A couple of private investigators go to Panama to find some missing missionaries, while there they find natives, voodoo and zombies.

An interesting little mix of traditional zombies and living dead in this no-budget flick. Right off the bat I had a good feeling about Stoned Dead, the intro shots of jungle landscapes were really beautiful and the whole thing was well filmed. However, it was plagued with issues that soured me quickly.

Almost all indie flicks have one thing in common, crappy editing. It makes sense, you have the creative people in charge of editing, and they want everything they made left in, so scenes that's only purpose is to introduce someone or make a small plot point end up going on for ten minutes.

It's hard to work hard on something then cut it, I get it completely. I can't overlook it, though, and this movie is chock full of it.

There were several times when I found myself yelling "Come on!" at the screen as characters chatted back and forth. If these were real conversations where people were talking directly to me, I'd probably just start sobbing out of overwhelming boredom. I know that's rude, but sometimes I can't control myself.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that these scenes, or at least the information they convey, are important. They're just clumsily buried and that was a little hard on me, and the result of the long scenes was that it really takes a while to get going.

Also I was seriously troubled by the look of the zombies. In a zombie flick how the zombies look is usually a big selling point in a review and in Stoned Dead the interesting new approach was to make the zombies look just like everyone else but with bullet holes in them. Understandably, this is less than impressive.

Now keep in mind, while I did use this review to bitch about something that's common in indie flicks, but this movie is by no means the worst offender I've seen. It just made an impact because there's a decent story hid behind it that some serious chopping could bring right out.

I really wish the zombies would have looked cool, though. The whole reason zombie flicks are so popular among the indie crowd is they're not hard to do well. Ah well.

3 out of 10 guys I didn't realize were zombies until later