Comparison of two low-budget movies: “Brick” and “Enter Zombie King”

In our first weeks of this course, Digital Video Foundations, we’ve watched two low budget movies, with purpose to compare the two and see examples of how one can make movies without a big budget, in different ways. In our first tutorial we watched “Enter Zombie King”, which is an action-movie, where most of the cast are wearing ninja-fighter-masks and the scene is set within a (ninja?) fighter environment, on some kind of fighter-arena; where the “boss” or manager’s fighters are zombies.
“Brick” is a detective-movie, inspired by the classic film noir-genre. We follow Brendan in the time before and after his love, Emily has died under strange circumstances, where he desperately seeks to find out what has happened to her. In order to do this, he has to contact people from the mysterious high school, underground environment that Emily was involved with in the time before she first disappeared and later was found dead. We don’t know what kind of environment this is, but it is clear that Brendan was also a part of it previously, and as the plot is played, the movie slowly reveals what has happened.
“Brick” is the first-time movie of the director, and compared to “Enter Zombie King” (ZK) there is a clear difference and slightly higher level of production quality in Brick, than ZK, and I would also say that it is easy to see that there has been far more time used on details of the production as in script, shooting-style, lighting techniques and so on.

When this is said, it should also be said that the film-budget for the two are slight different, as the costs of ZK was approximately 250 000 dollars, whereas Brick’s was about 400 000. This can be an important factor that explains why the quality of picture, sound, lighting and probably acting was so much better in Brick than in ZK. But this still doesn’t justify the fact that I think the story-concept of Brick works better as a film-plot than ZK.

There are positive things with ZK as well. First of all it is an important fact that I found it quite entertaining, although it was a very bad movie. To me, it reminded me a lot about some of the same storyline you can see boys make up when they are younger, role-playing with each other, as zombies and ninjas always have seemed to fascinate young them, rather than girls, who would play something slight nicer and innocent.

In Brick there is no swearing, and this probably makes it accessible for a larger audience, like younger people. ZK is x-rated, and this is probably because of the time and attention the movie uses on showing off naked women in it. This is also one of the facts that make it easy to see that it must be made of guys, living out their dream of making an action-movie with their favourite elements: zombies, ninjas, masks and naked girls. The movie also takes the focus on breasts and nudity to a new level in one of the scenes where they are talking to a guy on a boat, by first placing a woman in the background, washing the boat, naked. Then, they go a little further by “coincidently” shooting from the angle of this girl’s breast!

When watching these movies we where also to think of what makes the difference between blockbuster and other movies, and I think the clearest factors are that a blockbuster have large budget, famous actors and good production quality. Having said this, I won’t say that a blockbuster is necessarily a good movie, because I think low-budget movies are interesting, because they have to appeal and find ways to amuse and entertain by relying and other factors, like creating an original story and especially on making up a good dialogue to weigh up for the lower quality of production and cast.