In We Are Zombies, the dead are calm, the living are idiots, and the real apocalypse is customer service. It’s a zombie film where brains aren’t food so much as a missing feature, especially among corporate suits and small-time crooks. The result is a gleefully trashy, surprisingly clever horror-comedy that treats the undead less like monsters and more like the logical next step of Western society.
The Living-Impaired and the Fully Stupid
The central gag of the movie is brilliant in its simplicity: zombies are “living-impaired” citizens, domesticated and docile, shuffling around as cheap labor and rentable property. They’re second-class in every sense—barely people, frequently merchandise, always exploited.
Into this morally rotting world stumble our three human disasters: Karl, his half-sister Maggie, and Karl’s best friend Freddy. They’re petty thieves who hijack zombie pickups from the Coleman Corporation’s “Retirement Services for the Living-Impaired.” Yes, the company that manages zombie disposal calls it “retirement,” like a nursing home with more embalming fluid.
From the moment Maggie intercepts that first call and Karl and Freddy show up pretending to be official collectors, the film makes its thesis clear: it’s not the zombies who are broken. It’s the system. The zombies are just the ones honest enough to literally fall apart.
Karl, Freddy, Maggie: Morons with Heart (and a Van)
Our trio operates at that beautiful intersection where low ambition meets lower competence. Karl is a chronic underachiever with a porn-level crush on an undead camgirl. Freddy is a lovestruck puppy who thinks proposing to Maggie with a hideous ring will fix the fact they’ve never actually dated. Maggie is the only one with a functioning survival instinct, which still isn’t saying much.
Their interactions are pure chaotic sibling energy: nonstop insult, reluctant affection, and the kind of terrible decision-making usually found in emergency room anecdotes. When Freddy calls Karl a chronic masturbator after confessing his love for Maggie, it’s not just a gag—it tells you everything you need to know about how emotionally stunted these people are. They are absolutely not ready for big stakes. The film, wisely, gives them the biggest stakes possible.
Corporate Evil, Now with Gas
On the other side of the moral cesspool is Coleman Corporation, the soulless mega-company in charge of “managing” the undead. Hannity, their militaristic officer, is the kind of guy who looks at a marginalized underclass and thinks, “What if we weaponized this?”
His answer is Project Zoltan, a gas designed to turn docile zombies into feral murder machines. Because nothing says responsible corporate governance like building a controllable zombie army. When the test subject’s head explodes during the demo, it’s an obvious failure… and also, in Hannity’s eyes, an obvious opportunity.
Coleman, the CEO, dies in a sex swing accident and reanimates as a brain-damaged zombie, which is honestly the most dignified corporate death imaginable in this universe. Hannity promptly uses him as a test dummy, because of course he does. Ethics, meet woodchipper.
Granny, Ransoms, and the Worst Kidnappers Alive
Things spiral when Karl’s grandma, Mrs. Neard, gets dragged into the mess. Stanley and Rocco, two incompetent collectors Hannity uses as blunt instruments, kidnap her to make up for the zombies Karl and Freddy have stolen.
Naturally, they can’t even manage a hostage situation without turning it into a horror show. Rocco accidentally shoots Mrs. Neard, turning her into a zombie, while Stanley records ransom videos like a man who’s watched exactly one crime movie and learned nothing from it.
This whole subplot somehow makes the world feel bigger and dumber at the same time. Every character is out to squeeze cash from someone else, and everyone is one bad trigger discipline away from making things infinitely worse.
Necro-Culture and the Zelvirella Heist
Because things weren’t unhinged enough, the trio takes on a side mission: steal the corpse of Debbie Jones, the iconic actress who first played Zelvirella, for a performance artist named Otto Maddox. It’s part theft, part fan-service, part incredibly stupid business decision.
When Debbie’s corpse turns out too skeletal to be useful, Karl has an epiphany—not about morality, of course, but about marketing. He realizes Jane, the undead camgirl he’s obsessed with, looks enough like Zelvirella to stand in. This is both the dumbest idea he’s had and the most believable, because of course in this world someone thinks, “We can just recast the dead celebrity with a zombie sex worker; problem solved.”
Jane, by the way, is one of the film’s secret weapons. She’s undead, online, and visibly done with everyone’s nonsense. The fact that Karl falls for her is played partly as a joke and partly as the only logical romantic outcome in a world this depraved.
Art, Gas, and Undead Mother Theresa
Otto Maddox’s art show, where the deal is supposed to go down, is a perfect storm. You’ve got pretentious performance art, illegal necro-celebrity impersonation, and a corporate psycho dropping Project Zoltan gas like he’s hosting a very illegal product launch.
When the gas hits and the zombies finally go berserk, the film shifts gears into full-on chaos. Mother Theresa shows up as a zombie and kills Otto, which is exactly the kind of joke this movie thrives on: sacrilegious, abrupt, and far too on-the-nose to be anything but intentional.
Meanwhile, Don, the black-market contact, gets his hands on a briefcase of cash and immediately gets eaten. This isn’t a spoiler so much as a natural law: in a zombie comedy, the guy who loves money most has to die holding a briefcase.
Buzzsaws, Bulletproof Rings, and Persistent Idiocy
The climax is a glorious pile-up of double-crosses and undead mayhem. Hannity captures Jane. Stanley reveals he’s been hiding among Hannity’s henchmen. Freddy snaps Hannity’s neck, but Hannity turns into a zombie and shoots Freddy.
Freddy survives because the bullet hits the awful ring he wanted to propose with, proving once and for all that bad taste is, in fact, bulletproof. Maggie decapitates zombie-Hannity with a buzzsaw—a moment that is somehow both righteous and oddly romantic. Stanley steals the money-filled briefcase and escapes, only to get bit and zombify still clutching it. Some addictions really do follow you to the grave.
Apocalypse as a Technicality
Two weeks later, society is gone. Project Zoltan’s gas has turned the world into your standard-issue zombie apocalypse. Ironically, this is the best thing that could’ve happened to our protagonists. The massive bioterrorist frame job that should’ve put them behind bars is now irrelevant; when everyone’s dying, no one has time for forensics.
Karl, Maggie, Freddy, and Jane end up holed up in a diner with zombie Rocco and zombie Mrs. Neard, forming the worst found family sitcom pitch ever. Stanley wanders the wasteland with his briefcase, proving that whether living or living-impaired, everyone in this universe is stuck in their own loop.
Brains Optional, Fun Guaranteed
What makes We Are Zombies work is that it fully commits to its premise: zombies as marginalized underclass, humans as morally bankrupt clowns, corporations as the true horror. The jokes are broad, the gore is playful, and the pacing is brisk enough that even the dumbest gag hits before you have time to overthink it.
It’s not trying to be deep, but it accidentally stumbles into some sharp satire: about exploitation, about how we warehouse inconvenient people, about how easily the powerful will turn any vulnerable group into either cheap labor or weapons. But the film is too busy having fun to lecture you. It just builds its world, throws blood on it, and lets you connect the dots.
In the end, We Are Zombies is less about the undead eating brains and more about a world where most people clearly aren’t using theirs. Happily, the filmmakers were—and the result is a messy, energetic, darkly funny romp that proves zombies don’t need to be scary to be a good time. They just need jobs, bad bosses, and one really terrible gas leak.
