WASTING AWAY (a review)

WASTING AWAY (a review)

A cool idea. Not cool execution.

The story: four friends in a bowling alley eat infected ice cream and turn into zombies...except they don't know they are zombies. In fact, they think they have been given a super soldier formula while everyone else has turned into zombies. And now they scramble around the city trying to live their lives, afraid of the "infected" until they realize that they are the zombies

Was it good?

Not quite. I mean, it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't actually good either. Which is too bad because telling a zombie story from the zombie's POV is a great idea. The problem is it just doesn't go anywhere. Most of the time the people don't have any real goal -- they think others are infected, but don't seem to be trying to do anything about it (either running toward help or trying to kill them or finding a cure or whatever) and the one note joke of them being zombies and not realizing it isn't that funny to begin with and repeated again and again doesn't make it more funny. The thing about these POV shift stories -- like MARY REILLY which told the story of Jeckyl and Hyde from the maids point of view or WICKED which tells the Wicked Witch's story from Wizard of Oz -- is that they actually have to have a story, something to say. there needs to be a good reason to tell a story from this shifted point of view and just "I thought it would be neat" isn't enough. So in the end it's a lot of running around, a couple jokes repeated over and over and not much else. The funniest parts are when one of the zombies who is just a head begins leading the group. That was a couple good laughs. The rest was blah.

*** NOT RECOMMENDED ***