The Undead Symphony

Darren Smith, Michael Avery and Guests
  • 5.0 (3)
  • ARTS
  • UPDATED TWICE WEEKLY

An undead podcast discussing all things zombie. Movie reviews and TV shows, franchises and chats with fans and the ghouls and boils who bring us this much loved genre.

  1. 23 HR AGO

    Episode 336: Last of the Living (2009)

    Send us Fan Mail In Wellington, New Zealand the only known survivors, out of work actor and Lothario Morgan, computer game nerdy accountant Ash and wannabe rock star Jonny enjoy the apocalypse the right way; by living in mansions, drinking beer and playing computer games. But when they run into Stef, a rather delightful scientist who is working on a cure and needs to get to Stewart Island, they have to finally get serious. Okay, so it wasn't Proust, but it wasn't the bottom of the barrel either. Akin to the Dutch Zombibi or Kill! Zombie! this was amusing, a few funny bits but nothing laugh out loud. A simple premise well acted but with some poor cinematography. 90 minutes on the dot of low budget unoriginality with a couple of fun kills, and an unsatisfying ending. Still, watchable. 5.5/10 from me. I enjoyed it a lot more than Cold Storage.

    45 min

  2. 3 DAYS AGO

    Episode 335: Cold Storage (2026)

    Send us Fan Mail Finally! I had been waiting for this one since pre-ordering it a month or two ago. COLD STORAGE with Joe Keery Georgina Campbell and Liam Neeson. A comedy horror movie that looked great in the trailer. And the thing about that cast is Georgina Campbell if anything has the horror chops of the three – Barbarian, the Watchers, Bird box, Influencers, Psycho Killer and has The Shepherd coming out too. We also have Ellora Torchia from Midsommar as Abigail So to the plot, when a highly contagious mutating fungus escape a sealed facility, two young employees joined by a grizzled bioterror operative must survive the wildest night shift ever to save humanity from extinction, as the microorganism spreads and destroys everything in its path... After a strong start in Australia with Sosie Bacon it fell away. I thought it was entertaining but weak, not in any way better than the Bruce Campbell Black Friday effort. The repeated jokes like about a suitcase bomb felt flat, Travis’s talking ghetto, and all the deaths just seemed just ok given the opening in Australia including Hero's suicide.  In short the trailer had all the best bits. Black Friday I scored 4/10 and I am going to give this the same. Despite some good bursting, the effects were weak, akin to Black Friday, the plot line of Abigail having to help as Richard Brake's Colonel hated Neeson was strange. The dialog was poor and cheesy. I am a bit disappointed to be honest.  Now, it is still head and shoulders above the TUBI shit I could have seen, but I am very disappointed by it and wish I hadn't prepaid for it. So, yes, it is a 4/10 for me. Very meh. Average at best.

    39 min

  3. 29 MAR

    Episode 334: Death Metal Zombies (1995)

    Send us Fan Mail PLAY THIS MOVIE LOUD!  The soundtrack is by Pungent Stench, Evit 13, Dead World, Brutality, Disrupt, Mortician, Pyogenesis, Candiru, Winter, and Dismember. If you don’t know who they are, just check grandma's record collection, and it follows a group of bad acting metal heads Brad, Tony, Johnny, Kathy and Angel as Brad wins a contest to get the latest album by his favourite band Living Corpse. The cassette includes a unique song that is not available anywhere else in the world. A song, that when played turns Brad, Tony and Kathy into zombies at the beckon call of the band. So is it virus or voodoo? It is definitely voodoo. And this makes sense to me as the zombies are just slow shuffling looking humans, staring and with dark rings around the eyes. Whilst some reviewers slagged the FX off for not being either bloody Fulci zombies, or blue Romero zombies, I think this is absolutely, and probably accidentally, in keeping with the style of voodoo zombies. Anyway, Angel must save the guys by playing the song backwards, and all the while a serial killer is bear hugging people to death in a Richard Nixon mask. Tricky Dicky indeed. I would have hated it more if I hadn't just seen Hsien of the Dead, and so this is going to be a 2.5/10 for me, on par with Pro Wrestlers versus Zombies. Which may sound bad, but there are over 30 movies below it in our list. Maybe not avoid if you like bad b-moves with a heavy metal theme.

    31 min

  4. 29 MAR

    Episode 333: Hsien of the Dead (2012)

    Send us Fan Mail The elation of finding a movie from our 42nd country was short lived within the first ten seconds of Hsien of the Dead, Singapore's Shaun of the Dead from 2012 and a supposed comedy. Although it was as funny as a road accident. This was awful, just plain awful. The 5.4/10 on IMDB is a reflection of a few idiots giving it 10 and then plenty of people giving it 1/10, and that was only because you can't give 0. With the worst level of amateur acting, bad shot choices, poor camera quality, terrible effects, and pointless plot lines, Hsien, a young army enlistee, Ah Huay a cosplaying martial artist, Edward a porn sensor in the ministry of propaganda, and receptionist Hana all fight their way to meet up in a parking garage, before going out, then back to the parking garage, with the idea of getting off the island on a boat. There is very little to redeem this movie. It is as if random people from the street were asked to ad lib scenes without talking about it before, and with total strangers. The toy helicopter, the cardboard chainsaw, and the terrorist were all low lights in a movie that had perhaps two amusing jokes, dozens of extras, and that I hated. This was 73 minutes of my life that I won't get back, and you can thank me for taking this one for the team. It is the worst movie we have seen since Oasis of Zombies, that at least has the permanence of still being around 50+ years later. Avoid this one. It was not one of those movies that are so bad it was good. This was just so bad. 1/10

    46 min

  5. 16 MAR

    Episode 332: Michael Catchup about Res Evil Series and Black Summer

    Send us Fan Mail A little chat-ette to start the week, as Michael appears in the rear view mirror to discuss the short-lived Netflix Resident Evil series and the first season of Black Summer amongst other things.

    54 min

  6. 15 MAR

    Episode 331: Godforsaken (2022)

    Send us Fan Mail I am going to be lazy here. These two reviews summed this movie up for me. A review 5/10 Some decent elements, but felt like it would never end Once you get past the cheesy low budget acting, there are some good parts to this movie. Some creepy scenes and the guy who played Chris was great and genuinely creepy. Chad's mum was also a good character/ actor.    But the last 30 minutes felt like 4 hours, I thought it was never going to end. Just non stop running and screaming and shakey camera. I got bored.    The girl, Katie, was pretty annoying in the 2nd half just constantly crying. I was relieved when they finally all died.    When the 3 of them were trying to hide, why did they seem to make as much noise as humanly possible? Stop screaming and make a plan maybe. 2/10 Demonic Zombies I watch about 3 horror movies a day searching for those hidden gem ones.... This was not one of them!! I feel like this movie had a good idea but it was poorly executed. The acting was soooooo bad!! The fake crying was awful and constant for about the last 25 minutes of the movie! It's hard to like any of these characters by the end. Also jerking the camera, yelling and screaming like a blubbering idiot isn't an enjoyable watch! Whoever wrote the dialogue for this movie did a terrible job! I really couldn't wait for it to end...Awful...just Awful! Also a cat and a dog get killed, they're eaten and it's very bloody! In short, the best thing about this movie was that it was 77 minutes long, and that was still 65 minutes too long. A very unconvincing found footage movie where the idiot filmmakers basically filmed everything, including driving there, going to a bar, walking to a friends house to get stoned, and even when a first aid kit is needed, picking the camera up to go find the first aid kit. The two reviews captured it, this was shit, they were annoying and too loud. It is a 3/10 for me, the worst movie I saw this weekend, and that includes two movies from Pakistan Out of the found footage and documentary style movies I have seen recently this was a poor, poor, poor Canadian cousin to the others. Savageland 6.5/10 The Bay 5 this piece of shit 3

    33 min

  7. 15 MAR

    Episode 330: Hell's Ground and Altered Skin

    Send us Fan Mail Two movies from Pakistan in this episode, all prompted by Ollie Eats Brains who had just discovered Altered Skin but hadn't seen it. Taking a look into it further Pakistan doesn't have too many horror movies and the list of zombie movies is even thinner on the ground. They do have their own webseries version of The Walking Dead called Zombistan but I am here for the movies. After a bit of research, i.e. I googles Pakistani zombie movies, I got two, these two so decided to watch them both. The idea for both of these movies is that the pharma and chemical companies through corruption in government just dump their waste into the waterways and the horrors that follow. Hell's Ground is a 2007 gore fest apparently that tells the story of 5 teenagers from Karachi that bunk school to head to a concert and end up lost in the woods and preyed on by zombies and a family of psychopaths. It is widely classed as Pakistan's first gory movie.  And it was alright. We see people demonstrating about the water quality and it causing zombies that look like they have leprosy as the groovy gang of Roxi, Ash, Simon, OJ and Vicky get lost in the woods whilst stoned. Simon is bitten and one by one they end up running into the darkness for one reason or another and are preyed upon by a spiked ball and chain wielding psychopath and his family. So, it all gets a bit Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 5/10 And Altered Skin was just dull. It was a conspiracy story with investigative journalists getting kidnapped and murdered, as an American ex-pat tries to find the truth to why he wife is in a coma. My interpretation of what the zombies could be was more interesting than the movie itself and other than about 8 minutes of chase scenes and a final battle, the most poster was the best thing about this one. 3/10

    1hr 12min

  8. 6 MAR

    Episode 329: Chrysalis aka The Living Dead (2014)

    Send us Fan Mail Despite the sneaky rebranding of this movie, from changing the title from Chrysalis to The Living Dead, to making the DVD box look very The Walking Dead including the font and the colour scheme, and including the tag line about day of the ghouls making us think of both Day and Night of the Living Dead, this 2014 low budget post-apocalyptic zombie effort is actually ok. It was referenced in one of the reviews of The Cove aka Escape to the Cove as being so much better and that reviewer was right. I mean, there was plenty to annoy me throughout, mostly that this is set 30 years post the end of society and still todays events, thoughts, attitudes and knowledge is referenced by people who were not even born when the world came to an end. It tells the story of Penny and Josh who are ambling around the post apocalyptic US, occasionally coming across running infected as they camp out in broken down warehouse after cliched broken down warehouse. They then meet Abira, who is heading to the city to meet a group who want to rebuild society by taking the city back block by block. A truly stupid notion if you ask me. And Abira has secrets. I actually thought it was well done. I have seen far worse. I have also seen better. The acting was fine from the 3 leads, and the tension was palpable. Would I watch it again? Probably not. Would I recommend you see it? if this is your bag, then yes. Strides better than The Cove and Zombie Warz, and the like. 5/10

    48 min
See All (336)

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

An undead podcast discussing all things zombie. Movie reviews and TV shows, franchises and chats with fans and the ghouls and boils who bring us this much loved genre.

Information

  • Creator
    Darren Smith, Michael Avery and Guests
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    336
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Undead Symphony
  • Show Website
    The Undead Symphony