The Undead Symphony

Send us Fan MailA low budget Japanese indie with a runtime of 45 minutes this follows the well trodden path of a production company making a zombie movie only for then the zombie apocalypse to actually happen around them. It is rarely done well, I am thinking the godawful Reel Zombies as well as Diary of the Dead, one of George's lesser movies.In this move, bought on Amazon for £3.99, Dom, Tommy and Gen are friends who run an independent production company that has had it's day. They have no money and so are making a zero budget zombie movie in Okinawa. After filming a scene they head into the woods, and a cursed copse where a real zombie attacks and kills their lead actor, before chasing the other into town.Add a funny scene of a drunk avoiding death, and a LOT of blood sprayed over everyone, and this low budget short is actually quite watchable. I would give it 5/10.

Send us Fan MailWading through TUBI again this weekend and the stink is under my fingernails. Johnny Gruesome is next up, a story of a revenant coming back to wreak revenge on those he thinks did him wrong.In this case it is D student metal head Johnny Grissholm, a drink driving, pot smoking thug that they try (and fail) to portray as a victim. He isn't he is a dick. Along with his slutty GF Karen, backstabbing dope dealing buddy Gary and nerdy virgin Eric. Johnny, a son of a drunk father, lives in a Podunk town, and one night, after being suspended from school, and beating a kid up in the parking lot of school, drives like a maniac whilst drinking. Gary can't stand it so chokes him to death in front of the others and they agree to make it look like an accident.And he comes back and starts killing everyone. Not that you notice, the deaths, the makeup, the acting, the music, and the cinematography is so you can't even think about the minimal plot.Don't waste your time. Watch The Revenant instead, which is also on TUBI.3/10 

Send us Fan MailNot to be confused with the 2014 movie of the same name with Brenton Thwaites and Laurence Fishburne this is a mixture of the movie we watched before this, Cell, with a signal/pulse turning people homicidal, like The Crazies. So if you liked The Crazies this is for you.It is written by and directed by 3 friends who each took a third of the story, but what this does is give us a slightly disjointed film. Part one tells the story of Mya and Ben who are having an affair and cheating on Mya's husband Lewis. It is New Years eve, although that isn't really used enough given NYE is a huge thing and it is barely mentioned, and Ben wants them to leave Terminus, their home city and move to the country to start afresh. Mya is still new at this infidelity lark and heads back to her husband, only to find cellphones, phones, radios and TV are all broadcasting this weird psychedelic signal. And that signal is turning people crazy homicidal.She barely escapes the building with one of her husband's friends, Rod, and there are some nasty kills, baseball bats to the heads, pruning sheers to the throat. All fun stuff. Before they crash the car after Rod goes nuts and starts attacking Mya.Part two tells the story of Anna and Ken and their landlord Clarke as Anna tries to throw a New Years eve party. Looking for Mya Lewis arrives with Ben tied up and unconscious in his van, and we have a comedy house invasion, complete with talking decapitated heads and cocktails.Before part 3 has Ben and Clarke looking for Mya as Lewis chases them into Terminus.I have to say, despite the switch in tone for the second part I genuinely enjoyed this movie. Far better than Cell, not quite as good as the Crazies, but still a very good indie take on it. The acting was great, the practical FX too. The dialog was snappy and funny when it needed to be and the violence bloody when it needed to be.This joins Savageland and Interlopers in the very small club of movies on TUBI I have enjoyed and made 8 times it's budget.6/10

Send us Fan MailJohn Cusack, Samuel L Jackson and Isabell Fuhrman from The Orphan movies, based on a Stephen King novel about zombies created by a pulse and linked to cellphones, and directed by the director of Paranormal Activity 2. Should have been a slam dunk. Was it? Well, no.The book purists slammed it. The movie reviewers panned it. And me? I remembered it quite differently. The Mandela Effect and all that.Clay (Cusack) is a bit of an ass, who walked out on his wife and son to pursue his dream of becoming a graphic novel artist. He works on a story about a raggedy man, a harbinger of doom and after selling it to someone heads to the airport to tell his son in person, regardless of his ex wife telling him he can't simply do that, as he walked out of them. He plans to anyway, see earlier comment about him being a bit of an ass.At the airport anyone with a bluetooth headset on or on their phone suddenly screams and convulses in pain, foaming at the mouth before turning homicidal, a la The Crazies, and killing people. Clay escapes as a plane flies into the terminal and joined subway driver Samuel L Jackson and others in heading out.We then have this idea of heading to see if Clay's family is still alive, they can't call, so it becomes a cross country apocalyptic road movie.There is a lot of dislike, but it had it's moments. 5/10 from me. I shall discuss with Michael next week as he hasn't seen it before.

Send us Fan MailI am back once again with the renegade master Michael Avery as we talk kids names, the education system, and other random nonsense before embarking on a lengthy chat about Colony the latest zombie movie from the man who brought you Train to Busan. Is it simply Train to Busan 2? No. It is Peninsula 2? No. It is something in between, a hive mind evolving zombie story with a villain and enough there for it to be top 50 but also plenty of USPs that will turn some viewers off.Did we like it? Yes.Would we recommend it? Yes.Would we watch it again? Probably.Colony 7/10

Send us Fan MailRecently Michael and I were lucky enough to catch up with part of the talented team behind Employee of the Dead, the new British zomcom currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo. It was our absolute pleasure inviting Ellie Rae Winstone, star/associate producer, and co-writer/director/producer Aaron Truss onto the pod for a game of Virus or Voodoo and to talk all things Employee of the Dead.And we were blown away by their passion for this project and the high end production values of what was essentially a proof of concept. How is it even possible that their proof of concept footage was better than most of the movies we have seen for the Undead Symphony? And it can only bode well for the actual production itself.This project, with deep personal ties for Aaron, feels like it must be made. It simply must and that can be helped by you, dear listeners. It has a great cast in Joe Acres and Dani Harmer, as well as the lovely Miss Winstone, and a crew who are all coming off high end projects. It feels, after seeing the footage and SFX created that they really know their stuff.So check out the links, and help align the planets for this project, Employee of the Dead.Here's the link to their Indiegogo, go check out their perks:https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/q-cumber-films/employee-of-the-deadMain website:https://www.eotdmovie.com And their socials: @eotdmovie (Instagram and TikTok)And Youtube:https://youtube.com/@qcumberfilms?si=M0mS6T2xJ40ou0g6

Send us Fan MailAn African-American led pair of modern zombie movies from TUBI this time around, my 17th and 18th movie from the streaming channel leaving just three movies for me to watch before I can say that I have completed it.In Bloodthirsty we have Brian and Sarah, a 20-something year old couple of college students about to celebrate their first year anniversary when Sarah is called back into work. When there the zombie shit hits the proverbial fan and the loving couple try to get back to each other amidst the chaos.Ok, not strictly true. Brian picks up Sarah for their anniversary date, but she is called back to work. He drops her off and goes home. At home, the neighbours turn zeke and carnage ensues. He kills a couple with a 20KG weight but mostly runs away, and makes bad choices that gets other people killed. He then drives to Sarah's place of work, where he twice cannot beat a zombie, twice goes down and is gonna be killed, before twice being saved. So much for the hero.In the blurb it talks about him fighting his way across the city to rescue Sarah, when in reality, he just drives from location A to B then back to A then back to B.Profoundly average but still better than Air Shift, and EVERYTHING is done off camera. And I hate that.Urban Flesh Eaters is somewhat better, telling the story of an apartment building that has to come together to beat the zombies. We have widow Cyn and her two kids, her friend Lu, a newcomer who is seen a being an ex-con, a gay brother, an OTT African god-fearing woman, a mad janitor, a madder Whiz Kid, a youtuber and others, not limited to inconsistent zombies. It was really going down from the apartment to the ground floor, then back to the apartment when the zombies swarm in, then back down to the basement when the apartment is overrun, then back up to the apartment when one of the kids loses his asthma inhaler, before going back to the basement to save him, before heading to the roof for the inevitable off camera rescue. Given they used stock footage of NYC combined with a daytime soap opera apartment building they were def not getting a chopper for the finale.There was a lot more going on, too many people at times, Cyn came over as crazy, then ok, then crazy seeing her dead husband, then after supposedly losing a kid almost kissing the con, the kids were good, as were some of the others, but by tomorrow I would have forgotten about it all.In the end Bloodthirsty was a 3.5 at best and Urban Flesh Eaters 4.5. The latter being the better of the two. Neither I would really recommend.

Send us Fan MailThere are three radio station based zombie movies and this is by far the worst. Writer/director Chris Maes creates an absolute shambles of a movie that only stretches to 76 minutes thanks to repeated use of the same shots of zombies slowly heading to the radio station, the same record on the turntable and the moon. Filled with continuity errors, scenes where everything happens OC or OS, and then more of the same shots again this time with VO from the main characters, TEMU Kirsten Stewart local radio DJ Lisa and should have been a comedy character but wasn't serial killer who has killed 4 or 5 women John.I watched this only to save me from Bloodthirsty and Urban Flesh Eaters on TUBI and I am regretting that choice. I nearly fell asleep, I went shopping half way through, I fast forwarded a third of the movie, and I even had to hide my eyes from the cringeworthy slow motion Guardians of the Galaxy walk down the corridor that couldn't have felt more out of place.A movie this bad needs to be turned into a parody or a comedy. It could have worked as a Night of the Living Deb style comedy, just with a serial killer, and a pointless TV news plot line. But no.The hazmat suited guys? Oh, yeah, and the whole this is caused by the radio station being built on a secret nuclear storage facility with uranium that glows green and turns people into zombies, except it's not a comedy, read that as it's a serious plot.3/10 and I feel it should be less.

Send us Fan MailMexican so the second Mexican zombie movie we have seen after Some Be.The sudden outbreak of an unknown virus turns people into rabid and hungry creatures. Marcos, Claudia, Renato, and little Zoe, a 5-year-old girl; decide to run away and hide on a hill; but the infected begin to appear near them and they hunt by sight, sound and smell. Leave no trace, make no sound and leave no odors behind. In the end this is pretty standard low budget zombie survival junk. I have seen this movie in two dozen languages the world over. Marcos is infinitely unlikable. We don't know anything about anyone, or their motivation. Marcos as lead we see a single almost pointless flashback to Mexico City and that is it. Claudia is in half a dozen scenes max. Renato is ok but pointless. And the girl, Zoe, is noisy, and keeps running off all the time. Annoying. They all deserved to die.Now, there are a few saving graces for this movie. Firstly, it is only 75 minutes long. Thank fuck. If it was a 3 hour 70mm IMAX Christopher Nolan job, I may have tried to end it all by jamming my head in my Nutribullet. And secondly, regardless of the ok acting, and cinematopgraphy, there is one outstanding scene. A scene that could grace any of our top 10 zombie movies and The Walking Dead too. It this scene had been in the Walking Dead people would still be talking about it.The scene: After little Zoe runs off whilst Claudia is looking in her backpack Marcos finds he and hides from the infected with Zoe behind a tree. Claudia then lands with a thud the other side of the tree and is being eaten by unseen infected. She turns and sees Marcos and Zoe but cannot let on she sees them and so is eaten alive and dies, keeping silent to protect her daughter. Again, below average movie, but impeccabl scene.That being said, I wouldn't recommend Los Infectados, or The Infected. It was a dull, slow low budget standard story with unremarkable unlikeable characters.3/10

Send us Fan MailA shorts day today, I am going to find and watch half a dozen zombie shorts and give you my thoughts. Did that rhyme? Woah, I'd better not break into song.FIRST WAVE 2014 6 mins 55 on YoutubeThe blurb - Following the outbreak of an aggressive virus, a young woman awakes in a hospital bed. As the horrifying events that led her there are revealed, it becomes clear that the cure is just the beginning.Night. A man and his daughter are running from zombies towards a school or hospital building. And then a woman wakes up in hospital, cuffed to the bed. She screams and has flashback to being one of the zombies chasing the man and girl through a building, I think. Getting a hammer to the head in the process. She has a semi circular blood patten on the white of her eye and I have seen that in a zombie movie before. And I have in the 2017 horror film The Cured. In the movie, characters who are infected with a zombie-like virus and successfully treated with a serum are left with a visible mark: a distinct, semi-circular crescent of blood in the white of their eyes. Was this the short that allowed the Elliot Page movie The Cured to be made?The doctor tells her she was the first, a great hope. More flashbacks. Her in a cell now. Good jump scare with a zombie outside and more flashbacks. The little girls dad is killed and she hides. And the doctor tells her they will all be released soon.He asks her what she remembers…. No in the movie they deny remembering anything from their time as zombies, but do.  She just cries though. A she remembers being a zombie and then seeing the little girl and as a zombie getting more and more excited… endVery good, this was definitely the short that became The Cured. Excellent. Watching it on YouTube saw the comments from people saying this is what needs to be made rather than Hollywood nonsense. And indeed they did make it.Next SURVIVORS 2025 7 minutes When the unexpected side effect of a trial cancer treatment brings about the apocalypse, one man with his BMX and a Baseball bat, must use his martial arts skills to survive the infected hordes.A cyclist in armour cycles around a quiet city. Overturned buses. Quarantine zone. This is a proper action short. Excellent zombie effects, as he rides into one and hits it with a baseball bat before being chased by a running horde.It is proper BMX stunt riding to Are you gonna be my girl by Jet.=, jumping over barriers, riding up walls, clobbering the zombies. He gets knocked off his bike and his backpack comes off. He is then torn as zombies charge in, does he grab the backpack or get on his bike and leave? He goes for the pack and there is an awesome leg severing shot in slo mo. The violence is fun and OTT like the Bill Skarsgard Boy v World, but the blood and gore is all done in post that does let it down. I did laugh out loud when he hits the kid zombie.He rides out and across town, and there are high up shots with zombies running after him. Again, done really well. He is heading towards other survivors, but comes off his bike. Is he gonna be killed? No the other survivors are as badass as him.And after a cool drone short of their hide out… the biker opens the backpack and he has… a playstation… who wants a game fo FIFA? Who said the apocalypse couldn’t be fun? Well done the Kirby brothers.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gQc06lHkC0 PASTIME 3 minutes by John Blankenship aka Matinee McCabrehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy5Oq9OJz1cIn 1968 the recently deceased mysteriously began to rise from the dead. There was no time for preparation, no time to draw battle lines. The plague ravaged our nation, our world. One by one our towns fell. No government could protect it's citizens from the virus. Until one of the only survivors was just nine years old.It is beautifully shot, as a young boy walks around a forest, collecting water in a jar, walking around a town in the 60s with old cars out and rusted. He goes into a house and finds baseball cards and comic books. Taking them, as well as baseball. He heads out into a field and hits the baseball out and away, the tink sound of the hit waking zombies in the field who move in on him as he raises his M16 machine gun.End. Wonderful and to the point. SEVERED 2025 9 minutes After a zombie bite, Hannah’s only chance for survival is a brutal amputation with James’s machete. But when he fails to return, her infected mind conjures a horrifying rescue—forcing her to question what is real, and what is a final, cruel hallucination.Very walking dead a couple of teens, a boy and a girl fight off a horde in the forest. The boy saves the girl, pushing her into a car, as he goes down under the horde. He then gets in but she has been bitten on the arm so they have to hurry. He then apologises and chops her arm off.The boy finds a gun in the glove compartment. She gives a heartfelt monologue about committing suicide and not being torn apart or being one of them.I had the end of The Mist vibes as he has the gun to her head but then the zombies move away. Or are killed and blood sprays up the car windows.Them being in the car is reminiscent of The Battery, if you have seen it, about the two baseball players surviving in the car.We then get very 28 Days later piano as the door opens and it is a ripoff Negan complete with Lucille, you kids want some help?She then wakes up in the car alone and still bitten. And her boy is a zombie. I did think he was under the horde. So she screams and blows her brains out.Well done, well filmed, great acting and special effects, just all done before somewhere.Moving onto Dead Line from 2022 20 minutesDuring a zombie outbreak, a recently bitten call-center employee working for a specialist 'Survivor Hotline' must help a young woman escape her infected mother and get to safety before he becomes one of the undead.A British comedy with too much music, as a guy on a support line takes calls from the public. He tries to sell decapitation kits etc, listening to people wanting to deal with the dead, or spreaders as they are know.After an off camera attack on the office, he is bitten and wounded. A woman then calls for help after her mother was bitten. He goes through his procedure booklet which has funny airline style diagrams. The whole thing is on him, at his desk, and was filmed during COVID, so it is just voices on the phone and him, as he starts to react to the bite on his hand. She hides in the bathroom from her zombie mother. And he says jump out the window, jump and roll.He is dying, and trying to help her get to safety. Again, it is all over the phone. He calls a military rescue centre who have orders to shoot to kill anyone out. And he gives them shit, saying in death he will find the officer and eat his heart.It is tense as lucy makes it to the military post, we hear shooting but she is ok, and the guy turns overnight but remains at his desk with the headset on even when a zombie,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jHA2i90NdcAll of these zombie shorts were thoroughly entertaining, some original, some less so, but all done well. There is a huge amount of zombie entertainment out there in the short movie space and we should, as a community, support them all.And finally, a special shout out to two zombie shorts I feel deserve some love, one of which is on the Disney channel no less, THE LAST MARRIAGE, and the very British STILL.Next up I am going watch the 30 zombie shorts on ALTER, a fantastic high end Youtube channel, if you haven’t heard of you must check it out.https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtmNpo8LSL8ZUANvP8S54oAkURYsLFr9V

Send us Fan MailAnd so I am back into the second half of the show, the 2019 Zomboat! available on Amazon, an ITV2 show of 6 20 something minute episodes. So to break it down, it is set in Birmingham, for those not in the UK, it is the second largest city in the UK, in the middle of the country. We have Kat a movie and gaming nerd, her self-obsessed vacuous sister Jo, nice but lazy guy Sunny, and nice but a bit vain guy Amar.Episode one the escapeEpisode two trying to find a car and a phoneEpisode three the hotelEpisode four the supermarketEpisode five the fuelEpisode six the shelterEach episode had a zombie movie trope to use as it's and it didn't always do it well.In the end there is a decent twist at the end of episode 6, and the acting, FX and most of the writing was fine. I would question how long the show could have gone on after this season. And ultimately it was a comedic show on par with Dead Set, if a fraction below it.I still would recommend it to anyone that hasn't seen it. It is a 5.5/10 for me as there was nothing really wrong with it. Kat reminded me of Night of the Living Deb a little, and the boys a bit of Riz Ahmed in Dead Set.Could they have made a second season? Maybe, but it would need to have really gained something new to keep you attention.Again, 5.5/10 

Send us Fan MailThis one passed me by completely. A British zom com set in Birmingham on the Grand Union Canal to London. Made in 2019, it is about four characters Kat, and her sister Jo, Amar and Sunny, surviving the zombie apocalypse on a canal boat. And, I have to a feeling I may echo GertieFlyyyy from Reddit when they said Zomboat! was great. It was campy and dumb, but it was fun and enjoyable. I mean, there's some stupid shows out there (including Lucifer. Come at me.) And the stupid show that I enjoyed gets cancelled. Figures.One season, 6 20 something minute episodes which is a very British thing, BBC, channel 4 and ITV all produce shows in Seasons of 6. Why? Well, back in the day you could fit 3 episodes on a C90 VHS cassette, so to sell the video cassette series it would be two cassettes at 9.99 each from WH Smiths or HMV and it just hasn’t changed. We wont get the US 13 or 26 episode a season here. So we are limited to higher quality shorter seasons, think The Young Ones, Blackadder, Spaced.The premiseThe aftermath of a zombie onslaught being unleashed on the British city of Birmingham. Sisters Kat and Jo, together with unlikely travel companions Sunny and Amar, flee for their lives by canal boat.Episode 1. Nerdy Kat is a computer game, horror movie and zombie nerd talking Walking Dead and Romero, and her sister Jo, played by the actress who played Ellie from Ibiza Undead, who is a bit of a vacuous slapper escape Jo's latest zombie shag, before heading to Jo's ex's canal boat. On there they find the zombified version of the Jo's ex's new girlfriend and have to kill her. Meanwhile Sunny and Amar are also trying to escape Birmingham having been there for a stag do. The banter is good, the zombie effects too, it is't quite Shaun, but it isn't far from the original zombie episode of Spaced.Episode 2. Jo and Amar get off the boat, as Amar wants to escape in a car, whilst Jo wants to find her phone so she can find her ex. Meanwhile Kat takes the boat to find an online friend whilst getting progressively annoyed with lazy Sunny.Episode 3. With the boys wanting to see if any of their friends survived in the stag do hotel from the night before, Kat sees a resource run side quest and Jo, covered in blood from the episode before wants a shower.Episode 1 was genuinely funny, and as a zombie nerd I loved it, but the next two episodes, other than a few good lines, were already petering out. 

Send us Fan Mail"Forgive me father for I have skinned." - Cancer spelled Kansa.A movie so terrible I had to take five sitting to finish it including a nap and a work call I didn't even need to be on, a movie so bad it needed narration and constant music, a movie so bad I had to double check it wasn't made by Uwe Boll, a movie so bad the highlight was a closed caption that said "Fabulus pants."What movie are we talking about? GallowWalkers, for some reason one word, starring Wesley Snipes mid tax evasion jailcell as a cursed gunslinger who's woman is raped, dies in childbirth, and he hunts down and kills the rapists only for them to come back as piss eyed zombies that need to murder and skin their victims and wear their skin else they end up looking like human jerky.A lot of awful blond wigs, some of the worst dialog in the history of cinema, and all this could have been Chow Yun Fat as a zombie hunter called The Wretched. Alas, we shall lament what could have been.This? One of the worst movies I have ever seen.2.5/10

Send us Fan MailOur first (and potentially second) zombie movie from Barbados. It is really a post COVID, post vaccine, anti-vaxxer load of tosh in which we barely see anything from the government or the mysterious military chemical facility in the description, and instead are treated to the incompetent Kyle, Kelly-Ann and Bryan as they stumble from one zombie to the next, tripping over their own feet and being inconsistent in their abilities and belief systems.Now, the gore is good, reminiscent of the 1970s Italian gore-fests from Fulci, and the zombie effects are in keeping too. But the acting and writing is so, so poor. When it is set in a single house, and one room in said house, and the rest is woodland and waste ground surrounded by corrugated iron panels, we aren't in for a fun time.It was country 46, which was the highlight. The rest was poor. 3/10

Send us Fan Mail2017 and from Hong Kong this movie is a bag of cats. It is all over the place. A supposed comedy movie with two slackers Lone and Yeung, living in a run down Cantonese opera house run by their aunt, thinking they are the Heavenly and Earth dragon, the double dragons. Instead they are an unsuccessful sleazy fit Lothario and a chubby, bespectacled man bun of a loser.Add the cute girl Yit who is part of a paranormal investigation agency, supposedly, Lone's dad returning from 15 years in prison and wanting Lone's aunty Shen who runs the opera house to slice him with a machete, and the villain, a square supernatural chicken that fires souls into people turning them into zombies, and can send human-seeking eggs into the city that kill you instantly, and this makes absolutely no sense.We have a manga start and ending, and it just doesn't know if it should be funny, or not, or serious, or not. It was too comedic to be serious, too serious to be a comedy, and too stupid to be anything else.Other than Lone shouting FUCK! and the subtitles saying he said "quickly!" this was a wash out for me.4.5/10 if you want to watch a Hong Kong zombie movie, instead watch the 1998 Bio-Zombie or Hong Kong Zombie.

Send us Fan MailAlways happy to talk Dead Zero, having followed the project for so long, and in this episode we have the man himself, Lee Donaldson, back now we have seen the first chapter. We talk the future of the project, and funding options for fans and followers alike.Follow the project herehttps://www.instagram.com/dead_zero_feature/and watch it herehttps://whop.com/lee-don-productions-ltd/dead-zero-chapter-1/

Send us Fan MailIn a post-COVID Japan we get four stories that make up the anthology Everyday of the Dead. Pretty dreadful acting, pretty awful writing, pretty awful cinematography. We have Punch of the Dead, where a dumped guy comes out of lockdown to go see his girl, only to be dumped over the phone. He decides to limp over, and fight his way to get, giving every one of the slow moving zombies a punch, before discovering that she has been cheating on him. She does get her comeuppance, and our guy limps off. In Chain of the Dead a couple who are having an office affair find themselves chained to each other a la Saw. Although the reason is much more simple and no one has to go delving into baskets of dirty syringes or have their head ripped off. The wife of the man wants a divorce. But she also has left poisoned water in the room, so when the man drinks it he turns zeke and goes after the office girl. In actor of the dead, a poor man's Still, an unemployable actor inadvertently walks into a couple of zombies and, so stop them killing him, he copies their behaviour and acts like one of them until, that is, a sniper hunting zombies gets them in his sights. And then we have the last story, as a man thinks he is immune, but isn't really, a TV crew follow a vigilante around who is killing zombies. The two will collide. But what will happen?It was poorly acted, poorly filmed, the animation was terrible, the writing, the makeup, well, everything was terrible.2/10

Send us Fan MailOnce the Bone Temple was released we looked at the calendar and the next big ticket item for zombie movie fans wasn't the gender swap NOTLD remake (another one!) or the scene by scene remake of ROTLD, no, sir, it was the next zombie movie by Yeon Sang-ho the write/director of Train to Busan - Colony.Colony tells the story of a bio-terror attack in a building that has office and conference spaces in the top floors and a shopping mall on the lower levels. Disgraced awkward professor Kwon and her ex-husband Han are invited to a presentation by Chain Bio, who are using natural design in their technology, most notably, using the idea of Mycelium to allow electronic components to communicate instead of using wires, carbon, optical cabling.An overly villainous villain played by Peninsula's Koo Kyo-hwan injects the CEO with the virus and with some classic South Korean bone cracking, body morphing, goo spewing changes he is patient #1. Or is he?The infection spreads through the building and we have the normal rag tag group of survivors including a cop on a mission, a business suit, a teen and her bullies, and a security guard and his disabled sister, joining Kwon and Han as they try to escape.Fast paced, with a lot of excellent new hive mind elements, I found I didn't need the villain to be so villainous, and I didn't need the Jason opening his eyes at the bottom of the lake ending, but the rest is superb. Is it better than Train to Busan? Not in my eyes, but it is very good. Certainly better than the other movies we have seen this year.7/10 and def worth a watch when you can, despite it's shortcomings.

Send us Fan MailThe time has come. Our friend Lee Donaldson is now finally showing off the labours of his hard work, Dead Zero. In a windy hotel on Southend seafront Michael and I attended the Horror On Sea movie festival, meeting up with Lee, and watching the first 31 minutes of Dead Zero. What did we think? You will have to listen to find out, but as a little taster, it was a lot better than many of the movies we have seen in the genre. It needs work, and it needs the backstories of the characters, but it was still thoroughly entertaining.

Send us Fan MailMichael has caught up, watching Tyler Posey and Donald Sutherland in Matt Naylor's Alone (Final Days in the UK), the western version of #ALIVE. Will he like it more? He is also tattooed. He also likes rock music. Listen to find out.

Send us Fan MailAs we excitedly prepare ourselves to head to the Horror On Sea movie festival at the weekend and the premier of Dead Zero, Michael and I go wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy back, back into time, to the first episode of The Undead Symphony Pod. Back then I didn't have a Michael, didn't have a format, didn't have the theme tune and didn't have the celebrity intros. In episode one I watched the #Alive and Final Days, both based on the same script Alone by Matt Naylor, who worked on both movies. It was that whole Let Me In, Let the Right One In, kinda scenario where two movies came out at the same time based on the same script, one American and one not, and both very good.After discussing #Alive today, we shall reconvene for Final Days tomorrow,  but in this lunchtime chinwag, we ended up expanding our chat to South Korean horror as a whole and it's place in the world of zombie entertainment.Check it out here. 

Send us Fan MailFrom the people who brought you Deadlocked (2020) comes an upgrade of sorts. Despite the comic undertones of the title, and the comedy lines from douche nozzle Toby as well as the "come to daddy," goading by the lead as he takes on the undead this is not a comedy. This is a zombie drama set in the rest room at a coffee shop, where tall, handsome, but mostly pathetic hunk Iverson and his newborn baby hold out with madman Harry, sarcastic barista Brie, fitness freak Annabel and absolute ass piece Toby as zombies pen them in.There are precious view zombies, it is mostly the people who you are trapped with turning on you. And the baby crying puts them all on edge, turning one against the other whilst Iversen, who is a clear foot and easily 50 pounds bigger than all the others and could kill them all, is just too much of the wimpy kid. The CGI veins also sucked.5/10When I saw Deadlocked, which is set in an elevator, I was rather watch The End? from Italy, which is much better. This is a toilet zombie movie, so I would rather watch Stalled, again much better.

Send us Fan MailAnd I have my dog walker and post man disrupting me too.

Send us Fan MailSomme-bies!Yes, that is actually one of the many Battle of the Somme jokes made by Marcus (played by the patchy bald soldier from 28 Days Later). Somme-bies! Somme-er Holiday. Somme-body get me out of here.I do hate found footage. I really do. I know some people love it but when it is done badly it is so bad. And this was bad. Given we have seen Live! Escape, Live! Survival, Godforsaken, The Bay, Zombie Diaries, Diary of the Dead, Savageland was more documentary style, but then the REC and Quarantine movies, I can easily spot the mistakes made. In this the mistakes are many.If you like camera glitches, camera glitches that somehow make you jump to past footage as filler, lots of people running about and screaming, but actual action and deaths off camera, if you like an annoying condescending director making unfunny Somme jokes and actually easy to kill zombies that for some reason are from the allies as well as the German ranks, and zombies obsessed with a van, then this is for you.It was the locations of Trench 11 meets Nazi Zombie Death Tales with the poor footage skills of Zombie Diaries and Goforsaken.It may not be the worst found footage zombie movie I have seen, but it is Somme-where around there.World War Dull! 3.5/10

Send us Fan MailIn this episode I shall be reviewing a zombie movie that I had seen before I started this podcast. And yet somehow 4 years into it and nearly 400 movies from 42 countries into it I haven’t gone back and reviewed the black and white Japanese movie Miss Zombie. Directed by Sabu and released in 2013 this multi award winning zombie movie takes it in a different direction, in a post apocalyptic Japan zombies exist and are caught and domesticated as either slaves or pets by the humans. I am getting FIDO vibes here. Just tragic FIDO vibes. The blurb is simple, A wealthy Japanese family hires a female zombie to do their household chores. However, soon they realise that her presence is affecting everyone around. Hires? No she is bought as a slave, as all zombies are in this movie. So whoever wrote that is an idiot.She is a slave. She is abused by the locals, stabbed everyday, raped, attacked. But yet the doctor who bought her is now falling for her slow moving, scarred wiles, and the mother is now getting more and more jealous of her after her son dies and is brought back as a zombie, by the zombie.Filmed in black and white, with no music, and a repetitive style, each day Miss Zombie remembers more of her life before, and the tragedy of how it ended, as everyone else becomes more and more obsessed with her as we reach a violent climax.Definitely unique in the genre, true, it is a little slow, but haunting. 6/10

Send us Fan MailAmerican made with Arab oil money from the UAE. Is that why the Ick, a monstrous alien lifeform that has been around for about 20 years looks like oil? Maybe. Starring Brandon Routh, poor, poor, Brandon Routh, I do genuinely feel bad for him, this tells the story, kinda, of the Ick, and how it has always there in the town where he loses everything after being the high school star quarterback and prom king, with Mena Suvari as his prom queen, to being a crippled alcoholic janitor, then science teacher, before the Ick then becomes aggressive and takes over the country.Nice idea? The Blob meets Venom in B-Movie madness? No, it is a fucking mess. Despite the acting, Brandon Routh, Malina Weissman, Taia Sophia, Zeke Jones, Jack Seavor and Mena Suvari are all great, a decent soundtrack, and Cold Storage level FX. A bag of cats no one should have opened. This movie will cause severe brain damage to anyone higher up the evolutionary ladder than a demented bee. Despite a rocking early 2000s soundtrack (Good Charlotte, Blink 182, Wheatus, Toad the Wet Sprocket)  this movie was put together by a director who makes music videos, so has a max attention span of 4 minutes, and an editor with extreme ADHD. No shot lasts more than 15 seconds, no scene more than 5 minutes, there are scenes crammed in that don't fit, or have some sort of relevance but are filmed so differently that it's like we have ad breaks mid movie and those ads are for TikToks of a different version of this movie.I go back to my Hitchhiker's reference, "this movie will cause severe brain damage to anyone higher up the evolutionary ladder than a demented bee." 4/10 and very very disappointingly put together. Sorry, Brandon.

Send us Fan MailZombie Reddy is a 2021 Indian Telugu-language zombie comedy crime thriller film directed by Prasanth Varma and starring Teja Sajja, Anandhi, and Daksha Nagarkar.The blurbMario, a game developer, and his friends, get caught up in the rivalry between two families and a mysterious zombie attack in Rayalaseema where they go to attend a friend's wedding.That is the easy bit... but then we have two rival clans where everyone has the same name, and moustache, and there's a 25 year rift between the two, dishonour and bloodshed, all whilst a mad scientist with a God complex tried to cure COVID but ends up creating a zombie virus in the end.I won't lie. I didn't enjoy this. Too much insanity. Too confusing. Too many of those slow mo shots with a fan blowing the central characters fringe. Am going to score it 5/10 but it earned 4 of those points in the last half hour of it's 124 minute run time, thanks to non stop running and fighting.If you want to watch an Indian movie watch Go Goa Gone.

Send us Fan MailA random DVD find, and a camp as Christmas Asian zombie movie that scores high on IMDB and RT and pays tribute to George A Romero's Dawn 78. Yes, it is set in a shopping mall, yes the zombie makeup is pretty bad and yes there are amusingly memorable kills as well as comic scenes.We join low level criminals Woody Invincible and Crazy Bee who operate out of a bootleg DVD and computer game store in the mall, alongside Kui the stolen phone salesman and his long suffering wife, the salon with Jelly, Rolls and Cindy, and the sushi restaurant. Throw in some cops, some mall cops, and a boi-weapon in a bottle of Lucozade and it's about to get crazy, as this isn't a huge American style Monroeville mall here, this is the small glass units in a rat maze like rundown Asian mall.What did I think? It was fun, unexpectedly so for a movie made in 1998. I could see the exact movie made now in the exact same way. The characters were all fine, and the two leads Woody and Crazy Bee were absolutely fine, cheeky criminals. If you are a fan of all Asian zombie movies then this is on par with Tokyo Zombie rather than Train to Busan, but it is an absolutely fun, camp as Christmas, decapitation and petty crime kinda story with an unforgettable ending.5/10 from me 

Send us Fan MailIn our first catch up in 2  month I pose Michael the question, "was the 2007 Spanish found footage movie REC a game change in the zombie genre?"

Send us Fan MailIt is actually surprising how many Australian zombie movies and shows we have seen thus far… We Bury the Dead | 6.5  Little Monsters | 6.5 Wyrmwood: Apocalypse | 6.5  Cargo | 6  Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead | 6 Undead | 5.5 Neighbours versus Zombies | 5  Last Hope | 4 Infini | 4 Plague (2014) | 4  Me and My Mates Versus the Zombie Apocalypse | 3.5  Zombie Brigade  | 3 Over 3% of our 376 zombie movies and shows are antipodean.And so to Residence, an enigmatic hero, a speechless child, and a ragtag motley crew of arguably the most poorly written and annoying characters ever to grace the screen journey through a zombie filled apocalyptic landscape to seek refuge in a medieval fun park, whilst pursued by an unstoppable, deranged lunatic. 6.2/10 on IMDB which ridiculously high, and probably inflated by the cast and crew, or friends of the cast and crew, or idiots given a watch link who don't realise you can still be critical even when it's free. Where is you objectivity, man?Anyone recognisable from the cast? Libby and Harold from NeighboursThe humour is idiotic. I don't think I can even describe it here as it requires me to stop swearing loudly in my head and think about it sensibly.  Is it as bad as me and my mates versus the zombie apocalypse? Or worse? It is definitely down there. You know when you fast forward you have the >> for twice the speed, the >>> and finally >>>>. Well I was wishing they had invested 5 speed >>>>> fast forwarding as this was utter shit.KJ was horrible, the vacuum salesman was terrible, and the writer, director, and the king, Cyril… was about as funny as cancer. And then even when we get a semblance of a story with the diabetic girl's dad being the monster we have a weird serious ending.3/10This movie is so bad I am glad it had adverts, as at least then I had the chance of a minute of entertainment every quarter of an hour when the ad breaks came.Would I watch it again? I would rather shit in my hands and clap

Send us Fan MailSet during the brokering of a deal in a top end hotel local sleazebag Fu Gui tries to use junior newsreader Cindy to seduce Director Wu, the university headmaster so he can make money on a demolition and relocation real estate deal. Booze is plied, and food, whilst Fu Gui's long suffering driver and handyman Gou Sheng is told to wait down in the underground car park. But the zombie apocalypse is bubbling in the background caused by food, or so we think.Before long Director Wu's bitten driver bursts in, kills two of the guests and Gou rushes up the building to save his boss, Cindy and college buddy Dongzshi.Based on the graphic novel by Ruibo Cao this is a two location survival story that really fits into the out of the frying pan into the fire idiom. The hotel in which they are trapped in in the beginning and need to fight and escape from the zombies, picking up 12 year old schoolgirl Xiao and losing a couple of others along the way, and then a warehouse complex of orange jumpsuit wearing criminals and their pedophile boss. Yes, there is a lot going on.Not ground breaking but better than expected, a 5/10 from me, on par with the other YouTube offering of the weekend, Extinction: the GMO Chronicles, which was slower but had some good zombie elements, whilst this was faster paced but lacked anything new.Both were 5/10 for me and both are free on YouTube.

Send us Fan MailA 2011 German effort on YouTube for me now. Extinction: the GMO Chronicles. GMO = Genetically Modified Organism. And we meet hero Tom, a former Spec Ops operative who casually drove around the city on day zero, ignoring pleas for help, before taking up resident in a disused US missile base from the cold war era. He does that annoying and obvious Vlogging thing to a laptop, and says there are no other survivors. Cue the survivors!We gain elderly American former NSA spook Bill, his estranged German daughter Lisa and her dickwad of a boyfriend Martin. Martin is a very "don't look at my girlfriend!" kinda guy. We then gain Zara a nurse, and then Max and his nerdy brother David before two separate zombie attacks drive them out of their camp. Why? In this movie the zombies evolve. We start with boring day walkers that nap at night, then get day runners, then night runners, then a blind screamer, then parkour zombies, and finally night vision parkour zombies. Phew! It is like Dead Island all over again.Tom is looking for his sister, but she is zeke, and they gain a baby for their efforts, the most dangerous thing in the zombie apocalypse is a baby. And worse still, all the nuclear power stations are going to go critical soon. Shit!Ok. This did have some good bits. I did like the blowing the zombie up in the car scene. I did like the zombie evolution. However, the terrible cuts, and making poor Germans act in English in a German film was cruel, and caused this to be scored down.It is a 5/10 for me, so still ok. Better than a lot I have seen, but not that much better that I need to see it more than once.

Send us Fan MailWith a slightly different take on the zombie apocalypse this monochrome modern Indian American family story tells of three siblings surviving in their own different ways. Older brother Hari and his wife Barbara stay in the large family home drinking cocktails, playing piano and keeping safe. Younger brother Rishi cannot bring himself to kill the biters he sees around town, and Vinita lives vicariously through others, travelling long distances to record their survival stories for her podcast - Didn't Die.Film in high def black and white, this movie leaves the zombie violence and gore behind to tell the story of how people survive. There is heart, and there are both tears and laughter, there were a couple of comedic moment I did laugh at, but maybe that's just me.When Vinita's ex Vincent comes onto the scene with a baby he rescued, the delicate balance in the family home changes, but will it change for the better or worse?After the arty nonsense of Ever After last time out and the crap of Stink of Flesh before that, this was a change. It was heartfelt, showing a Hindu family, the parents from India, the kids born in the US, or at least brought up in the US, with the memories and nostalgia of family meals and photo albums seen through flashbacks to home movies.It's not a feelgood movie and the ending of the larger part of the movie annoyed the shit out of me, but still, I am going to be generous and give it a 5/10 score

Send us Fan MailA 2018 German movie, our second after Rammbock: Siege of the Dead. Set two years after the fall of civilisation, it follows Vivi, a twenty something girl living in Weimar, one of two remaining cities. In Weimar they kill the zombies and anyone infected, in Jena they are trying to find a cure. No one lives outside of the cities, and they are linked by an automated shuttle train.With some pretty gorgeous cinematography at times, and pretty decent acting, we follow Vivi and badass Eva as they leave Weimar and start on the journey to Jena on the train, only for it to break down half way. And from there they are on foot.The tension is good, and there are some pretty decent action sequences, including the chase across the dam, Vivi getting a set of decortive antlers in the eyeball, and the mad zombie bride with her pet bird, however this movie is let down by having a mad lead character. Vivi is just too insane. She talks to herself all of the time, and nothing that makes sense, she is pretty useless, dresses inappropriately for survival in the zombie apocalypse, and makes the worst choices.The ending is not remotely satisfying, and the near constant overly dramatic cello will get on your nerves.There is enough to like, so it is a 5/10 for me, but I don't seen to see it again. It would have been better to follow Eva, who is hot, strong and capable.

Send us Fan MailA Canadian effort to save me from Daniel Baldwin on TUBI. An eco-warrior group are demonstrating the logging of an island, but the company doing the logging, or raping the land as the hippies say, are doing far, far worse. They are pumping the trees with a chemical that makes them grow three times as fast.The trees, understandably, as not happy about this and are not going to take it lying down, unless they have already been chopped down, of course, and start spitting out this red ooze. A logger gets the red ooze in his blood stream and we have a survival story where loggers, scientists and tree hugging hippies are having to work together to make it out of there.TBF the acting was fine, the gore and zombie make-up was fine but the pacing was all off, the edit was messy and padded with scenes and shots that didn't work. We had way too many cuts away too soon, to show a fucking misty lake, or the tree tops, random POV night scope zombie footage once, and some awful repurposed footage.It was a 4/10 for me with the idea of an eco-disaster causing it, and it being the trees. The trees! It is in the trees! 

Send us Fan MailWoah. Where to start with this one? Unpick this at your leisure; Matool is surviving the zombie apocalypse in Southern Colorado by killing the slow moving, blue faced undead with a hammer and long nails. Okay so far? I was. Then after a zombie attack on the hut he is hiding in with others he runs out into the street and is knocked over by Nathan in his pickup truck. Matool is knocked unconscious, gaffer taped at the wrists and ankles and then driven back to cuckhold Nathan's home for his nymphomaniac trailer trash wife Dexy. And from there we learn Nathan and Dexy have an open relationship, an alternative lifestyle they have difficulty maintaining in the zombie apocalypse, hence Nathan kidnapping Matool and others.Add Dexy's psychotic sister Sassy with a third sibling's face growing out of her side like an arsehole with teeth, and that Nathan is into screwing hot female zombies he keeps chained up in the shed, and this isn't going to give anyone sweet dreams.I scored it 3/10 for uniqueness of story and the zombie gore was ok too. However, I would avoid this like you would Johnny Z.

Send us Fan MailThe Spanish team behind REC would have us hate the Americanized version of their movie, but that dog won't hunt, Monsignor. Much like #Alive and Final Days and Let the Right one In and Let me In, I feel the 2008 US remake of the Spanish game changing REC of the year before deserves a chance.I am a glass half full reviewer and know that his has a decent cast, with Jay Hernandez, Jennifer Carpenter, a young Joey King, Johnathon Schaech and Gregory Germann, Bernard White, Rade Šerbedžija and Doug Jones sliding into the ill-fitting soiled painties of the monster at the end. It will have FX and tension on par with the original. It just isn't the original.The ending does change, and it actually makes more sense, if you are no a fan of possession stories, but the rest is pretty much the same. I think some of the scenes they added add to the story, the brain drill for example, Randy the asshole and the dog, but I can's score it as high as REC as it just isn't original.Still worth a watch at 6/10. REC (7/10), REC2, REC: GENESIS, REC:APOCALYPSE, QUARANTINE and QUARANTINE 2:TERMINAL (6/10)and now this frees me up to watch this weekends diabolical DVD offering The STINK OF FLESH.

Send us Fan MailAnd we are back with the sequel, taking place 2 hours after the end of the first as a SWAT team of four including an idiot cameraman played by the same actor as the idiot cameraman in the first movie go in with a doctor to assess the situation in the apartment building. It is obvious though that the doctor knows more than he is letting on, and it is true! The whole thing is demonic possession, with the virus allowing sufferers to be controlled by a demon. It means we do get some cool voice changing from the kids and cops as they are taken over. And we do have some cool kills. However, this does suffer from the Jurassic Park issue. We had our mind blown by the T-rex in the first, in the second it was ok, and by the third it was meh. Here the hectic style of the first movie is persisted, we do have some good kills and a story loop. We also get a great ending that should have set up another movie between this one and the fourth, however, the third (GENESIS) doesn't continue the story of Angela Vidal.I have scored the others higher now, the series being REC (7/10), and all the others REC2, REC:GENESIS and REC:APOCALYPSE 6/10 making it a consistently entertaining series and well worth the watch.

Send us Fan MailI am going to say something controversial. The gamechangers that have shaped the zombie genre are well known to us all (White Zombie the first, Night of the Living Dead making it about survival, Dawn of the Dead making it large, 28 Days Later making it scary and giving us running infected, Shaun of the Dead making it funny, The Walking Dead making it mainstream TV and World War Z making it an A lister movie) but I am going to put forward this, the 2007 Spanish REC as a potential addition to that list. Why? Well sure, there were found footage movies before it, most will say Blair Witch Project of 1999 was the first but I would say Cannibal Holocaust was a pioneer in horror. But REC, in 2007, has been copied so many times, with the final shot of the lead being dragged back into darkness, that I would say this should take it's place in that list. If Shaun can be there with a simple zombie movie story, but is there as it was the first genuinely funny zombie comedy that others try to emulate, then REC was the first found footage zombie movie and now we have them coming out of the woodwork.It follows Angela Vidal as young reporter for a lesser known show and her cameraman (I still have issues with just how useless cameramen are in horror movies, just filming rather than helping) as they head with a fire crew to a claustrophobic apartment building where an elderly woman is trapped in her flat. Angela is in the second and concluding movies, so her arc is pretty awesome, and much better than Alice in the Paul WS Anderson Resident Evil franchise movies. And of course it all goes terribly wrong. Lots of face biting, blood, infection, screaming fast moving infected, lots of Spaniards shouting over the top of each other, as the authorities lock them in for 76 hectic minutes. There are some great bits, not least the final shot, and the mother being handcuffed and them not being able to do anything about it.I do love the REC movies, I would say they are the most consistently good series of movies, and we have plenty in the genre. All four are good and definitely worth watching. Copied by the Americans with Quarantine, with its own spin-off sequel in Terminal. I would recommend them all. And am more than happy to be watching REC2 next. 7/10

Send us Fan MailWhat in the Uwe Boll have I just seen? As I wade through the cesspool of TUBI trying to find something decent I, for my sins and completeness, need to tick this one off.Not to be confused with Narnia Dark Island, 1962 BBC series or the Dark Island in the Thousand Islands, or the  prominent feature of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, is located in the lower (eastern) Thousand Islands region, near Chippewa Bay in St Lawrence County NY. It is another shitty movie on TUBI from 2010.When a defense contractor loses contact with its lab on a remote island, a team of soldiers and scientists is sent to learn what happened.Rotten Tomateos say Terror awaits a team of soldiers and scientists who have arrived at a bioweapons facility to determine why contact was lost with the researchers there. 8%IMDB says Soldiers and scientists visit a remote island, the site of bio-weapons research, after losing contact with the staff there. 3.3/10Leterboxd says After losing contact with its researchers on a remote island, a military corporation hires a group of scientists and soldiers to find out what went wrong.  2.7/10And none of those descriptions are technically right as a former soldier turned sulky boat owner, a scientist pretending to be a soldier, and blurring the lines, an actual soldier, a toxicologist pretending to be a medic, and a nerd head by boat to an island not dissimilar to the island in Boll's monstrous House of the Dead. Why? Well, a nasty company has been performing experiments that somehow turn people into zombies and then smoke monsters like the one in Lost. Also monster sounds like Lost. So basically a Canadian TV version of House of the Dead meets Lost. Wanna see it? I wouldn't. If anything the highlight of the movie was realising I hadn't covered REC or REC2 yet for the pod, and both are free on Amazon.3/10 don't bother

Send us Fan MailI am sewer surfing on the stinky crest of a TUBI wave this weekend, with Dark Island tomorrow and this the 2010 Defiled.OK, let me give you the premise and we shall take it from there. It is a 100 minute long silent movie inasmuch as the characters do not speak. The humans do not speak at all and the zombies each have a single noise, be it a yar, a grunt, or a high pitched eee.Yar, his name is the sound he makes, much like Gnar from Delamorte Delamore, (1994) has gotten one of this 3 zombie friends pregnant. But, after an ill-advised feast of a dead camper that poisons the other zombies to death, including the mother, Yar must first, and I never thought I would ever write this, perform a C-section with a butcher's hook, before looking after his zombie baby.He saves a non verbal human female from two other zombies and now has a nanny for his zombie baby. And then there is a lot of walking. Walking to the woods. Walking to a farmhouse. Walking along train tracks. Walking through fields. Walking to a factory complex. Walking... walking... zzzzzz.But then, realising they are all poisoned, and wanting to save his baby, they head to find the human scientists and soldiers for help.So, a black and white silent movie told from the zombie perspective? Sounds interesting or shit? Well, to be fair it is both. Conceptually it is a good idea, but it is painfully repetitive and slow. Artsy for the sake of it? Or artsy because of budget and talent? Who can say. It was unique. I have seen hundreds of zombie movies and this was pretty unique. Good? Hm. Recommendable? Only for the uniqueness of it. A 2010 silent zombie movie.4/10 an oddity.

Send us Fan MailI was dubious, and rightly so. I have been burned of late by movies that were not zombie movies, like The Bay. And that has a lot more in common with Itch! (2026) than any of the movies we have covered. However, there is an actual zombie element to this too. A proper, back from the dead and attacking the living element. So, as a  lay person, I can say this is indeed a zombie movie.Written by, direct by and starring Bari Kang this tells the story of a NYC hardware store and a group holding up as a regenerative parasite causes people to first, scratch their own skin off, and then, after dying, return from the dead to scratch other people's skin off too.A low budget effort we have a decent enough location reminiscent of The Mist (if you like depressing endings) and Bait (if you like shark movies), a hardware store in one of the boroughs on a hot ass day as Jay, his non verbal biter of a daughter, rude customer Henry and shop girl Lisa are joined by wannabe robbers Miguel and pregnant Gabriella. Outside, along with some overly used and overly loud external civil unrest sound effects, including a incredibly close plane crash, the "itch" is spreading. People are scratching themselves to death, or being shot by the police if they can't control their itching in 10 seconds. Only to come back from the dead a little later.Time to batten down the hatches and survive, which seems easier said than done.It is a low budget movie but a decent enough effort. They could have made a few simple changes to make it more uncomfortable viewing for the audience but it isn't gross, other than the miscarriage. If anything it could have been more uncomfortable if it was an intolerably hot NYC day, sans AC, and I was a little disappointed that most kills are off camera too.5/10 

Send us Fan MailWith the upcoming gender swap Vivica Fox version of Night of the Living Dead coming up in November, I thought I would have the NOTLD league table in place before then, but with the title and story now in the public domain it means any twonk with a camcorder can make a version.This version from 2015 is the CGI animated version aka Night of the Living Dead:Origins and Night of the Living Dead:Origins 3D and stars Tony Todd reprising his role of Ben from the Tom Savini 1990 version, Captain Rhodes himself Joe Pilato as Harry Cooper, Bill Moseley as Johnny, and scream queen Danielle Harris as Barbara, and is set in a modern NYC over the winter.A few really odd nods to the original, with the old truck, TV and radio, and the building, all look out of place for NY compared to the other locations, but some excellent additions, with the flashbacks to Ben and his wife and son dying in the diner, and Tommy and Judy, as well as Johnny's demise by getting a plane in th face.The one thing that you will notice is the poor quality of the CGI characters, who don't blink, and look like the actors but with a stocking pulled over their head, squishing their face, ears and nose. Given this is 2015, that is only real negative.5/10 for me. The action scenes were decent, the tension, but the animated characters were just poorly created. 

Send us Fan MailBased on Courtney Summer's award winning YA novel of the same name from 2012 we are in a small Canadian town as the zombie apocalypse starts. Annoying teen Sloane is considering committing suicide because of her drunkard violent father, absent mother and now vacant sister.  But then after a bang on the door, we get the noises of the apocalypse and well, darn, it is the zombie apocalypse.After losing her dad after ignoring his advice on staying alive not once, not twice, but thrice, Sloane joins up with the only other survivors from town, who all are from the same class at high school. What are the odds?We get some decent effects and tension, I thought. Sloane is, if anything, the pain in the ass, and being the central character we see too much of her walking off by herself before she causes numerous deaths.Plenty of naysayers moaning about this one, but I actually liked it. Anna and the Apocalypse without the singing, Breakfast Club without the John Hughes factor. You do feel like you've seen this before and that it is all derivative, until you realise the book was written 14 years ago.What can I say? I enjoyed it. It felt like an elongated episode of Black Summer.6/10 

Send us Fan MailI should have known better. When a fellow movie reviewer lists their worst zombie movie of all time, I should have thought, well, if I listed our worst zombie movies (Attack of the Flatulating Dead, Oasis of the Zombies and Hsien of the Dead) I wouldn't then expect them to go out and buy them on DVD before watching them. But guess what I did?Yes, this was bottom 3, on par with the aforementioned bags of steaming horse dung. Zombinator! A documentary style movie where the camera crew are mute at times and just film people being eaten, stabbed, shot, you name it, and don't give their opinions despite them being the only adults in the room of 15 fuckwit wannabe fashionistas.And this was before the zombie apocalypse, created by the "company" and a mad colonel, and before the idiot fashionistas are saved by the Zombinator, a man so tough he wears sunglasses at night, a man who's shotgun doesn't need reloading and a man who's dialect coach should be shot.If I could liken this movie to a liquid it would be the liquid at the bottom of a garbage can, bin juice, in taste and smell.Avoid this one like the syphilitic sore on your pervy uncle's lip as he comes in for a kissy hello.1.5/10 absolute badger shit. 

Send us Fan MailIn Wellington, New Zealand the only known survivors, out of work actor and Lothario Morgan, computer game nerdy accountant Ash and wannabe rock star Jonny enjoy the apocalypse the right way; by living in mansions, drinking beer and playing computer games. But when they run into Stef, a rather delightful scientist who is working on a cure and needs to get to Stewart Island, they have to finally get serious.Okay, so it wasn't Proust, but it wasn't the bottom of the barrel either. Akin to the Dutch Zombibi or Kill! Zombie! this was amusing, a few funny bits but nothing laugh out loud. A simple premise well acted but with some poor cinematography.90 minutes on the dot of low budget unoriginality with a couple of fun kills, and an unsatisfying ending. Still, watchable.5.5/10 from me. I enjoyed it a lot more than Cold Storage.

Send us Fan MailFinally! I had been waiting for this one since pre-ordering it a month or two ago. COLD STORAGE with Joe Keery Georgina Campbell and Liam Neeson. A comedy horror movie that looked great in the trailer. And the thing about that cast is Georgina Campbell if anything has the horror chops of the three – Barbarian, the Watchers, Bird box, Influencers, Psycho Killer and has The Shepherd coming out too. We also have Ellora Torchia from Midsommar as AbigailSo to the plot, when a highly contagious mutating fungus escape a sealed facility, two young employees joined by a grizzled bioterror operative must survive the wildest night shift ever to save humanity from extinction, as the microorganism spreads and destroys everything in its path...After a strong start in Australia with Sosie Bacon it fell away. I thought it was entertaining but weak, not in any way better than the Bruce Campbell Black Friday effort. The repeated jokes like about a suitcase bomb felt flat, Travis’s talking ghetto, and all the deaths just seemed just ok given the opening in Australia including Hero's suicide. In short the trailer had all the best bits.Black Friday I scored 4/10 and I am going to give this the same. Despite some good bursting, the effects were weak, akin to Black Friday, the plot line of Abigail having to help as Richard Brake's Colonel hated Neeson was strange. The dialog was poor and cheesy. I am a bit disappointed to be honest. Now, it is still head and shoulders above the TUBI shit I could have seen, but I am very disappointed by it and wish I hadn't prepaid for it.So, yes, it is a 4/10 for me. Very meh. Average at best.

Send us Fan MailPLAY THIS MOVIE LOUD! The soundtrack is by Pungent Stench, Evit 13, Dead World, Brutality, Disrupt, Mortician, Pyogenesis, Candiru, Winter, and Dismember. If you don’t know who they are, just check grandma's record collection, and it follows a group of bad acting metal heads Brad, Tony, Johnny, Kathy and Angel as Brad wins a contest to get the latest album by his favourite band Living Corpse. The cassette includes a unique song that is not available anywhere else in the world. A song, that when played turns Brad, Tony and Kathy into zombies at the beckon call of the band.So is it virus or voodoo? It is definitely voodoo. And this makes sense to me as the zombies are just slow shuffling looking humans, staring and with dark rings around the eyes. Whilst some reviewers slagged the FX off for not being either bloody Fulci zombies, or blue Romero zombies, I think this is absolutely, and probably accidentally, in keeping with the style of voodoo zombies.Anyway, Angel must save the guys by playing the song backwards, and all the while a serial killer is bear hugging people to death in a Richard Nixon mask. Tricky Dicky indeed.I would have hated it more if I hadn't just seen Hsien of the Dead, and so this is going to be a 2.5/10 for me, on par with Pro Wrestlers versus Zombies. Which may sound bad, but there are over 30 movies below it in our list.Maybe not avoid if you like bad b-moves with a heavy metal theme. 

Send us Fan MailThe elation of finding a movie from our 42nd country was short lived within the first ten seconds of Hsien of the Dead, Singapore's Shaun of the Dead from 2012 and a supposed comedy. Although it was as funny as a road accident. This was awful, just plain awful. The 5.4/10 on IMDB is a reflection of a few idiots giving it 10 and then plenty of people giving it 1/10, and that was only because you can't give 0.With the worst level of amateur acting, bad shot choices, poor camera quality, terrible effects, and pointless plot lines, Hsien, a young army enlistee, Ah Huay a cosplaying martial artist, Edward a porn sensor in the ministry of propaganda, and receptionist Hana all fight their way to meet up in a parking garage, before going out, then back to the parking garage, with the idea of getting off the island on a boat.There is very little to redeem this movie. It is as if random people from the street were asked to ad lib scenes without talking about it before, and with total strangers. The toy helicopter, the cardboard chainsaw, and the terrorist were all low lights in a movie that had perhaps two amusing jokes, dozens of extras, and that I hated. This was 73 minutes of my life that I won't get back, and you can thank me for taking this one for the team.It is the worst movie we have seen since Oasis of Zombies, that at least has the permanence of still being around 50+ years later. Avoid this one. It was not one of those movies that are so bad it was good. This was just so bad.1/10   

Send us Fan MailA little chat-ette to start the week, as Michael appears in the rear view mirror to discuss the short-lived Netflix Resident Evil series and the first season of Black Summer amongst other things.