Stone (Chris Margetis) and Skull (Mike Carey) are a pair of washed-up brothers who eke out a living on the independent wrestling circuit. Some of the lesser-known and significantly less beefy grapplers in the arena try to make a name for themselves by injecting illicit human growth hormones to help them bulk up in a hurry. Unfortunately, it has just one side effect: It turns them into flesh-hungry zombies. Once the entire arena becomes infected, it’s up to Stone, Skull, and a few surviving wrestlers to make it through the night.
Wrestling and horror have always gone hand in hand, both in terms of their fandom, and the fact that sooner or later, every wrestler-turned-actor winds up appearing in a horror movie at some point in their career. (This one features Randy Couture.) Directed by actor Max (Sabotage) Martini, The Manson Brothers Midnight Zombie Massacre is kind of a mess, but there is some good stuff here. The humor between the good natured, but dim-witted brothers is hit and miss, and their Bowery Boys-esque malapropisms work about 50/50. The wrestling sequences are solid, and the backstage, inside-baseball scenes of the wrestlers going over the matches in the locker room before the main event are entertaining.
Some of this, admittedly, doesn’t work. The framework scenes of a trailer trash family reading a Manson Brothers comic book are odd and unnecessary. It also takes way too long to finally get to the zombie action. Still, it features two scenes I’ve never seen in a zombie movie before, which makes it marginally worthwhile. First is the scene where a character gets one look at a zombie and immediately drops dead of a heart attack. The second involves a wrestler waving a cape like a matador at a zombie dressed in a chorizo costume who charges at him like a bull. So, there’s that.
Margetis and Carey (who also wrote the screenplay together) are OK in the leads, but the film really needed two guys with stronger presences to carry the movie on their shoulders. It's nice to see Couture here, although he really isn’t given much to do as one of the other wrestlers. D.B. (Eight Men Out) Sweeney seems out of place in something like this, but he looks like he’s having fun as the Mansons’ energetic manager.
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