A zombie outbreak traps a band of drag performers inside their nightclub in the first feature film from Tina Romero.
The closing night film of the 2025 Chattanooga Film Festival’s in-person portion was the feature filmmaking debut of Tina Romero, daughter of the late and legendary George A. Romero, who revolutionized the zombie horror subgenre with Night of the Living Dead in 1968 and Dawn of the Dead a decade later. Tina follows in his footsteps wonderfully with Queens of the Dead, a zombie apocalypse film set in the niche of drag culture that’s brimming with personality, energy and empathy along with hilarious comedy and chilling scares.
Queens of the Dead follows an eclectic cast of characters with Katy O’Brian leading as Dre, owner of Club Yum in Brooklyn working irrationally hard to keep the night’s show afloat after her star Yasmin (Dominique Jackson) backs out at the last minute. Dre reaches out to her backup performer Sam (Jaquel Spivey), deals with banter between her drag talents Nico (Tomas Matos) and Ginsey (Nina West), and pushes her frumpish brother-in-law Barry (Quincy Dunn-Baker) toward fixing her venue’s plumbing despite his refusal to use the proper pronouns for the talent which surrounds him. Once the show begins, however, zombies surround Club Yum and threaten the lives of everyone in Dre’s crew, leaving survival of the zombie apocalypse up to whether they can settle their differences.
As one can probably gather, Queens of the Dead sets up a lot of chess pieces before this subgenre’s standard for violence takes shape in this zombie picture; there’s even a subplot involving Dre’s wife Lizzy (Riki Lindhome) taking transgender patient Jane (Eve Lindley) to rendezvous with everyone at the club in hopes of finding a sanctuary amongst the horde of dead that flooded their hospital and Margaret Cho as a vigilante gang leader in a cameo role. It’s also worth noting that while the banter amongst the cast is hilarious, a lot of the punchlines won’t land for audiences out of tune with the fast-paced flamboyance of queer conversations.
But that’s part of what makes Queens of the Dead such a fascinating watch, it’s full of lingo authentic to the personality of drag culture, and Romero smartly casts the majority of her ensemble with actors on the queer spectrum, effectively subverting this subgenre with a heartfelt empathy toward the state of life on the LGBTQ+ spectrum today: all the queer characters here have more than likely been confronted with derision, self-hatred, ignorance, rejection and death in many, if not all, facets of their lives up to the events of this narrative, and Dre spends a ton of time trying to keep everyone together as the undead close in on them.
Romero also layers each character with an interesting arc to which audiences of all creeds can relate: Dre is a team leader who puts the safety of her employees over her own, Sam has to overcome anxieties that his drag persona makes him feel, and Jane just wants to be accepted in a world that constantly rejects her. Add phenomenal performances and a soundtrack that never stops thumping, and you have a crowd pleasing horror-comedy in Queens of the Dead that would have made George A. proud.
RATING: ★★★★
(out of five stars)
DISCLAIMER: This review is a re-run from the film’s closing night screening at the 2025 Chattanooga Film Festival. Queens of the Dead opens in Nashville, Tennessee on Friday, October 24th.