Mulva

Mulva Zombie Ass Kicker (2000)

This movie-reviewing gig can be a funny thing sometimes. The longer I do it the more I realize my standards have changed. With that in mind I’ve always planned on going back and reexamining the early movies that I reviewed to see if I still liked them or in the cast of Mulva Zombie Ass Kicker hated them as much as I did. So when I received a copy of Mulva from the fine people over at Tempe Entertainment I thought what the hell lets check it out again.

First I think that this might be the very first or one of the first Chris Seaver directed movies from LBP (Low Budget Pictures). The movie is less than an hour long, but feels much longer. The story is silly with a young woman named Mulva going out on Halloween for the first time since being traumatized and having her candy stolen. Since then she has become a disgusting chocoholic. But fate intervenes and the dead rise from their graves to feast upon the living, which puts a bit of a cramp in Mulva’s Halloween plans. The movie becomes a series of set pieces where silly characters like Bonejack and Teen Ape show up to battle the undead and say somewhat funny lines.

Even the best LBP movies are really nothing more than a series of sometimes funny and sometimes retarded characters spouting off rude dialogue and getting themselves in all sorts of twisted situations. Basically more or less random stupidity that I find really entertaining and fun to watch. Okay Teen Ape is funny as hell and I’m not ashamed to say so! But whether it is the inexperience of the cast or the director this one just doesn’t work at all like the later LBP movies do. First of all the acting is terrible and I don’t like the Mulva character at all. We do get some Bonejack and Teen Ape, but even those characters seem like early versions of themselves and aren’t as fun as they would become in later movies. And while LBP movies never boast high production values this one looks really bad. Between the bad locations to the odd people holding signs in the background of many of the scenes I just didn’t get it or find the movie funny at all. I will give the movie some credit for two bits that were pretty good. The fan boys getting ambushed by zombies and the zombie Benny Hill bit were genius, but not enough to make the movie worth sitting thru.

My original review gave the movie zero stars and said it offered nothing at all. Since then I’ve seen independent movies that really suck and deserve zero stars, which makes me reconsider how harsh I was with Mulva the first time around. Honestly this still isn’t a very good movie and I can’t recommend it to anyone other than the hardcore fans of LBP. For more information on where you can pick up this and the other LBP movies Tempe has to offer check out their site at http://www.tempevideo.com/

1 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer