DVD Review: A Plague So Pleasant

By Jeffery X Martin

Anyone with a decent camera phone and at least two acquaintances can make a zombie film. It’s that simple. Because of the simplicity of the basic set-up (don’t get eaten), we’ve gotten a lot of zombie flicks that are the same thing over and over. Eat that leg. Yank out those entrails. Cut off those zombie heads and for the love of all that’s profitable, don’t stray from the formula!

A Plague So Pleasant is a movie from writer/director Benjamin Roberds. He doesn’t change the formula, but he does lean it up against a brick wall, smack it around a little, and steal its wallet. What we get is a zombie movie with arthouse pretensions that manages to do what other movies that have followed that path fail to do: it works. And it works exceedingly well.

This movie does some rewriting of the standard mythology. That Zombie Apocalypse everyone’s been waiting for lasted a grand total of 12 hours. Two billion people died, but still. It wasn’t a long, drawn-out thing. As soon as the humans stopped shooting, the zombies stopped biting. Now, the zombies are kept in fenced compounds, where they spend their days like cattle, wandering around grassy fields. It only takes one thing to mess things up: a girl.

When Mia (Eve Boehnke) refuses to date Todd (Max Moody, in a great Peter Serafinowicz-like performance), because she’s still in love with her zombie boyfriend, Gerry (Gerry Green), her brother Will (David Chandler), takes matters into his own hands. No spoilers here, but let’s just say that shit goes downhill in a hurry.

Composition is king in this movie, and director Roberds sets up some beautiful, startling shots. For a movie filmed on digital video with an estimated budget of $1,400, A Plague So Pleasant shows the talent of its director quite well.

So, what do I mean by “arthouse pretensions?” Well, the first 20 minutes or so are in black and white. How does that work out for you? You should also figure out how far into the undead allegory you’re willing to descend. What do the zombies represent to you? What’s the thing you fear that you can transfer onto them? You should also know that this movie has a slow pace. It took me a couple of times to get into it, but once I did, I couldn’t have been more pleased.

A Plague So Pleasant is an above-above average entry into the glutted zombie movie department. The patient viewer will be rewarded. The easily bored will wake up wondering what happened. But the real takeaway here is that there are more stories, interesting ones, to wring out of this genre. It looks like the zombie movie ain’t dead yet.

A Plague So Pleasant was released on September 29 by Wild Eye Releasing.