5. Make-out With Violence (2009)
The sentimental teenage universes of John Hughes collide with the dark, morbid worlds of zombie fiction in Make-out with Violence, an independent film that gives us living-dead girls drinking rat shakes, captured with all the moody poetry of a young Terrence Malick. Sewed together out of so many disparate emotional pieces, Violence is an admittedly challenging film because its rarely ever playing as just one thing. The individual sequences are sometimes baffling, but the cumulative effect of the Deagol Brothers singular vision is one of poignant yearning and melancholy, which is kind of a new trick for zombie movies. How can I explain this in a way to tempt you? Imagine if one of the Breakfast Club mysteriously disappearedlets say Molly Ringwaldand then she reappeared, as a zombie. Thats essentially whats happening when lovely, undead Wendy shows back up in the lives of the Darling boys and throws the neighborhood into disarray. Taking elements of the Peter Pan story and turning them on their head, Makeout works best as a kind of eulogy for childhood innocence. You might be expecting 80s style shenanigans but this all goes a much darker direction when the brothers realize Wendy is just a shell of her former self, and needs her food alive and wriggling when she eats it. Smart, sad and sometimes humorously grim, Make-out with Violence is a delightfully odd and absorbing little gem.