The ZRC Reviews ‘Zombie Hotel’
It took a bit of work and quite a bit of waiting for the Region 2 DVD to get here from the UK in our heightened era of Terror Paranoia (which serves as the backdrop for many an Anti-Zombie story I might add) but the ZRC is now ready to review ‘Zombie Hotel’.
(It’s sad that you still have to tell people that Zombies don’t all want to bite them, but I suppose it’s best to get it out of the way.)
Our organization had very high hopes for this television series, based upon Youtube videos floating around and user commentary; a kids show about the peaceful friendship of two Zombie children and one Living boy, going to a mainstream school for mostly Living kids? Dare we hope that Zombie Friendly programming aimed at the next generation was actually being made?
Well, was, past-tense. ‘Zombie Hotel’ ran for one season in 2006. And although it’s been aired in many countries, and dubbed into many languages, it doesn’t appear to have ever been considered for the United States.
This is all the more tragic considering the fact that it is, in fact, both highly watchable children’s programming AND Zombie-Friendly entertainment.
‘Zombie Hotel’ is, as outlined above, primarily about the Unlives of two Zombie children, a Zombie girl named Maggot and a Zomboy named Fungus. Yes, those are really their names. In Addams Family-esque fashion, the Undead in this series tend to have outrageous names but be perfectly friendly to outsiders. Likewise, their father is named Rictus and their mother Funerella. Which, really, I think is stretching even this joke a bit far.
This nuclear family runs a small hotel on the outskirts of a cheery nondescript town in a thoroughly unidentifiable region of the world, as suits a program meant to be localized all over the place, I suppose. Again like the Addamses, their home and only their home is surrounded by perpetual gloom and dark clouds, with some sort of dimensional rift open in the sky above. Also like the Addams Family, their neighboring conventionally animated citizens completely gloss over the obvious bizarreness of this situation; perhaps an example of what Douglas Adams characterized as a ‘Somebody Else’s Problem Field’.
The first episode sets up the show, as the Zombie family has decided to send Maggot and Fungus to what they characterize as ‘Human school’. That brings us to my one real objection to ‘Zombie Hotel’; the Zombies don’t think of themselves as human, exactly. They definitely don’t feel inferior to Living people, aka Humans, but they don’t see themselves as part of the community either. That’s a shame, and even if it’s just imprecise language, not something I’d want put in the malleable minds of the young. Zombies are people too, as we often say. No more and no less.
That aside, Maggot and Fungus are apparently the driving force in this decision, as their father is supportive but their mother is driven to distraction with worry about how the kids will fare in Human company. She makes them swear to keep their Zombie natures a secret, which the children reluctantly agree to.
(Yes, they make the one small step reference, but it really is wonderfully progressive for Zombie kids to get to attend school with everyone else)
The other children in town prove as unable to recognize the fairly obvious as anyone else, and Maggot and Fungus catch flack less for their pallor and dark, Romero-esque circles under their eyes than their outmoded clothing. They eventually befriend a Living boy, Sam, who had been bullied by the same children picking on Maggot and Fungus, and the secret slips out: Maggot and Fungus are Zombies.
(Fungus accidentally takes his family out of the casket, and worries about the fallout)
Not, however, the ‘sleeps in dirt’ kind, they reassure Sam that’s only in the movies.
(The primary trio, three friends not separated by the presence or absence of pulses)
In actual fact, Maggot and Fungus have the coolest beds I’ve ever seen in fiction or anywhere else: giant, many-eyed, huge fanged monstrosities. The Zombie children sleep snugly in the monstrosities’ mouths.
(The bed open…)
(and closed. I want one so badly.)
Over the five episodes on the one and, again tragically, only DVD (at least from the BBC), the three kids work together on school projects, helping out the hotel denizens and generally getting by in elementary school life. It’s pretty heartwarming stuff; from a narrative perspective, nothing groundbreaking, except by allowing the Undead to participate as equal members of a fictional community at all! Treating Zombies like people, sadly, is still revolutionary for television.
I would be remiss if I didn’t cover the last episode in this DVD package though, where the kids are assigned a movie-making project at school and decide, in a possible bit of meta-commentary, to make their very own Zombie movie, with Maggot and Fungus as the hapless human victims.
(Recursion or commentary? You decide.)
That is just such an awesome idea, and it’s very well-executed too.
(Directing is hard work, or so directors tell you, at any rate.)
‘Zombie Hotel’ receives our highest rating, that of Zombie Friendly, for its low-key and open-minded approach toward Zombie-Living integration, whether in our schools or in our larger communities. Though relatively hard to obtain, we highly recommend it to all our readers.
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