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It would be difficult to come up with a genre with a wider gap between its successes and failures than the horror comedy.  Some of the most beloved horror films of all time are horror comedies, but for every Evil Dead 2 or An American Werewolf in London, there are a dozen Idle Hands or Vampire in Brooklyns.  This is probably due to the widespread misconception that horror and comedy films are easier to make than films of other genres, therefore any hack who’s shot a music video or is friends with a comedian is qualified to make a horror or a comedy film.  The problem is only compounded when the two genres are combined.

Possibly the only way to make a horror comedy worse is if the film is made in a country that isn’t particularly known for classic horror or comedy films.  Some place like Germany, the homeland of Night of the Living Dorks.  The movie tips far more to the comedy side of the equation, and remarkably somehow manages to mine three separate decades for material that has already been ripped-off better elsewhere.  It takes the characters from an 80’s John Hughes movie, updates them with 90’s-style gross-out gags and sex-obsession of the American Pie movies and wedges them into a plot inspired by the current stale zombie trend.

The characters are familiar to anyone who has ever seen a teen comedy.  There’s the frustrated nerd filled with hidden geek-rage, the wild-and-crazy party animal/hawaiian shirt enthusiast and the main character, a tortured Cusack-ian type who pines for the popular blonde girl while ignoring the (much hotter) girl next door who is clearly in love with him. Due to a failed voodoo love spell involving one of Central Europe’s many urns of zombie ashes, the three titular dorks are turned into zombies.  Most of the second act of the movie alternates between the guys displaying some superhuman characteristic and realizing they are zombies, and then promptly forgetting this fact until the next scene calls for another superhuman gag and they once again are shocked to realize that they might just be zombies.

What’s that you say- zombies don’t have superhuman powers?  In this movie, being turned into the living dead has approximately the same effect as being bitten by a radioactive spider.  In short order the undead dorks realize that they have incredible strength, are nigh invulnerable and have have the classic zombie power of x-ray vision.  Instead of donning tights and becoming putrefied crimefighters, the guys instead use their zombie powers to win a rugby game in P.E., which according to bad movie logic naturally makes them the most popular people in school.  That is, until one of them goes rogue and starts eating people.

All of the aforementioned cliches and vast liberties taken with zombie mythos would be perfectly acceptable if the movie was any good.  In fact, horror comedy being a hybrid genre, the film could succeed on one count and fail on the other and still be acceptable.  Unfortunately the comedy is pitched squarely at the Meet the Spartans crowd and the horror elements are there only to move the plot along and allow for a few lame special effect sequences.

As Night of the Living Dorks is somewhat horror-related and non-American, the Hollywood remake is currently in development.  In this case, though, the perfect storm of a promising premise and a filmmaker who can be funny (Michael Showalter of Mtv’s The State and Wet Hot American Summer is set to direct) combined with the low bar set by the source material means that this remake has a very good chance of improving on the original.  Until then, if you’re in the mood for zombified, horny teenagers, you’ll have to settle for Laguna Beach.

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