Movies
Wasting Away
“In an attempt to breathe new life into the overworked zombie subgenre, Wasting Away adopts an interesting perspective: What if zombies didn’t know they were zombies?…It’s an interesting idea that’s slowly buried by a pantload of failed attempts to be clever.”
In an attempt to breathe new life into the overworked zombie subgenre, Wasting Away adopts an interesting perspective: What if zombies didn’t know they were zombies?
Four employees at a small-town bowling alley find out the hard way when a batch of lost serum from the U.S. Army’s Bio Weapons Unit finds its way into the self-serve ice cream. After exposing themselves to the serum via neon-green vanilla cones, the friends are transformed into brain-hungry zombies. But get this: they don’t realize they’ve been turned into zombies. And therein lies the humor. Supposedly.
Director Matthew Kohnen changes up the pace by switching back and forth between the living human and zombie points of view. The human perspective is shot in black-and-white, with the four friends in full zombie regalia, working it with some old-school lurching and moaning, white eyeballs bulging.
But when the film adopts the zombie perspective, the action is shot in color, with the four actors out of their creature makeup and looking normal, humorously discussing their predicament like the cast of a Friday night sit-com. (“You got any jerky? I feel like jerky!”) The constant maneuvering between the two different perspectives is really all the movie has going for it, and it’s not nearly enough to retain viewer interest.
Sure, there’s a goofy plot involving military man Nick Steele (who convinces them they’ve received a dose of a “super soldier” serum), unrequited love, and a wacky bowling competition, but the narrative is pretty inconsequential. The movie is simply an excuse to choke a few seconds of irony out of a clumsily conceived idea. Making up its own zombie rules as it goes, Wasting Away postulates that only a drunk human can understand what zombies are trying to say (apparently the brain waves of zombies and drunkards move at the same speed…huh?), and, to make matters worse, zombies are depicted searching desks, running from the living, using tools and weapons, and carrying on rational conversations with each other, essentially breaking every implied rule of Romeroean lore.
It’s hard to tell whether the silly banter between the zombie friends is intended to be blisteringly funny, but the dialogue sounds like lame lines that didn’t make the final draft of the Idle Hands screenplay. The green screen work is cheesy enough to make you wish they’d left it on the cutting room floor. Even the sparse makeup effects manage to disappoint. While initially intriguing, the central conceit of Wasting Away grows old quickly, like the taste of Velveeta, or talking baby movies. It’s an interesting idea that’s slowly buried by a pantload of failed attempts to be clever.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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