Shaetano83

Somehow they manged to take the original story and remove most of the interesting parts, leaving us with a slow and atmospheric exposé of loss and grief. What it does it does great, it's beautifully filmed and the acting is good, but it's just not enough. The entire point of having the dead come back to life is to examine all the implications of this happening, the original story understands this, it's in the title "Handling the undead", it asks the question of how to deal with this situation. But here most of those implications are glanced over or not touched upon at all, making the supernatural elements superfluous. Ultimately this movie had worked much better if it was just a story about three families experiencing loss, maybe in some kind of sliding doors scenario. It unfortunately feels like a missed opportunity and a waste of good source material.

All in all it's a fairly standard fantasy story. A group of unlikely friends and rivals go on an adventure that is more about the journey than the destination. There's a decent amount of callbacks to the original, and even a few nicely edited cut ins from the movie. However the story lacks the direction of the original, and seems to wander at times. It's also more concerned with romance than the original, which is understandable due to the difference in target audience. The visual effects are nicely done, and the environments beautiful. The acting is sometimes pretty good and sometimes not very good at all, some of the jokes are spot on and some fall flat due to how they are delivered. Similarly some of the props look amazing, and some just look cheap. The soundtrack consist mostly of (bad covers of) modern pop music, which only serves to take you out of the experience. This is yet again because of the target audience, but I feel that this is the part that brings it down the most for me, especially considering how iconic the soundtrack of the original is. In my opinion it's a 6.5, but I give it a 7 because a 6 is to low.

I expected more of a story about a struggling video rental store, where the employees have to find new and creative ways to keep the business alive, possibly set in the late 90s to early 00s. Instead we get a fairly typical workplace comedy that centers on quirky employees, and with the usual will-they-won't-they romantic subplot.

The characters are generally likeable and the actors do a great job portraying them, but the jokes are rather uneven, sometimes they are really funny, and sometime they fall flat. All in all it's an OK comedy show, it reminds me of Superstore, but not quite as good. It might be that my expectations were too high, or that they haven't found their rhythm yet. Hopefully they'll get a second season so they get a chance to polish the show further, and it might just become a classic.