Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

OVERLORD (2018)

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Produced by JJ Abrams, OVERLORD (2018) is a WW2 zombie movie that made me long to watch either a good WW2 movie or good zombie movie, as for me it didn’t quite achieve either. I was excited to watch it as I authored (with Tim Long and David Moody) a WW2 zombie series called THE FRONT, but in the end, I found OVERLORD predictable and boring, despite some really nice visual elements.

The movie begins with a platoon of the 101st Airborne in the skies over Normandy, preparing for the big drop in the early hours of D-Day. Aside from showing a racially integrated unit (okay fine it’s 2018), the movie starts out with overused tropes. The platoon is oddly led by a sergeant, because all sergeants are tough and crusty and lieutenants are novice weaklings, and we have, echoing SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and BAND OF BROTHERS, a “jerk who has a heart” paratrooper bragging how he’s going to killer Hitler and end the war. Everything goes badly, and with only a handful of paratroopers surviving the drop, they set out to a French village where they have to blow up a radio tower, a mission that for some reason is critical for D-Day to succeed. There, they discover the Nazis (in full purely evil sadist trope mode) are experimenting on a zombie serum to create super soldiers. Teaming up with a local woman, our band must destroy the lab and the radio tower.

Visually, the movie is nicely done, and the action is good. The protagonist (Boyce) is likeable enough, though his character is almost as flat as everybody else’s, resulting in me not caring if anybody survived. The pacing in the second act is awfully slow, wasting an opportunity to make me care about these soldiers. OVERLORD seems to want to deliver B movie schlock, and for me it didn’t achieve the pulpy, fun, comical, self-deprecating kind of B movie schlock that really works. As with many Hollywood movies, the result feels flat and paint-by-numbers.

OVERLORD’s gotten some good reviews, so as always YMMV. It’s not horrible, but I found it somewhat forgettable.

IN THE FLESH Season 2

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IN THE FLESH is an amazing British series about life after the zombie apocalypse. Told from the point of view of a zombie who has been cured and is now reintegrating into society, the series works as both an excellent drama and also for its themes of prejudice and recovering from trauma. It succeeds where its imitators like THE CURED failed. I recently finished the second season, which was as good as the first.

In the first season, Kiernan leaves a government center where zombies have been cured. The only problem is they remember everything they did while they were infected. He struggles with his guilt and shame while trying to be hopeful about being with family again, including his kind but clueless parents and his sister, who was a fighter in the Human Volunteer Force (HVF), a homegrown militia that held back the tide of the undead. The season works so wonderfully because it tells both sides really well: The HVF veterans who don’t trust the cured, have to similarly assimilate to civilian life (going from heroes to in some cases the small-town losers they were before), and in some cases are suffering from PTSD. And of course the cured themselves, who have to face family and neighbors they brutalized while infected.

Season 2 picks up where the first left off, but the tension and prejudice between the cured and the uninfected has reached a new level where it’s being institutionalized. Among the cured, an underground organization is forming to resist societal control, while the government is instituting harsher and harsher measures for controlling the cured, such as forcing them to work menial jobs to prove they’re not the bad sort and give back for what they’ve taken the country. It all comes to a head with a prophecy that if the first risen is killed at the anniversary of the rising, the dead will rise again…

This is a great series that shows how horror tropes can be used to engage people about big familiar themes in a fresh and interesting way, and how these tropes can work very well if taken seriously with solid human drama. IN THE FLESH is not so much a zombie apocalypse show as one that deals with how society would come together again after one was stopped in its tracks with a cure. Unfortunately, while there’s no third season, in the first two a complete story is told, and it’s different and compelling than what you’d usually find in the genre.

ALL ROADS END HERE by David Moody

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David Moody’s ALL ROADS END HERE is a very strong follow-up to ONE OF US WILL BE DEAD BY MORNING, the first in his second HATER trilogy, and in my opinion one of the strongest in the series.

If you’re not familiar with HATER, it’s about a final war spanning the human race that begins with a certain percentage of the population begins to react with terror and hate against anybody not sharing the Hater gene. The Haters, as they’re called, start killing everybody else, and the government reacts with a program of detainment then extermination. Most of the first series focuses on the Hater point of view, while the second focuses on the Unchanged.

ALL ROADS END HERE picks up soon after ONE OF US WILL BE DEAD BY MORNING leaves off, where Matt finally makes it home to his city, now turned into a massive, overcrowded refugee camp under siege by thousands of Haters. His months spent trying to get home have taught him how to be a survivor while in a constant state of extreme danger. Now he must acclimate himself to being around people again, though the struggle to survive continues. Soon, he discovers a group trying to condition the Haters to accept the Unchanged so as to broker peace, but it may have bigger, more nefarious plans.

From back in the day when Moody was self-publishing HATER and his AUTUMN series as PDFs, I’ve been a fan of his original twist on tropes and meticulous attention to realism and human psychology under stress. While his work deals with the fantastic, everything about it rings true and makes the story, characters, and action all the more compelling. With ALL ROADS END HERE, Moody once again proves he’s still got it and remains one of the best authors of zombie fiction.

KINGDOM (Series)

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Adapted for the screen from the webcomic series THE KINGDOM OF THE GODS, KINGDOM is a period drama series that rolls out like GAME OF THRONES meets THE WALKING DEAD set in Renaissance Korea–another terrific foreign series Netflix has added to its programming.

The story begins with Crown Prince Yi-Chang resenting being unable to see his father, the King, who has fallen ill and is rumored to be dead. In his stead, the young queen and her adviser, both from a different clan, dominate the palace and await her pregnancy coming to term; as Yi-Chang was born out of wedlock, the queen’s baby, if a son, will claim the throne, putting Yi-Chang’s life in jeopardy. Yi-Chang’s interest in seeing his father is therefore driven by concern but mostly self-preservation. While tracking down the physician who treated his father, he discovers a plant used to raise the dead, which turns them into cannibalistic monsters active only at night. After an outbreak in a village spreads, he must stop it before it overruns the entire kingdom.

As a zombie story, KINGDOM is smart, believable, action-packed, and has the bonus of several twists on the traditional zombie, such as their ability to only be active at night and unleashing them in a foreign historical setting, with its conventions and beliefs about the dead. As a historical drama, KINGDOM doesn’t have the depth or complexity of GAME OF THRONES, nor does it have the same whip-crack dialogue, but it’s similarly smart and engaging. Thematically, it is class conscious as it explores the plight of the population under the rule of a small group that gets everything, a situation the prince wants to rectify. The characters are all likeable and engaging, and after the setup, the plot rolls along at a crisp pace.

If you’re into GAME OF THRONES or zombies or just good foreign TV, check out KINGDOM. It’s good stuff. Be warned Season 1 ends on kind of a cliffhanger, but rest assured the second season was set to begin production this month.

I AM A HERO (2015)

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Based on Kengo Hanazawa’s manga, the Japanese film I AM A HERO (2015) brings the zombie apocalypse full blast to Japan. Like TRAIN TO BUSAN, it shows what can be accomplished if you tell a story about people with zombies in it rather than the other way around.

Hideo Suzuki is a manga artist who struggles with being an ordinary man telling stories about ordinary people, which has stalled his career aspirations. His name means “hero,” though he is that in name only. When a new pathogen turns people into mindless cannibals, he always does the right thing but never the heroic thing we want and need him to do. Teaming up with a young woman, he ends up fleeing to find a compound being held by a group of survivors seething with its own power struggle. At the end, Hideo will face his ultimate test to become a hero in deed as well as name.

The movie is a lot of fun, punched up with some excellent action sequences, dark comedy, and a cathartic finish. The zombies are pretty standard walkers though capable of sudden manic bursts of speed, enhanced with sickening popping sounds as they change, black veins, milky eyeballs, weird contortions, and getting stuck on a key idea in their lives they repeat over and over like a stuck record. One zombie was a pole-vaulting athlete, who does some really creepy stuff in the film.

Overall, I AM HERO is a good movie and a great zombie movie. I give it a B+. Highly recommended for zombie fans.

PATIENT ZERO (2018)

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PATIENT ZERO (2018) is a zombie movie that aims for the stars but only makes it as far as the roof. There’s something strangely compelling about it, the way those old Ginzu knife infomercials used to be compelling (“if you buy now you also get…”), but like those old infomercials, in the end, you don’t buy it.

The movie starts with the remnants of humanity surviving in underground bunkers like nuclear silos. The disease is a rabies-like illness that produces violent infected called Mad Dogs (those who know my zombie fiction are probably laughing by now). In one bunker, Dr. Gina Rose (Natalie Dormer) works with Morgan (Matt Smith), the only human known to have been bitten but survived, hope to combine his blood with that of the first infected, patient zero, in the hope of making a vaccine or a cure (the movie confuses the two). With a DAY OF THE DEAD feel, they work with the military to capture infected and interrogate them in the hopes of identifying patient zero. (Morgan can somehow communicate with the infected in their language, which consists of roars and grunts.) The officer in charge of the operation (a stock villain) thinks it’s a waste of time, resulting in conflict between the scientists and military. Compounding all this is a melodramatic love triangle between Morgan and his infected wife, held in a cage in the facility, and Dr. Rose. When an infected (Stanley Tucci) infiltrates the facility showing self-control and rational thought, indicating the infected are evolving and organizing, everybody is put in danger.

This is an odd movie, stitching together interesting elements, intriguing premise, competent direction, very good acting, and strangely engaging melodrama into a hot mess with weak villains, zombies that aren’t scary, some crazy dialogue, and a flat ending. The movie tries to be and do too much, but I don’t know whether that sinks it or saves it. Overall, I have to give it a C+.