2. Dead Creatures - 2001

This movie is a Fangoria Films release, which means lovely low-budget movie making from horror fans around the world. In this case London is responsible for the funny accents. The setting is on the down and out streets and in the dumpy flats of broke, hard-living youth. The struggles of a group of girls who have contracted a cannibalism disease invokes both the familiar zombie plot and the nostalgic addiction junky-tales iconized by Trainspotting in 1996. The girls have contracted the disease that renders them dependent on human flesh, from various innocent interactions like dating crushes (a metaphor for the STD epidemic) or simply helping needy bystanders while strolling home with groceries.

The subtle fascination comes in the realized relation to how disheartening everyday struggles are if you’re poor, lonely, and confused about your future, in your post-teenage years. Though the main concerns for the girls are finding victims to eat and hiding from a (less than shady) zombie hunter, they talk openly amongst each other about hopelessness, death, the bleak “meaning of it all” and the sorrow of growing apart from estranged parents, all the while throwing back longnecks of Stella Artois.

The “tomorrow’s another day” anti-ending is great, and besides the almost pointless zombie-hunter character and the poor choppy sound quality noticeable during the one-on-one dialogues, this film is a pretty enjoyable little story, by the director that will eventually bring us the campy mild teen hit “I, Zombie.” I say watch it.