Why So Blu?

Buck Wild (Blu-ray Review)

Millennium Entertainment is bringing you the Blu-ray release of Buck Wild.  This zombie comedy was actually made all the way back in 2011, but is just now making its way to home video.  It made its big debut at the Dallas International Film Festival last year in April.  It then later took home the “Best Of The Fest” award at the Hill Country Film Festival the following month.  This film melds the genres of zombies and scary redneck hillbillies together in hopes of a great comedic romp.  The film was directed by Tyler Glodt.

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Film 

Craig and his friends are taking to the boonies for a weekend hunting excursion.  They have chosen the Buck Wild Ranch to get their deer sniping on.  While on the hunt, one of them accidentally shoots the owner of the ranch.  But, guess what?  He’s not dead, he’s a zombie.  So, while the friends figure out what to do with the body, they discover one of their friends who went has gone missing is also a zombie.  Now, they’re stuck in a town full of hillbillies and zombies.  Oh, and let’s make sure we overuse and abuse the term “buck wild” as much as we can in the process.

Watching bad, unfunny comedies is a torturous hell for me.  It results in sheer boredom.  Why?  Because they’ll keep throwing jokes that I’m not laughing at or rolling my eyes at for an hour and a half and it feels like forever to get to the finish.  Buck Wild is one of those movies.  It does mix with zombies, which should help give it some merit, but its too cheap a production to be able to do a lot of cool things in the zombie aspect, and tries its best to stay away from having to deal with any sort of big zombie confrontation as long as it can.

While the film tries joke after joke and goofy gag after goofy gag, I almost questioned whether it had a script of not.  A lot of it is very disjointed and doesn’t seem to go together in terms of characters and their motivations and interactions.  Scenes in this movie feel a lot like it was a bunch of guys dicking around on set and filming it.  And speaking of “buncha guys”, this movie is a complete sausage-fest.  There are some girls, but their total screen time probably equals a total of 3-4 minutes.

The cast is a bunch of poorly acted guys I’ve not seen before.  What really bugs is the guy they cast as the “nerd”.  He almost looks like he could audition for the role of Superman as he has this total Clark Kent thing going.  You know, that whole Transformers: Dark Of The Moon thing where you throw some glasses on a model and they are all of a sudden a geek.  This is just one nit pick with a myriad of bad choices made in the movie.

I made it to the end of the film, but it felt like it took forever.  I just could never get into it.  None of the jokes were funny, none of the story was interesting.  I didn’t like or enjoy watching any of the character interactions.  By the time any of the zombie action happened, I was already pretty much checked out.  I wanted a horde of slow crawling credits, no slow crawling zombies.  I guess you could say that I did not go “buck wild” for Buck Wid.

Video 

Encoding: MPEG-4 AVC

Resolution: 1080p

Aspect Ratio: 2:40.1

Clarity/Detail:  There’s some solid detail work, but the picture is rather soft.  For the most part it’s a rather smooth looking picture lacking detail in non close-ups.  At many times the image is almost too vivid.  And many solid out of focus backgrounds experience a little crushing.

Depth:  This is a rather flat picture, not giving too much of a 3 dimensional feel.

Black Levels:  The blacks are pretty dark, covering up details and not giving much interms of shading.  Not a lot of crushing noticed though.

Color Reproduction:  Colors are solid rather cold.  Red blood is pretty pronounced and vibrant.

Flesh Tones:  Skin tones are inconsistent and may change scene to scene.  Skin is mostly too smooth and not very detailed.  There are some really bad moments of some minor blocking and flickering at times as well

Noise/Artifacts: There are some rough shots in this thing, some that look as though there’s a grid hiding behind the picture.

Audio 

Audio Format(s): English 5.1 TrueHD, English Stereo 2.0

Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish

Dynamics:  This is a very front heavy track that isn’t very spectacular at all.  Between the score, effects and dialogue it all kind of melds together as one sound.  Its ok, but I’m sure it could have been much better.

Low Frequency Extension:  There is some solid, but not very noticeable use of the subwoofer, mostly used for the score.

Surround Sound Presentation:  Ambient noise and a lowered volume score inhabit the rear speakers.

Dialogue Reproduction:  Dialogue is a little muffled and slightly distant sounding.

Extras 

Just a few little deleted scenes are included.  Nothing else.

Deleted Scenes

• Good Boy (HD, :53)
• Sage Boss…Sage (HD, 1:33)
• Tom Packs…Carefully (HD, :44)

Previews – Buck Wild, Hell Baby, Charlie Countryman, Ninja II: Shadow Of A Tear, Life Of A King

Summary 

Buck Wild comes with a mediocre presentation and 3 deleted scenes.  As you could have probably guessed, there’s no way I’m recommending it.  With the extras so light, I’d have to base on the strength of the film and as you can see, there is no strength.  Steer clear of this title.