1st November 2010, 6:00 AM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:It's pretty cliche if you ask me. I mean the opening scene, "waking up in a hospital from a coma to find everything in shambles" has been done a billion times, from the first Resident Evil movie to 28 days later. Cliche can work though. If the series is intended to basically be a call-back to every zombie cliche out there all tied together, it can be good in that way. It's got a good start. There's "half-zombie dragging itself across the lawn" ala "Return of the Living Dead". There's "turn round a city street corner to find a whole army" ala Resident Evil Outbreak, and a bunch of others. There's the dramatic "I can't kill my loved one even though I know she's gone" that's been done in... every single zombie thing ever. Yeah, I'm going to call this series a huge pop culture reference to every zombie thing out there.
That doesn't make it bad though. It seems interesting. That said, I bust out laughing at the sheer absurdity of the main character riding a horse downtown with pistol by his side and a frickin' cowboy hat on (yes I know he's a sheriff, but I wonder if they made him one JUST to put that scene in the show, I know I would).
There's really not much you can do within the confines of the zombie genre that hasn't been done any number of times before, particularly if you aren't doing on of those "it's a zombie movie that breaks all the rules" movie. Like, Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula probably isn't going to surprise you much, but Twilight might [and not in a good way].
It's well-made and well-acted, which certainly goes a long way in smoothing over whatever cliches there might be in the script. I think as it goes, though, it'll start to diverge more from other zombie works as the focus moves more towards the characters.
Sometimes you get the scorpion.