Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (2016) Movie Review

I’m a huge fan of zombie comedies. My love of them started with Shaun of the Dead before expanding to things like Dead Alive, Night of Something Strange, Dead Snow, Fido, Dead & Breakfast, Boy Eats Girl and Cemetery Man. If it’s a comedic zombie film and I’ve seen it, more often than not, I’ve enjoyed it for one reason or another. Sometimes it will even take its place in my list of favorite horror comedies. Did Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies make that cut?

Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies is Austrian zombie comedy directed by Dominik Hartl from a script he wrote with Armin Prediger. The film starts Laurie Calvert (The Quiet Ones 2014), Gabriela Marcinkova (Byzantium 2012), Oscar Dyekjaer Glese, Margarete Tiesel, and Karl Fischer. The plot of Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies follows a group of snowboarders who get trapped at a ski resort during a zombie outbreak.

So did Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies make it onto my list of favorite zombie comedies? Not even close and there is one glaring reason for that: I didn’t find it funny. For me, most of the jokes either fell flat or were of the groan-and-eye-roll-inducing variety. Does that make it a bad movie? Not really. The characters are kind of one note but the actors all did a good job. The make up effects were solid. There is one area where this film excels and that is the kills. Just some of the things you will see are ripped off arms, impalements via antlers, decapitations by a trap door, ski poles to the eyes, various limbs and heads cut off with a snowboard, smashed heads, a zombie deer shredded by a snow mobile, faces cut in half, a disemboweling, and a glorious scene of zombies being sucked into and torn apart by a snow blower that feels like the lawnmower scene in Dead Alive. The last 20 minutes is glorious.

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The first problem is the first half hour or so is pretty boring and takes forever to get to the point. The characters, for the most part, are stupid. The first human zombie is clearly undead, yet people have full conversations with him and dance with him, failing to notice he’s a bit abnormal until he’s tearing them apart. By then, he has turned an entire fucking bar. The second problem is that this has been sold as a lighthearted film but there are a lot of moments that felt out of place tone wise – they were just too mean spirited. The “hero” of the movie breaks into the hiding place of an innocent man and leaves him to die a horrible death. One of the leads starts to turn and asks to be killed. A woman tries to help him by stabbing his leg. He finally turns and she stabs him through both eyes with ski poles. Somehow he doesn’t die and he becomes a running gag throughout the whole movie.

The next problem is that we are given a human villain that I absolutely hated (which was the point) and rather than show him dying a horrible death, he is turned offscreen. Come on! Lastly, the film has no resolution. The heroes are still stuck on a mountain with zombies below at the end of the film.

I had high hopes that Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies would make its way onto my list of favorite zombie comedies but unfortunately it fell short in the humor department. The jokes were lame, the characters were stupid and it was too mean spirited for its own good, although it did have  several excellent action scenes and the gore gags were phenomenal. If you are in the mood for some brain dead fun, then give Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies a watch.