Was It Good: The Girl with All the Gifts

We've had vampires kids and now we have zombie kids! This spin on the ol' zombie story injects a few new ideas into the mythos but in the end it's not quite enough to make it a great film. It is, I would say, worth a watch for some of the tension it builds in a few scenes and some of the acting isn't bad either. There's a pretty intense scene that might give you nightmares of scary children and it gets all Lord of the Flies pretty darn quick, which one would kind of expect when you have roaming gangs of blood thirsty children. And hey, it's also based on a book, written by M.R. Carey, not that I've read it but I could see the book being better than the movie which is normally the case.

This film also explains what other zombie films decide not to and gives more of a definitive answer behind the virus and how it evolves, which was probably also explained in the book. No spoilers, it's in the trailers, but these kids don't exactly look like zombies because the virus hadn't mutated to that stage when they were first infected, therefore you get half zombies? You know, I wouldn't hold back from saying they're fairly vampiric in the way they feast on people and still look human, but with scarier faces when they're in hunting mode (I mean if vampires devoured a bit more than just blood.) That's been in a movie before right? 

Aside from the bloodiness and vampy zombies, the main character is this little infected girl who is just trying to hold it together in her school for zombie children. Well it's more like a child prison but these people still have some humanity and are at least teaching them things that normal kids would have learned pre-apocalypse. The girl develops a bond with the teacher played by Gemma Arterton (whom I can't remember when she was in a movie last) and that's kind of the emotional connection that pushes the story along. "Don't kill her she's just a child, I mean she's a zombie but I love her like a daughter and she helps us sometimes?"

The ending of this movie also made me laugh. Again, I won't give it away but the way things ended up for our two main characters was happy, in some manner of speaking, but for how long?. The movie makes it seem like it's all good but after everything I witnessed throughout the hour and fifty min run time I just didn't buy the happy ending. I was just imagining all sorts of fun post credits sequences. Think the stinger in the Dawn of the Dead remake. So, I didn't hate it, it was good for one or two shrieks and an "oh shit" moment and certainly a laugh or two. Actually the main theme song for the movie is a pretty decent track. I checked out the whole soundtrack on Spotify and it's mostly just different versions of that song throughout with just a few additional songs. Check this out if you want to see a fresh take on the zombie genre!