Zombies! In Which I Take a Brief Moment to Share a Little Bit of Time with the Living Dead

Well of course it's movie reviews!  Like I'm really gonna spend time with zombies, ha!  How would we even communicate?  Zombies can't talk!

     (Not to mention the fact that THEY AREN'T REAL)

All the titles link to trailers

Warm Bodies

Grade: B

I suppose it was only a matter of time!

Question:  How do you make the dead look sexy?  Answer:  Nicholas Hoult, who probably has played the sexiest corpse this side of Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her and Kim Basinger from the Tom Petty video for “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”!  I prefer my zombie movies with a wink and a smile.  The TV show The Walking Dead notwithstanding, my favorite zombie movies are all comedies, and this follows suit.  And I did like it!  It’s just not in my top three, which are Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, and Death Becomes Her.  It probably makes it into my top five, however, right alongside The Return ofthe Living Dead.  And it’s actually pretty darn mild for a zombie movie!  This may be the first bona-fide zombie movie rated PG-13!

The romance is cute, but if you accept the fact that zombies can actually exist (and let’s face it, that’s actually asking a lot right off the bat, being that they aren’t actually pumping blood through their bodies to make their muscles work), this film then asks you to accept the fact that zombies can become human again, and can start talking and thinking.  I realize one of the first zombies in all of literature, Frankenstein’s creature, was able to communicate verbally, but whereas that was a serious examination of the concepts of life and death, and not a silly rom zom com, in this movie the fact the zombies start talking is just a childish contrivance for a cute romantic movie.  What’s more romantic than a love that causes a zombie to rejoin the living, and not just him, but other zombies too, whose hearts start beating again at the mere idea of love?  It’s an interesting twist on the classic romance movie.  I’m just not sure it qualifies as the best of zombie films.

The Dead

Grade: C+

I had never seen it before, and so I was kind of looking forward to seeing what all the critical hype was about 25 years ago, while I was too busy watching Fatal Attraction, Moonstruck, and The Witches of Eastwick.  That’s what I thought it was going to be anyway!  I thought this was going to be John Huston’s last film from 1987, a lyrical labor of love starring his daughter Angelica Huston, an adaptation of a classical piece of literature by favored Irish author James Joyce (clip linked here).  That’s what the description said, though I found it odd that SyFy would be running this kind of movie.  Maybe there was a fantasy angle or something that I wasn’t aware of.

     Then I discovered that what I actually recorded onto my DVR, despite what the description said right there on the guide, was a 2010 B-grade horror film that was kind of like Night of the Living Dead in Africa.  

I was still game, though it did mean I needed to switch gears.  Instead of an understated, poetic drama about an upper-class Christmas party in turn-of-the-century Ireland, I was now going to watch a nightmarish vision about two survivors attempting to make their way across the unforgiving landscape of Africa in the middle of a zombie plague.  

The film was an attempt by the Ford brothers, Howard and Jonathan, to make a name for themselves in the crowded marketplace of independent horror films.  As such, it’s not so bad.  The African zombies are actually quite chilling in their slow moving, creepy-eyed dead slumber, some of them with bones protruding from their wobbly, broken legs.

White actor Rob Freeman as an American military engineer Brian Murphy, and Prince David Osei as Sgt. Daniel Dembele, roaming across the desert looking for his son, make for an interesting duo.  I am still a horror movie fan, and the movie is watchable, and there are some good scares here.  But if truth be told, it was not what I was expecting AT ALL, since I was in the mood for the graceful Angelica Huston drama, and it’s really not the sort of movie to shoot to the top of my favorite horror movie list anyway.  I’m quite content with my box set seasons of The Walking Dead at the moment, thank you, (ComicCon Season 4 trailer linked here!) and though true zombie movie fans may want to check this out, I guess the rest of us need not know it even exists.  It’s just another zombie movie in a market now flooded with zombie movies.  Why, I just reveiwed one of them (above), not to mention the fact that one of the recent, big, over-hyped summer blockbuster was the Brad Pitt zombie-thon, WorldWar Z!

     I guess I’ll have to catch that final film of John Huston’s some other time.