Monday 22 February 2010

WASTING AWAY

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND AN IMPORTANT LESSON

I was all set to really hate this one. I've had a string of terrible rentals recently and this film, to judge from the artwork and blurb, looked just as lousy as anything I've had recently. So it sat by my DVD player for over a week before I finally popped it in, fearing the worst and expecting yet another cheap zombie non-epic made by an idiot and his buddies. Well, you should never prejudge these things.

Wasting Away is not, let's be clear, any kind of masterpiece. But it is a nicely played, occasionally quite witty and well thought out romzomcom, done with a light touch and with a few neat and original ideas in the mix. Chief of these is seeing the action from the zombies' point of view: they don't actually know what's happened to them and they think everyone else - the living - are the ones infected with some kind of disease. It's a clever angle that I can't recall seeing before. A military project to create a serum for "supersoldiers" goes horribly wrong and some of the chemical accidentally ends up in some ice cream: consumed by a more than usually likeable bunch of teens who promptly turn zomb. Matters are heightened when an apparent SuperSoldier turns up claiming there's been a deadly viral outbreak in the town and only these five people are left uninfected. As it switches between colour and monochrome depending on whether we're with the living or the undead, the zombs are either typically shambling ghouls or ordinary young people trying to work out what's going on and why all the "infected" are behaving so strangely.

So the moral of the story is Never Prejudge. In fact you can prejudge a lot of the time, quite safely, but once in a while they will sneak one past you that's better than it immediately looks. A pleasant surprise, and worth a look.

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