Wasting Away

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A 2007 Zombie film unique in that it takes the point of view of the Zombies. A lone motorcyclist intercepts a military transport shipping toxic materials, causing a car wreck which results in a lone keg getting to a bowling alley and mistaken for beer. Mike uses the "beer" to make alcoholic soft-serve ice cream, and shares it with ex girlfriend Vanessa, fellow bowling alley employee Tim and his girlfriend Cindy. They all pass out, and wake up only to discover everyone else is speaking in a fast high pitch and has gone homicidally insane. Also, brains are ridiculously delicious, and drunk people are not hostile and can be understood.

The film deals with the quartet trying to survive a world gone mad against them, and the army trying desperately to kill them all.


Tropes used in Wasting Away include:


  • Body Horror: Chunks of them fall off, even when they see themselves as essentially human, much to their confusion.
  • By the Eyes of the Blind: Or rather, the drunk.
  • Crazy Survivalist: Cindy's parents, who shoot at Tim and Cindy when they go so Tim can ask them to let them date.
  • Deliberately Monochrome: The "real world" is in black and white, but "zombie vision" is in full color. This helps distinguish what the main cast are seeing and what the humans do.

Tim: Does it look green?
Mike: It's just the light.

  • Detachment Combat: Despite being severed, Mike's hand still obeys his commands.
  • Emergency Transformation: With a big chunk of pragmatism. After running out of booze and being forced to kill a bowling hall full of sober people after they attack the main cast, they decide to reuse the alcoholic/toxic waste soft serve ice cream to make more zombies to help them overpower the army and escape the city.
  • Granola Girl: Cindy, which makes her Horror Hunger really shocking to her.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: Nick and Mike.
  • Horror Hunger: They're hungry for living flesh, but aren't crippled by it and go most of the movie without obsessing over it. Brains still taste good though.
  • Just a Flesh Wound: What zombies think about most wounds, including having a steering handle in the chest.
  • Losing Your Head: Mike.
  • Not a Zombie: Inverted, the zombies don't see themselves as such, and think everyone else is psychotic.
  • Run for the Border: Just substitute Mexico with "toxic waste dump". Mike cooks up a plan to flee to "Zombie Paradise", a toxic waste valley where no human will ever venture and they can live in peace.
  • Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: They're stuck at a somewhat stable type 1, they decay and can't heal, but so long as the head is intact...
  • Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror: Pretty much in the comedy end of things.
  • Super Soldier: The toxic materials was originally meant to be a super soldier type serum, but it went Horribly Wrong.
  • Super Strength: The zombies, especially women zombies, who seem to take a level in Badass post change.
  • Sympathetic POV: Pretty much the point of the movie; it paints zombies as misunderstood humans who are unduly on the receiving end of fear and hostility.
  • Van Helsing Hate Crimes: Zombies are still the same people they always were, and don't really suffer from Horror Hunger leading them to kill.
  • Weirdness Censor: The quartet see themselves as human, instead of slowly decaying corpses.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: What the army is afraid the spilled toxic waste will cause. It does appear to have gotten people infected other than the main cast, and they get re-killed.
  • Zombie Infectee: Played for Laughs by pairing it with Weirdness Censor, the main cast have no clue they're zombies so don't engage in classic denial. Once they do figure it out, they cope fairly quickly.