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.
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Review: The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse – self-titled
On August - 4 - 2010
Review: Night of the Zombies
On July - 21 - 2010
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?
Review: Doghouse
On July - 14 - 2010
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”!
Review: Quarantine
On May - 21 - 2010
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.
Review: REC
On May - 19 - 2010
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.
Review: Insanitarium
On May - 14 - 2010
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.
Review: Survival of the Dead
On May - 7 - 2010
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.
Review: We’re Alive
On April - 30 - 2010
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.
Review: Mulberry Street
On April - 16 - 2010
When there’s no more room in the sewers, the rats will walk the Earth. Or so might run the honest tagline of Mulberry Street (aka Zombie Virus on Mulberry Street), one of the selections for the 2007 edition of After Dark’s Horror Fest.
The story focuses on the tenants of a Manhattan apartment building that are about to lose their apartments to make way for upscale development. Before that happens, there’s an unfortunate outbreak that turns people into zombie-like rat mutants. Together, the tenants must face the zombies. Er, rats. Whatever. In other words, it’s a basic zombie siege film, with a rodent twist.
At first the creatures look and act like zombies; later they go all ratty (elongated faces, big incisors, pointy ears) but still love biting the shit out of everyone. It’s a weird twist, and while I appreciate the desire to do something different, it comes off as being different solely for the sake of difference — there’s no real effect on the story, tone or even look of the movie except for the rat makeup near the end.
It’s a symptom of the film’s real issue, which is lack of focus. Weird subplots never get resolved and odd character notes go nowhere. The intent may have been to add depth, but the result is to simply distract from the heart of the film. Despite those issues, it’s a decently paced and quirky, if unremarkable, zombie movie that just ends up feeling a little muddle-headed.
Mulberry Street/US/2006/
Review: The Zombie Combat Manual
On April - 9 - 2010
Lots of zombies. No guns. No problem. That’s the basic premise of Roger Ma’s The Zombie Combat Manual, an in-depth analysis of the tools, techniques and concerns inherent in facing the living dead mano-a-corpso.
Presented in the same faux-nonfiction style as Max Brooks’s wildly popular Zombie Survival Guide with a much more specific focus, th ZCM offers 300 pages of detailed instruction on every aspect of combat with the undead. The books starts with a couple of brief chapters on the zombies themselves, quickly outlining the type of zombie we’re talking about by outlining people’s misconceptions about them, their anatomy and a catalog of their strengths and weaknesses. In summary, these are very like the aggregate ideal picture most fans have of zombies — slow moving, killable only by destroying the brain, completely mindless and highly contagious, spreadable by bite or scratch. In other words, nearly identical (with a few specific changes/details) to Brooks’s conception, or to the zombies found in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie for that matter.
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