cockneys versus zombies

I seemed to go through a terrible stretch of movies during this period.

Having not enjoyed Fanboys and The Raid, I then received Cockneys versus Zombies.  I'd heard this wasn't very good, but was hoping it would be a bit of humorous relief.

Unfortunately, it wasn't all that funny.

One of the problems with it is that it doesn't actually seem to have much of a grasp on what it wants to do with "cockneys" side of things.  Yes, it's set in the East End of London and the older characters are definitely getting into "proper" cockneys territory, but the younger element of the cast could almost have been anywhere.  And it's the younger element of the cast that's really carrying the story.

Well, I mean, obviously the story is a bit thin, but it takes up most of the time, so they're obviously on screen more of the time.

It almost feels like the whole "Snakes on a Plane" grand-concept thing.  They've come up with a title and then tried to work a plot up so that they can call it Cockney's versus Zombies, but in reality haven't really achieved that as it could have been set anywhere - there's nothing all that cockney about it

It also fails to really hit the mark in terms of scares and laughs.  I'm guessing one of the inspirations for the film was Shawn of the Dead, but the problem of course is it's not as well written and not as funny.  Also, one of the things that's probably not obvious with Shawn of the Dead is that it's actually a RomCom in structure with Zombies added as a twist.

CvZ lacks this as its core, which is okay, there are other types of films, but it's replaced it with something along the lines of a heist movie, and it doesn't do a very good job at being a reasonable heist movie.

The effects were okay, if a little thin - I'm guessing that they couldn't quite scrape up enough budget to do everything they wanted and the horror side of it ended up without enough cash to do lots of good, gorey kills.  It doesn't make up for that by being scary - there are some good jumps, but it's not really a horror movie-proper.

And as I say, it doesn't achieve the trick of being a comedy either, so it was very disappointing.