'Movie Night!' 'Army of the Dead' & 'Love and Monsters'

I say 'Movie Night' but it was more like 'Movie Morning', watching telly and eating bacon rolls, it was glorious... :o) I've been house-sitting and giving my mates cat his insulin injection, twice a day, and it's safe to say that one of these activities has been going better than the other one. I am pretty sure that the cat took it's revenge by throwing up and tracking it's vomit around the house (the little shit), I'm going to be so glad when my mates get back...

But anyway. It hasn't been all bad :o) My mates have Netflix so I took the chance to tick off a couple of movies that can only be found there. And here's what I thought of them...


'Army of the Dead' (2021)

Following a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, a group of mercenaries take the ultimate gamble, venturing into the quarantine zone to pull off the greatest heist ever attempted.

I loved Zack Snyder's 'Dawn of the Dead' (even more than the original Romero film, seriously) so when I heard he was going to be making another zombie film, I was totally up for it. I finally got to watch it, this morning, and... It's a bit of an anti-climax if I'm being honest. Don't get me wrong, it looks amazing with a bunch of hard core mercenaries shooting the hell out of a Las Vegas full of zombies. Explosions, awesome zombie fights and a surprisingly decent looking zombie tiger; you can't ask for a lot more than that, right? Well actually...

While the 2004 'Dawn of the Dead' gave us a bunch of engaging characters (albeit for differing reasons) to root for, 'Army of the Dead' doesn't really bother with that, preferring to rely on the pyrotechnics and mercenaries to get us through the shooty bits and asking us to identify a little more strongly with the undead who are just that little bit more human this time. And that's not how it works with zombie films, how can you identify with someone who talks in grunts, eats living human flesh and... is dead? You can't and that's the whole point, we cheer on the living in films like these and by ignoring that (the mercenaries are interchangeable and don't stand on their own at all as characters), we're left with a film that's watchable but just a little too shallow to be really engaging. And maybe that was the point but... it shouldn't have been. Still, at least I can say that I've given 'Army of the Dead' a go, lets see how much of it I remember in a week's time.



'Love and Monsters' (2020)

Seven years after he survived the monster apocalypse, lovably hapless Joel leaves his cozy underground bunker behind on a quest to reunite with his ex.

Youtube kept throwing me random clips from this movie and I'd been meaning to watch the whole thing for some time now. It's a really sweet 'rites of passage' style movie about working out what is important and then going for it, only to find that... Well that would be telling and I think you need to watch this yourself so I won't say too much more than that. Lets just say that the monsters look amazing here, I watched the whole thing with a big smile on my face and felt all good about life afterwards. It really made up for 'Army of the Dead' and that was just what I needed. If you have Netflix, give it a shot if you haven't already.

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