Dante’s inferno

An atypically impassioned assertion from the scummiest of scumbag conservatives leads America and its leaders down a slippery slope into hell! The casualties of an unpopular war rise from their graves in order to show the world that your vote truly is your voice! Like a mad, blood-soaked political prankster that got high before coming to work, director Joe Dante’s (The Howling and Gremlins) short film Homecoming shoves its pointed anti-administration satire down your throat, while also trying to eat your brain.

Showtime’s Masters of Horror premise is simple: Recruit talented horror-buff writers; pair them with big-name horror directors; and set them loose on hour-long, low-budget horror flicks. But Homecoming rises above its made-for-cable contemporaries in ways it doesn’t even have to, with black humor, plentiful zombie action (albeit of the revisionist, uncharacteristically vocal sort) and cheesy Tales from the Crypt-style throwback camp.

This zombie holocaust touches on many major points of the real Iraq war and protests thereof—even including a Cindy Sheehan correlate. Dante and screenwriter Sam Hamm (adapting Dale Bailey’s short story “Death and Suffrage”) know that most of the appeal with any zombie movie worth making a drinking game out of is the plausibility of its reality as our own (adulterated with undead cannibals though it may be).

But Dante’s film really shines with its over-the-top humor, painted in the broadest of possible strokes. When someone stoically puts an “I Voted” sticker on a zombie soldier upon completion of his final mission to go Democrat, it really doesn’t matter if the movie is smart enough to be a classic political satire. And while much of it is entertaining more in theory than in execution, at least it’s a balls-to-the-wall blast of ideas that can safely say it “went there” every which way that it could.