The Undead Symphony

Two very different movies this week. 

We have the comedy curse movie Dead Before Dawn starring Christopher "Great Scott" Lloyd and featuring a podcast favourite, It Stains the Sands Red's Brittany Allen, a rather obvious but fun romp where a bunch of college seniors accidentally create a curse that compels anyone they make eye contact with to commit suicide, and then come back as not just a zombie, but a demon possessed zombie, a "zemon". They will try to kill you by biting you and giving you a hickey, but you can control them but French kissing them. So, nothing out of the ordinary there.

And Belgium's first zombie movie, the claustrophobic, high pace Yummy, set in a fictitious Eastern European country, Alison and Michael head to a rundown hospital for cheap plastic surgery only to discover that Dr K's revolutionary stem cell treatment has been running in parallel to his work on a zombie patient zero. It is a bloody, gory mess and I really did like it. If this is what the Belgians can produce, they should make some more.   

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.

In this weeks episode we watch the Spanish Netflix offering Valley of the Dead, telling the story of Nazi experimentation during the bloody Spanish Civil war and Hard Line, aka Dead Rush, a POV modern day effort seen through the eyes of David, a regular guy as he tries to come to terms with the end of the world.

Sure, in Valley of the Dead, we have some dodgy CGI of planes, and driving scenes shot in front of a screen aside, I really like this. It felt formulaic in places when you lose a character at each location to the oncoming zombie hoards, but you could skim over that because it was well shot, the characters well played and fun, and who doesn't like trying to end Nazi experimentation?  It is republicans backed by Russia verses nationalists back by Nazi Germany but in the end they are all Spaniards fighting for their lives and ideals when the undead return.

I hate POV with a capital P. Outside of the camera view in The Blair Witch Project it is always done badly, a gimmick, like the end of Doom, so it can be truer to it's computer game roots and when Neo comes back from the dead in The Matrix. So a whole 77 minute zombie movie shot entirely POV (other than two short scenes at the end and when the main character dies (SPOILER!)). Not as dumb as I initially thought, the acting is pretty limited, but this genre doesn't draw the best of the art, other than the TWD and spinoffs (obvs). They tried to make it immersive by making it POV, but in the end you are disappointed that you are David and not one of the others.

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.

A different take on the zombie genre this week as we look at it from the side of the zees. Yes, we are on the dead side of the fence cheering on the shufflers against the human scum.

In Dead Heads we meet Mike, confused after a car accident and desperate to see his one true love Ellie. One small issue, he's a zombie, murdered by Ellie's father and has been dead for 3 years. Still, the path of true love is never easy and so with wise cracking sidekick *and fellow zombie Brent, and a huge shuffler called Cheese, Mike heads cross country to offer Ellie his heart, even though it doesn't actally work anymore.

And then we watch The Revenant, and no not the Leo frontiersman bear movie, this is another story of a normal man coming back from the dead and seeking his purpose. We meet Bart Gregory, a soldier in Iraq who is killed in action and then repatriated, only to come back from the dead. Confused initially Bart and his best pal Joey then become gun slinging vigilantes taking down the underworld of LA, and gaining their guns, drugs and cash, and some degree of notoriety as well.

Both very watcheable takes on the genre, with smart zombies you care about, much like my own Thombie.   

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.

Two movies this week that barely scrape into the zombie bracket for me, although google uses the z-word for both.

Alone, one of a thousand movies with the same title, is an incredibly slow, dull plague movie where a disease could potentially effect everyone and the only known cure has a chance of turning you into a homicidal maniac. Minimal cast, minimal location, minimal everything really. Production values were fine in terms of the acting, visuals and sound, but the story was just sooooooooooooooooooo boring I nearly nodded off a few times. Nothing happens.  More happens in some movies pre-credits that happen in the whole 80 something minutes of this one. Avoid.

The Serpent and the Rainbow, however, starring Bill Pullman and directed by Nightmare on Elm Street's Wes Craven,  has a lot going on, but falls to the edge of the genre because it is more about voodoo, with a bit of dream manipulation (it is Craven after all), and some zombie drug that puts people into a death like state. Not a zombie movie, but harks back to the voodoo ideas of the 1930s and 40s White Zombie and I walked with a Zombie, as well as the origins of the plague in the 1980s with Zombi. Watch once.

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.

According to Douglas Adams 42 is the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. In this, episode 42, we are not so lucky. But there was hope.

We had The Last Hope, a very poor Australian effort, where an immune soldier, the eponymous last hope, and others head across Australia to find a hospital to create a cure. Well, a very tiny, backwater part of Australia. No cities, no towns, not even a village. Not even two houses next to each other.

And then the Israeli Cannon Fodder: Battlefield of the Dead, a very grand, and large title for what was a 4 man mission, through a hole in a fence, some woods, a doorless house, a burned out hotel and then a beach. Could it score as badly as the Israeli Another World? The worst scoring movie so far? We shall have to see. 

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.

Put another shrimp on the zombie powered barbie and crack open a tall, cold Castlemaine 4X from the zombie powered fridge, as this week we are looking at the Wyrmwood series, the 2014 Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, where we are introduced to the new world, of zombies as fuel, and hazmat suited doctors and armoured soldiers killing the survivors to make their own serum, through the 2019 Wyrmwood: Chronicles of the Dead Teaser, for a TV series that never got made, to the 2021 bigger budget, better FX and honed Wyrmwood: Apocalypse.

Follow Barry and he looks for his sister Brooke, after she was taken by the soldiers for experimentation, before we join Rhys, on his quest for redemption. 

All very watchable 

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.

A real cult classic this episode, The Return of the Living Dead. 1985, cool mid-80s punk music, odd mid-1980s fashion (shoulder pads, collars up, no sleeves and a lot of zips and chains), and a slightly comedic plot derived from The Night of the Living Dead that didn't really feel all that funny. Still, it is the movie that gave us the idea that zombies want to eat brains, and why. So it is cemented in zombie movie history that that alone, and less so the 4 ever-diminishing sequels.

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.

We are baaaaack! Did you miss us? Well, we weren't gone for very long to be fair. But we are back with the second season of The Undead Symphony, starting with two international efforts, the cheesy, a bit racist, Shaun of the Dead rip-off Kill Zombie! from the Netherlands, where Aziz, Mo, Jeffrey, Nolan, Joris and Officer Kim must battle their way across an Amsterdam full of green foam spewing zombies to save the girl, and the Japanese One Cut of the Dead, a movie about a movie about a zombie movie where the original zombie movie crew was attacked by real zombies. It will be a wild ride, people, strap yourselves in.

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, and the last of 2022, we watch Aquarium of the Dead that includes Vivica A Fox from Kill Bill Pt 1 and 2 in a terrible role, where the CGI walrus has the best range of the acting "talent on offer" and Dead Again, no not the 1991 Kenneth Brannagh and Emma Thompson effort. This is a bad 2021 British movie with bad special effect, sounds effects, alien space craft that advertises itself as a comedy but, truth be told, is anything but.

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.

Brini Amerigo's writing and directorial debut is, to be fair, a piece of woman-hating misogynistic nastiness wrapped up in a half-assed house invasion where the house has real horrors in it story. 

A gang of home invaders who make the household commit heinous acts at gunpoint before killing them pick the wrong house this time when they attack the Pontecorvo home. The seemingly meek and mild father is a scientist working on a zombie virus strain in his basement, and the home invasion unleashes the undead.

It is bad. There is graphic rape and murder, both wholly unnecessary, and probably highlighting the writer/director's own mental health issues. And you can see why, thankfully, he didn't get to make another movie after this.

3/10 

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.