It should have been a literal no-brainer, a violent mash-up of two enormously popular, seemingly distant, but in some ways overlapping genres: the witty regency-era romantic comedy of Jane Austen and the broad, gory satire of the zombie apocalypse. Sure, the source novel - Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride And Prejudice And Zombies - was so lazily and clumsily written that it made Jane Slayre look like Jane Eyre, but that was kind of irrelevant. It always felt like a novel that was only written as a route to getting a movie made, after all, with the concept much more a riff on screen period dramas and the living dead than their literary equivalents. The filmmakers were buying the rights to Grahame-Smith's fun pitch, not his appalling prose, and there was plenty that could be done with that. The early trailers and marketing materials looked promising, nailing the style of a generic regency period romcom and then delighting in truly skewering it. But when the film came out it turned out just as much a disappointing, witless, charmless squandering of a fun B-picture concept as the book. Anyone desperate to see their beloved Lizzie and Darcy reimagined into a bunch of new scenarios, though, shouldn't be too distressed. From TV and film to video games to YouTube, there have been plenty of far cleverer reworkings of the iconic romance. Just take a look at these for starters.
