If there is anything I like more than a crappy horror movie, it’s a crappy horror movie title that plays on words. For example, Santa’s Slay portrays a man dressed as Santa, slaying people. Or The Gingerdead Man who is a dead killer resurrected as a gingerbread man who continues to make people dead.
With the movie I am reviewing aptly named DIEner, I expected no less than a diner where people die. Little did I know I was about to be served with zombies as well. Synopsis follows below:
Ken (Josh Grote) is a wandering and unassuming serial killer who enters a forsaken and empty diner during the graveyard shift. After a long conversation with the diner’s lone waitress Rose, (Maria Olsen) Ken kills her and promptly delivers the same fate to the diner’s cook Fred (Jorge Montalvo). As Ken cleans up the bloody mess and deposits Rose and Fred in the walk-in freezer, company arrives. A young, unhappy married couple Rob (Parker Quinn) and Kathy (Liesel Kopp) stop by the diner, only to be followed by the arrival of Sheriff Duke Purdett (Larry Purtell). Ken now finds himself in the middle of a rousing game of cat and mouse which he manages well until the unthinkable happens. Back from the dead, Rose and Fred emerge from the freezer and start walking around! Once an unflappable serial killer, Ken now holds the young couple and wounded sheriff captive, trying frantically to escape the zombie predators!
I was expecting a very low-budget zombie horror film that tried to be a horror movie but failed. It was instead a terrible horror/comedy(?) with no zombies showing up until about 20 minutes in. I suppose I should have watched the trailer first.
Much of the 75-minute piece of refuse was taken up by the first 23 minutes introducing us to characters we couldn’t give a dead moose’s last shit about. I loved how the first five minutes we had to hear the horse-gummed waitress tell the killer her life story before he slow-mo kills her, and owns the cowardly cook with a knife throw to the back. We are also served a couple of nearly five-minute long flashback scenes trying to make us somehow sympathetic to the comic serial killer. I might add, the little serial killer in the flashback is approximately 10 years old and wearing the exact same shirt as the 30 something, grown up a serial killer. Great wardrobe department.
When the zombies do show up, they are a complete joke. The three principle characters were able to dodge around them like kids playing freeze tag in elementary school. The young couple, Rob, and Kathy, decide to just go right along with the serial killer’s brilliant plan of detaining the zombies. Tying one to a flimsy coat rack, and duct taping the other one to the floor the greasy kitchen floor. You know, as opposed to trying to kill said zombies, or even just simply leaving.
The actors had about as much life in them as the dead mouse that my cat dropped off at the doorstep this morning. And the soundtrack- oh the glorious soundtrack! – organ music. We were also treated to some tunes during the flashbacks; they sounded like a monkey on LSD trying to play a guitar while kicking bells across the ground and wind chimes flailing about. At this point, Grizzly Park was Academy material compared to this scum sucking piece of garbage paste.
The being said, I highly recommend it to anyone looking to ruin their life for 75 minutes.
- Bad acting (a given)
- Bad Music
- Not many zombies until the end
- Nothing funny
- Nothing remotely entertaining
For those reasons I award DIEner with a score of Zero Grizzlies, and may God have mercy on the souls of those who created it.
– Craptastic Bonus Fun Fact: the word diener is derived from the German leichendiener, which literally means corpse servant. Coincidence or DIEner writer genius? I’d put money on coincidence.
Grizzly Bomb 