The Girl With All The Gifts

#StokerScore 6/10

There was a time when you could rely on your horror movies to stick to the rules. Vampires were debonair/voluptuous, werewolves were hirsute and usually not of their own free will, ghosts rattled chains, serial killers were never stopped by the first thing that should have killed them, and zombies shuffled, slowly and menacingly in search of brains.  There were no A-list stars, the sets were relatively cheap, the blood was plentiful and there was no message other than not to indulge in sex before marriage as that way you could avoid said horror staple sending you off to hell.....then it all changed.

well, it's not Top Gun, is it?

I'm not sure which movie it was that changed the way each genre modified their own future, was it 28 Days Later for the zombies? Was it Alien for the ET's? I'm sure that movie buffs out there could tell me, but I generally embrace change, especially where horror movies are concerned, it's just that we seem to have hit a writers block and this is especially so with zombies. On one hand we have The Walking Dead, these reanimated corpses are still not referred to as zombies but are classic shufflers, taking out the human population either by force of numbers or appearing, silently, at the most inconsiderate of moments. Then we have the zombies in The Girl With All The Gifts, ravenous sprinters whose need is for human flesh and the spread of their virus. The problem with these two examples is that they're getting a tad boring. TWD is at season 7 now (I packed in watching after Season 5, so repetitive was the whole thing) and TGWATG is really just 28 Days Later but instead of the experimented zombies chained in the laundry yard, the experts have found other ways of assessing the virus, mutation. 

That being said, I loved seeing Glenn Close with the Army buzz cut, Paddy Considine being his usual mister dependable, and Gemma Arterton being Gemma Arterton. Alongside these stalwarts was child actor Sennia Nanua and bless her she really tried. She was saddled with some horrific dialogue but in the early stages of the film you really felt for her character and that was more than could ever be said for Kevin McAllister in Home Alone. 

Characters still do stupid stuff that warrants untimely deaths, so I guess some original horror movie tropes are respected and if you like a (very slight) change to your zombie fayre then this would be worth your time but I think zombies are in need of an upgrade or maybe we could go back to the voodoo roots?