Review by Pete Roche
The undead are so hip now that movies
centered on brain-eating can hardly be considered niche anymore. Zombie films
still perform well enough at the box office (I AM LEGEND, 28 DAYS LATER,
RESIDENT EVIL) to ensure someone somewhere keeps churning them out. Remakes of titles by zombie movie godfather George Romero arrived in 2004 and 2008, and
flicks like SHAUN OF THE DEAD and ZOMBIELAND tweaked formula using the “buddy”
template.
With WARM BODIES, director
Jonathan Levine (50/50) attempts to subvert the popular zombie genre by casting
corpses as the unfortunate, morally ambiguous victims of an eight-year plague
rather than the indisputably evil, flesh-craved villains of yore. Based on Isaac Marion’s popular 2010 novel of
the same name, it’s essentially an apocalyptic love story for the TWILIGHT set
that fuses (mild) zombie violence with tropes from teenage romantic
comedies. In short, it’s a zom-rom-com. Think ROMEO AND
JULIET go to the morgue. Heck, there’s
even a balcony scene.
