Warm Bodies
Directed by Jonathan Levine
Written by Jonathan Levine
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich, Rob Corddry
Summit Entertainment
Rated PG-13 | 97 Minutes
Release Date: February 1st, 2013

Back in 1993, Bob Balaban directed an obscure romantic zombie comedy (a rom-zom-com, if you’re one of those people) called My Boyfriend’s Back, about a teenager who returns from the dead as a zombie to take his high school sweetheart to the prom.

I won’t lie to you, I secretly kind of love My Boyfriend’s Back – it’s a guilty pleasure, what can I say. As a kid, I would rent the VHS tape every other weekend – along with The Sandlot and Critters – until the tracking button on the VCR begged for mercy.

Guilty pleasures (code for ‘bad movies’) are essential to appreciating good cinema. I won’t say My boyfriend’s Back paved the way to my discovery of films like Touch of Evil or The Seventh Seal, but as the late film critic Pauline Kael once said, “Movies are so rarely great art, that if we can’t appreciate great trash, there is little reason for us to go.” Amen, sister.

Balaban’s movie is great trash, and worth seeing for, if nothing else, early appearances by actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Matthew McConaughey, Renée Zellweger, and Matthew Fox.

Why am I talking so much about this damn movie? Well, because I found myself thinking of My Boyfriend’s Back and films like Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead and Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead while watching Jonathan Levine‘s latest film, Warm Bodies, based on the novel by Isaac Marion.