Cara Theobold, Ryan McKen, Leah Brotherhead and Hamza Jeetooa star in zombie-comedy Zomboat! streaming on TVNZ OnDemand now.
Cara Theobold, Ryan McKen, Leah Brotherhead and Hamza Jeetooa star in zombie-comedy Zomboat! streaming on TVNZ OnDemand now.
Opinion by Karl Puschmann
Karl Puschmann is Culture and entertainment writer for the New Zealand Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
When the new plague hit on Tuesday night there was a boring, yet no less dismaying, predictability to the ensuing pandemonium. Hordes rushed to supermarkets. The roads out of town filled up. I reached for the whisky.
As this isn't our first rodeo, you'd think we'd all have bettersurvival plans in place. Nope!
Once again, humans surged together to ransack supermarket shelves as a highly infectious virus swirled through the air while others showed a woefully poor and selfish sense of judgment as they sped off in their cars to potentially spread the virus to otherwise uninfected regions.
Me? I don't escape scrutiny either. With no idea how long the jaws of level 4 will remain clamped tightly shut, I really should've been rationing that sweet, sweet nectar instead of making a bit of a dent in the bottle on the first evening. A rookie error if ever there was one.
But as the days have ticked slowly over behind our closed doors, and the number of infected and areas of interest has swelled I've found myself in an increasingly apocalyptic state of mind. Perhaps that's why this week I reached for horror's comfort food of zombies.
Zomboat! sees Jo (Cara Theobold) and Kat (Leah Brotherhead) escaping zombies by boat.
Maybe it was the whisky, maybe it was the Delta outbreak, but whatever it was these infectious, walking dead monsters just felt absolutely perfect for right now.
But I also felt like I needed something funny. As the old saying goes, laughter is the best medicine - although honestly, I'd much prefer the Covid vaccination to any comedy special or sitcom right now. My booked-in jab day can't come fast enough.
So with these two requirements of zombies and comedy in mind I flicked on Zomboat! a new series with a pun title so bad that I have to respect it. The show, which is streaming on TVNZ OnDemand, is about a small group of survivors trying to flee a zombie apocalypse in Birmingham, England, by boat.
Leah Brotherhead and Cara Theobold star in Zomboat! streaming on TVNZ OnDemand.
The series opens with news reports and an eerily relatable warning: "Police advice is to stay inside and keep your doors and windows shut."
That advice is left unheeded when a zombie surprise attacks sisters Jo and Kat in their flat. After some ineffective - but very funny - attempts to dispatch it with makeshift weapons like a bread knife or a wooden rolling pin, they eventually take it out and escape the house.
Being an avid gamer and pop culture buff, Kat has planned for the unlikely event of a zombie attack. But just like anti-vaxxers, her sister Jo is initially reluctant to believe the cold hard facts staring her right in the face.
"It can't be a zombie apocalypse," she says, "because that's not an actual thing."
"Why don't you explain that to the guy over there eating his own arm?" Kat replies, pointing at a dead-eyed zombie snacking on his own appendage beside their letterbox.
This gory evidence quickly convinces Jo, leaving Kat to detail her survival plan.
Cara Theobold as Jo in Zomboat!
"Zombies can't swim. It's a famously underutilised anti-zombie measure," she explains. "The Walking Dead would've been over in one series if Rick Grimes had used his brain and gone to the Everglades."
Her brain's identified Eel Pie Island, a small island in the canalways of London's River Thames, as a zombie safe space. After hijacking a canal boat they sail off down England's slim canals towards their destination.
There's only 167 small problems with her plan. The first is that canal boats are painfully slow, being made to gently putt through scenic countryside, not whizz away from the flesh-eating undead. The 166 other problems are the canal locks standing between them and Eel Pie Island. Each of these standstill points offering potential for fatal zombie attacks.
They also discover two stowaways onboard, friends Sunny and Amar who'd spent the weekend in Birmingham at a stag do before all the zombie kerfuffle. At first the pals had planned to hijack the boat from the hijackers, but their incompetence is quickly recognised and instead they all decide to join forces in their dash to safety.
Escaping zombies in Zomboat!
A few episodes in I can say that Zomboat! is a lot of fun. It's smart and funny and punctuated with occasional splatters of gore. But even scenes of zombies being stabbed in the eye, or run over in a car, or having their guts unwound from their stomach are played for laughs rather than frights. In that regard it's hugely reminiscent of the classic zombie-comedy flick Shaun of the Dead.
In these very precedented times there's easy metaphor to be found in these highly infectious, super-spreaders of death. But we all know the deal with zombies, no need to bang on about it.
Instead, let me recommend escaping from the reality of our very real infectious killer by floating away with Zomboat!'s fictitious ones.
