The Undead Symphony

Send us Fan Mail It is an international episode this week as we watch joint Italian/Spanish production City of the Walking Dead, or Nightmare City, from 1980 and set in Madrid, and Cuba's first zombie movie Juan of the Dead. In Nightmare City local TV journalist Dead Miller is there when radiated zombies, nigh on indestructible and able to use weapons, land at the airport and kill everyone, b...

Send us Fan Mail Two very different movies this week, one made by the British, one made in Britain by Americans. One very good, one pretty poor. The Rezort takes the genre on a new angle. Several movies have looked at what happens to the zombies post outbreak. In The Cured they are second class citizens, trying to regain their rights, in Shaun of the Dead they are kept for menial labour, same for...

Send us Fan Mail Originally I had planned to follow my normal 2 movies per episode format but I just hated a lot of this movie so much my ranting took over the whole show. Rise of the Zombies, from the writer of Zombie Night (which we hated) and director of Zombie Apocalypse (which we hated), and starring Mariel Hemingway, Ethan Suplee, LeVar Burton, Chad Lindberg, French Stewart, and the headline...

Send us Fan Mail This week, dear listeners, we are treated to a Irving Rameses "Ving" Rhames double header with the 2011 Zombie Apocalypse and the 2008 namesake Day of the Dead, I say namesake as it is not a remake at all. In Zombie Apocalypse three useless survivors are two thirds rescued from certain death by 4 battle hardened zombie fighters who talk the big talk, but can they do the...

Send us Fan Mail Two new movies for me, neither rated very highly by critics and regular people alike, but I thought I would go into them with an open mind. In Paradise Z, set in Thailand, we have more of a survivalist tale, dull routine, but stunningly beautiful to look at as Sylvia and Rose live day to day. It is a little slow for 3/4 of the movie but it builds and I liked the clever little thin...

Send us Fan Mail Two very different movies this week.  We have the comedy curse movie Dead Before Dawn starring Christopher "Great Scott" Lloyd and featuring a podcast favourite, It Stains the Sands Red's Brittany Allen, a rather obvious but fun romp where a bunch of college seniors accidentally create a curse that compels anyone they make eye contact with to commit suicide, and the...

Send us Fan Mail In this weeks episode we watch the Spanish Netflix offering Valley of the Dead, telling the story of Nazi experimentation during the bloody Spanish Civil war and Hard Line, aka Dead Rush, a POV modern day effort seen through the eyes of David, a regular guy as he tries to come to terms with the end of the world. Sure, in Valley of the Dead, we have some dodgy CGI of planes, and dr...

Send us Fan Mail A different take on the zombie genre this week as we look at it from the side of the zees. Yes, we are on the dead side of the fence cheering on the shufflers against the human scum. In Dead Heads we meet Mike, confused after a car accident and desperate to see his one true love Ellie. One small issue, he's a zombie, murdered by Ellie's father and has been dead for 3 yea...

Send us Fan Mail Two movies this week that barely scrape into the zombie bracket for me, although google uses the z-word for both. Alone, one of a thousand movies with the same title, is an incredibly slow, dull plague movie where a disease could potentially effect everyone and the only known cure has a chance of turning you into a homicidal maniac. Minimal cast, minimal location, minimal everythi...

Send us Fan Mail According to Douglas Adams 42 is the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. In this, episode 42, we are not so lucky. But there was hope. We had The Last Hope, a very poor Australian effort, where an immune soldier, the eponymous last hope, and others head across Australia to find a hospital to create a cure. Well, a very tiny, backwater part of Australia. No...

Send us Fan Mail Put another shrimp on the zombie powered barbie and crack open a tall, cold Castlemaine 4X from the zombie powered fridge, as this week we are looking at the Wyrmwood series, the 2014 Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, where we are introduced to the new world, of zombies as fuel, and hazmat suited doctors and armoured soldiers killing the survivors to make their own serum, through the 20...

Send us Fan Mail We are baaaaack! Did you miss us? Well, we weren't gone for very long to be fair. But we are back with the second season of The Undead Symphony, starting with two international efforts, the cheesy, a bit racist, Shaun of the Dead rip-off Kill Zombie! from the Netherlands, where Aziz, Mo, Jeffrey, Nolan, Joris and Officer Kim must battle their way across an Amsterdam full of g...

Send us Fan Mail A real cult classic this episode, The Return of the Living Dead. 1985, cool mid-80s punk music, odd mid-1980s fashion (shoulder pads, collars up, no sleeves and a lot of zips and chains), and a slightly comedic plot derived from The Night of the Living Dead that didn't really feel all that funny. Still, it is the movie that gave us the idea that zombies want to eat brains, an...

Send us Fan Mail This week, and the last of 2022, we watch Aquarium of the Dead that includes Vivica A Fox from Kill Bill Pt 1 and 2 in a terrible role, where the CGI walrus has the best range of the acting "talent on offer" and Dead Again, no not the 1991 Kenneth Brannagh and Emma Thompson effort. This is a bad 2021 British movie with bad special effect, sounds effects, alien space craf...

Send us Fan Mail Brini Amerigo's writing and directorial debut is, to be fair, a piece of woman-hating misogynistic nastiness wrapped up in a half-assed house invasion where the house has real horrors in it story.  A gang of home invaders who make the household commit heinous acts at gunpoint before killing them pick the wrong house this time when they attack the Pontecorvo home. The seemingl...

Send us Fan Mail The 2010 Ford Brothers production of The Dead, filmed in Burkina Faso and Ghana finds the hero (Rob Freeman) the sole survivor of an evacuation flight crash making his way across a dusty, African country in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.  Meeting up with local soldier Daniel, who is trying to find his son, Freeman makes his way from unprotected village to unprotected village,...

Send us Fan Mail After the grim offering last time out I needed quality, and this spin off of Fear the Walking Dead was a perfect route back to decent zombie fare.  Starring Nick Stahl as Riley, his character from FTWD (Season 6), during the opening of the show back in Season 1, the crew of the USS Pennsylvania is pulled from a NATO exercise to the Gulf of Mexico but then lose communication with c...

Send us Fan Mail Two of the bottom of the barrel movies this week, one of which I couldn't comfortably finish. The overly stupid, misogynistic, self-referential Range 15 starring a whole landing craft of celebrity veterans and cameos from William Shatner, Sean Astin, Keith David, Danny Trejo and Ron Jeremy. Funded by the "stars" and a indie-go-go crowdfunding page this is god awful....

Send us Fan Mail Starring Elliot Page and with a more than a hint about the rehabilitation of terrorists detainees from the Troubles, this infected movie set in Northern Ireland poses the questions he have been wanting ask; what happens if the infected get cured? Do we take them back in? Are they the same person as they were before? Can we forgive them for the crimes they committed when out of con...

Send us Fan Mail Making the most of my Amazon Shudder account this week to watch a second Shudder Original (Virusl:32) as well as The Horde.  First we have the overly macho The Horse where a group of undercover cops head into the ghetto to take out the drug dealer who murdered their friend, only for the two competing elements to be forced together to fight the eponymous horde of zombies that are h...

Send us Fan Mail Set in a First Nation reservation where the natives are immune to a zombie virus that affects the white population, fish and carnivores, we see local police chief Traylor and family try to survive with their people, whilst balancing saving those who could bring it all to an end. The late Jeff Barnaby's movie is a superb take on the zombie genre with the back stories of racism...

Send us Fan Mail This week we look at Lucio Fulci's 1979 classic Zombie Flesh Eaters, aka Zombie, aka Zombi 2, an official sequel to Romero's, or at least the Argento edit of, Dawn of the Dead. Starring Ian McCullouch of Survivors, and Mia Farrow's less talented sister, we head to the Caribbean where the dead are rising from their conquistador graves to bit people on the throat befo...

Send us Fan Mail Back to a double header this week with the macho men Dolph Lundgren and Michael Dudikoff facing off as we watch and try to enjoy the awfully named Navy Seals vs Zombies, where a crack team head into Baton Rouge to rescue the Vice President and a Scientist with the cure when the zombie plague starts, and Dead Trigger, the big screen version of the phone first person shooter, where...

Send us Fan Mail It has received cult status but then there is no accounting for taste. I can see why, but not really. High school prom, nerds, cheerleaders, a bully, a bullying gym teacher with a military past and an alcoholic principal. But then add a spill from the local powerplant brings the dead back and it is all gonna go wrong. Favourite line. "Stare at the wall. It is the wall channel...

Send us Fan Mail A Thai movie where they get the zombie effects, the set and lighting and speed right but everything else wrong. Awful acting, annoying characters, ridiculous repetitive plot and in the end you even do a head tilt as to who the hell the characters in the final scene are. I hated this one, given that it got the look and feel so right, it could have been great. But with over a dozen...