The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

Quarantined is a complicated book—it’s definitely not for your average Marvel fanboy who enjoys flipping through the pages. It played out in my head like a classic Romero film with a touch of Danny Boyle thrown in and I had to stop after the first thirty pages to get a feel for what was happening in front of me. There’s a lot of depth to the characters here and often I found myself stopping to yell at them aloud for their decisions throughout the course of the book.

The story centers around a viral outbreak in a small town. A lot of people turn away at that idea because it’s been used so much in the past. Personally I’m a fan of the setting because it’s one of those glorious scenarios that can play out in so many different directions. I mean, you put zombies on a plane or a Greyhound bus and your options are pretty limited, but a small town often opens up into a much larger stage in which its characters can play their part.
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Look! A zombie!

There’s not a lot of reason to seek out the forgettable and forgotten zombie-alien invasion movie Invisible Invaders. Maybe if you were on a quest to see every movie John Carradine ever made? Or a quest like my own, to see every zombie movie ever made? Both would suffice, but in either case, put it near the end of your list — it sucks.

Its primary sin is it’s boring. A story about unstoppable aliens who can reanimate the dead should not be this dull. But if you tell that story largely via voiceover and stock footage, I guess it isn’t too surprising. The majority of the rest of the “action” takes place in a bunker, where four people argue, fight and “do science.” The result of their “science” is a goofy looking sonic raygun prop that can stop the aliens, thus saving the Earth. Also, two of them fall in love and the asshole guy dies.

Zombies? Yeah, there are zombies. They’re pretty incidental, though. The aliens occupy dead people in order to … uh … occupy dead people? Once they strangle a guy and they seem to cause some trouble elsewhere, but mostly they just stagger around looking vaguely creepy. I guess cinematic scares were hard to come by in the ’50s and maybe this was enough? Anyway, these are among the least interesting zombies ever. Even Plan 9 from Outer Space has them beat.

To reiterate: don’t watch this, it really isn’t worth your time.

Invisible Invaders/US/1959

This movie was viewed as part of my third annual Zombie Movie Marathon Month — read the initial Invisible Invaders reaction piece.

The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse’s self-titled album is a six-track concept album (or EP, if you prefer) about — what else? — the inevitable zombie apocalypse. One would think I would be positively inclined toward a concept album about the zombie apocalypse from a band that shared the name of my website. And you know what? One would be absolutely fucking right about that. But the fact is, my “day job” is roughly 75 percent music critic, so that that wouldn’t matter for shit if the music wasn’t good. Luckily (spoiler alert!), it is.

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Once upon a time there was a porn star named Jamie Gillis. And that porn star went on to try his hand at acting in a zombie movie called Night of the Zombies (aka Gamma 693, Night of the Zombies 2 and probably a handful of other names). And since Gillis had the acting range and skill of a heavy, wooden plank, that movie was bad.

Oh, and it didn’t help that the story was nonsense, the writing was shit, the effects crappy, the pacing painfully slow and the sound and lighting totally deficient. So is there any reason — any reason at all — to see Gamma 693?

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In director Jake West’s Doghouse, we follow a bunch of loutish men to a tiny, out-of-the-way village, where they hope to carouse and help one of them, Vince, get over his fresh, new divorce. From this not-terribly-zombie-sounding premise, things quickly progress into familiar (for readers of this site, anyway) territory: violent, bloody mayhem explodes within moments of pulling into the town, as they discover that for some reason all the women there have gone insane and are murdering and feeding on the men. Cue Hall and Oates “Man Eater”!

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It’s impossible to properly review Quarantine without referencing REC, the Spanish film it remade (review here). In fact, it’s really not even fair to call it a remake — it’s barely more than a relanguaging. The plot is essentially identical: There’s a TV news crew filming a reality show about late-night workers. The on-air personality Angela and her cameraman are following a group of firefighters around. A call to help a woman trapped in her apartment turns into a harrowing ordeal when the woman turns out to be irrational and violent and the building is sealed from the outside by the authorities. Zombie mayhem ensues.

The biggest change in the two films is the root cause of the outbreak. REC‘s cause is quasi-supernatural, while Quarantine goes with a purely natural form of super-rabies. The effect of this on the actual film is nil. Seriously, apart from a few lines of dialog and minor variation on one scene, there’s no real effect. Apart from that, Quarantine boasts a slightly padded cast (and consequently padded body count), a slightly padded intro (more on this in a moment) and a bonus kill where the camera man beats a zombie to death with the camera.

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There are a handful of zombie movies that attempt to use a kind of cinéma vérité style. REC is easily the best of the lot. The film uses a TV news crew filming a reality show about late-night workers as its central storytelling device. The on-air personality Angela and her cameraman are following a group of firefighters around. A call to help a woman trapped in her apartment turns into a harrowing ordeal when the woman turns out to be irrational and violent and the building is sealed from the outside by the authorities.

In many ways, REC plays out as an inversion of Night of the Living Dead. Both feature a small group of strangers trapped inside a building facing zombies. The difference is, in REC, the people are trapped in with the zombies, by hostile or uncaring authorities outside. This inside-out take on a classic situation serves to ratchet the tension up to excellent effect. Being trapped in a building by zombies is scary. Being trapped in a building with zombies is much, much scarier.

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From time to time you’ll run across an odd, unpolished gem among the rubble pile of half-assed, incompetent, direct-to-DVD zombie movies. Insanitarium, despite some notable issues, is one such movie. The story follows a young man named Jack Romero (see what they did there?) who gets himself committed to an insane asylum to try to rescue his sister Lilly. Once inside, he finds a mad scientist is using the patients to experiment with a nanotech compound that turns its users into raging, flesh-hungry freaks. Before long, all hell breaks loose (naturally) in the form of mobs of hungry patients running amok.

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George A. Romero is the undisputed master of the zombie genre. There’s simply no arguing that anyone else has ever — or likely will ever — come close to his contributions. So the release of a new Romero zombie film is always a big deal, even if his latest offerings have received mixed reactions from critics and fans alike. And if you were expecting Survival of the Dead to buck that trend, allow me to let you down now: this is not a return to the majesty of Dawn-era Romero. It fits firmly in with his post-2000 zombie offerings Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead.

That being said, I didn’t hate either Land or Diary. I came to appreciate Land after several viewings, and I really liked Diary from the beginning, although my enthusiasm waned to some degree after additional viewings. That said, I think neither of those films is as bad as their detractors claim. Both have merit and both are at least as good as 90 percent of the zombie films out there.

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Season one of the audio drama We’re Alive is done, making it the perfect time to review it as a whole. As one of the few episodic audio dramas around and perhaps the only ongoing such series that tells the tale of a zombie apocalypse, We’re Alive is well-positioned to make waves in the zombie world.

The story follows a relatively familiar zombie apocalypse plot arc. We start with a small group of soldiers, called to report to duty to deal with some sudden and extreme “rioting.” The rioters turn out to be flesh-eating freaks that turn their victims into more of the same. The soldiers flee, find other survivors and hole up in an abandoned apartment building.

As in so many stories of the type, the narrative follows the group as they fortify their tower, look for supplies and survivors, encounter other groups of survivors and face the zombies. The basic story elements are familiar. What sets We’re Alive apart is the twists. This is not a Dawn of the Dead clone set in a tower instead of a mall. It has its own unique personality, based in its original take on the zombies themselves, its distinctive cast of characters and its unusual format.

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