Heder stars as Drex Greene, a guy who simply woke up dead one day, presumably as a zombie. We don't really find out this season what caused his zombification, but we do get to see what circumstances led to his realization and how he handles his life after finding out. His journey begins as his body bag is unzipped by the lovely Cassie (Krysten Ritter, Confessions of a Shopaholic), a med student he knew in college. Once the shock wears off, she is determined to use her new medical skills to determine the cause of his condition, hoping to gain fame for herself. His best friend, Matt (Josh Gad), a budding filmmaker, wants his slice of fame in the form of an internet TV show about his zombie best friend and Drex's daily life.
Drex gets a job at an information processing company called Infocorps working under a jerk named Andrew (Wayne Knight, Seinfeld), but giving him access to all sorts of data on people, including himself, and he finds his own death certificate. As he is tortured by Andrew, he daydreams about eating his brain, especially since he realizes he can't consume normal food anymore without getting sick. Really sick. Drex, Matt and Cassie work to solve the riddle of his new zombie status, while retracing his steps leading up to the day he woke up dead and in the meantime, someone at his work keeps instant messaging him with vague info about his being a zombie. We see he is being followed by an ominous man known as Shadow Man and Drex also meets another zombie, a stunner named Aurora (Meital Dohan) who teaches him the glories of eating hot dogs, since, well... they're made out of brains anyway, apparently. Aurora is only interested in her newfound skills as a zombie, since these zombies look like the rest of us, but they are super fast, agile and can't be injured, and she is able to rob stores with amazing efficiency. When she realizes Drex doesn't want to be a part of her activities, she dumps him, which is probably for the best since he and Cassie have a little romance kindling anyway. When Drex's mom (Jean Smart) makes an appearance towards the end of the film and tells Drex she just might know what caused his condition, it is only then that I realize that this "movie" isn't going to wrap up and will end on a cliffhanger. What?
I didn't enjoy the directing style, where they cut back and forth between what had happened previously and what was going on now. It was frenetic, but aggravating, not stylized as it was in The Bannen Way. The acting was absolutely terrible and I can only chalk this up to the director since I've seen these actors before and they typically do a fine job. It was so overacted that it felt like a Disney series. Much worse, actually. What I can say is that there were tons of special features. All were short, the longest being 9 minutes or so and most averaging under 4 minutes, but honestly, I just didn't really care to see behind the scenes of Woke Up Dead. The cast seemed so amazed that the entire thing was filmed in only 12 days, but that seems about right to me.
I can't recommend Woke Up Dead at all. If you absolutely must check it out, go to Crackle.com to see it. I can say that I didn't realize it was a collection of webisodes, so that part of the editing was pretty good, but the story just wasn't engaging and I was glad when it was over. Shaun of the Dead this is not.
