Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

                                 
Director: Burr Steers
Year:  2016
Rating: 7.5

I am a big Jane Austen fan; admittedly more the screen adaptations than the books which I have never read or finished in truth. I tried both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility but at some point cut bait and fled for Raymond Chandler or some other hardboiled detective type. But I love the films and TV shows. Whether it is Greer Garson and Olivier as Liza and Darcy or Keira Knightley as a ravishing Liza or Colin Firth as a dashing brooding Darcy I eat that stuff up. Sense and Sensibility from director Ang Lee is one of my favorite films. And I may not have read Jane Austen but I have read a couple of the Jane Austen mysteries by Stephanie Barron in which the author does her best to imitate Austen's style and has Jane narrate the books. I quite like them.



So if I hear there is a new adaptation of Pride and Prejudice I am off and running like a hungry orphan for soup and that is what I did today by going to see a new version in the theaters. It felt like home week. The Bennett sisters, dear old dad and mom trying to find them wealthy husbands, the rolling English countryside, the lavish balls and gowns, Darcy trying to beat down his love for Liza, the boring cousin who will inherit everything when the father dies, the sinister Wickham, the gentility and fine manners, the class differences were all on display in the film. Oh, and zombies. Lots of them. I don’t recall them in the original but like I said I never finished the book. In the film Pride + Prejudice + Zombies, zombies have overrun England and the human race is fighting for its survival in Merry Olde England. Liza and her two sisters have been trained in the Shaolin Monastery in China to be deadly killers. Darcy is pretty good at slicing and dicing zombies as well. But between killing zombies love blooms just as it did in the old films. A lot of the original dialogue is actually kept, but a little bit is added, like “The zombies are coming to kill us all.” or “Now who would steal all those brains?”






I expected the worst of all films - something akin to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter which was like being beaten over the head with idiocy for 90 minutes – but I found myself quite enjoying this. Sure it is silly but rather fun and how can anyone not like the sight of the three Bennett sisters in flouncy frocks charging a horde of zombies with swords a flashing and flying heads in all directions. This is based on a series of three books. Sense and Sensibility has not escaped this updating as there is a book called “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters”. I wonder if Jane would object if she were around. Perhaps but think how rich she would be! And perhaps find her own Darcy. Sadly, the ending of the film seemed to be setting itself up for a sequel, but it never came. Maybe the Zombies ate it.