A boring post about zombies:

I rented Shaun of The Dead today to kill part of my evening and while there were some funny parts I’m afraid I was a little under whelmed. Everyone has been telling me for months that I would love it and yes, I liked it. However many of the funniest scenes are in the trailer and my expectations were set for more. It’s really a film about making relationships work, family – friend – and romantic, and living up to your potential.


Hmmm. A zombie movie should not be something that you could stage in a theatre. With the exception of the parts where they are driving around in the Jaguar hitting people, you could have done the whole film in the round – there was a lot of pathos and much of it wasn’t really funny. It was touching but also frustrating. There was too much character development and not enough shooting.

They’d be surrounded by two hundred zombies and instead of advancing the zombies would casually wait for the roommate fight, or the “you loved her in college” revelation; although trying to save the dead boyfriend by killing zombies with his severed legs was a nice touch. The inaction of the zombies strained my suspension of disbelief – if you’re going to have zombies it’s important that they ferociously attempt to kill everyone in a constant and crazed, though lumbering, way. It’s also important that your main characters kick a little bit more ass.

Perhaps the problem is that I just saw Resident Evil: Apocalypse – quite possibly the perfect zombie film. If you’re going to make a zombie movie my advice is more kicking and less emoting – the audience is already vulnerable confronting their own fear of death, you should reward them with the false sense of security provided by random knowledge of the martial arts.

I’m not kidding about Resident Evil: Apocalypse – even if you never played the game and don’t like zombies. The DVD comes with a second disk of special features and there is this long documentary about the modern dance choreographers that they hired to reinvent zombie motion, to rescue zombie motion from the Thriller video and to restore to the cinematic tradition a respectable connection with the arts. Not only did they develop a new form of zombie motion that focused on the progression of the virus through the central nervous system to the pineal gland, (they must have been reading Descartes) they had to teach this motion to the principle actors who would become zombies throughout the film and 400 extras. They opened a zombie school and did zombie workshops.

Kudos to you Resident Evil: Apocalypse team, history will note your genius.


Wow, that was a really boring post about zombies.