Tag Archives: 2009

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

It seems that this is a review I lost with my hard drive crash nearly 2 years ago.  Here’s news — you’re not missing anything — nothing in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and nothing with my review.  If a film doesn’t register with you, it’s hard to review it — so what would you read from that?  ANSWER – me, annoyed.

Anyway, I’m working from memory here, so let’s get started…

Colour Rating — Yellow Puss or Red Blood … whatever …

I haven’t read Pride and Prejudice, I have had no plans to, and after this film I am further not interested.  It’s amusing that Seth Grahame-Smith could write a quirky parody mashup (published 2009) combining the 1813 Jane Austen‘s classic novel with elements of modern zombie fiction, but mostly I just found it snooty and boring — I couldn’t get in to it.  When they showed the action stuff, it worked for me, but all otherwise it was the whos-in-love-with-whom Jane-Austen-junk my mother warned me about.

Not a gore-fest, this Z-film was a SNORE-fest!

There was clearly a lot of money behind this film, and one good thing I can say about it is that I’m sure it will perturb the Jane Austen purists.  Hopefully, it will be at least a little fun that it was re-envisioned.  For me though, coming from the zombie-film fan perspective . . . something was lost with this to capture the the zombie-fan demographic.

Conclusion…

If you’re a Pride-Prejudice/Austen fan and you’re open-minded — go for it.  If you’re a zombie-fan and you want to make sure you’ve watched EVERY zombie related film, well … good luck.  If you’re a die-hard zombie-film fan …. don’t bother.

LINKS to help you sleep

Survival of the Dead (2009)

garbageLet’s make something absolutely clear up front — Survival Of The Dead is garbage.  I rate it Red Blood, and it is on my List Of Zombie Films To AVOID.

What’s worse than that is that it clearly had a chunk of money behind it — not loads, but more money than many zombie films — which in my mind was money that could have been split to make at least 2 other cleverly-made lower budget better films.

The Core Problem — No Story

My impression of Survival Of The Dead is that someone — maybe their name was George — had a stack of admittedly clever zombie gags written down and sitting in a pile.  This person wanted to use these in a film, but didn’t otherwise know how to pull it off — which frankly is what they should have done and just left well enough alone.  However, they got together with their buddies — possibly there were a few beers in the room, possibly a few too many — and they had a brainstorming session that amounted to… “Okay, we’ll use the military ’cause that always flies in zombie films — oh, and to help it sell, everything Irish is popular right now, so let’s throw that in too!”  Having concocted a shoddy story-line they got their funding and started rolling.

grape smuggler
Close but … NOPE!

My guess is that’s how Survival Of The Dead got its start.  But what, no gratuitous possibly-future-famous Z-film breasts to further sell this potboiler?!?  I like bad film, but in this case I would prefer that whoever green-lighted this project read my review:  don’t waste your company’s money and don’t waste the audience’s time.

The Story — Lacking Though It May Be…

Kenneth Welsh hugging some other man on the ground
Uh … this isn’t what it looks like.

Zombies have taken over the world.  A ragtag band of soldiers roams the countryside to scavenging to survive.  The unit is intrigued when they hear of a safe haven on an island off the coast of North America.  Expecting to find a paradise, they instead find the island is torn apart by a wannabe Hatfield–McCoy family feud.  One family wants to exterminate the zombies while the other thinks everyone can peacefully coexists with their undead relatives hoping for a cure to return their relatives back to their human state.

BOOM!
Who want’s a birthday candle?

This turd is directed by George A. Romero.  At least you’ll recognize Kenneth Welsh.

Links