Summary
“Night of the Mini Dead” is a fun work of technical craftsmanship somehow putting the “cute” in “global zombie apocalypse”.
This recap of Love, Death + Robots season 3, episode 4, “Night of the Mini Dead”, contains spoilers. You can check out all of our coverage of this show by clicking these words.
“Cute” and “zombie apocalypse” aren’t typically words that you’d find in the same sentence, but that’s the hook of “Night of the Mini Dead”, and you’d be surprised how well it works across six scant minutes.
Love, Death + Robots season 3, episode 4 recap
Those six minutes cover a lot of ground, from an ill-advised sexual liaison in a church cemetery that inadvertently desecrates the site and unleashes a zombie plague upon the world, to a flight into space as the undead tear down everything from remote mountaintop monasteries to centers of political power. It’s all taken in from a slight remove, as a canted angle, like an isometric video game set among models of towns and cities with inch-high citizens. Voices squeak, first in delight and then in terror, as the snowballing effect of the undead plague picks up unstoppable momentum.
There’s no larger point or theme to “Night of the Mini Dead”. It’s purely an exercise in technical craftsmanship rendered in the most anachronistic way possible. Zombies are boring, these days, and the relative seriousness with which they’re taken in popular culture is a played-out joke in itself. This episode meets the gag halfway. It treats zombies as a cartoonish menace and the concept of an apocalypse as an excuse for sight gags and small-scale destruction. The broad sweep of the story is predictable by design; an all-too-familiar downfall occurring essentially on fast-forward.
There’s a case to be made, and these six minutes make it well, that if you’re going to do another zombie story, you should do it briefly.
