By Geno McGahee
I had really high hopes for JONAH LIVES. It was described as a “festival hit” and looked rather neat from the cover art and synopsis, but don’t judge a book by its cover. JONAH LIVES is released by Wild Eye Releasing and available on DVD and stars horror icon Brinke Stevens. As an added bonus, it notes that it filmed at the actual home of Lizzie Borden.
A group of friends are just hanging out and decide that a card game was too boring. Francis (Ryan Boudreau) has an idea to spice things up and gets a Ouija board to summon things on the other side. Everyone in the group seems really into it except for Tony (James Barrett). He begins noting how dangerous it is and says “everything is fun until somebody gets hurt” about five times as Francis counters with “it’s the 21st century” about a dozen times in return. The writing in this film is terrible.
The kids continue to play with the Ouija board and some strange things begin to happen. They contact Jonah, a man that was killed by his wife and wants revenge. He climbs out of his grave and the entire group goes into a trance that prompts Tony to scream “Jesus” over and over again. When their trance is broken, Lydia (Nicole Lasala), Tony’s girlfriend, is not right. She begins acting strange. Barbara (Jocelyn Padilla), the pregnant girlfriend of Francis, freaks out and so does everyone else. There is not one character in this film that has any consistency. Their reactions change every minute. Now they’re mad. Now they think it’s fun. They’re mad again.
While this group implodes, then laughs, then implodes, a party is going on upstairs. This is where Zora (Brinke Stevens) is introduced and she does the best she can with this role. The party is filler and adds nothing to the movie, but it was an opportunity to use the Lizzie Borden house and Stevens. Zora was the wife of Jonah and brags about how she married for money the second time around. Stevens was one of the few good elements of this movie.
Amazingly (spoiler), Tony and Francis, the two main characters, are killed, leaving Johnny (Rob Roy). Johnny’s role in the film was to laugh at any sexual innuendo throughout the film until he gets scared at the end and that’s when he screams for help. Lydia begins laughing about their fate as Barbara is terrified. Jonah, for some reason, wants to kill all of the people that got him back before he gets revenge on his wife. Why? Who cares? He’s a zombie. That’s a good enough reason, right?
So, we flip flop between the survivors of Jonah and the partiers upstairs. Jonah trudges along and Lydia begins to help him. In the end, Jonah gets his revenge and that’s about it. There really isn’t much of a story here, but I was glad it was over at the end.
JONAH is a movie that I really wanted to like, but it’s terrible. The story is simple and a retread of other ideas. The acting is not very good and the dialogue is the scariest part of this film. I love low budget horror and I like zombies, but the foundation of a film is the screenplay and this was built on bad ground. The zombie looks decent but that’s not enough to give this one a pass.
Rating: 2.5/10
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