The Scope

“Zombies?! In Spain?!”

What kind of horror movie is it? Zombie apocalypse shenanigans

Xavi (Samuel Gonzales) is a mall drone who’s eager to impress the beautiful Carol (Aroa Gimeno). Unfortunately, today is zombiegeddon! He’ll have to team-up with one of Carol’s thuggish companions and an ice cream vendor in order to save the world… or at least the sporting goods section.

Today’s Blogowe’en entry is going to be shorter than usual, as the film described here is a scant seventeen minutes and thirty-six seconds long. Still, it’s a real breath of fresh air in the irritatingly trendy world of zombie flicks

See, everyone will tell you they’re a fan of zombies nowadays. They love zombie walks. They go as zombies for Halloween. They totally made a zombie movie at their friends house one weekend.

Then, you ask one of these zombie fans if they’ve ever seen Peter Jackson’s Braindead (aka Dead-Alive) or a George A. Romero film that wasn’t made in the past ten years and the answer is almost invariably no. Zombies are still a fad of the 2000s, but rather than cry foul of supposed poserdom, I envy these neophyte undead worshippers. Sure, some are just hopping on the bandwagon, but many are just developing a love of horror movies by catching 28 Days Later or Shaun of the Dead. I remember how young and innocent I was when caught Re-Animator, Dawn of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead or Evil Dead II for the first time, all at the tender age of 13. Those cult clasics blew my widdle mind, and I went out of my way to show them to all my friends. I hope you are content to dig up the classics rather than settling for such C-grade insomnia cures like the 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead or the likes of Resident Evil 1-3.

There’s so much you young whippersnappers have to look forward to!

Nonetheless, today’s Blogowe’en is as modern as this blog gets, as it was just released this year. I’m not going to reveal much about the plot, but all the familiar elements are there: low-key romance, hordes of the undead, a shopping mall location, a rag-tag group of characters who form an unlikely (and unstable) team to fend off the zombies, and a goofball sense of humour. Where Cigarettes differentiates itself from the pack is where it doesn’t emulate its brethren. The abrupt conclusion not only gives us an all-too-rare glimpse of what it’s like to not be the hero in a genre film, but subtly spoofs the ubiquity of zombies. After all, if everybody knows about zombies from the glut of movies about walking corpses that Hollywood cranks out every few months, their weaknesses would be readily apparent and human beings would be a lot better prepared than, say, the cast of Night of the Living Dead.

If there’s one thing this short could teach American filmmakers, it’s how to keep up the pace. At 17 minutes, this short is not one minute longer than it has to be, and tells a fun zombie story with a few pleasant surprises. When they decided to remake Dawn Of The Dead without keeping any of the film’s satire, plot twists, or likeable characters, all that was left was a big-budget, crappy zombie movie in a mall. Here though, filmmakers Martinez and Roman show unimpressive craftsmen like the Dawn remake’s Zach Snyder just how it’s done.

Availability: The whole short has been made available online courtesy of the filmmakers. It’s well worth your time.

Short film Zombies and cigarettes / English subtitle from Rafa Martínez on Vimeo.

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