The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

You can thank Italy for this classic moment

The modern zombie movie is a thoroughly American invention, forged in Pittsburgh by George A. Romero. But like rock and roll and nuclear weapons, it wasn’t long before foreigners had a look and decided they just had to make their own homegrown versions. Before the blood was even dry on his incredible undead innovation, zombie began popping up all over the world, a trend that continues to this day. Once you’ve finished picking the corpse of Romero’s canon clean, had your brains eaten by Return of the Living Dead and devoured Zombieland  and are ready to travel the world in search of new zombie thrills, this handy guide should get you started. It’s by no means comprehensive—that’s a book, not a blog post—but it should serve as an intro to what the world outside of the good old USA offers the zombie aficionado.

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Thirty days, thirty movies: done. It all ended last night with Cemetery Man. If you aren’t familiar with the movie, the quickest summary I can give is its Italian title Dellamorte Dellamore, which translates to Death Love. It is a movie about death and love, with lots of zombies. It’s also beautiful (visually and otherwise), funny and damn strange.

I really want to do an in-depth review/critique/analysis of this film in the near future, so I will keep my remarks here brief. First off, if you haven’t seen this movie, put it at the top of your must-see list. Even if you don’t love it (and I think most of you will) it is an important film, both within the zombiesphere and within the larger context of “important” films. Hell, even if you think it is dumb as fuck (and it’s possible, though wrong, to interpret it that way) there is a whole lot of the gorgeous Anna Falchi nude in it (I’ll put a non-revealing nude picture of her below, for those who are curious), and arguably it’s not even gratuitous nudity since it ties closely into the plot.

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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.

More Resident Evil: Afterlife coverage, in the form of an interview with Wentworth Miller (aka the guy from Prison Break). (FEARnet)

There’s a new trailer for “dead things in space” videogame Dead Space 2 but I can’t find an embeddable version, so you have to go here. (Kotaku)

Check out this trio of stills from upcoming Italian zombie movie Eaters (and read more about it on my list of top ten anticipated zombie releases for 2010). (Dread Central)

Japanese sleazeploitation zombie film Big Tits Zombie 3D gets a poster. It’s got big tits, but no zombies, strangely. (Shock Till You Drop)

Is this a zombie movie?

I saw The Crazies this weekend. I liked it pretty well. It wasn’t a zombie movie. It did contain some very zombie-movie like themes and ideas, and the infected were somewhat zombie-like, but it wasn’t a zombie movie. Director Breck Eisner does a good job of explaining why in this interview. Here’s the key point, for my money:

They don’t lose their personalities and persona completely. It just lets loose this monster within and it does it differently with each person. That’s what makes it different from a zombie movie.

Now, arguably the same could be said about certain Romero works, especially Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead, but even in those movies, the creatures were zombie first (eat the flesh of the living above all else), remaining persona second. The Crazies had some of its infected do nothing more than just mill about aimlessly, while others actively sought revenge on those they perceived to have wronged them. Some worked as a team, some drove cars — does that sound very zombie-like to you? Compare that to other “infected” movies that, to me at least, are zombie movies, such as 28 Days Later. The infected in 28DL act like zombies — they seek out and attack the uninfected. They have lost all vestige of their previous personality, mind or soul. They can’t open a door, much less drive a car or operate a firearm. That’s a zombie.

Time will tell whether Eisner’s The Crazies is considered a zombie movie or not, despite his explanations and intentions. Ultimately, it’s the film’s audience and history that decides how a film is classified (never forget, Romero never considered his creatures zombies until audiences classified them as such and he went with it!). And that definition can be fairly arbitrary. For reference, here’s a look at five movies that utilize zombie-like ideas and creatures, yet alter the zombie mythos in fundamental ways. Some are considered zombie films, some are not.

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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.

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)

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.

There’s a new trailer (embedded after the break, naturally) out for Zombies of Mass Destruction (review here) and an interview with director Kevin Hamedani. Word of warning on that new trailer — it kind of spoils a lot of the movies best gags. (Bloody Disgusting)

A few more details have emerged on the upcoming Italian zombie movie fun of Eaters (mentioned in yesterday’s news post, and there were two trailers in there, too!). It’s about a mad scientist screwing around with a zombie virus because he thinks it’s the next stage of human evolution. Not totally original, but considerably better than “four to ten random strangers hole up in a mall/theater/church/whatever to try and survive the sudden zombie apocalypse.” Dread Central has a more detailed synopsis and some cool images. (Dread Central)

Enjoy pictures of a scantily clad woman kicking zombie ass in these Resident Evil 5: Gold‘s “Mercenaries Reunion” screenshots. (Kotaku)

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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.

Italy is getting the sequel to REC 2 and there’s a new trailer to prove it. The US? We’re just getting the shaft from Sony, as no release seems forthcoming. Fuckers. The Italian trailer is embedded after the break for you. (Dread Central)

The people behind Phase Two, an upcoming low budget, post-apocalyptic zombie film, want to wish you a Merry Christmas, via  a clip with a zombie Santa in it. That clip is embedded after the break. (Quiet Earth)

Got a few extra dollars and want to get in on the movie production business? How about joining the Indywood Project, which is aiming to fund a zombie movie called Invasion of the Not Quite Dead by reaching out directly to fans. (FEARNet)

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When I heard that the Final Girl Film Club was doing Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror my heart filled with joy. I reviewed this movie as one of the first half-dozen posts on the site, then just last month, added thoughts in a reaction piece when I watched it as part of my second annual Zombie Movie Marathon Month. So for Final Girl, I had to do something different, something more — so you get this, a few of my favorite things about the utterly insane Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror.

1. Plot? What plot? – There is essentially no plot in this movie. I guess technically it has a plot: Three couples and one fucked-up kid (see item 10) go visit an old coot for unspecified reasons, right after the old coot has unleashed some zombies, also for unspecified reasons. Mayhem ensues. That’s it. This is a good thing. Plot would only distract from the insanity.
2. Gratuitous nudity – What’s an Italian zombie movie without gratuitous nudity? In this movie, the women all get naked within the first ten minutes. That helps clear up what kind of movie we’re watching, right away, in case there was any question.
3. Bizarre soundtrack – The soundtrack is part lite-jazz stock music and part drug-fueled mindfuck on the dark side of the moon. I’d be willing to bet money the composer just got as high as he possibly could, fired up a borrowed synthesizer, hit “record” on the tape deck and started twisting knobs and hitting keys more or less at random. Clearly he was going for something like the Goblin score of Dawn of the Dead; just as clearly, he was far too incompetent to even approach such a thing. The results are strangely fitting to the rest of the movie, however.
4. Random bear trap – In one scene, a couple is running from zombies. The woman steps into a bear trap that seems to just be set out for no damn reason. Are there a lot of wild bears in the Italian countryside? No one seems perturbed by the fact that a bear trap was just casually placed on the path of this country estate, right where you might step in it while running from zombies.
5. Smart zombies – The zombies are smart enough to use weapons (pitchforks, scythes, other farming-implement type stuff mostly) and work together to use a battering ram to get at the tasty meats (i.e. our protagonists) barricaded inside the country estate. Later, they dress up as monks to lure the survivors into a trap. Oh, you wily zombies! Overall, they show themselves to be significantly smarter than anyone else in the movie.
6. Stupid, yet incredibly dedicated staff – On the contrary, the staff seem quite stupid and preternaturally dedicated. Even once the hardcore dying begins, they still follow orders promptly, even when those orders put them directly in harm’s way. Why can’t you find help like that any more? Oh yeah, they all died off in situations like these, or they were so stupid they set themselves on fire cooking.
7. The maid’s death scene – Speaking of those staff, the maid’s death scene is an all-time favorite. While she is trying to close the shutters, a zombie throws a spike at her and pins her wrist to the wall with it. While she struggles against this cruel fate, another zombie reaches up with a scythe and beheads her. Ah, cruel fate.
8. Leslie’s death scene – My second favorite death is Leslie, who suffers the unfortunate fate of serving as the Fulci “eye-gouge” knock-off of the film. Okay, technically it’s a glass shard that goes into her temple, not a wood splinter in her eye, but I am pretty certain this had to do with the effects budget, not any attempt at originality, because every other element of this scene seems directly lifted from the splinter-in-the-eye setpiece in Fulci’s Zombie.
9. Toasty Stuntman – They set a guy on fire by accident during the filming, but the director insisted they keep filming while the guy screamed for help because it was too good of an opportunity to miss. You only learn this by watching the special features, but if there were any doubt that this movie is insane from top to bottom, that should clear it up.
10. Peter Bark as Michael, the creepiest “kid” ever – Hollywood and Japan love the creepy kids, but they don’t know creepy like the Italians know creepy. You want a creepy kid? Cast a 26-year-old dwarf in a bad hairpiece as the kid, dub his lines in a weird, affected voice, then give him an incest subplot where he lusts after his mother. And gets to third base with her, before he becomes a zombie and kills her by biting off her nipple. That’s fucking creepy. Why didn’t this guy appear in more movies? Or why I haven’t I seen them, anyway?

That’s it, my ten favorite things about Burial Ground. If you can read that list and not need to see this movie immediately, you are a far, far better person than I — or at least a far more balanced person.

You can access the Final Girl film club entries on this fine movie here.

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.

Day four of Italy week was Lucio Fulci’s hallucinogenic masterpiece Zombie. It did not let me down. On the other hand, it did not win my girlfriend over — her complaints included bad acting, terrible dialog, terrible dubbing and way too much cheap gore. I’d personally call the acting functional, but I yield that the dialog is highly suspect and the dubbing is ludicrous. I love the gore though, and think it looks great — maybe not exactly realistic, but totally believable. And obviously, I love the movie and have loved it each and every time I watch it.

It comes down to looking for different things — she likes very linear, dialog and character driven movies (usually ones with no zombies in them) whereas I look for a movie experience that may or may not contain those things, but weighs all sorts of things like mood, camera work, stylistic flourishes, etc. that she doesn’t really register as terribly important. Zombie is a movie experience and Fulci was a master of using the camera,  using sound design, setting a surreal mood and creating great set pieces. This is the most linear, plot-driven movie of his I’ve seen — I think it’s a good thing I didn’t try to have her watch The Beyond.

We watched it in a little theater under a bar. It was a digital projection off DVD, but still freaking cool. This is definitely a movie to watch that way (in a theater, on a screen, with other people there) if you have the opportunity. It’s a different experience than watching it at home on your TV. The turnout was pretty small (I am a terrible promoter, and couldn’t dedicate a lot of time to it since it was a not-for-profit enterprise) but everyone that came, with the exception of my girlfriend, really dug the movie — even the people that came in two-thirds of the way through.

Also, thanks to the people that voted in my poll, especially those that are watching along with us this month. Don’t forget that if you write about the films I watched and wrote about and link back to my writings on the same films, I will return the link/favor and we’ll have a cool little zombie film club. Fun! I closed the poll, since it is over halfway through the month, but I will have something else up there shortly.

Next up is Zombie 3, a movie that Lucio Fulci started (cool!) and Bruno Mattei finished (uh oh…). That will end our five day excursion into Italian zombie cinema.