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All-around redneck idiot, child abuser and cowardly bully Karl (Stephen
W.Eckles) dumps some toxic waste onto a graveyard - upon which the dead
start to rise in no time. So eventually, Karl finds himself on the run
from zombies with the usual crowd: His abused stepson Alex (Seth Darling),
Jesus-like mechanic Mike (James Blackburn), an ex-marine with a dark
secret, his love-interest Monica (Wendy Andrews), her son Woody (Keola
Melhorn), who is among the first to die, geeky Phil (David Lionbarger), an
expert on zombie survival who is or course the first to die, and security
guard George (Del Jenkins). Of course, one by one these guys die, with
Karl meeting an expecially gruesome end when he tries to abandon the
others and steal their escape car. Eventually, they run into knight Lord
Warmin (Benjamin Palmer), actually the member of a medieval reenactment
group who has just snapped when the zombies killed his girlfriend - but
now he's in full armour and perfectly equipped to counter the zombie
onslaught ... that is, until he drops his sword, then the zombies drag him
off. Eventually, everybody dies but Alex, who makes it back home - where
he has to fight his zombie mother and his zombie family dog - when Lord
Warmin comes to the rescue. Sure, the zombies have dragged him off, but
their tooth weren't strong enough to bite through his armour ... Arguably,
the zombie genre is the most rigid of all horror subgenres, but also one
low budget filmmakers tend to come back to the most often, so to make an
interesting zombie movie, you have to either find a radically different
approach, or at least make your characters interesting. Grave Mistake,
I'm afraid to say, does neither. The story is just your typical humans
on the run-narrative, the characters are not only two-dimensional
clichées but also painted in such broad strokes it almost hurts, and even
the occasional flashes of irony can't save anything. Also, I'm afraid to
say most of the actors' performances are sadly sub-standard while the
direction is hardly above functional and never really goes for atmosphere
or the macabre. At least the gore effects are pretty decent for a low
budget indie flick, but that's hardly enough to save the film ...
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