The Undead Symphony

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.

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we closed our eyes and stuck a pin in the menu and came out with two very different dishes. We have the French football themed zombie movie Goal of the Dead, as the Olympique de Paris team and their captain Lorit head back to the pissant town of Caplongue for a cup clash. A clash that will bring Lorit face to face with fatherhood, his own father, and a zombie apoca...

Send us Fan Mail This week, as part of our rehabilitation after Z Nation, we are back on the high quality movies starting with the Romeo and Juliet in Zombieland Warm Bodies, starring Nicholas Hoult as R, Theresa Palmer as July and John Malkovic as her zombie hating father. It is funny, it is warm, it is a zom rom com even your horror movie hating other half will enjoy. And I have paired it with t...

Send us Fan Mail Something new and a full season review. I will do the same for the other TV shows including the Walking Dead franchise, Dead Set, All of us are Dead and the new Day of the Dead, but in this episode I head for the trailer park for the low end Z Nation, where moments of childish hilarity and clever plots are rare nuggets to be found only by digging in a landfill of used adult diaper...

Send us Fan Mail This week I have gone back to the shopping mall Zack Snyder remake of Dawn of the Dead, starring Jack Webber and Ving Rhames, and George A Romero's next instalment of his zombie series, Land of the Dead boasting Dennis Hopper, John Leguizamo and Simon Baker in the lead roles. When I watch the 1978 version of Dawn I always nit pick. There are plenty of things they do in the mo...

Send us Fan Mail Paddy Considine, Emma Arteton and Glen Close in the British zombie movie The Girl with all the Gifts, where a fungus turns people into rabid monsters, and where the next generation has evolved. And Extinction with Matthew Fox and Jeffery Donovan in another movie where the zombies have evolved from those at the beginning of the movie, in a snowy landscape and a story that was a mix...

Send us Fan Mail Back to the classics and one of the greatest zombie movies of all time, the game-changer that is the 1978 production of Dawn of the Dead. The first zombie movie set in a shopping Mall, with lines and themes that would be stolen by dozens of directors and writers in years to come. And the sequel Day of the Dead, the cheesier and angrier 1985 movie with a lot of issues that make it...

Send us Fan Mail This week we are back on the comedies with Little Monsters and Cooties. Australian little monsters stars Alexander England and Black Panther's Lupita Nyong'o as they battle an army of shufflers at a petting zoo/farm whilst on a kindergarten field trip, and Cooties brings Rain Wilson, Alison Pill and Elijah Wood together in this elementary school based, infected chicken n...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode I move away from the dual movie idea and watch two seasons of the Netflix zombie drama Black Summer. The spiritual sister of Z Nation with none of the comedy or cheese. Instead it is break neck speed, frantic and frenetic with zero character development for any of the actors other than the lead, and then she goes the wrong way. Hope you enjoy it. Let me know if you...

Send us Fan Mail A real yin yang of an episode as the most incredibly cast The Dead Don't Die fails due to poor choices from director Jim Jaramush whilst Shaun of the Dead flies high with the help of my ex housemate James and twin buddies Kev and Nick. Let's go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over.

Send us Fan Mail A comedy and a musical week, the jokes need to land when you are making a comedy, the tunes need to be memorable if you are making a musical,  so let's see if the 4th July dead presidents comedy and high school music cuts it.

Send us Fan Mail And tonight we are talking about the Korean movies Train to Busan, in my opinion  one of the best zombie movies ever made, and it's sequel, more of a zombie heist movie Peninsula. Both good, one great, and both worth a watch, or at least a listen. 

Send us Fan Mail In which I relive the first two zombie movies I saw as a teenager, the 80s cliché filled cheese fest Night of the Comet and the granddaddy of them all, George A Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead. 

Send us Fan Mail Time to nut up or shut up, go big or go home, and we, dear listeners, are going big. We are looking at Zack Snyder's Netflix zombie Vegas blast Army of the Dead starring Guardians of the Galaxy's Dave Bautista, and Brad Pitt in the biggest grossing zombie movie of all time World War Z, based on the novel of the same name.  After a few poor movies recently, it is good to...

Send us Fan Mail A trip down under for Martin Freeman's Cargo and then best get in a crate of your favourite alcohol to cushion the blow of Ravenous, a terribly dull French Canadian effort that I really, really didn't like

Send us Fan Mail it is a comedy week on the Undead Symphony as we look at the Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse with Tye Sheriden and Bruce Campbell in Walmart shopping horror Black Friday.

Send us Fan Mail In the second episode I take a look at a couple of movies that take the zombie genre in different directions, adding new elements to the theme. We have Matt Smith, Natalie Dormer and Stanley Tucci in Patient Zero with smart, conniving infected and Stephen McHattie in the out there Pontypool and it's brilliant transfer mechanism for the viris.

Send us Fan Mail In this, the first episode of the Undead Symphony, I look at the Korean Netflix movie #Alive starring Yoo Ah-in and Park Shin-Hye, and its American counterparty Final Days starring Tyler Posey and Summer Spiro, two movies with a very similar take on the hunker down survival story.