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.

The story reported yesterday about Rob Zombie’s lawyers trying to shut down musician/artist Eric Weiss for using the name Zombie! has been happily resolved — Weiss contacted me to let me know Rob Zombie himself called and they worked it out. Rob Zombie, you’re okay by me!

The Zombieland trailer is available from Apple — but no embeds, damn it. The comedy is about two guys (one scared of everything, the other scared of nothing — crazy!) dealing with the zombie apocalypse. (Apple via Shock til You Drop)

A couple of golden-age classic horror flicks coming to DVD October 6. The four-movie set includes The Walking Dead (a great, original zombie/gangster flick I watched a while ago for the Zombie Movie Marathon Month) and Zombies on Broadway (not heard good things, but who knows?) plus two non-zombie flicks Frankenstein-1970 and You’ll Find Out. The set is priced at $26.98. (DVDActive)

Adam Sessler of G4TV weighs in on the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott. It’s video, and I’ve helpfully embedded it after the break. (G4TV via Dread Central)

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Ah, Nightmare City, you have restored my faith in Italy. Actually, it’s an Italian/Spanish co-production, but whatever. This movie had its faults — a pretty bad script, craptacular zombie makeup, ridiculous ending — but wow, was it ever fun to watch. A plane comes down full of zombies, who run out, start shooting (yes, shooting — these are smart zombies!) and stabbing the living shit out of everyone in sight and head out to take over the city. Along the way, they eat (well, drink the blood of, technically) an aerobics/disco show, tear off a lot of chicks’ clothing (gratuitous nudity is a staple of these spaghetti dead flicks), crack open an elevator like a nut to get the tasty treats (i.e. people) inside, kill and get killed in some very entertaining and graphic ways. This is also one of the first movies (if not the first) with fast zombies, and one of the few with smart zombies — apart from being burnt-looking and lacking the ability to speak, they have pretty much the normal capabilities of their non-zombie victims. The last third drags a little bit and the ending is definitely lame, but this is still a really fun, if really stupid, zombie flick.

Next up, Lucio Fulci’s hallucinatory opus Zombie. Free public showing in Denver! Hopefully lots of people show up.

UPDATED UPDATE: Eric Weiss contacted me and says he was contacted directly by Rob Zombie, who did not know his lawyers were going after Weiss, and has agreed to coexist with Zombie! (aka Weiss). I had a feeling he didn’t know what his legal team was up to, and kudos to him for being a man and a human being and doing the right thing. Rob Zombie, zombie lovers everywhere salute you!

UPDATE: Opinion from my lawyer friend added!

I’ve seen a copy of the letter referenced in today’s news post from Rob Zombie’s trademark lawyers and it’s alarming. They seem to be claiming he owns the right to the word zombie in any musical context, which is just utter bullshit. I can think of a half a dozen band names that use the word in addition to the band Zombie! who they are going after (who, it’s worth noting, is a small, unsigned independent guy who isn’t a great position to fight a legal war). And since zombies are probably the second most popular movie monster ever, it isn’t like he staked out some far-out undiscovered territory with the name Rob Zombie — I guess John Vampire would be slightly less original, but just slightly.

I’ve asked  a lawyer friend if there’s any legal merit to the case and I will update when I hear back from him. I will also be attempting to contact the law firm tomorrow for comment. If you know of any bands that use the word zombie in their name, please leave them in the comments. I’d like to point out to these lawyers how futile and misguided this attempt really is.

My lawyer friend, who first points out that, “trademark law is a branch of Intellectual Property law and is its own unique thing with its own bar exam, etc.  If you really want a completely accurate legal opinion about this you would need to consult a Patent Attorney in all likelihood,” goes on to offer the following:

Without constituting an actual legal opinion but merely being my best guess, you are correct that this is bullshit.  The name “Zombie!” is distinct enough from “Rob Zombie” – the trademarked term – that it is unlikely to be confused and, therefore, unlikely to infringe upon Rob Zombie’s rights or capitalize on the goodwill his name generates.  There are numerous examples (The Mission and The Mission U.K., The Charlatans and The Charlatans U.K., Verve Records and The Verve, Dinosaur and Dinosaur Jr., etc.) where substantially more minor variations have been sufficient to differentiate between two distinct musical entities.  If the mere mention of the word “zombie” in a band name were enough to constitute infringement than Rob Zombie better be prepared to disgorge all of his lifetime earnings to the sixties band The Zombies.

After the break, you can find scanned images of the cease-and-desist notice sent to Eric Weiss of Zombie!

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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.

Musician Eric Weiss of the band Zombie! (a fun, kind-of-Misfits-sounding horror rock band) reported today on Twitter that Rob Zombie’s lawyers have sent him a cease-and-desist notice insisting he stop using the name Zombie! and selling merch with that logo, lest people be confused. Needless to say, this is complete and utter bullshit — Rob Zombie does not get exclusive use of the word zombie and his lawyers need to be eaten by ambulatory corpses if they can’t see that. When a guy comes along calling himself Rob Zombie or another band tries to jock White Zombie (itself STOLEN from an historic zombie movie, I might add), then they can get their lawyer on.

The folks at Fangoria have a bunch of stills and a few details from the cleverly named short film Paris by Night of the Living Dead. (Fangoria)

I’m a fan of poster art (rock concert posters, old movie posters, etc.) and I am totally taken with this print done for the Alamo Drafthouse’s Night of the Creeps showing. If it were up to me, my house would be decorated solely with this sort of stuff. (Fangoria)

There seems to be an inverse square law of sorts when it comes to movies released under multiple names — the more aliases a movie is released under, the worse it is. This 1980 Spanish/Italian co-production was released under at least ten titles in various countries and languages and it is god awful. Director Bruno Mattei is bad — this fucking guy could give Uwe Boll a run for his money. The story is ridiculous (a plot to reduce population goes wrong — or right? hard to say — and creates a fuckload of flesh-hungry zombies) and contains more holes than actual development. Acting: terrible. Effects and makeup: inconsistent, but generally bad. Use of stock footage: excessive, bordering on slapstick. Gratuitous nudity: appealing, but brief. Score: stolen! Yeah, this is a mess all right.

There are a few cool moments. The zombie rat that kicks off the madness is worth a laugh. There’s a zombie kid that is seriously awesome. And toward the end, a cat jumps out of a woman’s stomach cavity. A highlight reel of those would be great — sitting through the rest of this to get there? Not so much. The other moments of levity and amusement are slight and few; the padding and endless, pointless scenes are many. Cut down to about 75 minutes, this could be fun, if ultimately pointless. At its actual run time of just over a hundred minutes, it’s more like a punishing test of endurance.

Next up is Nightmare City, a contemporary of this work of art. God help us all.

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.

To kick off “The Horror Virgin,” a new feature at new horror site Horror Squad, Elisabeth Rappe watches the original Night of the Living Dead for the first time (how is that even possible?) (Horror Squad)

There’s some good news for all you hi-def zombie lovers out there: The RomZomCom classic Shaun of the Dead is coming to Blu-ray on September 22 for $29.98. (Fangoria)

If you own a Kindle and enjoy reading blogs on it (and don’t mind paying money for things you can get free elsewhere) you can now get The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse (yes, this blog!) delivered to you wirelessly.

I’ve already reviewed Burial Ground: Nights of Terror and I stand by that review. By most standard, it is a terrible movie. Terrible acting, terrible effects and makeup, terrible writing, dubbing, you name it. Yet somehow, it totally works. Probably because of the rule of Spinal Tap: everything works better when turned up to eleven. And this film is constantly turned up to eleven. Or maybe eleven and a half — everything is just a little but louder, or, in this case, just a little bit crazier.

Every crazy thing that could happen does, not to mention a bunch of shit that has no business happening (the incest “subplot” is just unbelievably off the wall, in particular). If you were to look up “exploitation film” in the dictionary, you should see a picture of this movie. Sleazy sex, sleazy gore, a dwarf (Peter Bark) playing an adolescent, random bear trap accident, five disembowelments (four shown in loving, graphic closeup), which I believe is some kind of record — that’s just the start.

The makeup is utterly crap, with little consistency from zombie to zombie, and all of it borrowed from better movies (Fulci’s Zombie mixed with the Blind Dead films). The effects aren’t any better, and are similarly ripped off, mostly from Fulci. A soundtrack that is equal arts cheesy lite jazz stock music and some dude high as a kite dicking around with a synthesizer and organ, horrible dubbing, shaky handheld camera work, poor continuity and weird editing … it’s a frigging mess, top to bottom. But somehow, totally hypnotic and irresistible, with a strange dreamlike quality in parts. It wasn’t quite as riveting the second time through (I watched it maybe four or five months ago) but I still had no issue getting through it. Recommended!

Oh, and Final Girl is doing a Film Club on it this month, so look for a link to that shortly!

Next up, Hell of the Living Dead takes us deeper into the heart of Italy.

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.

A boatload of details about the upcoming Night of the Creeps DVD release came out over the weekend. The release date is October 20, there will be a ton of special features and there are even rumors of  a possible sequel. Get all the details here. (AICN)

It’s Day of the Undead Hipsters as Williamsburg in Brooklyn gets its very own zombie crawl. Read all about it in this extremely detailed and kinda wordy report (there are pictures, too). (Fangoria)

The folks at Dark Horizons used their sweet language skills to translate the disheartening news that the film adaptation of World War Z is still some ways off — director Marc Foster is planning on doing another movie in the meantime, so don’t count on seeing it at the ol’ multiplex anytime soon. (Dark Horizons)

Zombie Christmas carols? Sure, why not. Zombie Command has some info on an upcoming book of zombified Xmas favorites. (Zombie Command)

Got a baby? Need to teach them about zombies? Of course you do. Hang this Left 4 Dead mobile over their bed, and you’ll never have to worry about whether they can identify a Boomer or not… (Kotaku)

I quite enjoyed the Night of the Living Dead remake, just as I did the first time I saw it years ago. I have to say that this remake compares really well to the original classic NotLD. Of course, with George Romero doing the screenplay, Romero, John Russo and Russ Streiner producing and Tom Savini (who did effects for Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead) directing, it damn well should have — that’s an impressive pedigree. It’s weird that this movie got such a lukewarm reception on its release and that Savini hasn’t directed anything else. The direction here seems fine — some of the acting is a little questionable (but never bad enough to derail the movie) but apart from that, this is a great remake. The zombies looked great (not surprising from an effects guy as director), the story was nicely updated (especially love the new ending) and the nods to the first were all very clever and not cheap at all. Considering some of the hack directors working today, Savini deserves another shot behind the camera.

Next up is Burial Ground: Nights of Terror — a movie I love for its sheer insanity. It will mark the halfway point for the marathon and kick off the first theme week — five days of Italy’s finest undead mayhem.

For a long time, if you said, “Worst movie ever made?” any respectable film geek would reply, “Plan 9 from Outer Space.” Well, years of shot-on-video crap and Uwe Boll films have taken away that easy, go-to answer, but make no mistake, Plan 9 is indeed a bad film. So bad it’s good? Yes and no — there are definitely parts where the badness transmutes to pure comedy gold, but there are long, interminable stretches of pain between those parts. I will say Tor Johnson made a good zombie, though. The overall verdict on this one is: ridiculous — but worth seeing for historical value and a few laughs.

Up next is the 1990 Tom Savini remake of Night of the Living Dead. Should help wash the taste of this out of our mouths.