Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)
To paraphrase Spinal Tap: “There’s a thin line between clever and funny.” Case in point: I was a fan of the cult British sci-fi comedy RED DWARF. Ten years after the last episodes were shown, the cast and creators were reunited for a three part miniseries called BACK TO EARTH, where the characters, ostensibly from the future, found themselves back on Earth in the present day, learning to their existential horror that they were just characters in a cult British sci-fi comedy, even meeting the actors playing them and the writer who created them. It was quite clever.
Along the way, however, they forgot to be funny. Which you’d think would be a pre-requisite in a comedy.
Mothers of newborn kids always look like this…
I remembered this as I watched PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, the film adaptation of the 2009 novel by Seth Grahame-Smith. The movie was directed by Burr Steers, who also wrote the adapted screenplay. P&P&Z is in itself an adaptation of the 1813 novel by Jane Austen. If you’re intimately familiar with the story already, congratulations on your entry into womanhood. For those of you who have chest hairs and bo stick skills, Austen’s story concerns Elizabeth Bennet and her four sisters as they fuck about the English countryside dealing with marriage, manners, morality and billowy men’s shirts among the landed gentry of the British Regency (for our American readers, that’s the period after the Pilgrims landed at Los Angeles but before Benny Hill was made Prime Minister).
Okay, dinner parties have now gotten more interesting for me…
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES tries to ape the storyline and setting, but with the addition of the undead. In an opening sequence of shadow puppetry, we learn that the undead have been rising, London has built a wall and a moat around itself (they should get the zombies to pay for it too!). The English send their children to the Far East to learn martial arts (the rich can afford Japanese, those less well off have to do with Chinese Shaolin), but otherwise things are pretty much as you’d expect, with a woman’s best chances at happiness and prosperity lying with finding the right rich husband and avoid poverty (when the Bennet sisters’ father (Charles Dance) dies, they won’t inherit his wealth).
Feeding on the servants is simply scandalous, Marjorie!
The movie then opens proper with Colonel Darcy (Sam Riley) of the local Anti-Zombie Militia, entering a wealthy estate to investigate rumours of a newly-infected zombie. None of the gentry admit to it, of course, but Darcy has a vial of carrion flies as a means to detect dead flesh on people (a nice touch). Darcy finds the victim and despatches him – but no one knows about another victim upstairs munching on a servant girl…
And everyone thought the highlight of the party would be Pictionary…
The Bennet family don’t think much of the dour Darcy, but are more welcoming of the young and handsome Mr. Bingley (Douglas Booth) whose family is throwing a ball. There, Bingley sets his eyes and trouser snake on Jane Bennet (Bella Heathcote). Elizabeth, who doesn’t really want to get married, steps outside and is approached by a zombie, who appears intelligent and can talk, but is killed by Darcy. A horde of zombies then attack the party, prompting the Bennet sisters to fight them off. Darcy gets his own groove on with Elizabeth when he witnesses her in combat.
Nice makeup, though…
We’re introduced to other characters, like the dim-witted Parson Collins (Matt Smith), whose still marriage material despite having all the tact of Rob Schneider, soldier Mr Wickham (Jack Huston), whose approach to zombies is at odds with the shoot-them-in-the-head approach of Darcy, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Lena Headey), an eye-patched zombie killer. Another nice subplot involves the notion that the war against the zombies is bankrupting the kingdom, and Wickham believes a truce between the living and the undead is possible by controlled feeding of pigs’ brains to keep them civilised…
Bloody regulations…
There’s a lot of plot in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, due to the filmmakers’ desire to show how clever they are in sticking to the dense romantic and societal machinations of the original novel, but that’s to the detriment of those looking for zombie action. Not that there isn’t any, even if the gore is all CGI and as fake as Bill Cosby’s alibis. And there is some nice scenes of the Bennet Sisters arming themselves and marching out to bring down some undead.
Tis but a scratch…
But that’s what they are: scenes. This is the sort of thing that would have been ideal as a fake trailer on Saturday Night Live, or even a short movie, because you have to spend so much time seeing how clever it was that they could put a supernatural element in an established, familiar setting and having characters in period costumes cutting down zombies. It should have been wilder. It should have been crazier and gone balls-deep into the mayhem. It needed Sam Raimi directing it, and Bruce Campbell as the Bennett Sisters’ Dad, leading the girls in a charge against the dead.
That would have been clever and fun.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES is still available in some selected theatres, and the trailer is below.
Deggsy’s Summary:
Director: Burr Steers
Plot: 3 out of 5 stars
Gore: 5 out of 10 skulls
Zombie Mayhem: 3 out of 5 brains
Reviewed by Deggsy. So civilised and cultured his farts are in Latin.
Stay Bloody!!!
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