Zombucha! review: zombies, kombucha, mayhem!

From the dubious racial politics of Victor Halperin’s pre-Code 1932 feature White Zombie, through George A Romero’s 1968 high bar Night of the Living Dead and its many damned children, to ‘No, but they’re mushrooms,’ and on to the giant dicked-28 Years Later, the pungent flesh of zombies has always absorbed the all-consuming fears of our time.

Could anyone have guessed, however, that their socially coded evolution would lead us shuffling towards a sentient scoby that enslaves marauding, kombucha-addled wellness acolytes? Yet here we are, thanks to director Claudia Dzienny’s bonkers Zombucha!

Debuting at the Melbourne International Film Festival, it opens with glitchy credits and soldiers scouring a misty moor as hobbling ghouls emerge, arms-outstretched, from the depths of a dark forest, as a final girl clutching a glowing green gun leads the men into battle. Except she’s not our star.

Zombucha!: what fourth wall?

Actual lead and Zombucha! screenwriter Emma Leonard’s freelance special effects makeup artist, Maddie, interrupts this dread-filled intro, set to Lord Fascinator’s electrically shuddering score. Gleefully barging through the fourth wall, sheleaps through the ‘cut’ to touch up the monsters’ makeup.

Alas, her precarious employment – a pervasive horror of our time – is shortly severed, booted from set and blacklisted after sorta accidentally poisoning Duncan Fellows’ creepy actor, Gabe (fair).

Moping at home, she tells her stressed-out boyfriend Leo (Ryan O’Kane) she’d kill to have his job security. Unfortunate, then, that he’s just snapped and cracked it at his ad agency gig, blowing up and quitting on the spot to the tune of Annie Hamilton’s ‘Dynamite’.

All while his boss, Audrey star Jackie van Beek’s Hopper, thunders that she made him a silverback, but: ‘If you walk through that door, you’re going to be a mother-fucking bonobo.’

Zombucha!: the call to misadventure

Now a no-income couple with nothing to do but monkey business, Joe and Maddie’s brief dalliance with ditching it all and swinging round the country in a combi van stalls when they reverse over a neighbourhood pet.

Another option presents itself when, while scouring an organic market they can’t afford, she goes googly-eyed for hunky stall-holding hippie Kai (Stephen Madsen).

Not unlike Audrey’s family, Maddie and Joe are enjoyable company if not exactly good people, soon deciding that their way out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves is to steal Kai’s scoby and launch their own competing kombucha company, egregiously dubbed Thirsty Virgin.

The thing is, Kai’s mixed up in seriously strange business with a bunch of beardy God-alikes in white robes and won’t let go of the culture he calls Mother without a fight.

That’s the least of their worries, as the accidental addition of greenery from the garden of next-door neighbour Blanche (Brigid Zengeni) causes the scoby to transform, like a mogwai fed after midnight, into a swirling, crackling and throbbing maelstrom with malignant intent.

Just like kombucha took over the wellness-obsessed world, this yeast of war demands total domination, like Levi Stubbs’ ravenous Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, manifesting a zombie army from all who dare sup from her cup.

That includes Maddie’s best mate, also called Audrey (Shakira Clanton). Can they save themselves and everyone else before it’s too late?

Zombucha!: sillier and sillier

As Zombucha!’s gleefully daft set-up continues to spiral out of control, getting sillier and sillier as it goes, this Shaun of the Dead-adjacent hoot continues to accrue surreal subplots, culminating in a glorious backyard brawl of apocalyptic mayhem chaotically captured by cinematographer Calum Riddell.

Along the way, it allows for lines like ‘You’ll split yourself in half like a scotch finger,’ as the gang clumsily defends humanity, as ever-welcome Breaker Upperrervan Beek’s boss lady Hopper chooses violence, popping off as this suburban nightmare spawns a neighbourhood of flesh-eating millennials primed for the offing in gorily glorious ways.  

Snappily edited by Julien de Benedictis with a view to the TikTok generation, Zombucha! storms in at under two hours as Dzienny dives headlong into Leonard’s fermented, fever-inducing nightmare of fizzing hilarity.

With the off-kilter sensibility of early Tim Burton’s eerie comedy, it’s a thirst-quenching delight that really spills the tea.

Zombucha! is showing as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival.

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Zombucha! review

4 out of 5 stars

Actors:    

Emma Leonard, Ryan O’Kane, Jackie van Beek, Stephen Madsen, Shakira Clanton, Duncan Fellows, Brigid Zengeni

Director:

Claudia Dzienny

Format: Film

Country: Australia

Release: TBC

Available: Cinemas