The Undead Symphony

Send us Fan Mail Time to nut up or shut up. And Michael and I are back on it with one of the mainstream hits from the realm of the undead - Zombieland, starring a very bankable cast of Jessie Eisenberg (Squid and the Whale, American Alpha), Woody Harrelson (Natural Born Killers), Emma Stone (La La Land) and Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine). A mainstream cast for a mainstream movie that borro...

Send us Fan Mail Before Michael formerly joins the Podcast, living in the relative idyllic calm of the mainstream zombie hits (28 Days and Weeks Later, Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead), I am back scraping the bottom of the barrel,  and wading chest deep through the stagnant filth that is the low end of the Z List. This week, as punishment for enjoying 28 Days and Weeks Later, I struggled (and I real...

Send us Fan Mail And he is back by popular demand.  Off the success of his 28 Weeks Later chat Michael is back again to discuss the sequel 28 Weeks Later, it is bigger, it is bolder, it is more American, but is it in keeping with the original? Can Robert Carlisle, Idris Elba, Jeremy Renner, and Rose Byrne fill the boots of Cillian Murphy, Naomi Harris, Brendan Gleason and Christopher Ecclestone? 2...

Send us Fan Mail It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. As the incredible Dead Island 2 game is released (high), but without co op play (low) we here at the Undead Symphony are working our way through the z list, as well as finding new movies. This episode we watch Amityville Uprising, a movie so bad I had to air out the house after watching it. And that was a struggle too. Off the b...

Send us Fan Mail I am joined this week by Michael Avery, a long time follower of the podcast, who has supported us throughout. And we are excited to talk all things zeke, as well as review and discuss one of the true game changers in the genre (sorry John Carpenter) of zombie horror, Danny Boyle's seminal work 28 Days Later. Starring Cillian Murphy, Naomi Harris, Brendan Gleason and Christoph...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we take a look at Peelers, a movie that does not live up to the billing of "outrageous comedy" that we discovered in the Amazon Prime description. I would say it is an infected movie, it is on the "z list" of movies classed as zombie movies found on that global source of information, misinformation, disinformation and outright lies that is Wikip...

Send us Fan Mail I love finding hidden gems, diamonds in the rough, and given the utter crud some zombie movies are, or infected movies, they are few and far between. So, much like when I discovered Blood Quantum, I am excited to say that I have found another in the form of Eradication starring Harry Aspinwall. David (Aspinwall) is in isolation, in communication with his scientist wife Sam, he fol...

Send us Fan Mail This week I am looking at two wildly different movies. Having moved on from the "zombie" search on Amazon, I started with "undead" and finally "dead". And this threw up two movies I hadn't seen. Dead Rising: Watchtower is a low end Hollywood take on a first person shooter game of the same name. It stars Jesse Metcalfe, Virginia Madsen, Dennis Hay...

Send us Fan Mail This is partially Brendan Fletcher's fault. Having seen him in The Last of Us as Robert I checked to see what else he had been in and, other than 3 episodes of iZombie (that I will not watch), 13 Eerie, a Canandian zombie flick appeared. It has a few names too, Lock Stock and 2 Smoking Barrel's Nick Moran, Stargate SG-1's Michael Shanks and Canada's 2008 Hottes...

Send us Fan Mail We are genuinely both sad to bring the Last of Us three episode podcast to a close. It has been great fun reviewing and discussing the show of the game that gave us so much joy. We look at the episodes back on The Last of Us: Left Behind giving us a personal arc for Ellie, as well the cannibal Cultists lead by the ominous, controlling David and then bring the show to a close as Jo...

Send us Fan Mail My brother Jeremy joins me for the second of three special episodes of the Undead Symphony podcast as we work our way through the second third of the HBO show The Last of Us starring Pedro Pascal and Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie. Having set the pace and style of the show in the opening episodes, we are loving the little elements inherited from the game, as well as critiquing and...

Send us Fan Mail Joining me this episode I have my brother Jeremy, ardent fan of The Last of Us (TLOU) game series. He has played TLOU 1 and 2 on numerous occasions, as have I, and therefore will be coming into the HBO show starring Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal, Nick Offerman and Gabriel Luna with the same eyes as I do. We know the game back to front, the plot lines, he gimmicks, and everything the...

Send us Fan Mail In this classic starring Peter Cushing and John Carradine, the Nazi's are at it again, creating their super soldiers that then go wrong (surprise surprise). 30 years after the war a pleasure cruise around a Caribbean island runs into a ghost ship. The ship has been sitting on the sea bed since it was scuttled at the end of the war by its commander (Cushing) to send the uncont...

Send us Fan Mail Cockneys vs Zombies with Michelle Ryan (Bionic Woman), Harry Treadaway (Penny Dreadful and Mr Mercedes) racing to save their grandad, Alan Ford (Snatch) and his friends at their old peoples home in the East End, including Richard Briers (The Good Life) and Honor Blackman (Goldfinger) as a zombie plague from 1666 tears through London. It was ok, not brilliant, but watchable. In Zom...

Send us Fan Mail Day of the Dead Bloodline, one of those movies that aren't official sequels or canon, but rather are a "reimagining" of the original. Now personally I found the Day of the Dead weak, dated, and forgettable. Outside of "Bub" I didn't like it. And this, well, before I started I thought if anything it would have 1. the military, 2. the bunker and 3. an a...

Send us Fan Mail Two movies that couldn't be more different, but two movies I thoroughly enjoyed. After a dumpster dive into YouTube I chanced upon a bad Chinese zombie movie (The Way Home) that I had to skim, but then I learned of the sequel, well not really a sequel but same genre/writer/director I am guessing. Also not sure where the Home in The Way Home is, as in The Way Home 2 they are a...

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...