Make Out With Violence, a 2008 American indie coming of age / zombie tale of a boy trying to fulfill his unrequited love for a girl who has risen from the dead.
Newly graduated high schoolers basking in one final summer are rocked by the disappearance of a friend, the bright young beauty Wendy Hearst. This deeply affects a close-knit group of friends including twin brothers Patrick and Carol Denning.
But nothing is what it seems in this unpredictable coming-of-age drama when Wendy returns quite literally from the dead. Keeping her animate corpse in an empty house, the twins and their younger brother Beetle maintain a faade of normalcy for their family and friends as each searches for a way to revive Wendy and in doing so becomes more absorbed in satisfying their own desires…
Special Features
- Making of Featurette
- Feature Commentary
Awards
- Atlanta Film Festival 2008 – Won Grand Jury Award Narrative Feature
- Magnolia Independent Film Festival 2009 – Won Best Feature Film
- Memphis Indie Film Festival 2008 – Won Ron Tibbett Excellence in Filmmaking Award
- Nashville Film Festival 2009 – Won Best Music in a Feature Film, Won Best of Festival Award Narrative Feature
- Oxford Film Festival USA 2009 – Won Jury Award Best Narrative Feature
Reviews
“One of the best Indie films of the decade.” – Cinematical
“The product of a genuinely unique sensibility, the sort-of-zombie-movie Make-Out With Violence is inventive without being twee, quirky without being overly Wes Anderson, and suffused with a late-adolescent sense of longing as palpably felt as it is understated…A lyrical, surreal and deeply felt zombie movie.” – Village Voice
“Filled with clear, bright images and moments of skewed genius, this delicate debut effortlessly evokes those languid summer doldrums, when even a rotting girlfriend is better than no girlfriend at all.” New York Times
“Deconstructed zombie drama/puberty pic “Make-out With Violence” manages to feel head-scratchingly unique even as it recalls “Let the Right One In,” “River’s Edge,” “Deadgirl” and numerous other films…but just about holds together with its strong compositional sense, killer atmospheric lighting and wall-to-wall music track…” Variety
“…there are good reasons why Make-Out With Violence wowed so many critics and audiences during its brief regional festival run. The Deagols have found ways to make a virtue of their limitations, largely through insane ambition…Make-Out With Violence is a horror film set against the backdrop of a quirky small-town romance, all narrated with Terrence Malick-style deadpan precociousness by the twins’ preteen brother. Isolate any one of these elements, and Make-Out With Violence would become just another wan indie, cranked out by fledgling film students with more time than talent. (Even the movie’s striking lighting and pinkish hues aren’t super-impressive, given that digital cameras have given amateurs everywhere the power to generate beautiful images.) But the Deagols keep pushing the pieces of their story together, clearly digging their own weird juxtapositions of John Hughes, George Romero, and Wes Anderson. By the end, the dreamy guitar-pop soundtrack and the confluence of multiple coming-of-age stories weaves a strong spell, as the movie resolves into the story of a circle of immature friends trying to tame unruly adult emotions—the kind known to lunge forward and bite off the faces of the unprepared.” The Onion AV Club