Daemon reviews Flesh Candy

Flesh Candy. Right off the bat I have to give kudos for the name. I don't really nag on this aspect as much as I should, but there are a lot of good and bad machinima series out there that lose me from the start because of poor titling. A machinima with the name 'Flesh Candy' just begs to be watched, doesn't it? It's like naming your film 'The Mexican Porn Massacre'.

Flesh Candy is a zombie-themed machinima, which honestly aren't as overdone as everyone says they are. The setting is a post-apocalyptic military base, and the series focuses entirely on the soldiers who live there. That sounds good on paper, but in practice it proves to be very underwhelming. It took about six minutes for us to realize who these people were fighting, and we don't get a glimpse of the zombies until the very end.

The main problem with this episode is the focus. The writers are so intent on introducing us to the members of the squad and their motivations (usually through bloated exposition) that we learn almost nothing about the state of the world or the zombies themselves. When you're dealing with a zombie story like this that takes place in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, we need to see the zombies themselves immediately in order to establish an air of dread. Just a few shots in the opening of the zombies ripping at an old bloated corpse before the choppers arrived would have accomplished this perfectly.

When the dialogue doesn't lend itself to exposition it's pretty tolerable. There are some good one-liners peppered throughout and the characters seemed likable enough. But we spend so much time seeing this group of people as soldiers that we never see them as survivors, which is probably one of the most crucial aspects to focus on in a zombie apocalypse tale.

The visuals are of course stunning. This is the same group that made Crossfire, after all. The visual quality is great, as is the color correction, though I'd be open to seeing the show become more stylized over time. There's some really good sound design (particularly at the end), but I get the feeling that the composer wasn't really giving it his all. The music never seemed to leap out and seize me, but instead just laid back and vaguely established the mood.

Overall though, I liked Flesh Candy. If I'm nagging to learn more about the world that the story takes place in then someone did their job right. I'm sure most of my questions will be answered in future episodes, but if there's one thing I need to get across to the makers it would be that unless we can view these people as survivors of the zombie apocalypse, then you're not telling a good zombie story.