Talking to a friend over what she has been up to over the summer, she mentioned about catching up with books/DVDs,due to her laptop playing up in loading up Netflix. Arranging to meet up,I got asked to bring a Horror flick along. Recently picking this up after reading Kim Newman's review in Empire,this looked like a good moment to install this film.View on the film:Keeping most of the action blocked in the toilets, director Christian James & cinematographer Sashi Kissoon flush potential boredom away from the limited location by focusing on the claustrophobia,eyed up as W.C looks through the gap in the door,and wide-shots showing the gents stuffed with zombies. Wetting the floor of the loo with wonderful oozing sounds, James has the movie overflowing with Horror Comedy Splatter,where every attempt W.C. makes to escape is met with zombie moans and buckets of blood jamming his way.Drained at a trim 72 minutes, (and 10 mins of credits!) writer/star Dan Palmer dishes up a one-man play, (with Antonia Bernath being an unseen voice in another cubical) of cute lo-fi comedy, running over W.C useless handyman grasping anything at hand to beat the apocalypse. Locked in a toilet for most of the flick, Palmer does not shy away from showing the mean, sarcastic side of W.C. After doing well delivering character-based laughs and gory jolts, the makers dent everything with a sudden, ill-fitting ending,which leaves the film stalling.

Christmas Eve, somewhere in the UK. There's a corporate party. There's also a complaint about a smell in the ladies' rest room. Our hero, WC, extracts the dead rat causing the smell from the ceiling fan vent. Two women in skimpy costumes come in, so WC hides in a stall on top of a stool.One of the women turns zombie, then bites the other. WC drops his cell phone into the toilet, which fries it. Then the first two zombies go after WC. He kills the first., then the second. More zombies come in. Soon enough, WC is trapped in the loo. More zombies come to the toilet. Fortunately for WC, they are, by and large, slow zombies.He gets another cell phone from a zombie, then calls the police. Unfortunately, he does this at the moment of conversion. Evie is in the second stall over, and she has also not converted. Jeff from IT shows up, strong and not infected, but WC unintentionally infects him. Their chances grow slimmer.Evie and WC talk from 33 minutes until 41 minutes. That inspired zero laughs, rather like the movie as a whole. WC gets his ladder, and makes an attempt to get his tool box. He get the toolbox, but loses the ladder. The conversation resumes, only on a more ribald note. Evie throws him a pill, and he makes the awful mistake of taking it; he has not experience with drugs, so he's screwed.While drugged, WC just walks out of his stall and the zombies take him where he wants to go. Sure. Then Evie finally makes contact, and the false memories fade.Some truths come out. The management had fired him. On the way out, he stole some fund for a 'good cause' whatever that was. He also stole Evie's cell phone, that is, the one he dropped down the toilet.By another happy circumstance, he gets his hammer for a while, only to get his hand grabbed and bloodied...or so he thought. He needs to get swinging with the hammer. He does get to a crawl space that might get them out, or not. Evie turns out to be really large, and likely won't fit. She sacrifices herself to give him more of a chance.He follows a crawl space to another vent, but only zombies are in the connecting room. He tries other rooms. Finally, he wraps himself in toilet paper and breaks through the zombies. He meets the real Evie, and she seems OK, except she got lacerated by one of the zombies.Will he make it out alive, talk to his mum, have a Happy Christmas?----Scores-----Cinematography: 6/10 Poor. Has sort of a VHS feel to it: low contrast, washed out, sometimes grainy.Sound: 6/10 Hollow. Has that bad VHS hollowness. I wonder what equipment they used to record such bad sound.Acting: 1/10 There is only Dan Palmer, and he is not worth anything.Screenplay: 1/10 Nonsense. Perhaps 15 minutes of plot spread over 82 minutes. The zombies are not funny, WC and Evie (actually Heather) are not funny, the drug nonsense is beyond stupid. The zombies are a threat, then they are not, then they are. It is totally inconsistent.

The first thing that should worry you about this film before even watching it are the words prominently displayed on it's poster stating that it is "A worthy successor to Shaun of the Dead". After watching the movie I decided to go and read the full review where that little excerpt was taken from, just to make sure that the words 'This is not' didn't come immediately before or after it, because this is not a worthy successor to Shaun of the Dead and a worthy successor to Shaun of the Dead this is not.In 1989 a family flying from Venezuela to Brazil crashed in the dense forest of an unexplored part of the Amazon rain forest. The tribe that lived there had never seen TV or movies, never heard of horror or zombies, yet I would bet my first born child's soul that with the home video camera that the tribe found in the wreckage, they would manage to make a better horror/comedy zombie film than what the makers of Stalled delivered to us.First things first, Stalled is about a janitor working in a large office block who sneaks into the ladies restroom to quickly use one of the toilets, while in there the zombie apocalypse happens and he get's trapped. They should of made a movie about a person trapped in the toilets with a TV playing this movie and no way to turn it off, at least that would be true horror. There are 3 main problems with this movie, firstly the camera-work is just horrible. Close ups and weird angles that are obviously meant to make the movie look interesting do nothing except make the movie look like a bunch of film students were given a camera with no teacher around to tell them when they were doing things wrong. Also it just looks cheap, it doesn't have that movie feel to it, it looks more like a half decent home made video posted on Youtube.The 2nd problem is the acting, especially by the actor playing the main character. He is the writer of this movie and unfortunately for us he decided to play the lead role as well, a lead role where the character is the only character on screen for 95% of the movie. He can not act. I could give any of you reading this a copy of the script, on the day it was to be filmed, and I would expect that all of you could deliver your lines better than he could. I will be surprised if his acting career in the future entails anything more exciting than dressing up in a giant animal suit and playing Roger the giant Rabbit in a pantomime for preschoolers, even then he wouldn't be first choice for any director. But acting in a horror comedy film isn't that important, not when you have a witty script filled with humorous and/or dangerous situations for our characters to find themselves in...........and that brings us to the last, and possibly the biggest problem with this comedy horror film. It just doesn't successfully deliver on the horror or the comedy. The comedy is school boyish at best, not what we have become used to from British films over the last few years. The first "funny" scene in the film is when the janitor, stuck in a stall in the ladies toilets, contemplates masturbating to two scantily clad women who walked in and decided to start making out with each other for no real reason after they had been talking about what men they liked. At least I think it was meant to be funny, either that or it was meant to be disturbing, if it was meant to be disturbing then the filmmakers succeeded. The comedy goes downhill after that with jokes and gags that just don't work. The horror on the other hand is non existent, it doesn't miss like the comedy does, it just isn't there, sure there are zombies and we see people get eaten, but there is no tension, no sense of claustrophobia (which is quite an achievement for a movie set inside a toilet cubicle),no panic, no urgency and absolutely zero fear shown by the leads. I can think of pretty much any horror comedy movie and all of them had more horror in them than this did, even the Scary Movie franchise, and for a movie that is meant to be a horror comedy but isn't funny and has no scares, that's a problem.I'll leave now, I will admit that this movie left me thinking about it long after I had finished watching it, and that thought was "Is it irony that this movie is set entirely in a toilet and turned out to be a big steaming pile of sh...........?"I give it 2 stars out of 10. One for the camera operator managing to keep the camera pointed in the right direction and another for the brilliant portrayal of a toilet played by a very talented toilet.

Stalled, in my personal opinion, is actually a good comedy/horror, something that works even for girls, even for the stomach weak people, because it doesn't rely that much on gore. Of course, it has its parts, but mostly it tries to be constructive, as much as it can, especially considering the plot and somehow I think it succeed.We all know that a janitor is trapped in a women's restroom, so if you lower your expectations a little, especially from those 2 bad reviews that are here, I think you might just laugh a little at this one. I watched it become more interesting, more humorous and smarter, therefore I do recommend such a movie. You want a real crapper, then watch "Zombie ass: toilette of the dead", you wanna have some innocent fun to pass the time, sure, give "Stallet" a try. I'm telling you, if you are a horror fan that likes to put one eye on the cross with comedy from time to time, this one will do the trick. A nice add-on to the gender.Other horror comedies I would recommend: Dead Snow; Night of the living dorks; One eyed monster; Grabbers.