Juan of the Dead (3½ Stars)

In the last few years there has been a rise in the popularity of zombie films. Every time I browse the DVDs in my local supermarket I see new low budget films with "zombie" in the title or photos of rotting corpses on the cover. To be honest, I don't understand the fascination with zombies. Vampires are different. Vampires are sexy. Zombies are just ugly and disgusting. That doesn't mean that I don't like zombie films, as long as they're good. I intend to watch a few Japanese zombie films in the next few weeks. I just don't understand the latest zombie craze.

"Juan of the Dead" is a Spanish/Cuban film, made on location in Cuba. Juan is a lazy Cuban ex-soldier who spends his days lying in the sun and telling his friend Lazaro that Cuba is Heaven on Earth. It always has been and always will be the best place on Earth. He changes his mind when Cuba is suddenly, inexplicably, overtaken by zombies. He's forced to fight for his life.

This is a comedy, like many other zombie films. The Cuban television broadcasts refer to the zombies as American dissidents who are trying to undermine the Socialist way of life. Entertaining, but not worth watching more than once.

I've decided not to add links to film trailers in YouTube. Not regularly, anyway. While browsing my older posts I noticed that some of my links were broken. That's annoying. I removed the links from those posts, but I can't check every single post for broken links. In future I'll only post links to trailers if I think that the trailer is somehow significant in explaining the film.