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.

Go behind the scenes of Zombieland and get an update on the status of Zombieland 2 in this extensive interview with director Ruben Fleischer. (IconVsIcon)

It looks as if Pet Sematary is being revived for another go-round. The remake will be scripted by Matthew Greenberg, who handled the adaptation for 1408, a movie I was thoroughly unimpressed with. I am unenthused. (Hollywood Reporter)

Strike a zombie pose, photograph it and send it to Michael Moreci and you could be immortalized as a zombie in his upcoming graphic novel Quarantine (no relation to the film of the same name). And win an autographed copy of the final book, of course.

Details emerge on the DVD/Blu-ray release of I Sell the Dead (review here), coming March 30. The only extra is a trailer (are you fucking kidding me?) and you can see the cover now. (DVD Active)

If you’re in Philadelphia, you can catch a zombie double feature tonight featuring One Dark Night (never heard of it) and Bruno Mattei’s Night of the Zombies (aka Virus, aka Hell of the Living Dead, aka a terrible piece of shit that ranks as one of the worst zombie movies ever). Better hurry though — it starts at 8 p.m. Eastern time at the International House. (Geekadelphia)

Among the nearly 200 zombie movies I have seen, there have been some truly atrocious films. Not just bad mind you — in a genre so filled with amateurish, low-and-no-budget entries, bad is commonplace. No, we are talking about the truly, spectacularly terrible — movies that are difficult, painful or even brain damaging to sit through. Which I have done, because when it comes to zombies, I watch them all from the opening credits to the end credits, no matter how much it hurts. And some of these hurt bad. So to save you the trouble — or to provide the masochists with fodder for their self-abuse — I present these, the ten worst zombie movies I have had the misfortune to sit through. I don’t necessarily claim these are the worst of all time, just the worst I have seen. God forbid that there are actually worse, but in all honesty, there probably are. And I’ll get around to watching those eventually, too…

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The idiocy of Zombie 3 left me almost speechless. In all honesty, this was probably the worst movie of Italy week, and probably the worst movie of the festival so far — only Hell of the Living Dead is close, which is, not surprisingly, another Bruno Mattei movie. Yes, Mattei did this, even though it claims to be a Lucio Fulci film, it’s pretty well established he had to leave this for health reasons and Mattei took over. Based on what made it in the movie, Fulci’s involvement was minimal, at best.

Zombie 3 is the story of Death-1, a compound that mutates into a virus (what?) and turns a whole city into zombies. Really stupid-looking zombies that look like a cross between Nightmare City’s crap-encrusted, radiation-burnt creatures and more traditional grey-face undead. Some of the pulsating, oozing pustules on the zombies were impressive — the rest of the makeup and effects were ridiculous. Also ridiculous were the numerous, extended fight scenes between the zombies and commandos; the near-constant use of dry-ice fog; the severed head in a refrigerator that leaps out and bites a dude (okay, that was awesome and ridiculous);  and the elements blatantly ripped off from Return of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead: Mattei, you are a fucking thief! And an incompetent.

So Italy week was fun. We got to see some of the best and worst of Italian cinema, and at least one that was both (Burial Ground: Nights of Terror). Up next is the mockumentary American Zombie. Monday we start five days of Japanese zombie cinema — we’ll see how they compare with the Italians.

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.

In Zombies the Beginning, you have a classic steal – the filmmakers (Italian “legend” Bruno Mattei, chiefly) took Aliens, replaced the aliens with zombies and voila, new movie! Only, not very new – we’re talking line-for-line swipes 95 percent of the time. There are a few moments of amusement to be found here in seeing how they deal, or fail to deal, with the changes necessary to realize the zombified take on Aliens. There are also a few moderately humorous lines, including the obligatory nod to George Romero. Then there are a few real WTF moments, such as the weird brain that controls the zombies, the pregnant women incubating zombie babies (which seems awfully redundant and pointless since a zombie bite appears to makes more zombies, but whatever), the weird air-conditioning ducts that lead to the pregnant women in one scene and the fucked-up zombie-hybrid naked hobgoblin children that presumably come from the pregnant ladies. Mostly though, it’s just a dull, tepid, cheaply made Aliens rip-off that isn’t worth the time it takes to sit through.