Shed of the Dead
A shed can be many things; for most it is for keeping gardening equipment or storing garden furniture through the winter, while for Roald Dahl it was where he did his writing, but for Trevor it is where he hides from both the obligations life and his wife Bobbi, headphones on and painting miniatures for his tabletop games as he dreams of fantastical victories.
Those who share the allotment are not impressed with the disgraceful “post-apocalyptic” state of Trevor’s space, the aggressive Mister Parsons advising him a petition is to be presented to the council to have him evicted, but the day is about to get worse still as the zombie apocalypse begins.
Some of the living dead are friends and former lovers, some are strangers, some are likely the bodies that presumed serial killer Doc has been burying in his own patch, but trapped in their home, Trevor, Bobbi and their respective best friends Graham and Harriet are running out of options and the roll of the dice is unlikely to save them.
Written and directed by Drew Cullingham and with its world premiere at the Sci-Fi London film festival, Shed of the Dead is a shuffling, oozing army of clichés and bad behaviour, Trevor and Graham (Spencer Brown and Ewen MacIntosh, the latter making no attempt to be other than a charmless budget Nick Frost substitute) overgrown man-children while Bobbi (Lauren Socha) is a hectoring shrew.
Sold on the strength of the above-the-title cast, horror veterans Kane Hodder, Bill Moseley and Michael Berryman are little more than cameos while Brian Blessed does not even appear, his distinctive voice employed only to narrate the introduction and epilogue.
With scenes lifted wholesale from Shaun of the Dead with added vulgarity and presumably aimed at teenage boys as socially isolated as Trevor and Graham, the sole purpose of Shed of the Dead seems to be to help unemployed misogynist losers feel better about their lack of achievement in life and with women.
The men hopeless, sexist daydreamers, the women shrill harpies in the real world and wanton scantily clad sex objects in the Trevor’s fantasy realm, Shed of the Dead makes Cockneys vs Zombies seem like a flawed masterpiece, while slackers versus zombies were already rounded up in The Battery.
Any late attempts at character drama undermined by the persistent juvenile behaviour, placing blame on each other rather than coming up with a plan and ogling a dying woman’s underwear rather than rendering comfort or assistance, Shed of the Dead has nothing to add to an already overcrowded subgenre and would have been more entertaining if chopped up as firewood.
Shed of the Dead had its world premiere at the Sci-Fi London film festival on 18th May and is released on digital download on 20th May
