A mysterious virus has devastated our civilization, transforming its victims into flesh-eating monsters with no memory of their past lives. The remaining humanity lives locked up in heavily armored bunkers, in terror. Everything changes when a team of humans on a reconnaissance mission in search of food comes across a group of hungry zombies hunting for prey: one of them, R, is deeply affected by Julie, the girlfriend of one of his victims and, instead of eating her brain, decides to save her from the fury of his companions. As the days pass, living with Julie produces changes in R that were previously unthinkable, leading him to believe that this bond could represent salvation for humanity and its fellow men: a salvation hindered on one side by fearsome "Onyx" and on the other by the army led by Grigio, Julie's father.
If you like zombie's gener you will love this movie ... or not!
It cheats in a cheap way through creating 2 level of zombies: the good ones and the bad ones. Also, it breaks tons of zombies stereotypes to be able to build the story, that's why you may end hating it if you are a "purist".
As this is not my case, I really enjoyed this movie. Fun script, good casting and great performances by Hoult and Palmer. Also, always a pleasure to watch a movie with John Malkovich.
This is a quite different zombie movie. I think it can best be described as a romantic zombie movie with a humorous touch and some action thrown in for good measure. It is not at all a bad movie. I do prefer the “shot everything that moves and when it doesn’t move anymore shot some more just to be sure” type of zombie movies but I still quite enjoyed this one. The words “romantic” and “zombie” is of course two words that you really would never expect to see in the same sentence. Surprisingly enough it does indeed work in this movie.
I think my main enjoyment of this movie was the voice-over with R’s thoughts though. At times it is incredibly funny. The actual story, that the zombies’ magically starts to heal themselves is of course pretty nonsensical but you do not really watch zombie movies for their elaborate plot anyway. I have seen worse and this was not really supposed to be a horror-zombie movie anyway so I can live with that.
This is the first zombie-movie that I have watched where you actually see the story from the zombies perspective. Another thing that, surprisingly enough, worked quite well. The voice-overs helped a lot to make that happen.
The special effects are fairly low key for being a zombie movie but I would say that they are just about right for this movie. The “bonies” are the most monster-like ones in the movie and their make-up is quite cool. Unfortunately their movements are quite stiff and look decidedly computer generated. That is a shame and pretty much the only complaint I have concerning the actual implementation of this movie.
Unless you are totally allergic to zombies I would recommend watching this movie. I would especially recommend it if you are not normally into zombie movies. You are likely to be surprised.