THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

In this Belgian Zombie-comedy, a young woman, escorted by her boyfriend, travels to an Eastern European hospital for plastic surgery. Things are going smoothly until the boyfriend stumbles across, and accidentally releases, a restrained Zombie - the single event snowballing into a full-on Zombie outbreak, quickly overrunning the entire hospital. With the military using deadly force to confine the outbreak to the hospital building and the ravenous Zombies increasing in number, all remaining survivors, including the travelling couple, do their best to stay alive long enough to see their freedom restored.

MY VERDICT:

There is not too much to be said about Yummy; it is a high-quality yet disappointingly average Zombie movie that does nothing frustrating but also nothing outstanding. The action starts reasonably quickly which is a welcome sign and, even when the Zombies start coming out of the woodwork, the film finds time for some minor character development. The background story elements given to characters is refreshing for this type of 'kill 'em all' movie; the performance of the actors alone is enough to make those characters likeable though, sadly, even with the added personality traits, I doubt you will feel strongly about any of them. Those performances also aid the humorous side of this Zombie-comedy - many of the jokes come from the reaction of the characters to situations and the credible acting often makes the scenes pretty funny while never going too far, making the film feel overly comical. The Zombies are quite realistic looking with exposed bones, stiff joints, liberal amounts of gore and blurry eyes. They are definitely the more snarly, aggressive Zombies of 28 Days Later yet stop short of full-on sprinting, cleverly linking the old-school shambling Zombie with the modern insanely-fast sprinters. In all, Yummy never feels overly long, being paced well and not including any 'filler' scenes that could easily be removed without altering the enjoyment of the movie - extremely commendable, but I just wish there was something more, something unique or outstanding. There are only two glaring mistakes in the film; the very first Zombie - the one accidentally released by the boyfriend - clearly has higher than average intelligence for a Zombie; being clever enough to chew through the restraints that hold her and dexterous enough to untie the lower straps of those restraints (though this is done off-screen so other explanations are possible). The ending is also not really a conclusion to anything, just a convenient place to stop.