The First Four Minutes Of Warm Bodies Is Actually Touching

Coming off like a mashup of Shaun of the Dead and Zombie Land with some manic pixie dream girl nonsense thrown in, the premise of Warm Bodies – after a worldwide apocalypse, zombie boy falls in love with human girl – is interesting, and the book upon which it's based has been really well received.

But in the hands of the wrong studio things could go horribly wrong. Like The Time Traveller's Wife horribly wrong. Add to this the fact that we're dangerously close to reaching peak zombie and you feel less like we're about to get something cool and more like we're about to see the last drops of fuel extracted from a dried out earth, Mad Max style, before the zombie genre is killed forever.

Consider my fears (temporarily) averted. Via Fandango, the first four minutes of Warm Bodies has popped up online, and shocker, it manages to be funny and kind of touching, and reveals a really interesting take on the whole undead-as-a-metaphor-for-something thing. Previous zombie films have used the shuffling undead as a stand-in for things like consumerism and global pandemics like AIDS. Warm bodies treats it note for note like depression. Have a look and see for yourself.

Rob Corddry as a middle aged zombie who clearly used to be a heavy drinking business traveller is also a nice touch. Yeah, it does mine rather overexploited territory, glossing over the origins of the apocalypse via heavy references to other well known zombie films, but that's fine because it looks like we might be getting our first original take on zombies in several years. Just so long as none of them run.

Please god, please don't let them be runners.

[Source: Fandango]