Wait, Wait, Don't Kill Me (2020) poster

Wait, Wait, Don’t Kill Me (2020)

Rating:


USA. 2020.

Crew

Director/Screenplay – Adam Lippe, Producers – Ed Feldman & Adam Lippe, Photography – John Presutto, Music – Geoffrey Waterman, Animation – Ellen Marcus, Makeup Effects – Sick & Twisted FX & Thrillhouse Designs LLC. Production Company – Wait Wait Don’t Kill Me LLC.

Cast

Keet Davis (Gilberto Aguilar), Angelique Chapman (Cheryl Aguilar), Tony Cheng (Hero ‘Bobby’ Bando), Reesa Roccapriore (Kate), David Marr III (Quenton), Will Hutcherson (Gray), Andrew Hunsicker (The General), Jan Punwattana (Erin), Jeffry Farber (Dennis Collins), Kennedy Cill (Iris Aguilar), Noelle Figueroa (Chandra Aguilar), Preston Smith (Serious Business), Peter Bakouras (Officer Gareth Peters), Rob Byrnes (Pro-Active Parachute Man), Eduardo J. Escobar (Confused Parachute Man)


Plot

In the neighbourhood of Nicetown, Philadelphia, people are becoming infected with a virus that causes them to become dehydrated. In their need to consume water, they end up attacking others like crazed zombies. The military arrive at the hospital to supervise the handling of the infected and a cordon is placed up around the neighbourhood. In one apartment building, Gilberto Aguilar comes across Kate hiding in the basement storage area after witnessing her roommate being attacked by one of the zombies. Gilberto gathers various other tenants, including his daughter Iris, gay couple Quenton and Gray, the conservative Dennis Collins, as well as Bobby, a Japanese store hand at the local supermarket who fled after seeing his boss attacked. Meanwhile, Gilberto’s wife Cheryl is out on the streets unable to get home.


Wait, Wait, Don’t Kill Me left me confused about what it was going to be for some time. There is talk about a maddening condition brought on by dehydration (which in real life is just something that makes people mentally confused at its more extreme state). There is also association with a virus as cases are brought into the hospital (some not too bad makeup effects) and a general who is having the bodies examined and institutes a quarantine. However, it is not long before all the talk about dehydration and viruses pans out to be nothing more than another variant on the Zombie Film. The film was made shot was between 2015 and 2017 but was released following the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, leading to the mistaken assumption that it was another Pandemic Film.

Wait, Wait, Don’t Kill Me is not a particularly good variant on the zombie film. Some commentators describe it as a comedy but it is hard to find anything that is funny in the film. It feels as though director Adam Lippe has merely shot around his own apartment building and neighbourhood – there is no production designer credit, for example. Quite a large part of the film involves the various characters huddled for protection inside the storage cage in the basement of the apartment building. Not that Adam Lippe ever builds these scenes to any kind of Night of the Living Dead (1968)-like apocalyptic siege – no zombies ever try to attack them there, for instance.

These are interspersed with scenes where Keet Davis’s wife Angelique Chapman wanders the streets and seems unable to go home. (How big is Nicetown, you keep wondering ie. would she not just be able to walk several blocks home?). At one point, she signs into a motel but rather than stay there in safety is back out on the streets and for some reason has to crawl through a muddy drainage pipe. There are various scenes with soldiers, who for some reason drop bottles of water from the roof of a building on mini-parachutes to people below.

You get the impression that Adam Lippe has allowed his cast to improvise many of their scenes as the dialogue often has a randomness to it that feels unscripted, particularly so in the case of lead actor Keet Davis. The worst offender among these is Andrew Hunsicker who gives one of the worst performances I have witnessed in some time as the general – at one point, he turns the attempts to diagnose the virus into a game of charades with the diagnosing doctor.

The film was a directorial debut for Adam Lippe.


Trailer here


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