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Recent releases:
- That They May Face the Rising Sun
- Jericho Ridge
- Civil War
- Mothers' Instinct
- Sweet East, The
- Ghost Busters: Frozen Empire
- Immaculate
- Roaring Twenties, The (reissue)
- Soul
- Dune: part two
- American Star
- Dune: Part 1 (reissue)
- Jerry & Marge Go Large
- Argylle
- Forever Young
- Jackdaw
- All of Us Strangers
- Holdovers, The
- Mean Girls
- Poor Things
Warm Bodies
Stars: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer,John Malkovich, Analeigh Tipton, Rob Corddry, Dave Franco, Cory Hardrict
Director: Jonathan Levine
The 12A certificate gives it away. Warm Bodies may be a zombie picture but the shambling corpses who populate the post-apocalyptic world and its live populace conjured up by writer-director Jonathan Levine (from a novel by Isaac Marion) dont really qualify as scary.
Actually its a pleasing blend of comedy, romance and shocker.
Nicolas Hoult, now grown-up and no longer resembling the cute kid from About a Boy, shambles convincingly as Zombie R who is given to moaning a great deal about his plight and summing up his discontent with Im not sure what were all waiting for.
He discovers what hes waiting for when he saves human Teresa Palmer (yet another Australian actor seeking a career somewhere other than Down Under) from a zombie attack and instead of eating her brain, he takes her back to the passenger aircraft in which he lives. And life or, rather, death suddenly has a purpose for Hoult when he falls in love with Palmer
The film, shot in Canada, creates a convincing world devastated by the mysterious virus that transformed humans into the Living Dead. But here post-apocalyptic horrors are diluted in the service of what amounts and pretty effectively too to a revamp of Romeo and Juliet; Levine doesnt beat the analogy to death but theres no mistaking his target and, largely, he hits it.
Hoult and Palmer make an attractive couple and John Malkovich hams away happily as Palmers ruthless zombie-hunter father; well used Montreal and Quebec locations (cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe) and shockfilm regular, composer Marco Beltrami (with Buck Sanders), add useful atmosphere.
Alan Frank
USA 2013. UK Distributor: Entertainment One. Technicolor.
97 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 12A.
Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 2, Violence/Horror 2, Drugs 0, Swearing 0.
Review date: 07 Feb 2013