With a title that sounds like the kind of joke offering that would turn up on Jay Shermans show in ‘The Critic’. It was literally only the knowledge that ‘Pride and Prejudice…and Zombies’ was a film adaptation of a highly successful range of books that made me hit play on this thing…In hindsight I should have left it in the charity shop I found it in…UNOPENED I might add…

The plot BROADLY speaking is the same as the 19th century novel, only now theres the introduction of Zombie outbreaks across most of England and our sisters have all been training in Chinese martial arts. it deviates more and more from the original source as it goes along, but all ties back together by the end…and thats kind of this films biggest problem.

It has a serious case of identity crisis. Its a period piece AND a zombie movie…but it’s period elements have all the charm of an unenthusiastic BBC adaptation, and the zombie/horror elements feel fiercely underplayed. Leading to an end product that I dont feel will really appeal to either party. The period fans will feel like the zombie elements and lack of respect for the source material is in bad taste, while the zombie horror fans absolutely WONT sit through the 19th century affairs of the Bennet Sisters…

The script utterly DRAGS on almost every level. I was honestly surprised to learn that the original author apparently had a close hand in shaping this film, because it seems to almost represent the antithisis of what the books represented. What we have here is a very dry production that almost seems to want to shy away from the Zombie/Horror/Kung Fu Bennets element that makes the thing worth watching.

The pacing is beyond a crawl as we slowly and painfully work through what can most sincerely be described as a sighing attempt at period work. Theres been a complete misreading of the tone, this should have been a campy, over the top, jet black comedy with oodles of gore, silly moments and energy as we watch these characters from much loved works of fiction, get thrust into a scenario thats COMPLETELY tonally opposed to what the original work offered.

Instead; we get a meek offering that feels WAY too wedded to the original source material and tries to play it as straight as possible. And dont get me wrong, I can appreciate that sometimes taking a ‘Straight man’ approach to something inherently silly can, in and of itself, make something even funnier. But here, it just results in an incredubly dry offering. Theres maybe one or two isolated momets where them playing a jokey bit straight laced actually works. But for the bulk of the film, it feels like the martial arts and zombies are an inconvenience that the period piece has to just sort of…deal with every 10 minutes…rather than an intigrated and involved part of the narrative.

The act structuring is there, the core elements of a passable script are there, they’ve just been handled so poorly in translation to the screen that they’ve totally missed that POINT of what the book was about. absurdism…and this things about as absurd as magnolia. It clocks in at 102 minutes and you feel every second of that 102 minutes as if it were twice that.

The direction is messy, bland and incoherent, theres a standard to this production…but ‘just bearly holding it together’ from a studio is a woeful endeavour make no mistake. Its a film that trades heavily on post colour correction to give it a style, and I can honestly say that there were better offerings floating around on youtube at the time…which is stunning to think honestly.

Theres no sense of artistic vision here, everythings been shot seemingly for function or because it looked like a cool idea at the time. which has resulted in a tonally disjointed work that, by the 45 minute mark left me asking why I was watching…

Its the cine really where I take the most umbridge. Because the film is kind of seperate into two sections, the period bits and the horror bits. It makes it a bit cleaner for me to talk about them both.

The period bits are bland, they’re shot without any creative relish or interest. if you fed the BBCs period piece output from 1985 – 2013 into an AI generator, this would be the movie that would come out. Theres nothing new to it, no moment where I thought ‘oh this is nice!’ just…total mediocrity across the board as we drudge through the same types of locations, using the same types of shots we’ve seen over and over again. Its. DULL.

The horror elements dont fair much better either, with HEAVY use of CG on everything from the zombie effects to blood sprays and stabbings, most of the horror sequences are tinted dark blue or gray so you IMMEDIATLEY know its a zombie bit. again, shots are drab, lifeless. Nothing we havent seen in zombie related media in the last 15 or so years. its totally uninspired and lacked any real kind of depth or attention.

and only compounding the issues further, the fight scenes and martial arts sequences…Which are supposed to be the main thing to try and hype up the audience…are just SO badly shot and edited it becomes almost headache inducing. This is a film that feels that quick cuts automatically equal fast paced action…rather than it just looking like someone dumped a load of B-roll into a blender and then assembled what survived into 10 second bursts.

Its totally disorienting and left me wondering what I was even watching whenever it was on screen. This combined with the seeming reluctance to even WANT to have martial arts zombie battles just makes what little is there feel even less like it belongs.

The edit is just…awful. the basics are there in terms of cuts, but theres been no thought or consideration as to why. I honestly can say, this could have lost 40 minutes off the runtime easily and still have felt over long, sequences breath till they pass out basically. and the actual interesting bits flounder because of the seeming demand for the period piece elements to be front and center. Its such a dissapointment.

I cant fault the cast particularly, though they do feel a little ‘BBC’ in quality which is a *little* down market for a studio production, same goes for the scoring really which again, isnt bad..but isnt studio grade.

I just feel like this one was a massively fumbled ball. Had it been raw-er, more open to embracing the gore and heavy black comedy elements, more interested in taking a self aware look at itself and less bothered about offending people who likely were already going to be offended at the bastardization of Jane Austins work…Oh! and more willing to actually trying to merge the two genres its working with together, rather than it just being ‘period bit…zombie bit…period bit…zombie bit…period bit (with some martial arts…oooh.)…zombie bit.’ This could have been a completely different story.

As it stands…well, im glad its off my shelf.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/pride-and-prejudice-and-zombies/