VOD Review- Deadly Weekend aka Zellwood (2014)

"At least Sara Underwood is hot..."

See that girl on the poster there? The perky blonde with the sinful body? That's Sara Underwood.

She's a sexy little Playboy Playmate of the Year with elf-like features, who used to be on Attack of the show, on the now defunct G4 Network. On AOTS, she'd read the news, sometimes she'd co-host, but most of all, she just showed up and looked sexy.

We loved the show, and she was a fun part of it.

Turns out that she's also the star of her very own Horror flick called Zellwood, which has since been renamed Deadly Weekend. Not sure why they decided to give the movie a new title; sure, Zellwood is pretty lame as movie titles go, but is Deadly Weekend any better? Sounds really, really generic to us.

Point is, we've been fans of Sara Underwood's since her G4 days, so we were naturally excited to see her not only star in a movie, especially since it was a low-budget Horror flick. She's bound to get naked in a low-budget Horror flick, right?

Wrong!

The movie opens up with a bunch of statistics about how shitty of a place Zellwood, Florida is to live in, mainly because it has so much crime. Apparently, you're more likely to get burgled, assaulted, or murdered in Zellwood than anywhere else in the U.S. To illustrate the point, the opening shot of the movie is a mortally wounded guy trying to crawl across someones lawn, we're assuming, to escape whoever mortally wounded him.

Why are you looking into the camera, QT pie?

Cut to Sara Underwood having a crazy dream about a threesome that ends with a dude getting his joint cut off with a bolt cutter, and waking up screaming. After some "acting" takes place, we see a group of friends getting ready to go camping, because that's what groups of friends do in Horror movies. We also see a family getting ready to host the campers, and give them an Airboat Ride. Then there's some driving, and some more "acting," and then a lot of walking.

LOTS of "acting."

20-some minutes more of walking, camping, over-acting, and everyone being pissed-off because "Sara Underwood is a whore" later, things get really crazy when one of the friends pushes a little girl on the ground, and then gets hit in the head with a baseball bat by her sister. Then, everyone drinks some iced tea and takes a nap.

"Did I just get roofied... again?"

When everyone wakes up from their nap, they find themselves tied up and about to be tortured to death. Sara Underwood also gets to play hide-and-seek too, which only serves to add to the tension of it all. At this point in the movie, watching her run for her life while wearing a skimpy outfit is all we have.

They are perfect. We'll let you decide for yourself exactly which "they" we're talking about here.

The main problem with Deadly Weekend, is that it takes forever for anything to happen in the movie. Aside from a quick scene at the beginning, and a "dream" that felt like a cheap add-on, nothing even remotely horrific happens until about 49 minutes in. When we say that, keep in mind that this movie is 83 minutes long. So basically it's about 50 minutes of melodrama followed by about 30 minutes of some decent torture porn and gore.

We thought things were about to get better when the man characters all drank some poison and died... until we realized that it was only tea with some sort of knockout drug in it, which means that they woke up, and the movie continued.

Sorry, Sara, but you know we're right.

Had the movie focused more on the part of the plot that involved the family, and made the group of friends the "secondary" plot, it would have been much better for it. The whole family dynamic of Deadly Weekend, while not perfect, was at least more interesting than the dynamic of four morons walking through the woods and arguing/pouting for most of the movie's runtime.

And what was with that ending? The whole "family get-together" thing sounded kind of interesting, and we would have liked to have seen where that would have gone. Then again we would have liked to have seen what happened to Sara Underwood's character too, but that didn't happen either. 

What did they do to Sara?!?

The acting in this one isn't so hot either, aside from the Daughters (and maybe even the Dad at times.) It's mostly the fault of the lackluster script, and most likely the direction, and maybe even the budget... but for a 170k, you can take a minute or two to coach your actors a little bit better, you know? They tried, it just didn't work out very well for most of them.

So much of the movie just felt awkward. Take for instance the scene in which a wounded Sara Underwood limps around a living room and gets tackled over a couch; we actually laughed at that, and it wasn't supposed to be funny. It felt like someone just told the poor girl "pretend someone is chasing you, and you're real scared!" and then just called "Action!"

"Just pretend that you're Googling something... and... Action!"

That "poor girl" is the lovely Sara Underwood, who despite being a former Playboy Playmate, didn't even get naked in this movie. That really begs the question: why was she in it to begin with? We adored her bubbly personality on Attack of the Show, we truly did, but the girl can't act to save her life. It's not her fault either; she's famous for being gorgeous, not acting, so we really we can't hate on her for trying.

She literally spends a 12 minute segment of the movie writhing around on the floor, and acting all terrified: She wakes up bound and alone in some sort of plastic-covered room, and she begins to whine "Why?!?" (for 12 minutes, like we just said), which mirrored exactly what we had been thinking the whole time... about the entire movie existing.

Because, Sara. Just because.

It was just a mess of a movie, kept from being truly horrible only by a few likable elements. If you think we're being unnecessarily harsh here, allow us to present to you the title card for one of the movie's stars, Patricia Morales... the one where they spelled her name wrong. Yeah.

Sorry, Particia.

There's a lot of good Torture Porn action in this one, and that of course means that its a pretty gory affair. If nothing else, this movie made the most out of some cheap practical effects, and really went for the gore.

Best scene in the movie.

We get some random dream-sequence boobs at the beginning, but none of them belong to Sara Underwood, who somehow manages to stay clothed throughout. I mean, she looks good wearing skimpy clothes, and she's pleasant to look at in general, but why was she not naked in this movie? She's built a career on being hot & naked, and yet she hardly leaned on her strengths here at all.

"No naked me, for you! LOL"

Sara Underwood is really hot. Then again, we already knew that, so maybe we learned nothing from this movie.

H.O.T.

Pro's: The "kids" in the movie were pretty good; Sara Underwood is really hot; and there's a lot of gore to be had here, most of which was pretty cool.

Cons: The acting; the bad dialogue; the poor delivery of said dialogue; choppy editing; horrible pacing; the fact that nothing really happens until nearly an hour into the 1hr 23m runtime...

Unless you're a die-hard Sara Underwood fan (and even then), there's really no need for you to see this movie. If you do happen to want to watch it, you'll at least get to see her running around in some skimpy clothes (in addition to some good gore), as the reward for your bravery. Good luck.

D-

Deadly Weekend is available now on DVD and VOD.

Deadly Weekend/Zellwood may not be a good movie, but Sara Underwood is so lovely to look at, that she definitely made it more bearable. At least now we can say that she was a Horror Hottie once in her career, and I suppose that's something.