I finally got around to watching this movie, after seeing the painfully adorable trailer on YouTube but being too lazy etc. to track it down.
Somebody uploaded the whole thing onto YouTube so I watched it, feeling guilty because I was supposed to be working and also because I wasn’t paying for it.
I assume this movie didn’t get a great distribution deal, partly by having no (American) big names in the cast.
And maybe idiots thought Americans wouldn’t “get” it. OK, but who cares if only a certain slice of “foreigners” like me would recognize minor stuff like the use of the On the Buses theme song at one point? Can you really not figure out that “lockup” means “storage container” and so forth? And the accents were NOT hard to get past unless you are a particularly bumpkin-ish American.
But the same could have been said for Shawn of the Dead, which this movie obviously resembles.
It’s too bad because it was pretty fun.
It was also kind of depressing though, for the same reason The X-Files depresses and irks me.
Yeah, I’m going to post the last segment of Cockneys vs. Zombies, because it’s relevant to my point. Obviously, don’t watch if you plan to view the whole film.
So, yeah, “Cockney shrinkage” has been a problem for a while.
But as Mark Steyn has noted repeatedly, shifting East End demographics have added to the problem:
The heart of the Cockney East End: 85 per cent Muslim
That’s why the chin-up “London’s survived worse” optimism at the end of this movie is unfounded and intentionally or unintentionally naive.
Because you’ll notice that the East End in this 2012 film has… NO MUSLIMS. Zero. Not as the living or the dead.
Now, I wish I could tell you that the zombies in this movie are some kind of Muslim-metaphor but that would be intellectually dishonest. With no knowledge of the filmmakers’ real intentions, I’m going to guess that Cockneys vs. Zombies was a nostalgic labour of love, a paean to the East End (both the real one and the one of legend), which is disappearing.
But it’s not disappearing for science fiction reasons and therefore the filmmakers either couldn’t or wouldn’t even hint at it.
Perhaps they are Labour “zombies” themselves and refuse to acknowledge what’s really going on.
I hate to say, “If the Krays were still alive…” but, well, it’s true.
Where are all the skinhead football hooligans I’ve heard about my whole fucking life?
