The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

I may have spoken too soon. Maybe silly romantic melodrama is the theme of the marathon. This movie makes it five of six movies that contain that sudsy element. Zombie Honeymoon was reminiscent of the plodding, emo, “thinking man’s” zombie movie I, Zombie, only more briskly paced. Our lead gets attacked and turned to a zombie on his honeymoon, spends the rest of the film killing and feeling kinda bad about it. But not that bad. His wife, who kind of looks like a poor man’s Maggie Gyllenhaal and is topless briefly, helps him deal with it — which mostly means covering it up. It struck me as goofy and forgettable, but not altogether unpleasant. I suspect this one could have been better as an old-style movie, with more focus on the romantic melodrama (not that there wasn’t plenty) and less on the unimpressive gore.

Tomorrow I’m watching the timeless 1985 classic Return of the Living Dead with my daughter. That should be fun.

Marcel Marceau, the world's greatest mime, playing a zombie master and pedophile? Sold!

A while back, I praised the queer zombie film Otto for simply being completely original in the zombie milieu. By the same token, I have to tip my hat to Shanks. The world’s greatest mime playing a naive puppeteer who becomes a zombie master? And he’s also in love with a thirteen-year-old girl, who thinks he’s just swell? And it’s all presented as some sort of whimsical fairy tale, until a gang of bikers randomly appear and rape and murder his Lolita girlfriend and are murdered in turn by his zombies? How was this not a hit?

If you aren’t sold yet, there’s an appearance by a young Don Calfa, who’s also appeared in the zombie classics Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town and Return of the Living Dead (his greatest role, where he played  a Nazi mortician). Still not convinced? How about a guy pecked to death by a zombie chicken? Again, how was this not a hit?

Admittedly, it is deadly slow and wholly nonsensical, not to mention a little disturbing (was borderline pedophilia really that acceptable in 1974?), but I can’t help but make a place for it amongst the movies recommended for the fact of their batshit insanity.

This year’s theme is turning out to be “whacko” which I am down with. Tomorrow night is Zombie Honeymoon. In case you missed it (I see people Googling for it) I am posting the complete list after the break.

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Ooh, boy. The best thing about Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things is definitely the name. The second best part is Alan Ormsby’s facial hair and the whole cast’s clothes — as ridiculous as today’s hipsters look, they have nothing on the hippies of the early ’70s. This movie spent almost an hour futzing around before finally delivering zombies, and the zombies were pretty sorry when they finally arrived. I did learn a few things: zombies are smarter than hippies; at least some zombies can sail a boat; jobs in the theater were really hard to come by in 1972 (Ormsby gets the others to go along with his grave-robbing/dead-raising shenanigans by threatening to fire them from his theater troupe). I actually think this could be remade into a decent movie, but Hollywood would rather remake movies that were decent the first time around into shit than remake something shitty into something decent. What’s up with that?

Tomorrow night, the William Castle/Marcel Marceau zombie/mime movie Shanks. And no, I am so not even kidding.

Tonight’s entry I Walked With a Zombie was definitely not your average zombie flick. The 1943 movie had more in common with soapy, old-timey tear-jerking love stories – two brothers in a love triangle and the tragedy that ensues. Nonetheless, this is an inarguably good, perhaps even great movie. Sure, it’s dated and a little low on action — really, not a whole lot happens — but it looked good, the actors could actually act and the guy behind the camera really knew what he was doing. More interesting than entertaining, it’s nevertheless worth seeing. Plus, Roky Erickson wrote a song about it, which is reason enough to see it in my book.

Since IWWaZ was so short (a mere 68 minutes — amazing that that used to be long enough for a feature film!) I followed it with the humorous Danger! 50,000 Zombies! short (27 minutes), which starred Nick Frost and Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead fame. Pretty funny stuff, a lighthearted look at classic zombie tropes — a lot of it seemed lifted nearly straight out of Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide — with added homoeroticism. Up tomorrow is the cleverly titled Alan Ormsby classic Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things.

Brigitte Lahaie: By far the best part of Grapes of Death

Night two of the second annual Zombie Movie Marathon Month brought us the mediocre Grapes of Death. Seems the French just can’t give good zombie. They can, however, give great hot French girl, as this film proves via the presence of Brigitte Lahaie. Wowza. Something special here, folks. And for the people who keep finding my website via variations on the search term “gratuitous nudity,” you’ll be glad to know that Grapes of Death is all about the gratuitous nudity — including a nice nude scene with Lahaie, which almost justifies this movie’s existence.

This film is basically a protracted chase scene broken up with gratuitous nudity and cheesy gore effects. Snore. Still, it’s arguably an important developmental zombie flick, and it is far better than director Jean Rollin’s other zombie flick, the execrable Zombie Lake. Still, it’s not good. I paired my mediocre French zombie flick with a mediocre French wine, so at least I got a decent buzz out of the deal. I’ll have a full review up in a few days (and a splitting headache tomorrow) most likely. Next up is our June 3 installment, I Walked with a Zombie, an American film, but directed by a French guy.

The zombie apocalypse comes to reality TV in the BBC miniseries Dead Set. The premise is that the cast of reality show Big Brother, locked away in a house isolated from the outside world, are among the few survivors of a plague of flesh-eating zombies. They don’t even quite realize what is up – they think the producers are “testing” them – until one of the remaining crew gets into the house, followed shortly by one of the zombies. From there, the story follows a fairly predictable – or classic, if one prefers – curve as some are bit, a supply run is undertaken, more survivors make their way to the compound and finally, things unravel spectacularly.

Haters of speedy zombies might want to tune this one out – these bastards can move. The show gets credit, though, for not setting the characters into a situation where this speed would make escape impossible without cheap editing tricks as many fast-zombie films do. There are no scenes  where they’re surrounded … then cut, and they’re a few steps ahead all of the sudden, for example. The zombies look great, with creepy, white-irised eyes and lots of apparent wounds – everything from torn flesh to missing limbs.

The show uses a lot of cuts and angles to keep the gore from being too excessive for mainstream consumption but considering that this was on TV (pay TV, if I understand correctly, but still) the gore factor is remarkably high. It comparable, gore-wise, to something like Dexter in the U.S. – plenty of grue, but not so much as to classify it as a truly gory show for those that revel in such.

The creators clearly know and love their zombie lore. There’s at least one direct nod to each of George A. Romero’s first three zombie movies, including direct quotes from Night of the Living Dead (“They’re coming to get you Barbara”), parallel dialog from Dawn of the Dead (a character suggests the zombies are attracted to the studio where they’re holed up by some sort of “primitive intuition” and opines that the place used to be “like a church to them”) and a visual quote and parallel dialog from Day of the Dead where an obnoxious character gets torn apart by a mob of zombies while spouting curses at them the whole time. It’s not just Romero, either – at one point a character says another has “a face like a Manchester morgue” (clearly a reference to The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie).

They fail, however, at putting across a message as well as Romero or even Let Sleeping Corpses Lie – those films are admittedly heavy handed, but clear in what they have to say. Apart from the very obvious and zombie-film standard message inherent in the fact that it’s the failure to work together that causes nearly all of the problems for the survivors, this seems to be vaguely condescending toward and condemnatory of the reality-TV generation and surveillance state, but what the exact message is – if any – is unclear. It would have added depth to the proceedings if made a little clearer – or streamlined it if jettisoned all together. It’s also entirely possible that the difficulty in transmission stems from subtle but deep differences between British and American culture that leave me somewhat in the dark as to some of the targets here.

Despite that minor quibble, the writing, direction and acting are all up to the task – Jaime Winborn is particularly good as Kelly, and Andy Nyman turns in an impressive, scenery-chewing performance in the role of the bastard lead producer, Patrick. The only real complaint is the pacing is a bit off – things start off slow before catching stride, then drag a bit in the third and fourth episodes and seem a bit rushed in the fifth and final episode. Still, considering how well the creepiness, jump scares, drama and laughs all work overall, this is a minor issue. Falling short of greatness, Dead Set has to settle for being very good – but in a genre as heavily weighted to the terrible end of the scale as zombie film is, very good is high praise, indeed.

Dead Set/U.K./2008 – Made for TV

Today at Microsoft’s E3 press conference, Left 4 Dead 2 was announced and I couldn’t be more excited. The sequel to the blockbuster zombie apocalypse trainer of 2008 will be here November 17, 2009, according to the just-released teaser trailer. And to celebrate its announcement, I’m going to share five things I’d like to see in the second iteration of this incredible game. Unlike the similarly themed five suggestions for Dead Rising 2, which suggested necessary fixes, this is more of a wish list — there’s nothing that really needed fixing in the original.

1. Give us four more interesting characters – One of the great strengths of the original was its excellent and iconic characters. They weren’t all equally well conceived (frankly, old-timer Bill was hands-down cooler than the rest) but all were definitely a lot more realistic and engaging than your average game character. Without these personalities, Left 4 Dead would have still been the same kick-ass killfest it was, but it would have lost half its charm. Giving us four more great characters to root for will go a long way toward ensuring the new game is as good as the first.
2. Give us more of the back story – Another of the great strengths of the first game was the back story, delivered largely through innovative storytelling devices such as messages scrawled on walls and the details of the settings themselves. Give us more, and give it to us the same way (no cutscenes, please!). Word is one of the new characters is a cable news reporter — why not have her drop a few words about what she saw before all hell broke loose as part of the in-game chatter during quiet moments? And I think we’re all wondering how the boss infected get that way…
3. Connect the dots a little better – As far as I could discern, there was little or no connection between the campaigns in the original. Without any sort of narrative arc the game seemed like a series of unconnected incidents that left me wondering, “Why do these people keep leaving the safety they reach at the end of each level?” I’m sure you can think of some reason and some clever, in-game way of giving it to us (radios maybe?).
4. Don’t tamper too much with the bosses or add a bunch of new ones – I think the boss infected are just fine as they are. I’m curious how they got that way (see item 2) but I don’t want to see four new bosses in this game, with no explanation given as to how they appear. That is going to push it in the direction of the Resident Evil franchise, where the various letter viruses (T-virus, G-Virus, whatever) can create any kind of googley-eyed demon the developers dream up without breaking a sweat. It makes the whole thing too video game-y (yes, I know it is a video game, don’t be pedantic) and unbelievable to be fun.
5. Give us more, period – Arguably the one real flaw in the original is the small number of campaigns (four) and limited gun loadout. Given that the engine is already tuned to perfection, would it be too much to ask for to give us a few more campaigns, an extra mode of some kind (at least give us Survival mode from day one) and maybe a couple of extra weapons, simply for variety’s sake? A real grenade, for example, and maybe an RPG that’s hidden near the end of each campaign, for the end game, would be frigging sweet.

That’s it! Readers, I’d love to hear your ideas for what you want to see in the next one, or what you think of mine. And don’t forget, you can see the teaser here if you haven’t already (embed screwed the site up, sorry!).

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…

[poll id="2"]

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.

The ongoing swine flu outbreak in Mexico naturally has the zombie aware wondering if this could be the first step in the inevitable zombie apocalypse. It’s got some classic hallmarks: sudden development, high death rate, government entreaties not to panic, those biohazard-y looking dust masks. So is it time to head to your secure location, board up the windows and start sharpening your machete? Not quite yet.

It’s important to remember that, as of yet, there haven’t even been any rumors of swine-flu fatalities getting up to walk around. There also haven’t been any rumors of attacks on health care workers, family of the afflicted or anyone else. Hell, they only just verified it could pass from person to person. So apart from the elements of a new, highly contagious, still-mutating sickness and visual element of biohazard masks, this isn’t looking particularly zombiesque.

Still, it’s a good thing that the zombie community is watching these developments closely. If this does turn out to be the first outbreak of the zombie virus, we won’t be caught unaware. Even if it doesn’t, it’s a good test run of our monitoring systems and a chance to look hard at our contingency plans. And, if it turns out to be a more mundane apocalypse, like a garden-variety flu pandemic, the close monitoring of the news for signs of walking dead should still impart some practical knowledge sure to be of use.

So for now, keep monitoring the news but don’t shoot the staggering, sunken-eyed, pale dude on your lawn just yet. Look for zombie-indicating new developments – warnings to isolate the infected or dead should be considered suspicious, while instructions to decapitate or burn them should be considered an undead giveaway. Reports of riots, sudden outbreaks of bitey behavior or high spikes in murder rates near infected areas are all high-probability danger signs as well. And get your bug-out bag ready if it isn’t already. It can’t hurt to be ready to head for the hills when you see the first zombies instead of stopping to pick up that last box of granola bars and an extra fire axe, right?