Kind of like a zombie fairytale...

Rating: 8/10 (12 October 2013)

When I first heard about this movie, as a huge fan of the zombie genre, I was not impressed. I deliberately avoided watching this movie because it goes against everything I love about zombies.
However, I stumbled across the trailer for it, found there to be some humour and decided to give it a go. I was very pleasantly surprised. Apart from the very loose references to Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, this film has an original twist to the otherwise unchanging zombie genre.
Nicholas Hoult does an excellent job at channeling the typical awkward teenager in zombie form, and I found his inner dialogue to be the shining star of the film. Teresa Palmer delivers as the female counterpart, incorporating humour and womanly power throughout the film. Rob Corddry was hilarious as usual, although I felt he could have stuttered over his words a bit more, rather than speaking so fluently as a zombie. John Malkovich was awesome, he always is, but I would have loved to have seen some humour come from his character.
The direction was great, loved the cinematography, and the soundtrack suits the film perfectly.
The story itself is quite plausible within the zombie genre, I mean, if the dead can rise and eat brains, why can't they come back to life through simple human contact? Zombies are already a fantastical idea, so anyone saying this movie isn't 'realistic', must have forgotten that zombies aren't realistic, well they aren't yet!
I actually found the 'bonies' to be quite scary, and believable that there are two stages to the 'zombification' of former humans.
Although overall this is meant to be a romantic movie, I didn't feel as though it was overly mushy (I'm not one for chick flicks), it had a great story, and it's one of those rare zombie movies where there really is a happy ending, and we all need that every now and then.