The Undead Symphony

Off the back of our Dead Snow review with Curtis (one half of Gravely Serious) Michael and I are back to review the Dead Snow 2, the sequel in which sole survivor of the first movie Martin must go into battle a second time against the villainous Nazi Herzog and his zombie horde as they try to fulfil their purpose and complete their final order from Hitler, and kill everyone in the nearby town.

It is bigger, badder, gorier, but overall worse despite the critics preferring it to the original (what were they thinking?). The knives of the first movie have been replaced with hammers, the kills are bloodier and more numerous, and they have a tank (he says, doing his Boromir "They have a cave troll" voice).

Still worth a watch though 6.5/10

And check out this great track Drop Dead by Sorry About the Noise! that you can find on the links below. We highly recommend you check the guys out.

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/1idWdmytfmFefblfODy7iq?si=LhtYdMn_Rc64cUAfB4Pekg

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@sorryaboutthenoise

Instagram - @officialsorryaboutthenoise

I'd love to hear from my dear listeners. Recommend a zombie movie or show I haven't covered, or some on and chat all things zeke. Or just like and share.

Arguably the best computer game survival horror crossover that then led to a series of zombie movies that made a billion dollars at the box office, and spawned further reboots, and 4 animated movies and a prequel show on Netflix that the assholes cancelled a season early - yes is it Resident Evil.

Paul WS Anderson brings Milla Jovovic's Alice to life, an amalgam of Ada, Claire and Jill from the games with Matrix style high kicking and a rocking soundtrack. This, the original, follows Colin Salmon "Chunks", Michelle Rodriguez and their spec ops team as they investigate the lockdown of the Umbrella Corp facility under Racoon City. They find Alice and James Purefoy, two agents the the roles of a married couple as cover for their true purpose, without their recent memories and bring them along with Eric Mabius (supposedly a cop but no one is buying it) to discover what the Red Queen, the AI controlling the facility has done.

Containing iconic scenes such as Salmon Chunks with a laser, roundhousing zombie doberman pincers, and the Red Queen's deadpan "You're all going to die down here," it is cracking movie that has survived the tests of time and is still very watcheable.

7/10 

I'd love to hear from my dear listeners. Recommend a zombie movie or show I haven't covered, or some on and chat all things zeke. Or just like and share.

Where to start with this one? It had potential, the acting was mostly OK but the shot selection by the DP was terrible, the CGI was laughable and consistency was just not there in the behaviour of some of the characters.  And as for the ending? That annoyed the shit out of me. You see two alternate endings one after the other without any explanation. Piss poor.

So, to the movie? Six friends meet up for a weekend away at one of their parents' houses. But a terrorist organisation fires a ballistic missile with a chemical warhead at rural America, somewhere near Baton Rouge.  The chemical turns the locals into rabid crazies, the titular demented, who want to beat anyone they see to death. The 6 then have to escape, and then find salvation.

It had a few good moments but that ending did me in. The bad outweighed the good, and I couldn't give it more than 4/10, which is still better than the 3.8 on IMDB and Amazon and the 7% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Maybe watch it with low expectations. 

I'd love to hear from my dear listeners. Recommend a zombie movie or show I haven't covered, or some on and chat all things zeke. Or just like and share.

This week we are joined by Curtis Ghoul of the Gravely Serious Podcast to watch and review the 2009 Norwegian Nazi zombie splatterfest Dead Snow. And it was a surprisingly fun time (both the recording and the movie) with thrills, kills, a lot of gore and more than it's fair share of Evil Dead influence.

The blurb - a party of eight Norwegian medical students travel to a remote Arctic mountain for an Easter weekend filled with skiing and relaxation. After one of their group disappears while on a solo cross-country hike, a mysterious Wanderer tells the remaining visitors that, in the waning days of World War II, a battalion of Nazi soldiers disappeared into the nearby woods after the residents turned on them, and that their zombified corpses remain on the prowl in the area.

We then get head splits, head stomps, death by grenade, knife, stick, disembowelling, machine gun, chainsaw, axe and snow mobile, some post poop sex on the toilet, and more than our fair share of intestines.  And we scored it collectively as a 7/10, meaning we would recommend it to not only fans of the genre, but fans of fun gory comedies.  Maybe if it's a night in, and you  have a group of people around don't want to watch the classics yet again, you'll pop this on for some Scani punk fuelled fun.

And talking of music we have the single Boneyard by Russ Tafari as dessert.

You can find Russ' work on  https://solo.to/russtafari

and by looking for Russ Tafari on RussTafari.com | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

and his Youtube Channels

Russ Tafari TV

Underground Mastermind Productions

I'd love to hear from my dear listeners. Recommend a zombie movie or show I haven't covered, or some on and chat all things zeke. Or just like and share.

Oh this one wound me up big time. A South African zombie movie from 2018 where the main character is a blonde blue eyed American (played by a South African). It had a few good scenes but a lot of it is stolen from other sources, for example, main character is in operating theatre during the outbreak and wakes up hospital, is also wearing scrubs for a chunk of it, etc.

It is let down by setting itself in Southern African (whatever that is), having an obnoxious white American central character, that lies to the local people trying to save him and themselves, several times, and some things that just don't make any sense such as:

1. Not wiping bright red blood off your face for the 5 days over which the movie is set 
2. Not arming yourself with anything more than a single crowbar
3. Not even looking for food or water for 5 days
4. Not checking houses for food, water, weapons, supplies
5. Not getting in the convoy despite the vehicles being empty
6. The convoy having no  guards, and one person per vehicle
7. Henry's GF from being a bit of a bimbo and being evacuated to running the convoy
8. Only taking a GPS and a flare from the convoy and not food, water, weapons

I apologise in advance for the rant this movie review became

5.5/10

I'd love to hear from my dear listeners. Recommend a zombie movie or show I haven't covered, or some on and chat all things zeke. Or just like and share.

After the conversation with Michael and Steph on the top 10 Undead Symphony zombie movies I went looking for other people's top rated movies. IndieWire had a good one, but then I found the IMDB top 50. Outside of Re-Animator and White Zombie I had seen most of them, other than Dead & Buried from 1981 and Cemetery Man from 1994.

Dead & Buried is a nasty, dark story of a small coastal town where the locals murder anyone that ventures there, as Sheriff Dan (James Farentino) tries to solve the murders. But then the dead are found seemingly alive and well. What is going on? Why is his wife (Flash Gordon's own Melody Anderson) acting so weird? How has he not noticed that his home town is populated by psychopaths who video and photograph the murders as they happen?

Dated but good. 6/10 and there is an acknowledgement of an error  I made with a character, who I thought was Meloda Anderson playing a second role but was in fact someone else entirely. I should have worn my glasses.

And in Cemetery Man, aka Dellamorte Dellamore, Rupert Everett is a cemetery keeper who has to put down flesh eating zombies in a town he has never left. With his loyal and mostly mute sidekick Gnaghi he keeps the dead at bay until a chance encounter with a beautiful widow and the angel of death sends Dellamorte into a downward spiral of murder and insanity

Could have been better (as a comedy) 6/10

I'd love to hear from my dear listeners. Recommend a zombie movie or show I haven't covered, or some on and chat all things zeke. Or just like and share.

This week we have been joined by the awesome Steph from Listeners of the Dead podcast as she and Michael get to watch for the first time one of my favourite movies The Girl with all the Gifts starring Paddy Considine, Glen Close, Gemma Arterton and Sennia Nanua as Stephanie, I mean Melanie!

I reviewed this back in Episode 13, so didn't include the preamble/summary  plot, you can find it there if you want to listen.

This is us chatting all things zombie, with movie preferences, observations of US vs other markets, and then a classic game of Mastermind where Darren and Michael go head to head on their knowledge of Dawn of the Dead 1978 and 2004 as well as the all important review and scores on the doors for the movie (7.5/10).

Enjoy!

And finally, we at the Undead Symphony are proud as ever to be in a position to showcase musical talent with a zombie/undead theme, and this week we have Sean Rowland (@the_panic_broadcast) and his song Dress Up like the Dead, a spooky love letter to his wife, a dark way of saying something light.

You can find Sean as the Panic Broadcast on Instagram, Spotify and wherever you get your music.

I'd love to hear from my dear listeners. Recommend a zombie movie or show I haven't covered, or some on and chat all things zeke. Or just like and share.

All good things come to an end, well, everything comes to an end and I am glad of that fact as the snidey Hong Chul and conniving Din Din, and squealing idiot Tsuki were really starting to grate on my nerves.

Conceptually the South Korean Netflix show Zombiverse was brilliant, with an immersive experience for the cast of 10 in this unscripted reality show set within the backdrop of the zombie apocalypse, but the cast let it down. Outside of Dax and Song Young Il, and at a pinch Patricia,  the others were pretty terrible.

As Din Din and Hong Chul concede during a final task, it would be best if the cast never sees each other again. And I agree. It would be best.

7/10 and a unique concept worth watching and remaking with a more likeable cast.

I'd love to hear from my dear listeners. Recommend a zombie movie or show I haven't covered, or some on and chat all things zeke. Or just like and share.

For this hit and run of an episode I chanced upon a post on Instagram about an Italian zombie movie. We have not covered Italy yet and so I was intrigued. More so when the poster showed an elevator open a crack (6 inches) and a pile of zombie bodies outside. And so I found the trailer on YouTube and it looked fun, tense, claustrophobic. I was in.

And so we follow Claudio, a high flying, uptight, angry, misogynistic Italian slave of commerce as he leaves home and heads to the office for an important presentation. After abusing a couple of female workmates he ends up stuck in the elevator and berates anyone he can get on the intercom or on the phone until the zombie apocalypse starts.

From here the movie changes drastically. Claudio is trapped in a lift, the door is open 6 inches and he is stuck between two floors. He can see up the corridor but that is it. And the zombie outbreak is happening in full view, workmates killed or turning, SWAT shooting people and being killed themselves. It is a low budget, limited location zombie flick done very well. 

6/10 

I'd love to hear from my dear listeners. Recommend a zombie movie or show I haven't covered, or some on and chat all things zeke. Or just like and share.

What do I always say? The people who you meet in the zombie apocalypse are probably far worse than the zombies themselves. And the gang find themselves prisoners of the evil mayor of the small town. DinDin, Song Young il, Tsuki, Jonathan and Dax are asleep and tied up in a room in the dark, Na-Rae and Dr PeePee are banished to another room without blankets, and asshat Hong Chul and Patricia are being fed to the mayor's undead mother.

More fun and games to come as the gang need to escape from the house, and then make a daring rescue as squealing idiot Tsuki is caught, before Jonathan is bitten and turns, and the gang meet a new character who can teach them how to evade the zombies and fight them. But can he be trusted? Given the last person they trusted drugged them to feed to his zombie mother, I am going to say not.

I'd love to hear from my dear listeners. Recommend a zombie movie or show I haven't covered, or some on and chat all things zeke. Or just like and share.