Warm Bodies (2013)

2013

Directed by Jonathan Levine
Starring Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Rob Corddry, Dave Franco, Analeigh Tipton, Cory Hardrict and John Malkovich

Oh boy, a zombie movie.  I have the vaguest of memories of this film when it came out (like it came out ten thousand years ago or something).  I think I saw one ad, one poster and said "well, folks, another zombie movie" and never gave it a second thought.  However, looking for horror movies that fit the whole "Love and Red Stuff" motif was running a little dry on the ol' search for recent movies, so...here goes.  After dismissing this as just another run of the mill movie with brain-eating, communicate-by-grunt monsters, imagine my surprise when I find out that the movie is actually good.  Not GREAT, but good, and definitely worthy of the five bucks I spent for that rental on Amazon Video (/free plug for Jeff Bezos that I am in no way getting paid for).

Why is this exactly?  Well, for starters, it's pretty unique.  At least as unique as a movie with all the trappings of the usual zombie movie can allow.  It's actually told from the perspective of the freakin' main zombie.  Folks, this is a development that I thought would pretty much make the movie unwatchable, but lo and behold Nicholas Hoult managed to pull off a minor miracle with his performance as this guy.  More on him in a bit.  It also had a bigger budget than I anticipated ($35 million) and the always cute Teresa Palmer playing the hero's love interest, as well as John "The Man" Malkovich in a supporting role.  In short, they had a lot of help on this one.  It's a good thing, too, because the plot goes into all-too-familiar territory on a pretty frequent basis.

Meet "R," your typical American zombie movie zombie played by the aforementioned Hoult.  Along with his partner-in-crime "M" (Rob Corddry), R is currently milling around in an airport looking for new potential human victims.  Yes, folks, this is what he's doing.  Every movie in this subgenre has its own lore and science associated with the "how" of being a member of the undead, and we learn pretty quickly here that R has no heartbeat and that the reason that he craves human brains is because it makes him feel "alive" by absorbing the memories of that person.  I've got to say, from a writing standpoint, that's not the worst contrivance the guy who wrote the novel that this film is based on could have come up with.  Unfortunately, we also get a fascinating conversation between R and M consisting entirely of grunts and occasional near-words.  It's just as enthralling as it sounds.

The plot kicks into motion with the arrival of Julie Grigio (Palmer) and a group of human survivors.  I've been a big fan of Palmer's dating back to her days as one of the bitchy friends of Arielle Kebbel in The Grudge 2, and she's very likable and engaging here as a no-nonsense girl who has no problem putting herself in danger.  Of course, R is immediately smitten with her, and it's not hard to imagine why.  What is hard to imagine is what happens not too long after this initial meeting, as R attacks and eats the brain of Julie's boyfriend, thus causing his attraction to her to grow even more.  And cause his heart to start beating again.

In a lot of ways, this really is a romantic movie.  R saves Julie from a few attacks by his fellow zombies and hides her in the airplane that he calls home.  A lot of the middle section of this flick takes place in said airplane, as the story gives us admittedly a pretty nice long, slow burn with the relationship between these two.  They play a few games, listen to records, and even start to converse.  When I was doing my pre-viewing research, I thought I would absolutely HATE this part of the movie since modern-day screenwriters generally suck when it comes to crafting romances that I actually care about...but, amazingly, I did.  So +2 Fonzie cool points to the powers-that-be on that one.  Eventually, Julie gets restless and tries to escape, but the mindless hordes still attack her.  Derp.

The last half of the movie is a bit more action-oriented, as R resolves to take Julie back to the human encampment lorded over by Julie's father, Colonel Grigio (Malkovich, and he's awesome here as always).  Along the way, he reveals to Julie that he killed her boyfriend, prompting a mini-existential crisis that is probably much less fascinating than the flowery way that I just made it sound.  While all of this has been going on, all of R's friends have also begun to show signs of humanity - and this puts them on a collision course with the "Boneys," weird skeletal zombies who go after anything with a pulse.  All in all, decent storytelling that leads us to the big climax in a baseball stadium and a fight between R's band of good zombies and the Boneys.  And a surprisingly upbeat ending!  Wow!  Exclamation points because such a thing is fairly rare when it comes to movies featuring flesh-eating grunters.

Back in 2009 (and it makes me feel old that it was almost ten years ago), a little movie called Zombieland was released that I absolutely loved because it broke the mold for zombie movies by featuring actual likable characters.  It was the film's biggest strength by far, along with that amazing cameo by Bill Murray.  In a lot of ways, this movie is kind of similar.  It doesn't do what Zombieland did by going LONG stretches with no zombies onscreen, but that's kind of an impossibility with this setup.  But it does spend just as much time giving us some very human touches into its very inhuman story, and words cannot express how much that move was appreciated by this admittedly bad writer.

So what didn't I like about the movie?  Well, if it was any indication from the handy-dandy plot description, the first little bit of the movie is almost unwatchable.  Kind of like how I can't believe that they actually went ahead and decided to make an entire movie featuring nothing but the Minions (tell me, people, is the movie really nothing but those little fuckers talking gibberish?), the adventures of R and M and their deep friendship didn't exactly have me hyped up for the movie.  In truth, it was hard for me to get into the story of R because of this - at least until he starts talking.  But Hoult was so committed to this part that he actually managed to make it work.  Almost spiting itself, this is just one of those movies that works.

Rating time.  *** out of ****, and take that with the idea that I went into this one fully expecting to hate it.  Check it out.  And with that, we're done reviewing romantic horror movies.  Next month, we're taking a trip to the Not Too Distant Future...