The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

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

George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead is coming to various VOD services April 30 and theaters May 28, but the you can see a spiffy new poster for it today. (Bloody Disgusting)

If, like me, you’ve long thought that a plush zombie doll is what you need to truly complete your life, then you’ll be thrilled at the chance to win one in this contest sponsored by an upcoming game called Zombie Fortress.

Over at Kotaku, they try to define zombies in the course of asking “where did all the real zombies go?” and manage to restrict “real zombie” to an incredibly narrow and short-sighted yet still totally inconsistent subset. Lame. (Kotaku)

J.P. Moore’s Toothless, a zombie apocalypse tale set in the 12th century, has found a publisher. Look for it to come out from Dragon Moon Press early next year. (A World on Fire)

The pre-WWII potboiler King of the Zombies is more spy movie with zombies as a plot device than zombie movie, and it’s a dull, plodding spy movie at that. Two men and their faithful, comedy-relief black servant (I mention his race because it’s a constant theme in the movie) crash land on an island somewhere in the Bahamas. There they find a Nazi (not identified as such, but not hard to decipher) scientist who’s using voodoo to raise a zombie army and interrogate a captured admiral. A lot of not very much happens, the black servant (played by Mantan Moreland) does a lot of icky playing to broad stereotypes, some “zombies” shuffle around not very menacingly, the scientist gets caught and killed, the end.

I’m not one to hew to political correctness, but the way blacks are presented in this movie is hard to ignore. I know it was a different time, but it’s a very “gee, aren’t uppity negroes just hilarious! And isn’t it even more hilarious when they get put in their place!” kind of thing. It essentially takes over most of the movie, making it into a grotesque, anachronistic race-relations slapstick. Moreland seems a decent, perhaps even gifted actor, but he’s given a shitty row to hoe, here.

The bottom line is, this isn’t much of a zombie movie. The zombies are just stiff-shouldered black guys who don’t do anything. Pass on this one unless you’re determined to thoroughly explore the history of zombie film.

King of the Zombies/US/1941

Note: King of Zombies has entered the public domain, so if you’re curious, you can watch or download it from the Internet Archive.

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

The Austin public library will offer a showing of Zombie Girl: the Movie (a documentary about pre-teen filmmaker Emily Hagins) with a Q&A with Aaron Marshall, the man who made the doc, and Hagins herself after. The good times start at 6:30 p.m., Tuesday March 2. (Austin City Connection)

As part of a show on vampire forensics, National Geographic dug up a document from 1679 called DE MASTICATIONE MORTUORUM or “The Chewing Dead.” Dead people that get up and chew on the living? That’s a zombie, my friend! (National Geographic)

Plants vs Zombies continues its runaway success story on its latest platform (iPhone) with gross sales of $1 million in just nine days! (Kotaku)

Another day, another zombie tower-defense game for the iPhone. Here’s a preview of Zombie Smash. There’s a trailer below, as well. (IGN)

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

A hot zombie woman appears on a reality show with a yeti, a tranny werewolf and a Filipino vampire with a detachable head in Battle of the Network Zombies, a novel from Mark Henry. Oh, and it’s a murder mystery. Color me intrigued… (Cherie Priest)

Comedy Central’s new animated series Ugly Americans features supernatural creatures trying to integrate into life in NYC and one of the main characters is a  zombie. It premieres March 17 at 10:30 p.m. (Horror Squad)

Bloody Disgusting has some images and details on the upcoming drug-induced Rage-zombie apocalypse film The Devil’s Playground. (Bloody Disgusting)

The upcoming zombie flick Beverly Lane features a magician, a mime, some clowns and other sideshow attractions trapped with some office workers by an outbreak of zombies. (Dread Central)

Apparently L. Ron Hubbard wrote a zombie noir novel back in the day (1934 to be exact) called Dead Men Kill and it’s being reissued. If old L. Ron wasn’t such a terrible writer, this might be intriguing. (Fangoria)

Go behind the scenes of The Love of the Dead, a short film about a man trying to keep his love alive with an undead girlfriend. (Yale Daily News)

Zombie are well represented in nearly every medium, from film to the written word, comics to video games, and now, in the case of We’re Alive, there’s even an excellent zombie audio drama.

“When I was growing up, even as soon as kindergarten or first grade, I listened to old-time radio shows,” admits series co-creator Shane Salk. “When I was around first grade an uncle of mine sent me cassettes of Gunsmoke. I loved them so much that got more and more of them. There’s a place for this again. Everyone drives around, they all have iPods and whatever.”
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A daily roundup of all the undead news that shambles into view… Bookmark the home page or add the RSS feed to your reader for your daily dose of walking dead. Got news tips? E-mail me at cory.casciato[AT]gmail.com.

Can’t wait for the TV adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead series? Perhaps a fan film (embedded below) will help tide you over? FYI, SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t read issue 51 of the comic. (Splash Page)

This Halloween weekend (so, October 29-31), zombie lovers get their very own zombie-dedicated convention when the first-ever ZomBCon comes to Seattle.

A few more pics (three, to be exact) trickle out for the zombie-apocalypse-Africa-style movie The Dead. They show some sweet machete action. (Bloody Disgusting)

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

Fans of author Brian Keene (The Rising, City of the Dead) will be overjoyed to know he is working on a comic series called The Last Zombie, which the author calls “Damnation Alley meets The Stand and Mad Max in the aftermath of The Walking Dead.” (Broken Frontier)

The Nazi zombie comedy Dead Snow comes to DVD and Blu-ray February 23 with plenty of special features — behind the scenes stuff, make-up featurette, outtakes and more. (28 Days Later Analysis)

Some funky performance-enhancing drugs trigger a Rage-zombie apocalypse in Devil’s Playground, an upcoming feature-length zombie film from first-time director Mark McQueen. (Quiet Earth)

The UK gets Zombieland on DVD and Blu-ray March 15. (Dread Central)

Lawyers face zombies in Killable Hours and we get a look at typical small-town life during the zombie apocalypse in Gravesend, two new Australian pulp novellas. (Buy Zombie)

Australians, head down to the ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) on February 25 in Melbourne for Dead Set: Zombie TV, a look at the zombie on screen. (ACMI)

Reefer madness gets updated for a whole new generation in Night of the Living Heads, a pot comedy/horror movie about weed that turns its users into zombies. There’s a trailer below. (Bloody Disgusting)

Can a troubled marriage survive in the midst of the zombie apocalypse? That’s the question posed in Married with Zombies, an upcoming novel from Orbit Books. (Hayes Hudson’s House of Horror)

Zombie stories with a queer angle (in other words, LGBT themes, characters, etc.) will be the focus of Zombiality: A Queer Bent on the Undead, an upcoming anthology from Library of the Living Dead press. Aspiring authors, they’re taking submissions until June 27. (Library of the Living Dead forum)

Deliver booze, ammo and pizza in Zombie Killer Pizza, a card game that puts you into the role of a delivery driver for the last pizza joint on Earth. It’s currently in playtesting. (Shoestring Theory)

Live out your zombie apocalypse fantasies via the medium of Airsoft guns (think BB guns with plastic ammo) March 27-28 at Zombie Madness 4 in Colorado Springs. It’s a game where you seek out the source of infection and attempt to contain the virus. Man, I may have to go to this. (Colorado Airsoft)

You can now get the website Zombie Command in convenient iPhone App form! (Zombie Command)

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Communism and zombies, back from the dead and together at last. Today’s shirt comes to us from Teefury, where shirts appear for sale for a single day then disappear to never be seen again (except on the bodies of the people that bought and wear them, naturally). In other words, if you like this design that mashes up old Communism recruiting slogans with the walking dead, you need to act now. In just more than nine hours, it will be off the market forever. It’s only $9, if that helps. I’m buying one.

I’m attempting to assemble an all zombie-themed wardrobe. Fashion Zombie is my weekly post detailing the coolest zombie-themed clothes and accessories I can find. Check back every Monday for another look at the hottest zombie apparel.

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

George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead will get feature coverage and be featured on the cover in the April issue of Fangoria. (A World on Fire)

As the blogger who posted this notes, the timing may be in awfully poor taste given the recalls, but hey: Toyota has an ad featuring zombies! (Jalopnik)

Writer A. M. Esmonde has a forthcoming book/screenplay called Deathwatch, about a community beset by the undead trying to stop them and solve the mystery of whence they came. Zombie Command has more details and a preview of the intro and first chapter. (Zombie Command)

UK-based zombie fans will get the Ken Foree-starring, Serbian-made Apocalypse of the Dead (formerly known as Zone of the Dead) on DVD and VOD March 1. No word yet on a US release. (Horror Society)

If unlocking a “classic camera” mode in Resident Evil 5‘s latest DLC sounds like fun, Kotaku will tell you how and show you some screenshots of what it looks like. (Kotaku)

In Awaken the Dead, a priest with a dark past teams up with a shut-in prostitute (the daughter of the man he worked for in said dark past) during a citywide zombie infestation. Together, they rescue survivors, kill zombies and eventually uncover the secret behind the zombie outbreak.

Sound promising? Perhaps, in its small way. But the execution here was so flawed that any promise of the premise was quickly squandered. For starters, the whole thing was shot in the ugliest, blurriest, shittiest style I have ever seen. At least 90 percent of it used this horrible faux sepia tone effect. As a result, it was often difficult to tell what was going on. I couldn’t tell you if most of the zombie makeup and effects were good, because I could barely see them. The zombies did seem inconsistent — some had a sort of a demonic visage, others just looked like people with bloody faces.

The story was flimsy, but not terrible. The writing was frustratingly inconsistent: fairly solid at one minute, ridiculous the next. Same with the direction. The acting was actually decent, at least in the case of the leads (the priest, the prostitute and a Jehovah’s Witness they pick up early on). It was nothing special, but higher than usual quality for a film of this caliber.

All told, Awaken the Dead is entirely forgettable and not really worth your time. Its few positive points are outweighed by the terrible look, inconsistent execution and general dullness.

Awaken the Dead/US/2007