Is this a parody or a ripoff? Warm Bodies is so up front with its copies — copies– of Twilight that, judging from the trailer alone, by the time it hit theatres, I was sure it had to be a straight-up uppercut to tweener romance. I’m not so sure now.

But I am certain that the leads, Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer, were chosen for their resemblances to Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart (respectively, I think), both in looks and in their mutual tendency to overact. The story, however, is lifted from Romeo and Juliet and Zombies — and at least anyone who has yet to take freshman literature should be able to make the connection between Juliet and Julie (Palmer) and R (Hoult) and Romeo. That gets a pass though, since Shakespeare probably stole the story from somewhere else.

Anywho, Julie and R live in your standard zombie apocalypse. A big wall separates the humans from the Corpses (as they’re so called). And there’s a special subset of Corpses called “Bonies” (feel free to giggle like a high-school freshman who has yet to read Romeo and Juliet yet) — these are the folks who’ve decomposed to the point of full-on skeletalization. Somehow they’re still able to move and sniff, but there’s more than a few suspensions of disbelief.

There wasn’t much going on this Saturday, so I figured I might as well take the Brown Line up to the Western stop, then catch the 1:10 viewing at the Davis Theatre. I wasn’t much in the mood to head downtown to one of the AMCs, so I decided to venture uptown.

The Davis is one of those theaters that looks like it’s been around for years. It has the old-style theater sign with the letters descending in vertical order. I’d been there once before to see The King’s Speech with a friend who lives around the area, but I didn’t remember the distinct smell of urine that pervaded everywhere, from the box-office to the screening room itself.

Worldwide audiences thought that vampires may be getting a bit stale, so why not hop on over to the world of the flesh-eating dead and take on a few zombie-based properties. Studios saw how successful things were over at AMC when they took a chance on a comic book about zombies, so why not tackle a book without pictures in Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies.

Not only is the film already deep in the works, but they are already looking to the man who we once spent an entire 90 minutes Being, John Malkovich. Here’s the report on the film from THR:

John Malkovich is in negotiations to play the baddie in Warm Bodies, Summit’s adaptation of the zombie-centered book by Isaac Marion.

Zombies are hot right now–strike that, warm. Zombies are warm right now.

At least, that’s what Summit Entertainment believes, as they’re adapting the very recent book by Isaac Marion titled Warm Bodies, a romantic zombie thriller. The studio is so keen on the idea, that they’re about half way done with the lead casting. From THR:

Teresa Palmer, who received a lot of notice for her breakout work in I Am Number Four, is in talks to star opposite Nicholas Hoult in Summit’s zombie love story Warm Bodies.

Jonathan Levine is directing the project, which, in a tone described as Twilight meets Shaun of the Dead, follows an existentially tormented zombie named R that begins an unlikely friendship with the human girlfriend (Palmer) of one of his victims. The blossoming relationship starts a chain reaction that will transform him, his fellow zombies and maybe the whole lifeless world.

Summit seems to know their romanticized monsters, as they’ve gotten the whole Twilight world locked down inside of two films. What’s next? Werewolves in heat? Only time will tell.