BEFORE: Just three films left for me to watch in 2014 after this one, and I'll say that all have to deal with the end of the world in some way. I was trying to wrap up the project, but with 150 films left on the list, it looks like I'm setting myself up for Year 7. The watchlist has just never gone down as fast as I'd hoped. Linking from "World War Z", Brad Pitt was also in "Snatch" with Alan Ford, who appears tonight. The IMDB informed me that there was one actress who played a soldier in "World War Z" who also played a zombie in tonight's film, but since those were minor roles, that sort of feels like cheating.
AFTER: Well, we had a zombie film that was also a romance, then one that was pure action, and now we've got one that's a semi-comic crime film. The poster for this film says that it's like "Shaun of the Dead" crossed with "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels". That's about as spot-on a description as you're going to get, and I'm hard pressed to come up with a better one. There just aren't any big-name stars in this one, whereas those other two films each had a few.
It occurs to me that if we are indeed inching toward the zombie apocalypse, the current generation of teens and twenty-somethings, raised on first-person shooter video games, will be uniquely qualified to handle the encroaching horde. Hey, that's just nature taking care of itself - creating a situation, and then the necessary mutation of skills to deal with it.
But we also learn a few things here - like which is faster, lumbering zombies or shuffling senior citizens? Does a zombie attack really create an ideal time to rob a bank? What's the British equivalent of an old Indian burial ground? And what's up with that Cockney rhyming slang, anyway? Isn't "stairs" so much easier to say than "apples and pears"? Slang should be fewer syllables than the word it's replacing, right?
Other than that, it's the usual zombie knowledge - you have to kill them with a head shot, don't get bitten or you turn into one of them, get out of town and head for higher ground. Fortunately by now every character in films has also seen a few zombie films, so there's a lot less of a learning curve.
There is a moment in the film though, where a bunch of zombies wearing the colors of one soccer team encounters another bunch of zombies wearing another team's colors, and the two groups of undead hooligans start to fight. They've lost all cognitive brain function, yet somehow remember that the other fans are their enemies, and they're supposed to be duking it out with them. I'm being told that the two groups are fans of West Ham and Millwall, and in the U.K, this joke is probably hilarious. In the U.S. not so much, unless you can think of them as fans of rival teams like the Yankees and Red Sox or something.
Someone could re-make this film for U.S. audiences, set it in Brooklyn, and call it "Hipsters vs. Zombies". Nah, that would never work, and even if it did, then I'd be rooting for the zombies.
Also starring Rasmus Hardiker (last seen in "Your Highness"), Harry Treadaway (last seen in "The Lone Ranger"), Michelle Ryan (last seen in "Cashback"), Jack Doolan, Georgia King (last seen in "One Day"), Ashley Thomas, Tony Gardner, Honor Blackman (last seen in "Goldfinger").
RATING: 4 out of 10 meals on wheels
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