Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (February 26, 2015)
Can a red-blooded heterosexual male resist a movie called College Coeds vs. Zombie Housewives? Probably. Can a red-blooded heterosexual male resist a movie called College Coeds vs. Zombie Housewives when a free copy shows up in his mailbox? Apparently not.
Sexually frustrated scientist Gary (Frankie Dell) can’t get any action from his hot wife Tracy (Karlie Montana), mainly because she cheats on him with his pal Hank (Andrew Espinoza Long). Because Gary thinks he needs to spark Tracy’s libido, he develops a drug to boost the female sex drive.
Unfortunately, test subjects develop a condition that puts them into a trance – and also turns them aggressive and violent. As “zombie housewives” overrun the area, local cheerleaders Judy (Erika Jordan), Kara (Adriana Chechik) and Laurel (Michelle Maylene) need to stop them.
A few years back, I watched a few flicks like Bikini Royale, spoofs that were short on comedy/plot and heavy on nudity/sex. Coeds comes from the same studio as those movies and feels exceptionally similar to the earlier efforts.
When I viewed Royale in 2008, I liked it, though I think that was mostly because it offered more nudity than I expected. I thought it’d give us a little T&A, but instead, it presented a lot of graphic skin.
Stripped (ha!) of that element, though, there wasn’t much to the movie, and matters haven’t changed since then. Actually, from a certain POV, they’ve gotten worse. While Coeds throws out tons of sex scenes, it seems oddly squeamish when it comes to the depiction of full-frontal nudity. We got plenty of those images in Royale but none appear in Coeds; women strip all the time, but we don’t get to see them in the all-together.
Coeds does deliver lots of sex, but like its predecessors, these scenes fall short of “X”-rated explicitness. Characters appear to perform all sorts of acts, but the movie doesn’t show them in an explicit way. I don’t mind that so much, but the absence of the full nudity becomes a bigger nuisance.
The way in which Coeds compromises between “R”-rated movies with dollops of skin and actual hardcore porn makes it an odd beast. It’s like “porn lite”, as it comes with many of the same components as the harder stuff but tames these in a way that makes the result less likely to make many viewers happy.
Perhaps if Coeds fared better as a narrative, it’d be able to overcome its other drawbacks. However, the story exists as nothing more than an excuse for all those sex scenes – and a really flimsy excuse, at that.
Much of the film presents something of a soap opera related to cheating spouses, so the actual “coeds vs. zombies” motif fills next to no running time. The flick throws out a “fight scene” that lasts maybe two minutes and that’s it; no attempt to make this an actual horror/action film occurs.
Sure, one could argue “who cares?”, as I acknowledge movies like this just want to give us a lot of sex and a little campy fun. If Coeds succeeded in the latter regard, I’d appreciate it more, but the narrative sequences seem so dull that they’re nearly pointless. Clearly zombie movies offer fertile ground for parody, but nothing here scores points in that regard.
On the positive side, Coeds features a cast of extremely attractive women – well, except for Mary Carey. She plays Gary’s colleague, and she looks awful. Though only in her early 30s, Carey appears to have had so much plastic surgery that she now resembles a 50-year-old woman trying to look decades younger. She wouldn’t be attractive under any circumstances, but among a cast of genuinely gorgeous women, she becomes an unpleasant distraction.
That negative aside, guys will find ample eye candy among the actresses of Coeds. They add some visual spice to the proceedings, but they can’t overcome the movie’s general dullness. A flimsy narrative connected by a bunch of repetitive sex scenes, Coeds becomes a bit of a bore.
