NEWS & REVIEWS
“The movie was VERY creative in taking a fairly overused fad and reinventing it. This supplied many opportunities for the humor and I am happy to say that most of the jokes landed for a good laugh. In fact, I feel that the mockumentary style combined very well with the wild scenario.”
The Movie Take
Rudy Apolinar
“I really wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did. Within the first fifteen minutes, I laughed out loud at least four to five times.”
A Movie A Day Challenge
Jon Dunning
“This film is funny. Like it’s really funny… The film’s not all laughs though. It does have copious amounts of heart to it.”
They Said, We Said
Frank Gargiulo
“What Doesn’t Kill Us knocks it out of the park. Hell, nuclear bomb-missile-explosion knocks it out of the park… The ‘ol saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas. This film is huge!”
A Movie A Day Challenge
“But the film adeptly manages to avoid falling into complete cliché cringey preachery, because of:
A) Its frequently hilarious satirical comedic tone, pitched between the kind of dryly downplayed fantasy of What We Do in The Shadows, and the character-based comedy and drama of The Office (either the British or the American one).
B) Its surprising acuity in creating compelling characters you grow to genuinely care about, helped massively by all the actors delivering well-pitched performances that anchor the fantastical nature of the world of the film in a grounded emotional believability.
C) Its subtle world-building tantalisingly hinting at an abundance of potential story explorations of the interesting ramifications of this -ost-zombie universe. Like how the Bible Belt parts of Texas view necrosapiens as literal demons unleashed from Hell. Or how necrosapiens of different races and classes do or don’t benefit from the un-equal status quo. Or how the people opposed to – and afraid of – the necrosapiens around them, are sympathetic in the fear they have, because these former zombies were literally killing and eating people only a decade prior (a dramatic distinction in motivations for hatred, compared to the irrational and ignorant reasons for bigotry in real life).
That What Doesn’t Kill Us achieves more-or-less all of these ambitions within the constrictions of its obviously super low-budget is a remarkable feat.”
Podcasts Featuring WDKU
First Run Movies
What I thought was going to be a run of the mill zombie flick quickly turned into a “fresh out of the box” take on the genre that I thoroughly enjoyed. No film is absolutley perfect, but writer/director Zach Schlapkohl along with co-directors Jacob Kiesling and Ethan Cartwright created something pretty amazing. It was professionally made and I’ll say it one more time INNOVATIVE!”