The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

A daily roundup of all the undead news that shambles into view… Bookmark the home page or add the feed to your RSS for your daily dose of walking dead. Got news tips? E-mail me at cory.casciato[AT]gmail.com.

There’s a slew of DVD release info hitting, some of it contradicting previously asserted info (fun!). We’ve got word of October 13 for Pontypool on DVD (it hit on-demand today for you cable folks) which contradicts the July 21 date DVD Active reports. If I can get anyone at IFC to respond to my queries, I’ll get to the bottom of this. In less confusing news, REC is still slated for June 14 and grave-robbers-meet-zombie-gangsters flick The Crypt is coming to DVD August 11 after a limited theatrical release June 25. You can get a few additional details here. (Fangoria)

The talkmeisters at Fangoria Radio (Sirius channel 108/XM channel 139, satellite radio folks starting at 10 p.m.) will have Pontypool director Bruce McDonald and star Steven Hattie in for a chat. (Fangoria)

If you’re wondering what to get me for Christmas (in July), this oil painting of a toy zombie in front of the Seattle Space Needle is perfect, and will only set you back $32.99. (Fangoria)

A sequel to Greek zombie movie Evil (this one apparently called Evil in the Time of Heroes) is coming. There’s a teaser trailer after the break. (Quiet Earth via a Greek blog)

Who says there’s no new ideas in the land of the dead? The standard zombie tropes get twisted up with amnesia-like symptoms that alter the very perception of reality in the no-budget thinker Fugue State. I’m instantly intrigued. And there’s a teaser (which doesn’t really do the idea justice) after the break.

Finally, for those following the Zombie Movie Marathon Month saga, the final film list, in rough order (possibly final, but may undergo minor sequence changes) is also after the break. When we meet again, Zombie Movie Marathon Month will be upon us!

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A daily roundup of all the undead news that shambles into view… Bookmark the home page or add the feed to your RSS for your daily dose of walking dead. Got news tips? E-mail me at cory.casciato[AT]gmail.com.

The July 14 U.S. DVD release of the great Spanish zombie film REC is approaching soon. Today the DVD art was revealed, and man does it look like a first-time Photoshop user with no design skills created it. We can only hope someone in charge sees this crap and insists on a do-over. (DVD Active)

The mutant-femme-zombies meet dudes-behaving-badly flick Doghouse is set for release in the U.K. June 12. There’s a new poster for it, which looks fantastic. (Dread Central)

The latest iteration of Nazi-occult first-person shooter franchise Wolfenstein comes out August 4, which almost certainly means more Nazi zombies. And if you like your zombies in space, you’ll have to wait almost two months longer because Dead Space: Extraction, a prequel to last year’s hit Dead Space, comes out September 29.

After the break, there’s a trailer for frozen Nazi-zombie comedy Dead Snow, coming to VOD (video on demand) June 12.

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Zombies, as a rule, are more at home in film and video games than in literature. There’s no grand literary tradition stemming back hundreds of years, or even decades for that matter, as there is with vampires. The truth is, the vast majority of zombie novels are utter shit. Even among the good stuff, there’s no single great work, apart from very recent works from Max Brooks arguably, to point to as sterling examples of the form. Well, folks, in a decade or two that will change as David Wellington’s Monster Island becomes recognized for the masterpiece that it is.

Monster Island‘s story revolves around two characters, Dekalb and Gary. Dekalb is a former UN weapons inspector leading a mission to retrieve a stash of priceless drugs for a Somali warlord in exchange for a place for himself and his daughter in the new world order. Gary is a rather unusual zombie – a zombie who can still think, thanks to a clever plan devised while he was still alive. The paths of these two intersect fairly early on, with devastating consequences for Gary, then split, taking a number of fascinating individual twists and turns before meeting again for a satisfying climax. The surprises on each characters path are so integral to the story and so inherently satisfying it would be a travesty to spoil any of them, but suffice it to say that both must face dire circumstances in pursuit of what they desire, circumstances that change them and their initial goals.

Both characters are exquisitely wrought and developed throughout the story. Wellington manages to make them both sympathetic, even as they do terrible things. Making a zombie sympathetic to any degree isn’t an easy task, but Wellington isn’t your average hack horror writer. Surrounding these two characters is an excellent supporting cast, on both sides, alive and dead. Not surprisingly, since most of Gary’s companions are mindless dead, the bulk of secondary characters that get attention interact with Dekalb, from the teenage soldiers accompanying him in his mission to the survivors they meet in New York City.

The cause of the zombie plague is not revealed, but it appears to be supernatural for a number of reasons (again, revealing those reasons would spoil some excellent surprises). The average zombie is very similar to the zombies of George A. Romero’s Dead series – slow, nearly mindless (due to brain damage from asphyxiation as the person dies but before the zombie rises, it is explained) and always hungry. These zombies eat anything alive though – not just people, but animals, plants, even grass. And when they do, it fills them with vitality in undeath, healing wounds and giving them strength to go on. If they don’t eat, they slowly wither away and rot like normal dead things (well, normal dead things don’t walk, but you know…).

This is one of the finest zombie stories ever told, in any medium. It’s written in a spare, deft style that manages to pack maximum impact into minimal verbiage. There’s rarely a single word wasted throughout the story, from taut action sequences to tender, human moments to mind-blowing metaphysical revelations. Wellington’s mythology is well-developed, fully compatible with the popular view of the zombie and yet strikingly original in the realm of zombie fiction – I can’t wait to see how it develops in the two sequels. His characters are believable, his settings are real and his prose is gorgeous. This is an essential book for zombie fans – don’t pass it up.

You can read it online at the Monster Island website or purchase it from fine booksellers everywhere.

A daily roundup of all the undead news that shambles into view… Bookmark the home page or add the feed to your RSS for your daily dose of walking dead. Got news tips? E-mail me at cory.casciato[AT]gmail.com.

Director Gary Ugarek reports that Deadlands 2: Trapped has been acquired by Anthem Pictures. It may be coming to VOD (video on demand), since Anthem does that sort of thing. Presumably it will see a DVD release at some point as well. (Horror-Movies.ca)

The upcoming Wii zombies-in-space prequel game Dead Space: Extraction gets a preview from Kotaku. Short version: promising, but still needs some polish. (Kotaku)

Fine science fiction blog io9 has a thoughtful post up today asking the timeless (and slightly disturbing) question, can zombies be sexy? (io9)

After the break, you can view an insane bit of AutoTuned gimmick rap called “Zumbie” by Major Lazer. It’s about zombies, and probably NSFW.

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Considering June is almost upon us, I thought it was time I got serious about firming up this list. Here’s what I’ve settled on watching for sure:

Lucio Fulci’s Zombie
Nightmare City
Hell of the Living Dead
Zombie 3
Burial Ground: Nights of Terror
Versus
Tokyo Zombie
Plan 9 from Outer Space
Return of the Living Dead
Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things
Dead Set
American Zombie
Mutant
I Walked with a Zombie
Messiah of Evil
Day X
Grapes of Death
Night of the Living Dead (1990)
Pet Sematary

That’s nineteen, which is almost two-thirds of the month. There will definitely be three more Japanese zombie movies, which I’m inviting you all to vote for (poll at the bottom of the post and on the right sidebar). Leave me a comment or e-mail with suggestions on these. Here is the list of “maybes” I am still considering:

• They Came Back
• Dead and Breakfast
• Zombie Strippers
• The Stink of Flesh
• Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead
• Re-Animator
• Redneck Zombies
• Fido
• Evil
• Zombie Honeymoon
• Enter Zombie King
• Resident Evil
• Shanks
• Sugar Hill
• The Walking Dead
• The Fog

Also, if you have a blog, I invite you to join the Zombie Movie Marathon Month Film Club. It works like this: watch one or more of these movies this month (bonus points for watching them the same day as I do!). Write something about the movie on your blog, and link to my writing on the site from your post. E-mail me with the link. I link back to you! Fun! Easy! An excuse to watch a ton of zombie movies and maybe get a minor traffic boost!

Finally, I need a hand choosing which Japanese zombie movies to pick for my five days of Japanese zombies. No need to comment, just push a button. Never heard of any of these? That’s okay, you can pick them by title if you like. Or by art — the picture at the top of this post is for Onechanbara…

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A daily roundup of all the undead news that shambles into view… Bookmark the home page or add the feed to your RSS for your daily dose of walking dead. Got news tips? E-mail me at cory.casciato[AT]gmail.com.

Four brand-new clips of language-virus zombie flick Pontypool hit the Internet today. I’ve embedded one after the break, courtesy of Dread Central, and put links to the page with the other three. Can’t say much about them, because I haven’t watched them. See, I’m one of those weird, old-fashioned types that prefers to not spoil the best bits of a film before actually seeing it. But don’t let that stop you. If you can wait, it comes to VOD (video on demand) this Friday, making me wish I had cable TV. (Dread Central)

That sub-$100 budget zombie film Colin that’s been getting a bunch of buzz gets a bit more, with a brief story from Fangoria, including some words with the creator. And there’s a trailer, after the break. It looks intriguing, but cheap. Which I guess isn’t exactly shocking, is it? (Fangoria)

Live in Austin, Texas? Visiting June 13? If you answered “yes,” get thee to the Alamo Drafthouse for a special screening of Night of the Creeps, with director Fred Dekker and a bunch of the cast. The reunion will be filmed for the upcoming special edition DVD release, so you can point out your head’s silhouette to friends for years to come. Tickets go on sale tomorrow. (Fangoria)

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A daily roundup of all the undead news that shambles into view… Got news tips? E-mail me at cory.casciato[AT]gmail.com.

We’ve got another zombie apocalypse incoming! This one is called Autumn, and it’s a story about a plague that kills basically everybody in one very bad day. Then, in an even worse day for the survivors, the dead come back. It looks to be coming this fall (surprise, eh?), it has David Carradine and it sounds cool to me. Bloody Disgusting gets credit for spotting it and you can get more details and a trailer (unembeddable, sorry) at the official site. (Bloody Disgusting)

The upcoming issue of Rue Morgue has a piece on Dead Snow and a complementary piece on the fetid swamp that is the Nazi zombie subgenre, plus a piece about the Zombeatles and lots of other cool horror stuff. (Rue Morgue @ MySpace)

PopCap games are saying that the whimsical tower-defense zombie game Plants vs. Zombies (review coming as soon as I can stop playing long enough to write it!) is their best selling game ever. They’ve also got some more details on its origins. (Gamasutra)

It seems just a month ago I was reporting that Resident Evil 5 had sold 1.5 million copies (because it was), but today, Capcom bigwigs say that number is up to five million. Seems fishy, but who knows? In any case, RE5? It’s sold a lot. (Kotaku)

Look at that cover and read the title and you’ll know pretty much what you are getting with Dead Heist. It’s an exceptionally cheesy blacksploitation heist movie with some zombie-like creatures thrown in. And it has Big Daddy Kane as some sort of one-man anti-zombie army.  It’s a brain-dead b-movie action flick with a chewy, undead center, but hey, that can be fun. In it, a band of none-too-bright dudes rob a bank, get stuck inside and then the pseudo-zombies come. Then Big Daddy Kane comes to kill the zombies.

Those zombies seem lifted directly from the old Vincent Price chestnut The Last Man on Earth (itself an incredibly important film in the development of the zombie genre!), which is to say that they are sort of weird zombie/vampire hybrids. They only come out at night and they hunger for blood — which implies vampire — but they are dumb and they are many — which is more zombielike. Regardless, this isn’t the kind of movie that necessitates deep analysis. It is the kind of movie you can enjoy while drunk, or high or perhaps both. I think the highlight is the climactic fight. It is one of the worst choreographed fight scenes I have ever witnessed: so bad, it circled around to being good.

Dead Heist/USA/2007

A daily roundup of all the undead news that shambles into view… Got news tips? E-mail me at cory.casciato[AT]gmail.com.

News today? How about none, basically? Not that that’s why I haven’t posted. I was tied up with a paying job all day and didn’t have time, but as it turns out, it turned out to be pretty much a moot point, because there’s no real news to report! But because I love you (and zombies) I dug up a few nuggets…

Remember yesterday, when I gave you the early word on Colin, the under-$100 budgeted zombie flick from the zombie’s point of view? Well, CNN reads the blog apparently (or, just maybe they have their own source … I guess it’s possible) because they have a story about it today. Still no word about distribution or eventual release date. (CNN)

And … that’s it. But, here’s a link to a cool, on-going series of short-short stories set in a zombie-infested world. It’s written in a collaborative fashion (each story has one author, but they are clearly set in the same world, telling different parts of the story). It’s called Wrath of the Damned and I heartily recommend it.

Have a great weekend, and please let me know what I should watch for my movie marathon!

June is almost upon us and that means it is time for me to get serious about finishing the list of movies for the June Zombie Movie Marathon Month festival. I had hoped to have the entire list done by now but for a variety of reasons — scheduling conflicts, inability to confirm that movies will be available, indecision — I haven’t been able to do so. I have come up with a preliminary list of definite movies to watch (although not the when, for the most part), a couple of themes to explore and a handful of “maybes.” Now I am taking commentary from you fine readers. Help me decide!

My two themes are five days each of Italy and Japan. Italy has proven to be the easier of these, and comprises most of my “definite” list. Japan is a little trickier and I may put it to a vote next week (about time I used that poll for something, anyway). Apart from that there are a few seminal films that I have managed to not see yet and a few my daughter has managed to not see yet and those comprise the rest of what is definite.

Here’s what I have nailed down, some with commentary:

• Zombie (30th anniversary! I’m doing a free showing of this)
• Nightmare City
• Hell of the Living Dead
• Zombie 3 (Because Lucio Fulci worked on it briefly)
• Burial Grounds: Nights of Terror
• Versus
• Tokyo Zombie
• Plan 9 from Outer Space
• Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things
• Return of the Living Dead (daughter has never seen it!)

Here’s the stuff I am considering, but haven’t settled on:

• Dead Set (okay, it’s a TV miniseries, but still a moving picture show)
• American Zombie
• Mutant
• I Walked with a Zombie
• Messiah of Evil
• Night of the Living Dead (1990) (Haven’t seen this in years, like since it was fairly new)
• Pet Sematary (ditto)
• Onechanbara
• Grapes of Death
• Zombie Honeymoon

Okay, that’s where things stand at the moment. I’ve got ten nailed down, ten strong possibilities and a whole, long list of other stuff that I haven’t decided on. Comments and suggestions are welcome and encouraged.