NEW FEATURE - MOVIE CHOICES FOR KIDS

Once a week, I'll be running my movie review column called, MOVIE CHOICES FOR KIDS, here on my blog. The column is written to help parents make good movies choices for their children. Feel free to comment. This is the kick-off column. Please remember this is not an opinion for adults.

WARM BODIES (Running time:  1 hours 37  minutes)

RATED PG-13     Starring Nicholas Hoult, Theresa Palmer, Robert Corddry, John Malkovich

I was not expecting to like this movie. In fact I was expecting to hate it. Boy was I surprised! So much for accurate movie trailers. A zombie romance, what could that be about? The story was much broader than that. The story begins in an apocalyptic world where a virus infected people, killing them and turning them into zombies and then some into “bonies” skeletons that run around eating living people. Zombies kill people and eat their brains, which was pretty disgusting and a bloody, horrific, scary part of the movie.

One zombie, a guy about twenty years old (Hoult) who doesn’t know who he was or is gets an inkling that living humans have it better and he’d love to rejoin the living, who are barricaded behind a huge iron wall. This is a poignant part of the story where our zombie friend ponders what it would be like to have memories, dreams, be able to sleep, feel hot and cold and love.

A party of young human military personnel venture out of their safe place to find a pharmacy and bring back medicine. All but two are killed, one being Julie (Palmer). Our zombie, named “R”, has eaten Julie’s boyfriend’s brains. I know, yuck! And has his memories. So he knows Julie and falls for her. He saves her and takes her to an abandoned airplane where they get to know each other quietly.

Slowly, R begins to come back to life, which is the underlying theme of the movie – that zombies can be warmed back to life by human acceptance, support and love. I like that theme and smiled to find it in this movie, which I thought would be simply silly.

Warm Bodies is a sci fi thriller with a moral and plenty of humor. There are quite a few scary parts and the “bonies” can give you nightmares. There’s bloody violence, zombies eating brains (pretty disgusting), the “f” word mumbled once, but otherwise no bad language, no sex, one simple kiss. This film is best for kids who don’t scare easily and are not prone to nightmares. Most likely fine for children 13 and up and adults will get a kick out of it, too. 

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