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| DEAD FUNNY
ONE HELL OF A DAY
When a voodoo ritual goes wrong, Nathan (David Leon, above) finds strange things happening to his body - and even stranger things to his
classmates -like Shane (Paul Reid, below) .
boy eats girl
AMERICAN PIE MEETS BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER IN BOY EATS GIRL,
A ZOMBIE HORROR PIC WITH SAMANTHA MUMBA AND NEWCOMER
DAVID LEON HEADING ITS CAST. NICK RODDICK
TALKS TO DIRECTOR STEPHEN BRADLEY.
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If you’re a teenage boy with raging hormones (and are there any other kinds of teenage boy?), there are few things more mortifying than to have your mum turn up outside school to pick you up. Nathan (David Leon) is already having a very bad day, when his mother, Grace (Deirdre O’Kane), shows up at the school gates mid-way through Boy Eats Girl. Nathan is duly mortified. On the other hand, Grace has a point, because she knows something that Nathan doesn’t: she knows he’s dead.
The reason why Nathan is dead but still going to school is, as any horror movie fan will tell you, because he is a zombie - dead, but undead. Grace brought him back to life the night before using an ancient voodoo ritual involving dead chickens and other icky things. She had to do this because Nathan had drunk too much whisky and accidentally hanged himself in his bedroom after seeing his girlfriend, Jessica (Samantha Mumba), apparently going down on a creepy school mate who happened to have a flash car.
Everyday teenage stuff, in other words.
“THE WORLD OF THE FILM IS
VERY REAL AND NOT PLAYED
FOR LAUGHS; IT’S NOT
SELF-REFERENTIAL IN A WAY
THAT SOMETHING LIKE SCREAM WOULD BE. IT’S STRAIGHT HORROR PUNCTUATED WITH COMEDY”
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What happens next is that Grace’s voodoo recipe unfortunately had a rather important page missing, and her resurrection of Nathan unleashes a class-full of ravenous zombies after her darling boy bites class bully Samson (Mark Huberman) in a moment of frustration. But because, beneath their raging appetite for human flesh, the newly created zombies are still teenagers, their main aim in life seems to be to come between Nathan and Jessica, the girl he loves but never has the guts to tell. And, by the end of the film, there are lots of guts around. It’s been a hell of a day for Nathan, not to mention all the other people who get eaten along the way.
“All our classmates are dead,” mutters Nathan’s friend, Diggs (Tadhg Murphy), tearfully. “We’ve killed people we’ve known for years and we’ve seen other people being eaten. I mean, you’re supposed to make friends at school, not eat them.”
Boy Eats Girl, written by Derek Landy and directed by Stephen Bradley, is set in the suburbs of Dublin but manages to press a whole range of buttons, from American Pie via Buffy the Vampire Slayer through to An American Werewolf in London. The location may be Ireland, but the real setting of the film is that strange country called adolescence. Generous helpings of gore are thrown in for good measure, too.
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