What’s the horror: ghosts (in the form of Tom Riley), zombies

Does the dog die? Nope

Gore factor: Nah – our man BB doesn’t go that way

Re-watch scale: Eulogy is not one I will re-watch, but Undead has grown on me much like Haunted Highway did.

Here we are again – Nigel Bach is crankin’ these movies out more quickly it seems, for better or worse. Mostly it’s for the better, but along the way, there’s bound to be some duds. Eulogy isn’t Bach’s strongest entry, but it does serve a necessary purpose in bridging the death of Riley in the last episode to future episodes. After confirming Tom was killed at the end of Benign, Bach has to do something to open the Rileyverse back up for future films, and in that regard, Eulogy serves its purpose. Also, I think Eulogy was made towards the end of the pandemic, when working with others was still dicey, so that probably affected the end result as well. And kudos must go out to Bach for continuing to make films throughout the pandemic – nothing slows this dude down, it seems, and even when the world feels apocalyptic, there he is, doing what he does. It’s pretty comforting.

With Eulogy, we start in familiar territory – an investigative podcaster has gained access to new footage regarding Tom Riley’s current predicament and plans to create a documentary about the goings-on for his viewers. We saw this premise in Badder Ben, and it worked well, so I don’t have any problems with Bach mining familiar territory here. After viewing the usual “this is footage we found” opening text, and a quick catch-up/review for anyone who’s either new to the franchise or has forgotten what happened in the previous nine movies, our investigator for this outing, who identifies himself as Jackson Scott, promises to show us new information that will, of course, blow our minds. Let’s get to work!

First, Jackson reminds us that somewhere along the way, Bach started a paranormal investigation service called Boo Be Gone, because of course he did. Jackson gained access to hours of recordings related to BBG through a Freedom of Information Request, and the first clip he shows is one of Tom Riley himself (hey, Tom!) with a collection of BBG’s contacts, client files, and recordings that he’s hiding in his shed. He wants someone to know where his shit is, in case anything happens to him, which we know has come to pass.

Jackson’s standing in front of Tom’s shed as he tells us this, then he uses a crowbar to break into it. He finds the files, and just as he’s about to leave he hears that familiar Bad Ben screech – it’s honestly the weirdest sound ever – and in an old mirror hanging crookedly on a wall of the shed appears the message: He Rots in Hell. Wow, thanks mirror. Now we know what happened to Tom so we can all go home, I guess.

Just kidding. Jackson’s got a ton of material to review now, so we cut to his studio where he’s ready to record a new episode. He starts off by telling us he’s contacted the people in Tom’s files, and any time he encountered someone who was willing to talk to him he asked them “One simple question: did you know Tom Riley?” We then cut to Tom talking about what he thinks people will say about him when he’s dead. “I think people will say, yeah, I knew Tom Riley,” he says, which, way to shoot for the absolute minimum there, Tom.Then we cut to a collection of Tom’s clients all saying, unsurprisingly, “Yeah, I knew Tom Riley.” So far, so good, Tom. You’re predicting the future quite well.

But not for long, because soon Tom is being asked what else people will say about him, and he of course says people will probably say he’s a nice guy. Cut to the same group of people calling him an asshole, moron, and idiot. Heh. It was a pretty obvious setup, but it’s still funny.

This is as good a place as any to mention a key component of this BB installment – all of the clients Jackson interviews throughout the movie are fans of the franchise. Nigel Bach started offering cameos and mentions in his movies to fans who donate a few episodes ago, and with each subsequent film, the number of contributing fans increases. This movie approaches that funding much like Pandemic did, by primarily using these contributors as minor characters in a series of vignettes. It’s a trick that worked well once, but I’m not sure it’s good enough to be used a second time as it gets old rather quick here. Each scene from Tom’s video diary has a random picture in the background that’s clearly another contributor, and different fans create the video vignettes Jackson shares, all of which discuss their experiences with using Boo Be Gone and Tom Riley to rid their house of evil spirits.

As you can imagine, there’s a varying level of acting talent among these fans, so not understanding why they’re being used in the film at all might make the viewing experience baffling. And the random photos that keep showing up behind Tom can be distracting, as they’re clearly added digitally into a frame rather than being real photos. It’s an odd problem to solve; Bach needs financing to keep doing what he does, and he went through some financial difficulty with a shitty distributor who screwed him over which led to needing even more outside help, so I get why he solicits fan donations. Being totally independent is key to Bach’s movies; he does homemade cinema better than just about anyone, but that does mean a lot of crowdfunding, and he needs to keep upping the stakes, I guess, so fans continue to donate. It can weigh the films down, to be honest – BUT, again, the pandemic must be considered here also. Now that the world is back to business, Nigel Bach can find a way to make his contributors and his viewers happy, as well as appeal to new viewers; I’ve no doubt of that. If anyone can do it, he can. And his fans deserve to be featured, to be honest – they’re the ones who step up and keep him going when things get rough financially. Bach has managed to keep this train rolling since 2016, so I’m pretty confident he will iron out the kinks with each new installment.

But to make it work during COVID-19 time, this film is mostly just interviews – of different clients, and of Tom himself. Then we have Jackson occasionally popping in to stare into the camera and relay information, so overall, yeah – there’s a lot of scenes of people just talking into a camera in this one. The stories they all relay revolves around the idea that while Tom thinks he’s a kick-ass ghost hunter and has cleared the spaces of his clients to their satisfaction, his clients have quite a different perspective. Tom either failed to fix the problem, made the problem worse, or in some cases destroyed people’s property in the process. Some of the stories clients tell could have been their own movies, and in fact this kind of feels like a bunch of Bach’s ideas that never fleshed out into full-blown films.

One of the strangest things about this installment is how stiff Tom is in front of the camera for most of the runtime. He clearly had very specific things he wanted to say about each experience that he relays to the camera, and his interviews have the quality of being recited rather than spontaneously discussed with an interviewer. It’s unusual for Bach, who was definitely funnier and more spontaneous in Pandemic as he reacted to the situations people were sending him via video.

Things continue along in this vein until about the one-hour mark (!), when Jackson speaks to Tom directly via a psychic with a crystal ball. Sure enough, he is in Hell, and has taken to calling Satan Glenn just to piss him off. Heh. As soon as Tom Riley is back to wisecracking and done with reciting stories, the energy picks up tremendously, especially as we watch Jackson track down Tom’s lost grimoire (it was stolen by Bad Ben when he ticked Tom off and he threw it at the creature) and use it to bring Tom back to life. And back to life Tom is, about seven minutes before the end of the film. Unfortunately, almost as soon as Tom is brought back to life zombies come stumbling out of the woods, and Jackson and Tom take off. End of movie.

This leads us to Undead, taking place right where Eulogy stopped. Now that Nigel Bach is back to telling one cohesive story, Undead is all wise-cracking Tom, all the time. It starts out a little slow, as we get a fair amount of Jackson and Tom just running around trying to avoid the zombies and figure out what the hell is going on. This is all shot outside near Steelmanville Road, but not at the house, since at the end of Benign it was revealed to have a new owner. Bach, ever the master of the do-it-yourself horror film, does a good job compensating for the fact that there’s traffic driving up and down all the roads they travel as they try to get back to Jackson’s studio – “Are we the only ones who know what’s going on?” they keep asking themselves, which is a simple but clever move – I can’t tell you how many low budget horror films have neglected to acknowledge the normal daily traffic zooming around in what’s supposed to be the apocalypse. Nigel Bach can’t stop the traffic, but he will sure as hell quip about it. And quip he does. It’s all quite meta.

It takes about 20 minutes of wandering around outside and filming themselves talking about what might be going on before they make their way into Jackson’s studio, and Tom’s quips aside it’s a bit of a slow start. Still, there are some good bits in here, such as when Tom calls the cops and tries to tell them they’re being attacked by zombies, but they hang up on him. Jackson rightly points out that he shouldn’t be talking zombies with the police – just say we’re being chased by something else, he suggests, otherwise, they won’t take him seriously – so Tom calls the cops back and quips: “Hello police? We’ve got hummingbirds!” For some reason, this really cracks me up. They also find an abandoned campsite with a severed hand, and a note inside a backpack from the victim’s wife, telling whoever this poor dead dude is not to wear his earbuds too much and to have a good time. “Well, he’s not listening to his earbuds anymore,” Tom tells the camera, then looks at the severed hand. “Or his wedding ring, apparently.”

Things kick in soon enough, once the guys change clothes and pick up Jackson’s assistant, Mitch. They stumble into a zoo, of all places, and film different animals until a zombie pops up in one of the cages. It’s odd, but clearly, Bach got permission to film inside a zoo and was not going to pass that up. Either that, or they snuck into a zoo and were determined to shoot as much footage as they could while they were there. Either way, the zombie in the cage is a pretty good scare, as is the moment when several zombies are shuffling towards them and Tom says, “They’re slow-moving…that’s the good thing,” and a VERY fast-moving zombie bursts out from behind the shufflers to attack the camera. Heh.

They make it out of the zoo and walk right into a cemetery, where Tom gets the brilliant idea to dig up a body and try to “test” what’s up with the wandering undead situation. Jackson is, obviously, against this idea, and when Tom asks Mitch what he thinks, the face Jackson gives him to encourage him to back up his assessment that this is a bad idea is pretty funny:

Soon enough, another zombie attack sends them on their way without any graverobbing, and then they’re resting in the woods after giving it the slip while Mitch takes a shit in the woods. Hey, I’m just telling you what the movie says, don’t blame me. Anyway it’s here that we get our first big chunk of contributor shoutouts, in the form of social media comments that get posted as Jackson updates his podcast. They read the names first, then the comments, which are mostly insults aimed at Tom, although a few attack Jackson also. Once that’s out of the way, Mitch reappears and off they go again. I can’t help but notice that Mitch is wearing some seriously weird pants – are they cropped? Super long shorts? Capris? I cannot say.

Another zombie comes along, and Tom, true to form, is tired of running. He fights the zombie instead, and after he throws it to the ground Jackson puts a go-pro on its head. They send him on his way, content that they can track its progress in the hopes it leads them to some sort of clues. Tom is chafing and wishes he had baby powder. Heh. Mitch says he might know someone who can help them, and sends a text to his ex-girlfriend. She doesn’t text him back – instead, she poofs into the forest in a puff of smoke. Turns out it’s the witch from Haunted Highway who cut off a dude’s head then carried it into Tom’s Drop-U-Off ride. And what do you know – the headless dude was Mitch. He was into that sort of thing for a while, but he got over it. She doesn’t understand why he ghosted her, because she did reattach his head and everything. And she’s wearing the same style of baggy ankle pants as Mitch, so I feel like they’d make a cute couple. Anyway, the witch has some info for the group – she knows that all the zombies are “fresh kills,” in other words, people who died recently. It’s not much of a clue, but it’s something, and after she eliminates two zombies by throwing fireballs at them, she promises to get back to them with more information and poofs away.

We are now exactly halfway through the movie, and here comes the hard part. The guys find an abandoned laptop and sit down on some tree stumps to have a look. There’s a video file on it showing a burly man named Tony Ponzetti, who works at that cemetery, and he’s discovered some strange things going on with the dead bodies, and he’s going to talk about them. He proceeds to show a grave, then a photo of that same grave all dug up and empty. Then he tells the story about whose body was in the grave and how they died. Then he shows security footage of that body zombie-stomping through the cemetery late at night. Yep, you guessed it – this is Nigel Bach’s next contributor dump, and it’s LONG. The stories are funny, of course, and I’m sure if one of them were about me I’d love it. But I’m not one of them, and in spite of the humor and the clever device Bach has come up with here to include his donors, it slows the movie to a zombie-like crawl – especially since it goes on for 18 minutes. Still, a Wiccan who died while trying to sacrifice a black virgin goat and a woman who was killed by a street sweeper while she tried to retrieve a winning lottery ticket from a storm drain are amusing anecdotes; I just wish there had been more variety in the way these deaths were presented.

Finally, Tony concludes his video by saying that the people who’ve risen from the dead all died within the last 12 months, adding some specificity to what the witch told them earlier about the fresh kills. Before they have too much time to ponder this, a zombie sneaks up on them out of the woods and they scatter. Tom falls into the campfire, which leads to him having to don a borrowed pastel peach half-shirt from this point forward. Hehe. Tom explains that his body didn’t burn because he spent twelve months in hell so he can’t be burned. This triggers a thought for Jackson, who concludes that the spell he cast to bring Tom back to life in Eulogy must have brought every dead body that was twelve months old or less back to life as well.

The gang decides they’re hungry, so they walk back into town and find an abandoned restaurant. Inside, Tom finds some tarot cards, and tries to use them to get a clue about how they should proceed. But as soon as he lays out the cards, he starts talking in these strange tongues, that are basically just Tom’s voice slowed down while he speaks gibberish. It’s still pretty funny. As soon as he puts up the cards he can use his own voice again, and he relays that the cards sent him a message that he can’t trust someone around him. Both Jackson and Mitch swear that they’re trustworthy, and Tom seems to believe them. In another callback to Haunted Highway, the guys call Drop U Off to get a ride back to the house on Steelmanville Road, where they think the grimoire must be.

Once the guys are back at the house, we cut between footage of them looking for the grimoire in the dark, and scenes of the zombie with the go-pro on its head meeting up with other zombies as they wander through the woods. Eventually, Go Pro Zombie and all of his companions meet up with Mitch’s witch – the one who promised Tom she’d return with more information for him – and she tells them all it’s time to destroy Tom Riley. So she was the person he couldn’t trust.

As the zombies draw nearer, the three retreat to Tom’s shed to hide. Mitch mentions he needs to go #2 again, and Tom and Jackson complain about him trying to do so inside the shed. Mitch tells them it’s OK because he found an old book he’s going to use to wipe with, and of course it’s the grimoire. Hehe. The grimoire tells them that if they say the same spell Jackson cast to bring Tom back to life into the mirror, it will be reversed, stopping the zombies in their tracks. Unfortunately, it may kill Tom as well, but it’s a risk they have to take. Jackson reads the spell into the mirror, and all the zombies disappear. Suddenly, Tom groans and grabs his chest, falling to the ground. Jackson and Mitch are upset, but Tom soon pops up on his own, claiming he has a fainting goat disease. Heh.

They exit the shed and encounter the witch, who intends to kill Tom herself since he defeated her zombies. But Mitch offers to let her kill him instead if she will leave Tom alone, so she slashes off his head and disappears in a puff of smoke as Mitch’s headless body falls to the ground. Knowing that the last time the witch cut off Mitch’s head she eventually re-attached it, neither Jackson nor Tom are too concerned; in fact, they’re thrilled to have defeated the zombies and the witch on their own. “Is there anything I can’t conquer?” Tom boasts to Jackson. He’s faced everything at this point and always won, he says – well, except for aliens. And it’s at this point that a light shines down on them from above and zaps them into the sky. And just like that the next installment is up – Tom versus the aliens.

I have not had a chance yet to view Bad Ben: Alien Agenda, but when I do, you’ll most likely hear about it.