Episode 372: Shorts

A shorts day today, I am going to find and watch half a dozen zombie shorts and give you my thoughts. Did that rhyme? Woah, I'd better not break into song.

FIRST WAVE 2014 6 mins 55 on Youtube

The blurb - Following the outbreak of an aggressive virus, a young woman awakes in a hospital bed. As the horrifying events that led her there are revealed, it becomes clear that the cure is just the beginning.

Night. A man and his daughter are running from zombies towards a school or hospital building. And then a woman wakes up in hospital, cuffed to the bed. She screams and has flashback to being one of the zombies chasing the man and girl through a building, I think. Getting a hammer to the head in the process. She has a semi circular blood patten on the white of her eye and I have seen that in a zombie movie before. And I have in the 2017 horror film The Cured. In the movie, characters who are infected with a zombie-like virus and successfully treated with a serum are left with a visible mark: a distinct, semi-circular crescent of blood in the white of their eyes. Was this the short that allowed the Elliot Page movie The Cured to be made?

The doctor tells her she was the first, a great hope. More flashbacks. Her in a cell now. Good jump scare with a zombie outside and more flashbacks. The little girls dad is killed and she hides. And the doctor tells her they will all be released soon.

He asks her what she remembers…. No in the movie they deny remembering anything from their time as zombies, but do.  She just cries though. A she remembers being a zombie and then seeing the little girl and as a zombie getting more and more excited… end

Very good, this was definitely the short that became The Cured. Excellent. Watching it on YouTube saw the comments from people saying this is what needs to be made rather than Hollywood nonsense. And indeed they did make it.

Next SURVIVORS 2025 7 minutes When the unexpected side effect of a trial cancer treatment brings about the apocalypse, one man with his BMX and a Baseball bat, must use his martial arts skills to survive the infected hordes.

A cyclist in armour cycles around a quiet city. Overturned buses. Quarantine zone. This is a proper action short. Excellent zombie effects, as he rides into one and hits it with a baseball bat before being chased by a running horde.

It is proper BMX stunt riding to Are you gonna be my girl by Jet.=, jumping over barriers, riding up walls, clobbering the zombies. He gets knocked off his bike and his backpack comes off. He is then torn as zombies charge in, does he grab the backpack or get on his bike and leave? He goes for the pack and there is an awesome leg severing shot in slo mo. The violence is fun and OTT like the Bill Skarsgard Boy v World, but the blood and gore is all done in post that does let it down. I did laugh out loud when he hits the kid zombie.

He rides out and across town, and there are high up shots with zombies running after him. Again, done really well. He is heading towards other survivors, but comes off his bike. Is he gonna be killed? No the other survivors are as badass as him.

And after a cool drone short of their hide out… the biker opens the backpack and he has… a playstation… who wants a game fo FIFA? Who said the apocalypse couldn’t be fun? Well done the Kirby brothers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gQc06lHkC0

PASTIME 3 minutes by John Blankenship aka Matinee McCabre

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy5Oq9OJz1c

In 1968 the recently deceased mysteriously began to rise from the dead. There was no time for preparation, no time to draw battle lines. The plague ravaged our nation, our world. One by one our towns fell. No government could protect it's citizens from the virus. Until one of the only survivors was just nine years old.

It is beautifully shot, as a young boy walks around a forest, collecting water in a jar, walking around a town in the 60s with old cars out and rusted. He goes into a house and finds baseball cards and comic books. Taking them, as well as baseball. He heads out into a field and hits the baseball out and away, the tink sound of the hit waking zombies in the field who move in on him as he raises his M16 machine gun.

End. Wonderful and to the point.

SEVERED 2025 9 minutes 

After a zombie bite, Hannah’s only chance for survival is a brutal amputation with James’s machete. But when he fails to return, her infected mind conjures a horrifying rescue—forcing her to question what is real, and what is a final, cruel hallucination.

Very walking dead a couple of teens, a boy and a girl fight off a horde in the forest. The boy saves the girl, pushing her into a car, as he goes down under the horde. He then gets in but she has been bitten on the arm so they have to hurry. He then apologises and chops her arm off.

The boy finds a gun in the glove compartment. She gives a heartfelt monologue about committing suicide and not being torn apart or being one of them.

I had the end of The Mist vibes as he has the gun to her head but then the zombies move away. Or are killed and blood sprays up the car windows.

Them being in the car is reminiscent of The Battery, if you have seen it, about the two baseball players surviving in the car.

We then get very 28 Days later piano as the door opens and it is a ripoff Negan complete with Lucille, you kids want some help?

She then wakes up in the car alone and still bitten. And her boy is a zombie. I did think he was under the horde. So she screams and blows her brains out.

Well done, well filmed, great acting and special effects, just all done before somewhere.

Moving onto Dead Line from 2022 20 minutes

During a zombie outbreak, a recently bitten call-center employee working for a specialist 'Survivor Hotline' must help a young woman escape her infected mother and get to safety before he becomes one of the undead.

A British comedy with too much music, as a guy on a support line takes calls from the public. He tries to sell decapitation kits etc, listening to people wanting to deal with the dead, or spreaders as they are know.

After an off camera attack on the office, he is bitten and wounded. A woman then calls for help after her mother was bitten. He goes through his procedure booklet which has funny airline style diagrams. 

The whole thing is on him, at his desk, and was filmed during COVID, so it is just voices on the phone and him, as he starts to react to the bite on his hand. She hides in the bathroom from her zombie mother. And he says jump out the window, jump and roll.

He is dying, and trying to help her get to safety. Again, it is all over the phone. He calls a military rescue centre who have orders to shoot to kill anyone out. And he gives them shit, saying in death he will find the officer and eat his heart.

It is tense as lucy makes it to the military post, we hear shooting but she is ok, and the guy turns overnight but remains at his desk with the headset on even when a zombie,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jHA2i90Ndc

All of these zombie shorts were thoroughly entertaining, some original, some less so, but all done well. There is a huge amount of zombie entertainment out there in the short movie space and we should, as a community, support them all.

And finally, a special shout out to two zombie shorts I feel deserve some love, one of which is on the Disney channel no less, THE LAST MARRIAGE, and the very British STILL.

Next up I am going watch the 30 zombie shorts on ALTER, a fantastic high end Youtube channel, if you haven’t heard of you must check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtmNpo8LSL8ZUANvP8S54oAkURYsLFr9V

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi, I'm Ellie Ray Winstone, and I play Laura and Sophie in Employee of the Dead. And you are listening to the Undead Symphony.

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hello there, I'm Erin Truss, and I'm the co-writer and director of Employee of the Dead. And you are listening to the Undead Symphony podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

I mean, really, genuinely Friday recording with LA Winstone and Truss yesterday, watching all six episodes of Zomboat. And today what I did for you, what I'm doing for you, my beautiful dear listeners, is I'm going through some zombie shorts. Shorts, of course, are it's it's it is a SMED in itself, isn't it? You know, it could be anything from a minute or two or less, uh, all the way through to anything less than a uh anything less than a feature um based on my own uh zombie short that is hopefully coming out soon. Um I will be um submitting it to festivals that accept movies short movies that are less than 30 minutes. Uh many of them do less than 20. So if you're looking for zombie shorts, they could be anything. Anything out there from half hour down to a matter of seconds. Uh hopefully they're not a matter of seconds. Um and I suppose for the for the movie makers, uh the short makers, um it could be just a way of of of a stepping stone, if you like, into into making your first feature. I mean if I make if I put the Dradel of the Dead out there and people like Dradel of the Dead, then I do have a a zombie feature that I I want to make next. It isn't a it isn't just the expansion of Dradel of the Dead, it's something completely different. But if I could, you know, get the right people interested in a project based on this, then I do have a another stop motion zombie movie that I want to make, uh, which is more of a feature. So, yes. Here I am watching some shorts. So I've seen a few over the years, uh, quite a few over the years. Um, I will mention some of the others. Obviously, the big shout-outs that uh I did put at the end of the this podcast, but I'm actually gonna do it now. Uh The Last Marriage, for example, is an incredibly well put together Scandinavian uh zombie short about a couple living in the zombie apocalypse in a compound um with uh the zombified daughter, their zombified daughter in the shed. And the idea is that you know sp them splitting up or staying together. So is actually the human story of their relationship and their relationship with their daughter um in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. There's also the very British still um that uh the poster of still is actually one of the many posters on Eli's Wall in Trade of the Deb, because I think it deserves to be there. It is an incredibly clever short uh telling the story of the zombie apocalypse on a high street in the UK. Um when it happened, uh it's you know, it's one of those high streets where that he's got the regular shops and everything like that, and the charity collecting people and people who are uh human statues. And it's about a human statue, you know, painted silver, wearing a suit with a top hat and a walking stick who is just not moving. And it's really how long can he stay alive because the zombies are leaving him alone whilst he's not moving. So incredibly clever, very, very unique. So in this episode, I've got a few. I've got one, two, three, four, five. I've got five I have seen this morning, and I want to tell you about them because all of them are incredibly good. So this is short stay. Uh you know, short stay at school was because obviously we had to wear uh pants or trousers at school. Short stay was sort of like in the middle of the summer, or leading into the summer holidays when it was just so hot and we were allowed to wear shorts. So it's a short stay. Um so here we are, we're gonna have like half a dozen zombie movies. I'll give you my thoughts. Half a dozen zombie shorts, and I will give you my thoughts. And that did rhyme, but I am not. I'm gonna break into song. This is Davin Smith for the Undead Symphony, and this is episode 372, in which I'm gonna watch a pocket full of shorts, starting with First Wave. First wave 2014. It's six minutes and fifty-five seconds, and it's on YouTube. In fact, all of these are available on YouTube. Um The blurb is that following the outbreak of an aggressive virus, a young woman wakes in a hospital. Um as the horrifying events that led her there are revealed, it becomes clear that the cure is just the beginning. We start it as night, and a man and his daughter are running for their lives from zombies towards a building. The woman then wakes up in hospital and she is cuffed to the bed. There's a doctor and a nurse there who hide her hide her down, hold her down as she screams and flashes around as she has flashbacks of being one of the zombies chasing the man and the girl through the building. She gets a hammer to the head, or maybe it's one of the other zombies, they do kind of all look alike, but they are done incredibly well. And then the doctor checks on her and she has this semicircular hemorrhage in the whites of her eyes that I had seen before in a zombie movie, and I had. The cured was that they did these heinous, unimaginable things when they were zombies and they remembered everything they did, but they have to lie. They have to lie to everyone else and say they don't remember, because if they did, they'd be classed as even more monsters than they were, and so in that movie, uh the movie of this short, um they lie about remembering anything and say, No, I don't remember anything. Like so you treat me like who I am now rather than what I was then. Genius. Anyway, so the doctor says that she will be released soon. Ask her what she remembers, and she kind of doesn't say anything, suggesting that she doesn't remember anything from her time as a zombie, she just cries, and then sadly she remembers being a zombie and then finding the little girl. And it's actually done really well because she gets more and more and more sort of excited in sort of a brutal way before turning towards the zombie, and it was an incredibly good short. And I and some one of the commenters on the on that YouTube movie basically just said, you know, this should this is the sort of movie we want to see, you know, get away from that Hollywood rubbish. This is brilliant, and it is brilliant, and it was made as a feature film. Um it was made into the cured, which is excellent. So um well done, well done, everyone involved in the first movie. What was it called? What I'm trying to remember what it was called. First wave. So well done, everyone involved in first wave, and well done uh for making it into a feature, because that's the idea for a lot of people. I'm guessing, is that you make a decent enough short that it will uh sell the idea of your feature, and you know it's been done in the past. I mean, going back as far as you know, Billy Bob Thornton, Sling Blade, um, Yahoo Sirius, and Young Einstein kind of thing. So let's move on. Survivors from 2025. It's seven minutes long, and this is a this is a very different feel. Uh, when the unexpected side effect of a trial uh trial cancer treatment brings out the apocalypse, one of the one man with his BMX and a baseball bat must use his martial arts skills to survive the infected hordes. Um, this is a no nonsense fun uh zombie action epic. Uh a cyclist in armor cycles around a quiet city without overturned buses, and there's a quarantine zone, there are trains that have crashed, it's done really well, it looks good. Um he's racing around in his uh BMX, there are some excellent zombies with excellent zombie effects around. Uh he rides past one and clumps it with his baseball bat without getting off his bike, and he's being chased by a fast-running horde. And this is excellent BMX stunt riding. The guy's jumping over barriers, riding up walls, clobbering zombies simultaneously before he rides through a building and gets knocked off his bike. Now he had a backpack on. The backpack sort of lands on the ground after he splats the zombie, and now he sort of looks at well, if I get my bike I can escape that way, but I came out for whatever's in that backpack. We don't know what it is. We assume it's supplies of one sort or another. Does he grab his bike or does he grab the backpack? He goes for the backpack, and there's this awesome scene where the zombie chases at him and he hits the zombie sort of at shin level and severs its leg, and it's done incredibly well. The violent is fun, it's over the top, it's Bill Skarsgard in Boy vs. World kind of blood and gore. However, the the blood is done in post, and it's obviously done in post because it doesn't quite fit with what we're seeing on the screen. It's kind of like, oh, let's just add a splat there kind of thing. It's done well, but it just does it doesn't look a hundred percent. Uh I laughed at loud because uh after he kills a room full of zombies, there's his kid, maybe 10 or so, kid zombie, and he he sort of looks at it, tilts his head uh like a dog would, and uh and then he basically batters up and hits this zombie kid like across the room and into a wall. I genuinely laughed out loud at that. Um he rides out and across town. There's some excellent cinematography of you know drone shots across town as zombies are chasing after him at full belt as he's trying to outrun them on his BMX. But then he comes off his BMX hitting a rock in the ground. Um and is he gonna get killed? No, because other survivors are there. There's a fence with other survivors behind it. When those survivors come out, they're just as badass as him. So they're doing martial arts moves, they've got swords, they've got bats, and they take out all the zombies long enough for him to uh come back into the compound behind the Ching Link fence. We have a cool drone shot of their hideout, and the biker takes his helmet off and opens his backpack, and he's got a PlayStation. And it's like, anyone want a game of FIFA? Uh and uh I the tagline is Who said the apocalypse can't be fun? Um well done, the Kirby brothers who made this. Uh it was very good. It was fully thoroughly entertaining and couldn't be more different than uh the first wave before it. So that was Survivors. Moving on to Pass Time now. Pass time is by John Blankenship, aka on Instagram, Matine McCarb. Uh he's actually got an excellent uh YouTube channel, by the way. Uh, this one caught my eye the other day. Uh it's set in 1968. I recently uh deceased, the recently deceased mysteriously begin to rise from the dead. There was no time for preparation, no time to draw battle lines. The plague ravaged our nation, our world. One by one, our towns fell. No government could protect its citizens from the virus until one day, until one of the only survivors was just nine years old. Um and it's basically about this boy who's nine, um, who is walking around uh this small town. He got he walks around a forest, he collects some some stream water, um, he walks around the town. We've got some beautiful old school 1950s, 60s cars, you know, the ones you sort of see in Havana in Cuba, and they kind of rusted out. And I remember uh John actually describing how they were just there, and then he just um he just managed to capture the the footage because the owner had like pulled his garage door up or something. And it it's it's that kind of um fortune that allows you to get excellent footage. I always remember um on uh the set of uh Lord of the Rings, the first one, Fellowship of the Ring, uh where you have Sam. They basically they couldn't film because there was a heavy fog came in, and so Peter Jackson went out with like a handheld Cam uh and and uh Elijah Wood and Sean Aston, and then just got some some footage of them walking around the moors in this fog, uh, which is obviously on the way to Mordor, and it works so brilliantly they stuck it in the movie. I mean, fucking hey. I mean, why the fuck not? Um so this guy, uh John, managed to get some success uh out of a bit of luck. Someone having that those cars in a garage at the time they were filming. The boy walks through around town, it it's classic, it is so done really well, it's quite nostalgic. He goes into a a house, he goes up to a bedroom, he finds some comic books, he finds a baseball underneath a bed. Uh, he then heads out to like this overgrown brushland or field, throws the baseball out in the air and sends it flying uh with a pink, like it is, into the distance, and the bink into the distance uh wakes up all these zombies that were all laying around in the field. They all start heading towards him, uh, but he's got an M16. So he opens fire and kills them all. Excellent, beautiful, well done. It's like three minutes of your time. Uh it is uh if if the wonder years was set during a zombie apocalypse. Uh absolutely brilliant. Well done, John Blankenship, uh, for that one which was Pastime. Uh next, on to Severed. Now, Severed's interesting. Uh Severed, of all of them, it feels like is kind of just a Walking Dead uh ripoff, however, came out last year. Made really well. I mean it tells the story of Hannah and James after a zombie bite. Hannah's only chance of survival is a brutal amputation, hence the title Severed by James's machete. But when he fails to return, her infected mine conjures up a horrifying rescue, forcing her to question what is real and what is a final cruel hallucination. So I've seen the the ending of what 43 meters down and and whatever that one is where the the women climb to the top of that stupid fucking antenna uh and then fell off that they've just made a sequel to. Those kind of endings where it's kind of you know you're dying, so you're kind of hallucinating what's going on. So in a very Walking Dead style uh forest, a couple of teens, um, Hannah and James, a boy and a girl, are fighting off a horde. Hannah manages to get into a broken down car that is there and closes the door as James goes under the horde, and we think he's dead, but no, he manages to get into the back of the car, uh, and he seems to be uninjured. Uh she, however, has a nasty bite on her forearm, and obviously, this is the kind of zombie plague that infects you based on bite, so he gets his machete out, and despite being in a car, so you're not really gonna get a very good sort of uh power in your swing in the back of a car with a machete, he chops her arm off in one go. He then finds a gun in the glove compartment. Uh, she gives this very heartfelt monologue um about committing suicide, about not wanting to be torn apart, or become one and become one of them because her sister and her toddler were killed, and she does this whole thing about have you ever heard listen to a baby crying and then suddenly stop? And it's done incredibly well, well written, uh heartfelt, superb acting. Um and so you know, I was I was getting mist vibes at this point in time, you know, um very much so, because it's like, oh god, are they gonna just commit suicide and then the army turns up or something? Well, they're thinking of committing suicide, he puts the gun to her head, but then before he fires, blood spray sprays up the wheel walls because the zombies are being killed from every angle. So then being in the car was very reminiscent of the battery, that bit was very reminiscent of the mist. The whole thing does look like Walking Dead. We then kind of get a little bit of 28 days later piano, gotta see all the little parallels going on here. Uh and then the door opens and there's a rip-off Negan complete with a rip-off Lucille saying, You kids want any help? Uh he puts his hand out to her so she can grab him and she delays for a while. I was thinking, is it because he's put the hand out and it's the hand that you've just had chopped off? But he she puts her hand up, he takes her hand, but then she wakes up in the car alone and still bitten, because you know, at the beginning James was clearly going on down under the horde. She's been bitten, she's still got the infected arm, and James is a zombie outside. So she screams, put the gun, puts the gun that she found in the uh glove compartment to her head, and blows her own brains out. So incredibly well done, well filmed, well acted, and excellent special effects. It is just all been done before. Um, it's not bad in any way, I'm not saying that. I would say that this was certainly better than that Tales of the Walking Dead spin-off season. Um, so well done on what you've made. It could have easily been an episode of The Walking Dead, uh, you know, one of those bits where you learn about a backstory of a character who who you you meet. Um it it's just I mean it wasn't original like all the other things I've seen, however, it was done incredibly well. So well done on Severed, which only came out last year. Uh finally, uh, I'm gonna talk about Deadline. Now, Deadline is in 2022, it's 20 minutes, it's British. Uh it was made uh during COVID, I think, actually, and it's during a zombie outbreak. A recently bitten call centre employee working for a specialist, Survivor Hotline, must help a young woman escape her an affected mother and get to safety before he himself becomes one of the undead. I mean, this is a British comedy, there's quite a lot of music. It is literally a guy on a at a desk in an office with a headset on, um, as he talks, takes calls from the public, you know, he tries to sell them decapitation kits early on. Uh, we're listening to people who want to help want help in dealing with the undead or spreaders, as they're known in this movie. There's an off-camera attack then, and all of the people in the clause centre are killed. Um, other than him, and he's just been bitten on the hand. He then gets a call from a woman called Lucy, uh, whose mother is bitten and she wants help and she is panicking. Um, he's got a uh desk procedure book that he's going through, and the procedure booklet has interesting and funny uh airline style diagrams of people you know chopping zombies' heads off with chainsaws and the like. So the whole thing is on him at his desk, filmed during Covid, and it's all just voices at the end of the phone, um, with him reacting to slowly turning into a zombie uh and their calls. It's done really well, it is funny, it has a very limited uh you know story, so really it's not gonna be it could never be turned into a feature in this one, whereas the others had the potential of having more to it. Um he hides in the uh she hides in the bathroom uh from her zombie mother, and he's like, jump out the window, jump and walk, jump and roll, jump and roll. Uh he then calls the military on her behalf and says, Look, I'm sending a woman your way, and the officer is like, Don't send anyone our way. Uh we have orders of shoot to kill. And he goes, I don't give a shit what your orders are. In death I will find you and eat your heart out if you don't help this woman. We then do have this tense listening uh to her running around on the other end of the line as she gets to the military post and we hear shouting and we hear shooting, uh, and we think that maybe she's been shot, but she's like, They've saved me, they've saved me, they've taken me in. And then he's really happy, thankful, and kind of rests back before um before turning into a zombie overnight, and still being at his desk, still with his head sewn on, headphones on, uh headset on, and then he's sort of even take taking calls the next day, albeit as a zombie. I mean, all these shorts were thoroughly entertaining, ladies and gentlemen. I think I recommend for any of you zombie movie fans out there, just spend a day, go on to YouTube and find zombie shorts. Look for zombie shorts. You know, if you've got a like a threshold for how long you want to listen, watch them for, say, yeah, less than 20 minutes. You can sort by that. I mean, all of these were done incredibly well. We had Severed, we had Survivors, um I can't remember the names of the others. We had the the first wave, which became the cured, pastime, uh, and this, you know, it's all done, all done incredibly, incredibly well. There's a huge amount of zombie entertainment out there in the short movie space, and we, I think, as a zombie movie fan community should support them all. Um, next up, and I recommend you go there, is I'm gonna go and watch this 30, 30 zombie movie shorts on the altar. This A L T E R, uh fantastic high-end YouTube channel. If you haven't heard of it, you must check it out. And this has been a thoroughly entertained uh Darren Smith for the Undead Symphony. Uh, I've been watching Zombie Shorts, so I would just watch Deadline before deadline or watch Severed Pastime, uh Survivors and the First Wave. So go out, find some zombie shorts, and be thoroughly entertained.