Cockneys vs Zombies (2013)

OG Tough Guys andDumb But Cute Would-Be Thugs Fight the Undead

Movie / Outrbrea / Underrated

Cockneys vs. Zombies offers a truly ridiculous premise: a group of young Cockney toughs are simply trying to rob a bank, no big deal, when, bam, here comes the zombie apocalypse. They fight off the walkers with some understandable difficulty – I mean, there are not the sharpest bulbs in the basket -- but eventually, they get the job done – or they survive at least -- and somehow end up at an old folks’ home that’s populated by aging Cockney toughs from two generations back… and damn, can those old folks kick ass. It’s only a matter of minutes before the oldsters – the literal OG’s – are taking charge and beating back the horde of the hungry dead.

There’s absolutely no reason this should be as funny, engaging, and even exciting as it is. But it is. There’s a mad exuberance about old folks blasting away at the shamblers while the hapless younger generation barely keeps up. Much of it has to do with the performances of some great tough-type character actors from long ago – Alan Ford (who you will recognize immediately as playing the Cockney Tough guy since the 1960’s about 200 times -- Snatch, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, etc.) and Honor Blackman (yes, the Goldfinger Bond Girl and The Avengers‘ Mrs. Peel before there was a Mrs. Peel), not to mention Harry Treadaway as the only young’un with half a brain. Treadaway went on to distinguish himself as Dr. Frankenstein in Penny Dreadful, as Brady Hartsfield in Mr. Mercedes, and most recently as Narek in Picard.

You might have skipped this as another one of the Stripper vs. Zombies or Bigfoot vs Zombies low-budget throwaways, but in fact, this is a surprisingly well-made and just plain fun addition to your zombie collection. Or another great surprise for the zomfan who’s missed it for years.

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Boneshaker

Boneshaker:
A Gearpunk Alternative History,with Zombies

Book (Series) / Long After the Outbreak / Underrated

Zombies aren’t limited to a single timeline...and terrific authors like Cherie Priest can make them horribly real in any reality.

Take Boneshaker’s world, for instance. In this universe, in the early days of the Civil War, an inventor named Leviticus Blue (Priest always comes up with the coolest character names) creates a huge machine that can drill right through the Alaska permafrost and bring gold up to the surface of the Klondike… except the Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill hits a cavern filled with very bad gas that blasts a crater into the middle of Seattle and transforms much of the populace into “rotters” (yet another cool name for zombies. We have to make a list someday). The government, in its wisdom, solves the problem by building a wall around the devastated city and abandoning it. But that doesn’t mean it disappears.

Cut to sixteen years later, as Priest relates the adventures of the heroes, villains, and monsters who scrape out a living in the remains of Seattle – outside the wall and occasionally inside the wall. The story is filled with great speculative history, action, awesome devices, and some of the smartest and most admirable female characters in zomfic. It may be the first, and one of the best, examples of steampunk fiction – and maybe the only zombie steampunk fiction around.

Best of all, Boneshaker is only the first of Priest’s five-book series, The Clockwork Century, and every one of them is better than the last. And this first book – all of them, actually – also has one of the coolest covers around.

Come on. Zombies and dirigibles. What more could you want?

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Blood Quantum (2019)

Blood Quantum:
Native Americans vs. Zombies in a Grim, Effective Film

Movie / Post-Apocalypse / Underrated

With so many low-budget zombie movies sneaking in through streaming services or film festivals, it’s easy to miss unexpected quality and creativity when it appears. Here’s an example.

Blood Quantum (sorry, kind of an awful and pretty much inexplicable name) has your standard virus-based flesh-eaters, and the opening scenes that establish it are deceptively familiar. But the truly intriguing part comes after a timeshift, as we focus on the stories that rotate around the effect of the zombie apocalypse on the First Nations and an already devastated Mi’kmaq reservation – a reservation that survives because Native Americans seem to be immune to the zombie virus, maybe because of their connection to the Earth itself.

Virtually all the principle players here are Native Americans, and many of them came from and went on to fascinating careers. Elle-Maija Tailfeathers is a multi-award-winning actor, writer, producer and director; her co-star Michael Greyeyes paid his zombie-dues in multiple episodes of Fear the Walking Dead, showed up after Blood Quantum, in the not-wonderful V Wars, and was excellent in the underrated mystery series Home Before Dark. He also has the dubious distinction of playing Rainbird in the otherwise awful remake if Firestarter in 2022. No George C. Scott, maybe, but at least the part was played, more than passably well, by an actual member of the First Nations as Stephen King meant it to be. The writer and director, Jeff Barnaby, is a member of the Mi’kmaq himself, and continues his work on projects based on the realities and fantasies of native Americans, past present and future.

It’s a bleak and brutal plot and worldview, but not without good reason, and probably one of the best – and most overlooked – ‘serious’ zombie movies of the decade.

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Black Friday (2021)

Black Friday:
Zombies Attack Walmart (or something worse!)

Movie / Dark Action Comedy / SlowZombies

Horror Comedy, the mother of all oxymorons, is very tough to do well… but that doesn’t keep filmmakers from trying. Over and over. And hey, it doesn’t have to be Shaun of the Dead or Tucker and Dale vs. Evil to be worth a look.

So where would we put Black Friday, a 2021 entry in the Comedy Horror Olympics that starts with the all-too-real horror of the ruthlessness, cruelty, and utter madness of shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving, then postulates what happens when those shoppers go full-tilt zombie, thanks to some goo that looks like it came right out of The Stuff, a zombie-adjacent movie that we’ll talk about eventually.

Yeah, it’s funny. Not laugh-out-loud, roll-in-the-produce-aisle hilarious, but on the other hand it has Bruce Campbell – yeah, post-Ash, post-Burn Notice Bruce, at his 2021 doughy best, complete with a bushy mustache and a dickish attitude, teamed up/at odds with Devon Sawa, fresh out of the new Chucky series by way of Final Destination and Idle Hands, the last of which is another zombie-adjacent film we’ll have to cover.

There are some cool swipes at consumerism, corporate callousness, and the death of the American Dream throughout the surprisingly graphic all-night adventure, and though the ending gets a little too Ghostbusters (the first one, the good one) to work entirely well, but it’s a solid piece of comedy horror. It’s no Horrorstor, Grady Hendrix’s amazing book about a haunted/cursed IKEA that has no zombies, but you’ll like it anyway, and… hey! Bruce Campbell! Being a dick!

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The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

The Autopsy of Jane Doe:
Dark, Disturbing, Claustrophobic ... But Is She a Zombie?

Movie / One-on-One

Look, we can all meet for drinks after work and have a good, long, well-lubricated debate about whether the body on the slab in The Autopsy of Jane Doe is a zombie or a witch or a ghost or what. But whatever that thing is, it keeps crossing the line between living and dead and back again, always with ill intent. If that ain’t a zombie, we don’t know what-all is.

The father-and-son team of Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch, operating of that bizarre underground morgue, go through one awful and awesome postmortem as the mystery of this creature on the table grows wider, deeper, and more dangerous.

This is essentially a two-person drama (the zombie doesn’t count), and the tight but terrifying script produces two of the best performances Cox and Hirsch have ever given – which is saying something. Even better: the ending actually justifies the gettin’ there – another rarity in “locked room” stories.

Come for the zombie, stay for the mystery and the reveal, and try to forget what you see. We dare you.

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