I'm going to have to stop this "Give me four movies to select from" strategy for Movie Night. Last night my choices were:
Stand by Me: Same-sex love among homophobic kids vanishes when they grow up and get married. Geez.
Bad Hair: A horror movie about hair care products?
All of Us Strangers: Bereaved gay gay falls in love with a ghost? F*k the Sadness.
Warm Bodies. Nicholas Hoult, on the icon, was cute, and how could a movie about zombies go wrong?
A zombie (Nicholas) narrates. He can't remember his name, but later his human girlfriend names him R, as in Romeo or ARRR! His limited cognitive ability means that he doesn't remember what happened, sparing us scenes about the origin of the zombie Apocalypse.
Left: Nicholas butt.
ARRR spends most of his time plodding around the Montreal-Trudeau airport with the other zombies, hanging out with his friend MMM (Rob Conddry) -- all they do is grunt at each other, but isn't that what living guys do, har har -- and filling his airplane-lair with knicknacks that he scavenged.
Next door, behind a wall much too high to be even slightly believable, the humans live in a refugee camp and scrounge for food. Except for the evil President, who lives in a palace.
Some of the town teenagers, including the President's daughter Julie -- Juliet, get it? -- and her boyfried Perry -- go beyond the wall to scrounge for medical supplies, and the zombies attack. ARRR sees Julie, and gets the most exaggeratedly corny "love at first sight" look that they ever taught you not to do in acting school. He notices Perry, and gets rid of the competition by eating him.
But in this world, when you eat someone, even a tiny piece, you absorb their memories. ARRR absorbs Perry's memories, all of which involve Julie: falling in love when they are toddlers, their first kiss, their first sexual experience, their declaration of love, and so on ad infinitum.
Through the entire movie, I thought Perry was being played by Zac Efron. No, it's someone named Dave Franco, who could be Zac's identical twin. Seriously, they look exactly alike.
The other teens just hide until the zombies leave, but ARRR tricks Julie into thinking that he has to save her. He takes her to his airplane, and they proceed to fall in love.
Eventually Julie wants to return to human society, mainly because there's almost nothing left to eat at the airport, so ARRR tries to sneak her out. The other zombies want to attack,but he holds her hand and -- get this -- they instantly calm down. "Oh, you're in love. Why didn't you say so? Even brain-dead zombies understand that heterosexual romance is the most important thing in the universe. Go on through."
More heterosexism after the break