Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

The title is absurd but the film isn't absurd enough. What we have is a tiresome jaunt of faux English accents bleached in a substandard Victorian dye.

Too many stretched-thin characterizations are probably a necessity for such genre mash-ups. The tone keeps shifting at every turn, the momentum is spiffy while the performances are all in the likeable mould. This re-imagined fantasy may not be considered original in terms of ideas but it plays out in a light-enough vein to make the cobbled together concoction fairly invigorating.

It's a one-joke movie but the joke is funny. But in the land of zom-coms, it does pale in comparison to Shaun Of The Dead and others like Zombieland and iZombie. The film also has an overt theme of female empowerment - almost like Jane Austen on steroids. These feisty female warriors would make any feminist proud because they're not merely surviving, but charging off into battle to save their beaus from rampaging zombie hordes.

The film is all over the board stylistically and tonally, and the elements of both horror and comedy fall flat. By the climax you're almost forgotten what you're watching and who you're supposed to care about.

A tad too long and a little too late in coming along, PPZ could nearly have passed as being dead-on-arrival.

...while zombie films ride on blood and guts galore, there simply isn't enough gore in here to satisfy those who even like the zombie genre. So what we really have is a film that cannot be taken seriously either as a satire, as a period film and neither as a zombie film.