When Casey Walker arrived in town with his entourage for tonight's world première of A Little Bit Zombie at the Victoria Film Festival, the Toronto-based filmmaker was coming full circle.
It was while he was running a landscaping company in Nanaimo during the housing boom in the mid-'90s that the former University of Windsor student declared he was going to become a movie director.
He was drunk at the time, he confesses with a laugh, and it was all because of a woman he was trying to impress.
"The next day when I sobered up I said, 'Oh, shit, I've gotta do something about that!' " he recalled.
Walker, 36, never got the girl, although they're now close friends. But he became an accomplished writer and director of commercials and TV shows beginning with Prank Patrol, the children's reality pranks series.
When people ask why he decided to make a zombie movie as his feature debut, he answers with a question of his own.
"Why not another zombie movie?" replies Walker, a fan of both the zombie flicks laced with social commentary pioneered by George A. Romero, and Return of the Living Dead, Dan O'Bannon's playful, funny-scary homage to Romero's classics.
"There were two halves that made a whole. The zombie is one of the most fascinating creatures because you can't reason with it. There's no logic behind it, and there's nothing you can do. They're just coming for you, and that's it."
A Little Bit Zombie, which Walker terms a "rom-zom-com," is altogether different. If you're in the right frame of mind, you'll discover a ghoulishly funny, cheerfully grotesque romp that interlaces clichés you might find in a Katherine Heigl comedy with classic zombie movie tropes all held together by a deadpan adherence to the rules of the genre.
His horror comedy centres on Steve (Kristopher Turner), a likable human resources manager who becomes infected by a zombie virus during a wilderness getaway.
Crystal Lowe (Hot Tub Time Machine) plays his Bridezilla-to-be who isn't about to let her drooling fiancé's sudden hunger for human brains ruin her wedding plans.
Meanwhile, Steve's pragmatic sister Sarah (Kristen Hager) and narcissistic best buddy Craig (Shawn Roberts) can no longer turn a blind eye to his zombie-like behaviour. And it
doesn't help that Max (Stephen McHattie), a deranged zombie hunter, is in hot pursuit with his bookish assistant Penelope (Emilie Ullerup), a jittery cross between Sharon Stone and Scooby Doo's Velma.
The screenplay co-written by Christopher Bond, one of the creators of Evil Dead: The Musical, and Trevor Martin, was inspired by their own recent engagements, the director said.
"The guys don't have Bridezillas," he hastens to add. "We looked at how their brides behaved and what would be the opposite?"
Walker said Lowe was a consummate professional while portraying the fiancée-from-hell with the phoney smile who plans a rigid itinerary for the foursome's cabin-in-the-woods weekend and who isn't afraid of using her pink stun gun or putting Steve back together when he literally starts falling apart at the seams.
"She put herself in my hands and I took her way out of her comfort zone," Walker said, "She was constantly on the edge of breaking down. What you see is not Crystal at all."
Walker considers himself lucky getting McHattie (Watchmen, A History of Violence) on board.
"The reason Stephen McHattie is in our film is because his lovely wife Lisa said he had to do it," said Walker, recalling how she persuaded her "insanely busy" husband to do it after she read the script.
McHattie, whose gum-chewing, rifle-toting character says things like "Let's get this party started" before blowing zombies away or exclaims "My bad!" after a nasty kill, couldn't be more over-the-top. It wasn't his original intention, Walker said.
"Stephen said, 'I'm not playing this funny. I'm going to be dead serious,' " he recalled, noting McHattie changed his tune after showing up to do his scenes mid-shoot.
"He quickly got the vibe of what we'd been doing on set, so that didn't last. We laughed all day, every day," said Walker, who puts part of the blame on Roberts (Resident Evil, Diary of the Dead) for his constant ad libbing.
Filming was much more enjoyable than funding the film, a process Walker says was "hellish" even though he was motivated by his mantra, the Sir Winston Churchill quote: "If you're going through hell, keep going."
It began well enough in 2006 with My Million Dollar Movie, his innovative website that helped him raise $1.9 million by selling "frames" of his film for $10 apiece.
Contributors would get a producer credit and their money back if it made a profit.
This was before crowd-sourced funding sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo took off, but his lawyers advised him to shut it down when Canadian securities regulators entered the picture.
"That great big tumbleweed of awesomeness stopped rolling and it just kind of died. Yeah, I had the bad idea first."
mreid@timescolonist.com
