(Warning: extreme blasphemy ahead. Put your censor goggles on now.)

So that crazy Mel Gibson decides to up the stakes in the War on Jews with gore-fest snuff flick The Passion of Christ. Blurgh, I say. Let the religious psychos have their fun. I’m just disappointed that he missed the opportunity to create a film of the world’s greatest teen slasher/zombie book: The Bible.

Just imagine. Marching home drunk one night, a bunch of Roman soldiers accidentally kill their best mate Jesus, after he gets so paralytic he starts ranting about being some kind of god demon. They bury the body in the beer garden of a nearby tavern (the modern version might replace this with, say, an abandoned toxic waste dump). They think they’ve gotten away with it but 3 days later Zombie Jesus rises from the dead and comes back to plague them! “Man,” he says, “I was absolutely crucified last night!” in a witty reference to the original book, for die-hard fans to chuckle at, following in the footsteps of such classic lines as “What did you expect, yellow Spandex?”

Due to the prudishness of the medieval church, historical records are sketchy as to who Zombie Jesus’ first victim was, but if modern Horror is anything to go by, it was probably a female Centurion who was caught unawares while sitting in the hot-tub on the phone to her boyfriend.

All standard horror cliches so far, but this film has the advantage of historical authority in the zombie horror genre. Peter Jackson’s Braindead rips the “I kick arse for the lord!” line from the apocrypha. Even the Standard Zombie Laws of the Living Dead trilogy ultimately derive from the Roman Catholic rite of transubstantiation:

“He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life; and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink.”
John 6:54-55

George Romero’s trick was to have the zombies biting you instead of you biting Jesus. Few spotted this subtle reversal and thus credited him with an original invention.

Since there’s no hero, the film would be a non-stop Zombie rampage through the Middle-East. In fact, the modern idea of a hero is another role reversal: in the original Bible, Zombie Jesus is the one with all the throwaway one-liners, which have since filtered up into popular culture:

“Groovy”
John 6:67

“Who wants some?”
John 6:73

“I’m Duke Jesus and I’m coming to get the rest of you alien bastards!”
John 6:89

Also, and correct me if my biblical knowledge is a little rusty, but I think the original book version has a Roman soldier trying to kill Zombie Jesus by skewering him in the side with a spear. This is the origin of the modern Cop-shoots-Zombie scene where Cop finds out that his bullets won’t work. I don’t recall if Jesus eventually manages to bite the soldier in the original. Either way, there are only two canonical ways to kill a zombie: destroy its brain, or, and I quote from the Quake I manual: “Thou canst not kill that which doth not live. But you can blast it into chunky kibbles.”

Unfortunately, like all trilogies in the Horror genre, the source material eventually degenerates into self-parody with the Revelation chapter, sometimes known as Scary Testament 3. While this is the only part actually set in Hell, it’s packed with acid-trip visions of horsemen and the end of the world. More sci-fi/fantasy than Horror.

What would really have set this film apart from the standard Hollywood bunk is that it basically has a sad ending: not only does Zombie Jesus win, he ascends into some kind of all-powerful god-zombie; a fitting revenge based on the original Jesus’ post-binge drunken ravings. The film obviously ends with the one surviving (female) soldier in the changing room of the Roman spa reading words etched in steam on the mirror: “I still know what you did last Easter (cf. omniscience)”.