Review: Cockneys Vs Zombies / Cert: 15 / Director: Matthias Hoene / Screenplay: James Moran, Lucas Roche / Starring: Georgia King, Lee Asquith-Coe, Michelle Ryan, Alan Ford, Honor Blackman / Release Date: October 22nd
Like the shambling, bloody corpses we see on screen, the zombie genre keeps on coming seemingly without end. The latest film in the sub-genre to impress is Cockneys Vs Zombies which has a love of the zombie film as well as a love for a sub community of our nation’s capital that seems to be sadly disappearing in our modern age.
Starting with the opening of a tomb beneath a new housing development which leads to the unleashing of an old virus of some sort we then go into a brilliant comic book inspired credit sequence and this sense of comic book fun continues throughout the remainder of the film. Two brothers (Rasmus Hardiker and Harry Treadaway) decide to stage a bank robbery with their cousin Katie, dim witted Davey and mental case Mickey, to save their Granddad’s (Alan Ford) old people’s home from being demolished to create another new housing development. During the bank robbery and with hostages taken, the zombie apocalypse begins with the virus unleashed in the prologue. The gang have to make it across to the East End to rescue dear old granddad and the other inhabitants of the home as the world goes chicken (Chicken Oriental = mental).
Far from a mickey take, the film has a fondness for the residents that make up the characters of the film and their language and beliefs. There are funny moments involving cockney rhyming slang and all of its peculiar offshoots that are really great to listen to; the film has a very working class ethic and affection for the disappearing importance of the family and the sing song around the piano that make you yearn for a simpler time. With the housing development plot line as well as the zombie apocalypse, the sub-text is there although it’s not immediately obvious on first viewing.
Substance is one thing but films like this live and die by their action and gore content and Cockneys Vs Zombies has this in spades. Heads explode, faces are ripped off and all manner of graphic disembowelling’s happen. For what was a low budget British affair, the film portrays an epic apocalypse in the capital very well with lots of zombies and shots of smoking ruins off in the distance. The characters are all very likeable in their down to earth no nonsense dialogue delivered with tongue placed firmly in cheek and you actually care for them the way that you don’t necessarily with the exaggerated cartoon characters that populate Guy Ritchie’s London set thrillers.
Cockneys Vs Zombies sounds like a disaster on paper but turns out to be one of the most entertaining, thrilling and touching zombie films of 2012.
Extras: Behind the Scenes, Zombie School, and Trailer
