little edgy but the dialogue falls flat and just comes off as uninteresting. The characters are all charmless and there's no one to really care about or root for. Ken just talks way too much without saying anything at all. And he doesn't know how to use duct tape properly. As always, make up your own mind, but I'd pass on this.

I've watched this movie twice. Once was when I found it on one of those cheap "8 in 1" horror movie collections. The second time was to confirm just exactly what it was I had watched before.

This movie functions similarly to a movie called "After Last Season", lots of long boring scenes of characters doing nothing. Not only is it one of the most eye stabbingly boring movies I've ever had the displeasure of witnessing, but it also excels at being redundant and idiotic. Maybe if the writer(s) had spent less time trying to inject a pathetic backstory for our main character, this could have been a savable story.

Ken is a personable, talkative serial killer who has just dispatched the late-night skeleton crew at an out-of-the-way diner. When a bickering young couple and a local cop turn up and start to smell a rat, Ken is ready to add to the body count. But the bodies in the freezer aren't content to stay dead, and things quickly get out of control.

When you approach a movie with a title like this one, you don't tend to expect subtlety. But Die-ner's grim opening sequence (in a series of close-ups showing Ken cleaning up the traces of his work) tips you off that this is a horror movie before it's anything else. The low-key comedy proceeds mostly from the well-drawn characters' reactions to the situation. The young couple is faced with a double threat: they can't flee the zombies because of the psycho killer holding them hostage. Josh Grote (in his first film performance) does a great job as Ken, who is less terrified than utterly fascinated by the zombie rising. As a connoisseur of death, he's intrigued by the idea of un-death. "I kill people all the time," he says, "but they've never come back before." Louisiana actor Larry Purtell is hilarious as the tired, ineffectual sheriff, who gets taken out of the game pretty quickly and spends most of the movie groaning on the floor.

The film is fairly light on the gore, but there is one well-done zombie bite and a bit of hand trauma. That aside, it's a clever take on the zombie and serial killer genres, informed by lots of older movies but never beholden to them. They even manage to pull off the "kill me if I become one of them" exchange without embarrassing themselves. I think if more people see this, it has the potential to generate some buzz. If a DVD were available (hopefully with a different title), I might be interested in seeing it again.

P.S. Lead actor Josh Grote appears to be in no way related to Edward Norton, despite looking and sounding exactly like him.

A serial killer masquerades as a waiter at a night diner after he has killed the cook and waitress, but as customers arrive his murdered victims come back to life as zombies (no explanation given). Nice idea, this started reasonably promising, despite its obvious low budget. Sadly the middle section was a rather tedious bore, too few characters and poor attempts at comedy, clautraphobically set in a single location. The film does pick up towards the end but it is too little, too late. I have given KFZ a second viewing but with no improvement, I won't be watching it again. KFZ - Kentucky Fried Zombies: catchy title for a crappy movie.

A charming wise-cracking serial killer, sets up shop at an all-nite diner. Hoping to lake-out the 3rd-shifters that come in for coffee and pie. A bickering couple comes in and just as he's about to get started, here comes the dearly departed. Now this isn't a barricade the restaurant from the oncoming zombie apocalypse, in fact they don't even lock the doors. instead its a big farce as the couple has to wrap their brains around the fact that their brain eaters in they have to restrain. As they try to un-animate the recently re-animated. They also try and get help. As well as realizing their host is a serial killer who they have to escape from while avoiding the zombies. In one funny scene they ask the killer why he has a bag full of tape and rope? Well it's a tape and rope bag what else would you keep in it?