Although the casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Abigail Breslin suggests Terminator and Little Miss Sunshine versus zombies, Maggie is a serious movie, with bottled-up performances and soupy grey visualsTracy Bennett
Anne Rice, a key author in animating the undead genre, wrote her 1976 novel, Interview with a Vampire, following the death from leukemia of her five-year-old daughter. In Maggie, first-time writer-director Henry Hobson uses a fictional dying daughter story in an attempt to add gravity to the zombie genre.
Although the casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Abigail Breslin suggests Terminator and Little Miss Sunshine versus zombies, Maggie is a serious movie, with bottled-up performances and soupy grey visuals.
A Kansas farmer, Wade (Schwarzenegger) returns from the city with his recently bitten teen daughter, Maggie (Abigail Breslin), oozing teen angst along with a suppurating arm wound from a zombie bite. For the next few weeks, Wade, his skittish second wife (Joely Richardson) and kids watch, along with sympathetic or hostile neighbours, for Maggie to begin "the turn."
Ultimately, neither the brain-eating genre or the heart-breaking one is enhanced by this mash-up. Like Celine Dion's cover of AC/DC's You Shook Me All Night Long, file it under the category of "interesting-but-why?"
Liam Lacey