Warm Bodies is a slacker zombie romance film with heart.

It does owe a debt to the Twilight movies as well as Romeo and Juliet. The soundtrack helps a lot as well.

Set in a post apocalyptic America. Human survivors are small in number and live within an enclosed wall of their city.

Grigio (John Malkovich) the militant leader send sends a group out to look for food. This includes his daughter Julie (Teresa Palmer) and her boyfriend Perry.

They are attacked by some zombies that includes R (Nicholas Hoult) who eats Perry's brain and in doing so relives Perry's memories.

R saves Julie and they hide out in a plane. They both seek out fun such as driving a fast car. R finds that he is changing such as being able to dream again. Other zombies in his group also start to change developing emotions and speaking again.

It is only the bonies who are skeletal zombies who are pure evil.

Writer/Director Jonathan Levine does something refreshing and even fun with the zombie genre. Warm Bodies is offbeat, it does not all make sense and it certainly lacks gore.

Yeah, WARM BODIES is a mess, and unlikely to thrill the viewer unless they're an American teenager, because this film is squarely aimed at the TWILIGHT market. In fact it's pretty much TWILIGHT with zombies instead of vampires, and it's a film that serves to thrust post-modern mindless slacker humour down the throat of the viewer at every opportunity. Needless to say that I hated every moment, and sitting through it was a chore indeed.

The unlikeable Nicholas Hoult plays 'R', one of many zombies in a post-apocalyptic world, who inherits the memory and emotion of a random jock guy when he eats his brain. He ends up falling in love with the guy's girlfriend, a blonde bimbo type whose name I can't even recall. John Malkovich co-stars as the girl's tough dad and you feel sorry for him being mired in such an outing.

The plot is essentially Romeo and Juliet, but with lots of laughs and undead jokes along the way. There's some supernatural stuff thrown in too, like a twist involving the whole zombie epidemic thing which I didn't much care for. Plus, with the zombies being good guys for once, there has to be a breed of super-zombie as the real villain, which is all nonsensical. Anyway I was never going to love this film as it's the sort of soft, mainstream nonsense I automatically hate; your mileage may vary.

R (Nicholas Hoult) is a zombie, but he's trying to remember his human life. He's barely about to grunt a word out, and he has a friend (Rob Corddry) sort of. While hunting, R runs into human Julie. He falls for the girl, and saves her from the zombie pack.

There are a lot of zombie movies out there. I mean aaaalottttt. So it's not surprising that people are trying to explore a more expansive zombie universe. Zombies are faster, slower, funnier, and parodied. Now zombies are falling in love.

It's something new. I wouldn't say it's funny. It's not. It is curious, and somewhat sweet. Nicholas Hoult is a good emo zombie. The difficulty lies with the grunting halting speech. It makes the dialog hard to listen to. This makes the interior narration absolutely vital. It was probably important to try even more internal dialog.

As for Teresa Palmer, I'm not sure she's star material. She's a really pretty girl. I really like her, but I still see her as the girlfriend character. The other girl in the movie is Analeigh Tipton. She might be marginally better as the lead. She seems to have a little more comedic skills.

I am very happy that people aren't just doing the same old zombie movie over and over again. This story had obvious obstacles. I think it overcame most of them relatively well.