In the Doghouse

Oh, Doghouse, where have you been my whole life? I'm not saying I haven't been into the other zombie comedies, the Shaun of the Deads, the Dead & Breakfasts, all the way back to Hysterical! and the splatter comedy Romero was kickstarting in Dawn of the Dead, and all the way up to Ahh!! Zombies! But Doghouse, it's got the male-bonding (in stupidity) thing going on that Hot-Tub Time Machine had, that The Hangover was kind of predicated on, but it's got the serious kind of gore we know so well from Severance, from Feast. And it's such a good balance, to have 'real' issues and comical zombie mayhem. The lives and the deaths matter, but you can laugh at them at the same time, and that tension—this brand of movies, it completely understands that the impulse to laugh and the impulse to scream, until the moment of eruption, they're exactly the same impulse. So, by pairing the laugh with the scream, and on-screen (as opposed to locked within ourselves), they're dramatizing what we can never quite articulate in the moment. It's magic. Horror comedy's my favorite genre, I think. It's safe and gross and, when done right, revealing, can be a good critique of our own ridiculous selves. As for the particulars of Doghouse, they kind of make you understand that the best stories are those with the simplest premise: a crew of guys is leaving their spouses—all women but one—for the weekend, to get drunk and loud and crazy, and thereby raise the  . . . → → →