Let me start by stating I am a huge fan of the Zombie Genre. So when The Sound of Zombies landed on my desk for review, I was interested. The Sound of Zombies was written and directed by Lisa Coffelt and starts off in the true zombie spirit with a bartender and her patron talking about lost loved ones as the news plays in the background about the rise of zombies. On cue, a zombie comes staggering in and after a brief ruckus the scene ends leaving you questioning what just happened.
The next scene we see three guys who are arguing back and forth for the majority of the film about which one is dumber than the other with the slowest moving zombies ever filmed walking towards them. After what seems like an eternity of stereotypical one-liners and some of the most irrational thinking I have ever seen in a zombie movie (and that says a lot) the bartender from the opening scene comes walking by with music playing on her MP3 player and struts right on by the zombies. It seems the zombies can be controlled with the sound of music. To prove the point, we get a scene with some techno music and what I can only assume is a tribute to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” that actually did bring a smile and slight chuckle out of me.
The idea that zombies can be controlled through music has promise and I was hoping it would have expanded more into that, but where the film shows promise it is quickly devoured by the scene with the three guys arguing back and forth and quickly I lost my appetite for this film. I could take a couple of jokes here and there, but honestly the whole scene seemed to consist of stereotypical one-liners that really cheapened an interesting concept behind the zombie genre and ultimately left a bad taste in my mouth.
