Review by:
Andrew Welch

Just last Tuesday, Kino Lorber issued a new DVD/Blu-ray release of White Zombie, a 1932 pre-code horror movie starring Bela Lugosi. The film is hardly essential, but the differences between the zombies in the Lugosi film and the zombies we see in movies and television today are intriguing nevertheless. Yes, the zombies in Victor Halperin’s film move in the same stumbling, glassy-eyed way the zombies from George A. Romero’s later Dead films do—but unlike Romero’s zombies, they aren’t exactly dead and they don’t eat anyone; “brainwashed” would be the better word for their condition. And the plot of White Zombie isn’t about survival, but about rescuing a zombified loved one and returning her to “life.”

The zombies in Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies are the usual post-Night of the Living Dead shambling, moaning, brain-eating types, but there’s one crucial difference: their self-awareness. The movie’s main character, R (Nicholas Hoult), knows he’s a zombie and doesn’t enjoy it, but what can he do about it? A zombie’s gotta eat, after all. R narrates the film, introducing us to his world and filling us in on a few narrative gaps before we meet Julie (Teresa Palmer). Julie lives in a walled off settlement run by her father, Grigio (John Malkovich), and every day, she leaves the settlement with a small group of fellow survivors to look for supplies.

On one of these forays, R and a handful of other zombies attack Julie and her team—and it is at that moment that the film suddenly turns into a kind of zombie-movie retelling of Romeo and Juliet. In Warm Bodies, when a zombie eats a brain, he glimpses his victim’s memories and is reminded, for just a second, of what it was like to be human; this is what happens when R munches on the brains of Julie’s boyfriend. From then on, R is so smitten with Julie that he rescues her and takes her back to the comfy home he’s fashioned out of an empty cargo plane (complete with a nice cache of records, of course). Naturally, they fall in love.

This, alas, is where the movie stumbles. Levine, adapting a novel by Isaac Marion, tries to reanimate the familiar beats we’ve seen in so many love stories (the film has yet another one of those upbeat, peppy romantic montages, for instance). But even with the novelty of its zombie-based premise, the delivery feels strictly by-the-numbers, right down to a wholly predictable last-minute revelation that puts their relationship in jeopardy between the film’s second and third acts.

Ultimately, there’s never any doubt where all of this is going. But then, a tragic Romeo and Juliet-style ending just wouldn’t play well with today’s teenage audiences—or at least, that’s what the film’s backing studio, Summit Entertainment, is hoping. Summit is the same studio that brought the Twilight movies into the world; that might explain the film’s unwillingness to delve into the kinds of extremes you see in other zombie stories. This is refreshing in one sense, especially after the unrelenting grimness of, say, The Walking Dead, which offered, in both its comic-book and television versions, glimmers of hope one second before pulling the rug out from under you the next. Warm Bodies, on the other hand, is content to comfort rather than disturb, preferring to end as happily, and with as little blood and guts, as possible.

In that way, Warm Bodies is more like White Zombie than anything by Romero or Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman put together; after all, the destination is the same in both films: a happy, healthy, living couple. That journey made more sense in White Zombie, because that film’s zombie in question, Madeline (Madge Bellamy), was only under an evil man’s control rather than actually dead. R, however, is absolutely 100% deceased. That’s not an easy thing to come back from, to put it mildly—but what is death when compared to the power of young love? It's what makes the world—and the box office—go round.