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Sometimes I am very happy to be wrong.
I’m referring to a rather vitriolic post I made last year when I first heard about a movie in production titled “Warm Bodies“, which seemed to be my worst fears come to life. The final indignity of the Twilight phenomenon, as vapid watered down teen angst romance, having exhausted all other monstrous options, somehow intruded upon the zombie genre; the one place I had hoped against hope would remain sacrosanct.
If you don’t remember the post it’s because I felt I was inspired to enough swearing that I decided to host it on my other blog spot at the time and take the gloves off my inner language filter. Though looking at it in hindsight it’s not that bad, I suppose… if you don’t mind a few F-bombs and are curious, you can read it here. Or not. Short version is that I was horrified. I held out tenuous hope that the movie would be a comedy that would be aware of the ridiculousness of its premise, but circumstantial evidence such as an endorsement from Stephenie Meyer and IMDB classifying it under “drama” were not good signs.
If you look now, the IMDB entry is in the comedy section. And horror, and romance, but that’s fine… Love At First Bite has the same tags, and I’m an unabashed fan of that flick. Since it’s February 2013 debut, Warm Bodies has certainly failed to ignite any wave of tweens and twi-moms lusting after zombie dudes. That was also a good thing. A trusted friend of ours went to see it and declared to me that it definitely wasn’t taking itself seriously. Because of all this, sometime between then and now I breathed a sigh of relief and let go of any lingering rage. Then, while we were curled up sick last week, Dawn pointed out it was available on cable… so, what the heck, we gave it a go.
Now in my angry blog of yesteryear, I did bring up the movie Heathers, and how it had suffered from an ad campaign during its original release that made it seem a lot more airheaded than it turned out to be. I’m not quite prepared to elevate Warm Bodies to the hallowed place Heathers holds in my esteem (and if you’ve never seen Heathers, you really, really should), but by the time the credits rolled I not only didn’t hate it but found myself quite entertained… perhaps even a bit moved. I even found myself wondering if this is where Romero kept trying to go with his later movies, but could never quite get the tone right.
Yes, there’s still a zombie who falls in love with a human. And yes, she does eventually love him back. The “romance” is, thankfully, played for the creepy, blackly comic situation it should be for most of the film, and by the time it becomes anything more, well… certain important circumstances have developed. The story being told is a larger one than simple teen hook-ups, and if some of its particulars seem far-fetched or handwaved, I was willing to roll with them because the movie wasn’t taking itself too seriously. Considering the stuff I’ve been writing here, I’d be a bit hypocritical not to extend the same courtesy. Also, hell, even if liberties were taken in certain areas, I got to see a zombie eat someone’s brains by actually cracking the victim’s head open on the ground first, rather than magically biting through a human skull. This pleased me immensely.
It’s a weird sort of zombie movie, but it actually stands as an interesting addition to the genre, and if anything seems to satirize films like Twilight rather than try to imitate them.
Warm Bodies wasn’t the zombie apocalypse (heh) that I feared. In fact given the course of the film, I could almost call it an anti-apocalypse… but perhaps that gives away too much. I will instead merely repeat: I am happy to have been wrong.