Rent The Demented (2013)

Spoilers follow ... - The Demented review by NP

The crashing guitars of prom-rock opens this zombie picture, ushering in some semester-related romance between two pristine teens with teeth like gleaming tombstones. To break the mood somewhat, two more teens arrive, all shorts and perfection and squeaky voiced small-talk, ripe with reversed-baseball-capped diluted attitude. As they drive off to wherever, the family-friendly rock music returns. In the car, all four are shown hollering and having, like, a really good time. It is as tedious and appalling an opening as you can imagine. Rolling up at a big house (the main location for the story), the final couple join the gang. One wears shades and drinks beer from a bottle and his girlfriend looks exactly the same as the other females. There are boastful sex jokes and mock provocation and then the rock music is back. It’s way past time to hit ‘eject’ in the DVD, but purely because I’ve started this review, I decide to persevere.

A suspected terrorist attack threatens to tip this bunch out of their back-slapping reverie. I still don’t know what any of their names are. A CGI missile is seen to explode overhead and it is back to knuckle-punching, sports talk and everyone calling each other dude. “This whole thing has really got me thinking, you know? About, like, life.” Says one gummy hunk. “That’s really deep, man,” says another, bromance twinkling in his eyes. “He’s going to be a great guy some day,” says one pearly white lass to another. And the running time rumbles on.

This is absolutely my least favourite kind of film. Horrible, awful dialogue you’d find on some daytime US soap from the early 1990s, between manicured, characterless beauties you don’t care about enough even to WANT to see them dismembered by the promised living dead (even the zombies, when they eventually arrive, look like they’ve staggered out of a toothpaste commercial). Someone has actually funded this crap, cast a number of grinning, competent non-entities and put together an utterly soulless, vapid, smug environment when anything approaching horror takes distant second place to divine catwalk idiots arguing about jealousy and flirtation.

By the time the zombies, or the ‘demented’, or whatever the heck they are, arrive, nothing they can do could be enough to redeem this respectable, insipid, gore-free, thrill-free, lamentable soap fare. It doesn’t bother me that a corpse lying at the entrance of a pharmacy disappears between scenes; I don’t care that the confusing ending sees them both being rescued and not being rescued. An effort is at least made to make the last ten or so minutes exciting, and the finale does at least trey to do something unexpected: not even perfect people have a happy endings. Aside from that, however, this is just a hugely complacent, unambitious film.