The Undead Symphony

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...

Send us Fan Mail In this low level teen high school zombie horror from Blumhouse (Halloween, Insidious, Get Out, Black Phone) we follow the jocks and nerds trying to get extra curricular credit but going on a field trip. One small issue, the bus crashes, they are attacked by a metal head zombie, and their teacher killed, and the US is under a chemical attack, so find shelter!!! And it is the nerds...

Send us Fan Mail A remake of Dead Set (covered in Ep 24) this is twice the episodes, twice the carnage, twice the characters, and well, as it is Brazilian, it is a sexified version of the UK show. In Rio the reality TV Show Olympus is a hit. The contestants are stars and Brandau is the all-powerful producer/director. Nina is a peon, a runner, a gofer, and then zombie apocalypse happens. With the f...

Send us Fan Mail Set on the set of Big Brother UK Dead Set follows the contestants, production crew and they extended loved ones as they come to terms with the ongoing zombie apocalypse outside those gates. Starring Jaime Winstone and Riz Ahmed this infinitely watchable 2008 5 episode taster from Black Mirror's Charlie Brooker is post 28 Days Later fun and worth a watch.

Send us Fan Mail In this podcast we watch two of the lesser known George A Romero zombie movies, the 2007 Diary of the Dead, in which George uses gimmicks including found footage, voice over narration, and CCTV, before the terrible 2009 Survival of the Dead, which could be summed up as being two backward Irish clans wipe each other out because they are dumb. The zombies were actually smarter.

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I finally watch the first zombie I became aware of, the 1981 Zombie Lake. It has petrified me from 1982 and the moment I saw the poster in a video store window in Whitstable in Kent. I started watching horror movies in my teens, as we all do, but Zombie Lake was never watched. After Night of the Comet and the Romero's I forgot all about it, until now.... and b...

Send us Fan Mail Two very similar movies this week with the theme of infection and locked down offices. In the first, Office Uprising, Titan's Brendan Thwaites is Desmond, a slacker keeping  as low a profile as possible at Ammotech, a weapons manufacturer. When his co-workers are given a bad batch of Zolt, the new Army drink designed to up aggression they turn into homicidal maniacs and Desmo...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I decided to dive head first into the cesspit of mediocrity. You see these movies and you avoided them. But we are not shy of making those decisions here at the Undead Symphony. We just watch them with gritted teeth and a stress ball. And so to episode 20 where we watched the Austrian Attack of the Ledershosen Zombies, a movie wholly without any lederhosen wearing...

Send us Fan Mail A real yin yang of a week with the underrated It Stains the Sands Red and Zombie Night. It Stains the Sands Red tells the story of a drunkard, drug user trailer trash Molly, racing out of a zombiefied Las Vegas with her cohort Nick. With the car stuck in the sand and a zombie slowly moving up he road Nick gets bitten and the zombie chases after the drunk and high Molly. An anti-he...

Send us Fan Mail In episode 18 we travel further afield to  Venezuela for Infection, where a micro biologist father has to weigh up saving mankind and saving his son, whilst in Rammbock aka Rammbock: Berlin Undead aka Siege of the Dead, we revisit one of the original movies in the zombie sub-genre of being holed up in an apartment as the apocalypse happens around you.