Zombie Movies

[vivisectvi]

Posted by: Obi Chris Kenobi March 31, 2009 03:41 am
While researching materials and various formats for the (in coming plug alert) my Zombie Novel, I've naturally fallen into watching/trying to find Zombie movies to watch. So, I thought I'd create a thread for them as they are the forgotten genre of movies in hollywood. Over the last few years they've been the cliché/passé genre that can no longer be taken seriously.

I'll update this with the movies I've watched and what I thought about them as time goes by. Suggestions, comments and feelings towards Zombie Movies are more then welcome!

Posted by: dubq March 31, 2009 10:21 am
My favourite genre! I will get back to you with my top list of zombie flicks.. as soon as I get my coffee

Posted by: dubq March 31, 2009 11:30 am
Aight...

1. Dawn of the Dead (Original)
2. Day of the Dead (Original)
3. Zombi 2
4. Night of the Living Dead (Original)
5. Cemetery Man

Other than that I don't have any real thoughts on the subject off the top of my head. I prefer slow over fast. But I can accept the fast ones, too as they have their place in this genre.

Posted by: daileyxplanet March 31, 2009 12:28 pm
Has anyone seen Planet Terror?

Posted by: Jingus March 31, 2009 01:35 pm
Planet Terror... meh, I've just never been a big fan of Robert Rodriguez's style of action. Always seemed overly gory and sadistic for what's supposed to allegedly be fun escapism. Also didn't help my feelings that when I saw Grindhouse in the theater, the audience all laughed and howled like retards practically every time they showed Rose McGowan do anything with her prosthetic leg.

I forget who it was, someone on TSM I think, but someone once made a great point about the message behind zombie movies. (At least, before the modern fast-running trend.) The fear involved in zombie movies isn't so much of the undead horror outside the door, as it is fear of humanity's own self-destructive tendencies. After all, zombies are real slow and real dumb. Unless you're just surrounded by an army of the damn things, it should be easy to defeat them. Yet every single time, the humans in these movies make dumb mistakes or get into fights or otherwise victimize themselves in manners which let the zombies eat them. Whether it's making the wrong choice about which tactics to use, or one group of humans preying upon another, or just not paying attention when you walk into a seemingly empty room; it's not the zombies that kill us. We get ourselves killed.

Posted by: The Buzz March 31, 2009 04:21 pm
Fido, All of Romero's Movies, Dawn Remake, Shaun of The Dead, I even thought the Day remake was decent enough if you went in not expecting much. Mulberry St.(think that's the correct title) had an interesting take on zombies. I don't know if you'd count the 28 Days/Weeks movies as zombies, but those were sweet too. I enjoyed the Resident Evil movies(live action and the cgi). I know some wouldn't count it as a zombie movie, but I thought Quarantine was decent for a shaky camera movie.

Those are all I can think of off the top of my head, but if I can think of any others I liked recently I'll add them.

Posted by: Gary Floyd March 31, 2009 10:30 pm
"Cemetery Man" is an underrated little zombie movie/black comedy starring Rupert Everett I'd reccommend. Plus, it has zombie boyscouts and a pissed of, bitchy Grim Reaper! I'd also like to reccommend "The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue," which is the first Romero style zombie movie from Europe. Oh, and while they aren't traditional zombie fair, I reccomend "Tombs of the Blind Dead" and "Versus." "Tombs" is a wonderully creepy classic, while "Versus" is an insane amount of fun-just don't expect something that makes a bunch of sense.

My old TSM blog has a thing I did called "Month of the Dead" last summer, where I reviewed 31 zombie movies. You might find something interesting there.

Posted by: Jingus March 31, 2009 10:41 pm
If we're talking about more obscure flicks, here's a few not mentioned:

-there was one from Australia a couple years back called Undead which was a lot of fun. It wasn't strictly just a zombie movie, there were aliens and other weird metaphysical shit, but the movie mostly plays it for laughs and it's got some really cool visuals and action bits too.

-I thought the Tom Savini remake of Night of the Living Dead was unfairly shat-upon by some. Of course it wasn't as great as the original; what is? No, it doesn't have nearly as much gore as you might expect from a movie directed by Savini; so what? It still had an interesting contemporary take on the old story, and also a nice alliterative cast with Tom Towles and Tony Todd.

-I'm not a fan of most of the Hammer horror flicks from England in the 50s-70s, but Plague of the Zombies was a tolerable one. It was pre-NOTLD so the modern "they bite you and turn you into them" rules didn't apply, it was more of a voodoo/Dracula type of plot, but still not a bad flick.

-From my youth, I have a soft spot for Return of the Living Dead 3. It's Romeo and Zombie Juliet, come ON, it doesn't get any better than that. (Along somewhat similar lines, eagerly awaiting the upcoming Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead.)

-And oh yeah, if you're reading this thread and have not yet read Max Brooks's fine books Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, get your stinking carcass out of our sight and go correct your shameful mistake RIGHT NOW.

Posted by: Gary Floyd March 31, 2009 10:53 pm
I was going to mention "Undead"!

You might want to check out "Dead & Buried" and "Messiah of Evil", which are town with a secret tales with an undead twist.

See "Carnival of Souls." It's pre NOTLD, but I think it's one of the best horror movies of the 60's.

I forget who it was, someone on TSM I think, but someone once made a great point about the message behind zombie movies. (At least, before the modern fast-running trend.) The fear involved in zombie movies isn't so much of the undead horror outside the door, as it is fear of humanity's own self-destructive tendencies. After all, zombies are real slow and real dumb. Unless you're just surrounded by an army of the damn things, it should be easy to defeat them. Yet every single time, the humans in these movies make dumb mistakes or get into fights or otherwise victimize themselves in manners which let the zombies eat them. Whether it's making the wrong choice about which tactics to use, or one group of humans preying upon another, or just not paying attention when you walk into a seemingly empty room; it's not the zombies that kill us. We get ourselves killed.

I always found zombies frightening because I always some them as the ultimate grotesque parody/caricature of death-kind of like death mocking you right in the face. Also, Clive Barker said it best when he said that the zombie is "the ultimate liberal nightmare" in that you want this to be you loved ones again, but they aren't. That aspect always creeped me out.

Posted by: The Buzz April 01, 2009 01:17 am

(Jingus @ March 31, 2009 06:41 pm)
If we're talking about more obscure flicks, here's a few not mentioned:

-there was one from Australia a couple years back called Undead which was a lot of fun. It wasn't strictly just a zombie movie, there were aliens and other weird metaphysical shit, but the movie mostly plays it for laughs and it's got some really cool visuals and action bits too.

-I thought the Tom Savini remake of Night of the Living Dead was unfairly shat-upon by some. Of course it wasn't as great as the original; what is? No, it doesn't have nearly as much gore as you might expect from a movie directed by Savini; so what? It still had an interesting contemporary take on the old story, and also a nice alliterative cast with Tom Towles and Tony Todd.

-I'm not a fan of most of the Hammer horror flicks from England in the 50s-70s, but Plague of the Zombies was a tolerable one. It was pre-NOTLD so the modern "they bite you and turn you into them" rules didn't apply, it was more of a voodoo/Dracula type of plot, but still not a bad flick.

-From my youth, I have a soft spot for Return of the Living Dead 3. It's Romeo and Zombie Juliet, come ON, it doesn't get any better than that. (Along somewhat similar lines, eagerly awaiting the upcoming Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead.)

-And oh yeah, if you're reading this thread and have not yet read Max Brooks's fine books Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, get your stinking carcass out of our sight and go correct your shameful mistake RIGHT NOW.

I'll have to second all of those movies as well. I enjoyed the Night remake and Undead especially.

Posted by: special k April 01, 2009 02:23 am
Versus ftw! It's Japanese, has several very funny moments in it, and captures the fun of ultra-cheap Raimi movies better than anything since Raimi and Peter Jackson.

Objectively Wild Zero is just an OK Zombie Flick. But does any other zombie flick star Guitar Wolf?! I THINK NOT!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEtvkH56UcU&feature=related
Listen to Guitar Wolf! DO IT!

And Undead, RotLD 3 and especially Cemetery Man are worth a look.

Posted by: LuckyLopez April 01, 2009 03:03 am

(Jingus @ March 31, 2009 01:35 pm)
I forget who it was, someone on TSM I think, but someone once made a great point about the message behind zombie movies. (At least, before the modern fast-running trend.) The fear involved in zombie movies isn't so much of the undead horror outside the door, as it is fear of humanity's own self-destructive tendencies. After all, zombies are real slow and real dumb. Unless you're just surrounded by an army of the damn things, it should be easy to defeat them. Yet every single time, the humans in these movies make dumb mistakes or get into fights or otherwise victimize themselves in manners which let the zombies eat them. Whether it's making the wrong choice about which tactics to use, or one group of humans preying upon another, or just not paying attention when you walk into a seemingly empty room; it's not the zombies that kill us. We get ourselves killed.

I think that's definitely part of the zombie story appeal but I also think much of it is about hopelessness and the fear that your enemies are basically people. When one of them kills a person there's one more. You're right that its not hard to get away from the traditional zombie, but what comes after that? Where do you go? The progression of the Romero films really show that. You can get away and find some shelter and some fellow survivors, but what then? They just collect out there and the longer you stay still the worse it gets. So you can find someplace safe with supplies and secure walls but what then? You can't stay there forever. Supplies will eventually run out but hope and sanity will before that. So you can try and fight this and take it back but what chance do you have and how long can you do it before you give up? And then you get to Land and its people trying to rebuild society in a new world with some sort of strange ecosystem that includes the zombies.

Its just the terror of knowing that even once you get away from these slow, lumbering, dumb zombies there's just more waiting. These are the dead population of the world. How do you fight that? How do you clean it up? There's just so many of them. Its claustrophobia and agoraphobia turned into monsters. Yeah, there's also the man vs man and your own worst enemy themes but I always thought that was the main one. Of course I'm a small bit of an agoraphobic/claustrophobic so maybe that's why.


I really didn't care for Undead. Maybe I should give it a 2nd shot as I think I bailed on it prematurely.

I was surprised to see Mulberry St mentioned but I really enjoyed that one. I'm a NYer so I enjoyed seeing the city used well as a setting, but I also just thought it was a nice spin on some traditional ideas.

[REC] and the American remake Quarantine were nice recent films too assuming you somehow manage to avoid the trailers or the American promotional poster because they give too much away. But its a mood story told well playing on the tension and confusion of these stories.

A couple of films I saw in the last year or so that stood out to me. Dead and Breakfast is a really fun and campy with a recognizable cast (Jeremy Sisto, David and Evar Carradine) and a lot of cool little nods and references to the genre. It even stars Anthony Perkin's son and doesn't ignore that.

One movie I loved when I saw it was Zombie Honeymoon. I was caught by surprise and this is the long little rant I wrote at another messageboard in October 2007 hours after seeing it. I'm almost embarrassed by the sappiness of it but I rewatched the film a couple of times and still felt the same way.

I just watched Zombie Honeymoon. Its the story of a newly married couple who go on their honeymoon and are attacked by a zombie. Husband dies and is quickly resuscitated and wife spends the rest of the honeymoon adapting to the new habits he's developed as he transforms into a cannibalistic zombie. Sounds goofy, right? I've seen these silly comedy zombie romances before. Thing is, this is 100% straight.

Now I've seen it done straight before too. Lots of zombie stories have subplots where someone can't let go of their loved one who has turned. Usually its a minor aside and our protagonists kill the zombie either out of disgust or need. Sometimes they are angry at the crazy person, sometimes sympathetic but its just a quick thing. 28 Days Later apparently was SUPPOSED to explore this idea in detail but that horrible military story took its place. The one movie I've seen focus on this was Return of the Living Dead 3. The most serious of the Living Dead films I've ever seen about a young boy who clings to his turned girlfriend and fights to hang on to her as she more and more turns to the monster. I don't recall it being especially good but it was a really interest idea.

THIS? Was good. Really good. So good I'm sitting here wondering if maybe I'm a little too tired and am overrating it. So good that I didn't delete it and I intend to rewatch it tomorrow to make sure I'm not crazy. It was good! The wife reacts sensibly. She's horrified. She's angry and terrified. But she loves her husband and realizes that something has changed him. She's not setting up a zombie home. She's desperately clinging to her husband and the hopes that he can be cured. And the deeper this insanity gets and the more he changes the more horrified she becomes and you can see her slowly losing her grasp of her own sanity. She has her doubts, she runs away numerous times, she tries to stop him. But in the end he's her husband, speaking, loving her, telling her he's sorry and clearly meaning it. And he's a victim.


Sometimes it's hard to be a woman
Giving all your love to just one man
You'll have bad times
And he'll have good times
Doin things that you don't understand
But if you love him
You'll forgive him
Even though he's hard to understand
And if you love him
Oh, be proud of him
Cause after all he's just a man

Stand by your man
Give him two arms to cling to
And something warm to come to
when nights are cold and lonely

It actually plays over the end credits and I laugh when I hear it start. And then the lyrics just FIT the movie so damn perfectly. And not in a comical campy way like I laughed at. This is honest to God what that woman went through. Tammy Wynette might as well have been singing about a damn woman who's husband turns into a zombie and slowly slips into madness and murder and becomes a monster against his will.

Just to really tell you how serious this film is? Its dedicated to the director's sister and brother-in-law. He was killed on their honeymoon. Holy crap! Its an honest to God ode to a loved one and to his sister's pain! And I think he did a good job! Granted, I'm not sure if she'd be comforted or honored or anything. But I guess if your brother makes zombie movies you might have a tough skin or know him to be weird. But it was a sweet idea and very well executed.

Really, seriously. I think I loved this film. But I have to rewatch it before I commit to that.


Note, its also an indy film clearly shot on a High Def video, low budget. It often feels like a home movie. Thing is, I think that really adds to the feel a bit. At worse its a movie made in the 21st Century that kind of looks like one from the '70s or '80s. But I thought the look added to the very intimate story.


And a search tells me I don't have to hate the director for his questionable ethics.


Quote:
Although Gebroe had reservations about exploiting his sister’s tragedy for story material, she approved the project. “I felt like a scumbag…[but] I talked to my sister and she was all for it,” he said. “Above everything else, it was kind of a valentine to her strength, her ability to get through her grief and keep moving in life. So a lot of what is in there is straight from reality; everything’s from real life except the undead stuff.”


I think I love this film. I'll get back to you on that.

I probably did overreact with that and the lyric writing is something I'm not prone to do and a bit embarrassed by. But still, I've seen it a couple of times since and I didn't go back on my first impression. So I'd say its really worth a look.

Posted by: special k April 01, 2009 08:54 am
Ha ha, I forgot about that one! Zombie Honeymoon's quality definitely caught me by surprise.

Posted by: luke-o April 01, 2009 03:19 pm

(Jingus @ March 31, 2009 06:41 pm)
If we're talking about more obscure flicks, here's a few not mentioned:

-there was one from Australia a couple years back called Undead which was a lot of fun. It wasn't strictly just a zombie movie, there were aliens and other weird metaphysical shit, but the movie mostly plays it for laughs and it's got some really cool visuals and action bits too.

-I thought the Tom Savini remake of Night of the Living Dead was unfairly shat-upon by some. Of course it wasn't as great as the original; what is? No, it doesn't have nearly as much gore as you might expect from a movie directed by Savini; so what? It still had an interesting contemporary take on the old story, and also a nice alliterative cast with Tom Towles and Tony Todd.

Pretty much this. Add the obvious ones in there, and Shawn of the Dead for some Britishness and you're set to go.

Just remember, slow over fast. You want NotLD, not 28 Days Later.

Posted by: dubq April 01, 2009 03:25 pm
I agree Jingus. The Tom Savini remake of NOTLD was great. Romero was involved as a producer, so I'm sure that helped as well. Plus Tony Todd is the shit!

Also loved Undead. I have an import copy of that but I can't watch it anymore because I no longer have a region-free player. I really need to buy that in region 1 soon!

Oh, and worst, by far that I've seen? Day of the Dead 2: Contagium. The zombies were created by Tinkerbell!

Posted by: Sabre April 01, 2009 03:30 pm
I have alot of love for the spanish flick REC:, which got remade in the states as Quarantine. Havnt seen the remake, but its probably poo.

Posted by: Jingus April 01, 2009 04:23 pm

(dubq @ April 01, 2009 02:25 pm)
Oh, and worst, by far that I've seen? Day of the Dead 2: Contagium. The zombies were created by Tinkerbell!

I think that one wouldn't be hated so harshly if it just didn't have the Day of the Dead name attached to it. I actually kinda liked the middle part where the people were quarantined and trying to figure out what was going on. The rest of the movie was poo, but oh well.

Still didn't hate it as much as I did the remake version of Day of the Dead, with Mena Suvari as a drill sergeant and the wiescracking black sidekick and Bub The Vegetarian Zombie In Luv and the Resident Evil ripoff plot and using Ving Rhames for a two-minute cameo but promoting him as the star. Awful fucking movie.

For another zombie flick to avoid, Flight of the Living Dead was shite. The basic concept sounds neat enough: zombie outbreak on a plane. Sure, it's a total ripoff of Snakes On A Plane, but you could do something with it. Unfortunately the execution was horrible.

But the WORST that I've seen was a no-budget amateur movie called Zombies Gone Wild!, allegedly about some dudes who run into hot chick zombies on spring break. I can tolerate a homemade movie shot on a camcorder (there was one called Hood of the Living Dead which was halfway decent), but this irredeemable crusted maxi pad of a so-called movie felt like the kind of zombie movie that Vince Russo might've shot with some of his buddies... in middle school. Lemme put it this way: the zombies don't even show up until the movie is already 2/3rds over. Til then, it's just a bunch of "wacky" comedic improvised scenes filmed in apartments and parking lots. Yet you can go to Amazon right now and buy this thing on DVD for twenty bucks! I think I even saw it at Blockbuster. Un-be-fucking-lievable.

Posted by: The Buzz April 01, 2009 07:35 pm
Zombie Honeymoon was pretty entertaining. Boy Eats Girl was watchable. There is a movie called Zombies Anonymous I've meant to check out, but haven't yet. I know Flight of the Living Dead is usually panned as a movie, but I enjoyed it for some reason. If you like your horror campy, Zombie Strippers is always out there. I've also been wanting to check out Dance of the Dead, but after seeing how bad Brotherhood of Blood was, I'm hesitant to watch any more Ghosthouse movies.

Posted by: Jingus April 01, 2009 08:01 pm
Dance of the Dead isn't a masterpiece, but it's a perfectly decent little standard zombie flick. And D'OH on me forgetting that alchemical wonder known as Zombie Strippers!, one of the best mixes of shockingly highbrow and debasingly lowbrow material that I've ever seen.

Zombies Anonymous... sounds kinda familiar. But I might be thinking of a flick I believe was called American Zombie, a tepid mockumentary which wasn't much fun.

Were most people as disappointed in Diary of the Dead as I was? Aside from the gimmick already having been done better in .REC (not to mention Blair Witch, Cloverfield, etc) it just felt like Romero had completely run out of ideas. His social commentary is nowhere near as sharp as in his other zombie flicks, it mostly just consists of the narration endlessly rambling about viral videos and media buzzwords.

Posted by: Gary Floyd April 01, 2009 08:05 pm
I really enjoyed "Diary" the first time I saw it, but repeat viewings have not been kind.

Posted by: The Buzz April 01, 2009 08:24 pm
Zombie Diaries was a big waste of time for me, made Diary of the Dead look like the original Dawn in comparison.

Posted by: Obi Chris Kenobi April 02, 2009 01:25 pm
I've went a head and added some of these to my to 'buy' queue.

Posted by: Canadian Destroyer213 April 02, 2009 10:16 pm
The zombie film is the reason I love horror. I first saw the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD when I was 5, and I haven't looked back since.

I just recently saw THE BEYOND by Lucio Fulci, and I must say, that this is one of the strangest films I have seen in a long time, and I loved every second of it.

Posted by: luke-o April 03, 2009 02:02 pm
DIARY was actually better that I expected.

Boy Eats Girl is pretty funny and quite entertaining. Even though it does have Samantha Mumba in it...

I'm also partial to The Quick and The Undead.

Posted by: dubq April 03, 2009 02:29 pm

(Canadian Destroyer213 @ April 02, 2009 10:16 pm)
The zombie film is the reason I love horror. I first saw the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD when I was 5, and I haven't looked back since.

I just recently saw THE BEYOND by Lucio Fulci, and I must say, that this is one of the strangest films I have seen in a long time, and I loved every second of it.

Yup, the Beyond is fucking awesome. Also Fulci's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_the_Living_Dead (also known as The Gates of Hell). This is the movie that gave me an irrational fear of being buried alive as a kid.

 

[Gary]

"City of the Living Dead" is probably my favorite Fulci movie. Gory, but atmospheric as hell (I love the pick ax scene.)

 

[Jingus]

Um... I'll avoid chiming in with my thoughts on that one, then. I'll just say if I was forced to pick a Fulci film which involved zombies but wasn't Zombie, I'd go with The Beyond.

I've got like a zillion old reviews I wrote for zombie movies back at the Pit, I could repost 'em here, like a Rotting Shambling Brains-Fueled Corpse Of The Day deal. Gary, you wrote a bunch in your blog, right? We could be like the Internet's absolute worst version of Siskel and Ebert ever.

 

[vivisectvi]

Go for it Jingus! I'd love to read them!

 

[Jingus]

Okay. Just to establish my typical baseline, here's me bitching about a few that I didn't like. Note that I rate movies on a scale of 1-10 because I'm too pretentious to stick to ordinary star ratings.

Night of the Living Dead (30th Anniversary Edition): 2/10
Wait a minute, hear me out. Have you seen this version? SPECIFICALLY the 30th Anniversary cut? If not, then stay the fuck away from it, because it's a horrid example of graverobbing indeed. The original film is one of my favorite horror flicks, easily Top 5 of all time, but this is just plain necrophilia.

Everyone has seen or at least knows about George Romero's seminal 1968 flick which invented the modern zombie genre and changed horror movies for all time, right? Well, 30 years later, some of the original participants (cowriter John Russo, lead zombie Bill Hinzman, producer Russ Streiner, etc) are apparently needing money and so turned to their one laudable accomplishment in life in order to scam the legions of zombie fans out there. Romero was supposed to be involved, if you can believe the conspirators' commentary, but he definitely had nothing to do with this version.

So, long story short: they pulled a George Lucas and had Greedo shoot first. They shot new footage, including new beginning and ending, and chopped out 15 minutes of original movie in order to make room for the new crap. That would be bad enough in abstract concept, but what makes it even worse is that the new scenes SUCK, just horribly produced on all levels, and stick out like Khali at a midget convention. Pay special attention to the dick playing the priest, if you can stand to, as he somehow manages to be stiff and wooden and yet still chew the scenery at the same time.

Unless you want to listen to the commentary track where the filmmakers blatantly lie about how well the new footage matches the old stuff, even the biggest Deadheads should stay the fuck away from this murdered movie.

Oasis of the Zombies: 2/10
The experience of watching this film is sort of akin to watching a guy walk a tightrope. He's not a terribly good acrobat, but the rope is pretty short and the drop isn't too high, so he gets about a third of the way across just fine. And then he suddenly whips out a .38 and blows his brains out. As all the children in the audience scream, his body falls, crotches itself on the rope, and then spins over and crashes with a sickening thud onto the ground. And then... I can't believe it, he's moving, he's alive! And... he slowly brings the gun up, and eats another bullet.

This is one of the several million European zombie flicks which were churned out after Dawn of the Dead became a huge hit over there, although in tone and production it seems more similar to the Blind Dead type of stuff than anything like the Lucio Fulcis of the world ever produced. So this is one of the Undead Nazi subgenre of zombie films, and it starts out okay, considering that Latin hack Jesus Franco is directing. Oh sure, it's got all the hallmarks of a crappy 70s horror flick what with the laughable dubbing and the shaky handheld camera with an overreliance on the zoom lens. But it actually builds up the tension fairly well; there's an early battle scene which shows that they had a decent budget, and the Saharan locale is a nice change of pace from the urban areas s which host most zombie movies. It's got that grungy 70s realism working for it, where they manage to have a narrative, fictional movie that has the general atmosphere of a snuff film.

And then... the zombies show up, and it's like someone flicked a switch and turned the quality off. Our "Nazis" are very clearly shown to be swarthy Spaniards, complete with goofy long 70s haircuts. The absolutely incompetent zombie makeup is the worst I've ever seen, and I've seen The Incredibly Strange Creatures Which Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies. It looks like the filmmakers just slapped a handfull of dirt on their faces and called it a day. And somehow once they show up, the entire movie around them falls to shit too. The characters suddenly turn into complete idiots, continuity is nonexistant, LOTS of time is killed with people just walking around or starting and/or stopping cars, and the whole mess just plain signs up for the standard Kevorkian benefits package. Worth a look if you treasure watching really, really shitty zombie flicks.

White Zombie: 4/10
This creaky old B movie would probably be completely forgotten today if it hadn't starred Bela Lugosi and inspired the name of a certain rock band. Lugosi plays Murder Legendre, a voodoo doctor in Haiti who zombifies all his enemies and uses them as his slaves. Although this film portrays its zombies in the typical voodoo robot mode, it's the earliest picture I know of to definitvely state that they are indeed reanimated corpses and not just brainwashed people.

The film does have a couple of high points, like a creepy sequence in a sugarcane processing plant, and leading lady Madge Bellamy does a fairly haunting portrayal of her standard weakling maiden-in-peril part. Lugosi isn't bad either, even though the director is unfortunately in love with Dracula-style closeups of his face, which isn't helped by some goofy fake eyebrows and facial hair. But the rest of the film is pretty crappy. The violence is done in such a slow and phony manner, much of the actors seem like hammy stage players belting out their speeches to the cheap seats, and the dialogue must've sounded archaic even back then. Unless you're a genre completist, don't bother with this one.

 

[Gary]

http://forums.thesmartmarks.com/blog/lovecraft231/index.php?&st=100

My reviews from the old blog starting here. I actually like "White Zombie" though.

 

[Jingus]

http://forums.thesmartmarks.com/blog/lovecraft231/index.php?&st=100

Holy crap, you watch a lot of incredibly obscure stuff.

...

...I liked The Dead Hate The Living.

 

[Gary]

http://forums.thesmartmarks.com/blog/lovecraft231/index.php?&st=100

Holy crap, you watch a lot of incredibly obscure stuff.

...

...I liked The Dead Hate The Living.

That was kinda the idea originally. I love movies like "Dawn of the Dead" and "Return of the Living Dead" and whatnot, but really, I can't say anything about those that hasn't already been said. So I decided I might as well devote time to ones that don't get as much attention. If I do another one, I might go over a few more well known titles.

A lot of the obscure stuff I know about from a book about zombie movies I own called "Book of the Dead." I had to go through some suffering watching and reviewing some of that (shot on camcorder zombie movies: the bane of the horror genre in the 90's,) though there's some gems. I might do another one in July-I just don't know where I'll do it. I'm not posting in that blog anymore (it seems pointless to now), so maybe I'll just do it (with help) in July over here. It actually takes a while to pick the movies out and watch them (a lot of them I watch weeks, days, and months in advance)

 

[Jingus]

Watching a bunch in a row can burn you out somethin' fierce. A few months back I went on a marathon and saw 13 zombie flicks in a week, and even then I broke my own rules and watched a non-horror flick just for sherbert (The Princess and the Warrior, Tom Tykwer and Franka Potente's disappointing followup to Run Lola Run, if you're curious). Even in the depths of that thing, stuff like Hood of the Living Dead was the most unknown obscurity I tried. Except for Zombies Gone Wild. Oh, I want to find those "filmmakers" and kick their asses with steel-toed boots and I'm not even entirely kidding. But anyway, there's only so much of the same kind of stuff I can watch in a row. I tried for a vampire movie marathon a little while back, and literally gave up in fifteen minutes upon trying to watch Dracula 2000. "Wes Craven Presents" is almost official code now for "this is gonna suck".

 

[The Buzz]

Has anyone heard anything about that Dead Snow movie? Guess it's about a group of teens that get attacked by Nazi Zombies while on a ski trip or something along those lines.

 

[vivisectvi]

Speaking of Nazi Zombies... Shockwaves is another classic fave of mine.

 

[Jingus]

Weird, I've got Shockwaves uploaded to watch now. Along with Boy Eats Girl and Mulberry Street, based on the recommendations here. Couldn't find Zombie Honeymoon anywhere for some reason.

Zombie Strippers!: 7/10
This trashy little flick had NO business being this good. In the end the general effect is like someone set out to make the best Troma movie ever, and overachieved. It feels like something which was made by a talented porno director who is trying to branch out into the mainstream... and secretly double majored in English and sociology back in college. I mean, it's a movie starring Jenna Jameson as a goddamn Zombie Stripper; what the fuck are all these jokes about obscure existential philosophy and all this multisyllabic Big Vocabulary dialogue doing here? Especially in a movie which includes a zombie stripper doing the ping pong ball trick as an offensive attack?

The movie opens on a CNN-like newscast, informing us that thanks to a voting error in Florida, Bush has been elected to his third term. Our military is currently engaged in wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea, Venezuela, France, Canada, and Alaska. Meanwhile, Congress has officially outlawed stripping. Jump to a secret military base, where guess what, a new experimental biological warfare virus has gotten out of control. One of the victims stumbles into a nearby illegal underground strip club, and promptly tackles Jenna off the stage and kills her. But of course she don't stay down for long... and it turns out that the virus doesn't effect women in exactly the same way. They retain a little bit of their mind, and also turn into gothic superstrippers that the men in the audience go crazy for. But then the girls start chowing down on the customers they take back to the champagne room, and shit goes down.

Just from watching the girls in this movie, it seems like most of them have probably really been strippers at some point. There's a sense of casual familiarity here which just seems to genuine to have been faked, especially in a movie which is so deliberately campy. The only non-pron people here are Tito Ortiz who seemingly wandered onto the set and got cast as a bouncer, and Robert Fucking Englund who's having WAY too much fun in a loony scenery-chewing performance as the piggish club owner. The movie was written, directed, shot, and edited by a fellow named Jay Lee; this is his first feature film, but he's got such a breezy, playful confidence with his setpieces and cinematography that I'm just guessing he spent a long time sharpening his craft by making porn. The gore effects are clearly homemade, especially some dodgy CGI, but considering that it's a low-budget zombie flick starring Jenna Jameson I'm not complaining too much.

The strange thing is how much bizarre social satire and political undertone is present here. The movie is actually a loose adaptation of a semi-obscure existential French play called Rhinoceros; I've never heard of it, but apparently it's been performed on stage by Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles, and made into a movie with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder (!). The fictional town in this movie is called "Sartre", and at one point a zombie stripper is reading a book by Nietzsche and mutters, "This makes so much more sense now!" I mean, come ON, I don't think I've ever seen such a jarring contrast between high and low brow material like this, it's glorious. The movie has a lot of leftist anti-Bush sentiment, which is all presented in such a goofy and exaggerated manner that I couldn't help laughing along with it. Even stranger is the deeper, harder to describe stuff which deals with the nature of woman as a sex object, and what they put themselves through in order to please the male id. There's a subplot about the girls being peer pressured to get with the zombie program because the johns can't get enough of the living dead girls, and it's actually by far the creepiest thing in a movie which is mostly broad comedy. As God as my witness, this movie uses reanimating corpses as a metaphor for cosmetic surgery and aesthetic conformity.

But I must pull back on my effusive fellatio here, because the movie isn't quite the chimeric wonder which I might've made it out to be. There's a lot of tasteless gags which don't work, especially all the lousy wetback jokes about the Mexican janitor. The acting is often deliberately awful, but some people will still be put off by its amazingly corny nature. The two black-haired chicks looked way too much alike, I kept getting them mixed up. And no matter how much you glorify it with witty references to deep thoughts, it's still a grungy little movie about goddamned zombie strippers. But if such has any appeal to you, I can't recommend this strongly enough. Especially one little detail: I think this is the first movie I've seen which accurately depicts modern strippers as having clean-shaven crotches, and actually shows them on camera. I don't know exactly what that says about the movie. But it sure as hell says something.

EDIT: upon further research, it turns out that Jenna was in fact the only porn veteran on the set, as Jay Lee is a real indy director and the other strippers are all real actresses. Coulda fooled me. And that's a compliment.

 

[daileyxplanet]

I just started Night of the Living Dead (Remake), will return with thoughts.

 

[Jingus]

Whatever dumbass uploaded Shockwaves only put the first thirty minutes up and apparently thought we wouldn't need the rest. Fucker. I did watch Boy Eats Girl, and... no, it was not very good. I'll post the review here sometime soon, I've only got so many of these suckers and don't want to run out too quick.

 

[Youth N Asia]

Sadly Romero has just lost his touch. 2 classic zombie movies, a passable one, and 2 turds

And yeah, I consider Day one of the turds.

Diary of the Dead left me more disappointed than any other movie last year. I know he gets a boner from social commentary, but it was an unwatchable mess.

 

[The Buzz]

Guess there is hope that his new on Island of the Dead will be decent like Land. Doubt it'll be as good as the first two.

 

[LuckyLopez]

I JUST rewatched Diary. I saw the final 20 minutes or so a week back and just felt like watching the movie again. I was boozed up and it was on, so why not? Its just dull. I don't think Romero has any story left to tell. Even the one dramatic scene of the movie is just dull and there and captures no sympathy. The characters are generic, the scenes are cliche. It doesn't even feel like a Romero film. I don't love Day and Land but at least with those films it felt like he was trying to tell stories with characters he cared about. Diary just felt thrown together like it was made by any old half assed director telling a film filled with cliches taken from Romero films.

The first time I saw it I even thought it was a kind of general outlook of the overall Romero theme. Shack up. You find the Amish dude in his home and that falls apart. The folks who set up shop and that falls apart. Military falling apart. But even that just seems half assed and not nearly as present as I remember.

I have my problems with Day and Land but I still think there's something to them. Diary's just useless.

EDIT: I guess the grand message he was trying to tell was modern media (Youtube, MySpace, digital cameras and laptops) made hiding the truth impossible. But even that just seemed tossed on. We get a dozen instances of the girlfriend yelling at the camera and one occasion of the media distorting the truth. Meanwhile its just general zombie olympics. I'm not really sure there's a story in what Romero wanted but even if there is he did a half assed job telling it.

 

[special k]

Just saw a movie I must rent/buy: Attack Girls' Swim Team vs. the Undead.
It looks fantastic!

 

[Jingus]

Rotting Shambling Brains-Fueled Corpse of the Day:

Day of the Dead: 5/10
This movie has a very curious backstory. George Romero was offered $7 million to make a third zombie movie, with only one condition: unlike the unrated Dawn of the Dead, he had to turn in an R-rated picture. Romero balked, apparently feeling that having bloody violence was more important than a decent budget. For a compromise, the studio offered him less than half the original amount to direct an unrated movie, which George accepted. Considering that Romero's original script was apparently MUCH more ambitious than the little movie he ended up making, I'd call it a Pyrrhic victory or a Faustian bargain or any of those other words which indicate that someone didn't lose, but didn't really win either.

This movie is just fine as long as it sticks to the zombies. This movie is maybe the pinacle of Tom Savini's show-stopping gore effects, as he does stuff here which simply looks like real zombies are tearing real humans into real bloody pieces. Even ultraviolent stuff like the Dawn of the Dead remake never quite matched the sheer brutality of the carnage on display here. In quieter moments, there's some pretty fascinating stuff with the lovable zombie Bub, who is portrayed almost like Karloff's Frankenstein in his wide-eyed innocence when he's being re-taught how to be a human being.

Problem is, that's only part of the movie, and the rest is pure crap. All of Romero's Dead films have their share of social and political undertones, but this one is by far much worse than any of the others in that respect. I've heard people blather on about how this was supposed to be a commentary on the Reagan-era war-industrial complex, but it's such a heavyhanded and so one-sided in its mockery of the military that I just don't get the point. What the fuck was he trying to say here? "All soldiers are assholes"? All of the soldier characters in this movie are portrayed as being violent retards with macho egos and hair-trigger tempers, while all of the civilians are intelligent sane people who are trying to solve the big problems. Talk about a fucking straw man.

The rampant overacting doesn't help any of this, with the soldiers constantly posturing and yelling and threatening and generally chewing the scenery to itty bitty pieces. I mean, they really go balls out with the eyeball-rolling, shoulder-shaking, neck-vein-popping top-of-their-lungs hollaring at the drop of a hat. Romero's dialogue, never his strongest suit, is especially weak here with some of that 80s Profanity Overload which seems self-conscious and wrecks the disbelief suspension. Some people have said that they loved the basic premise of this movie, that having some people go insane in an underground bunker seems realistic for the end of Zombiegeddon; however, it's still a bunch of obnoxious pricks stuck in a room together having a screaming match to see which one wins the title of Biggest Douchebag, and the losers are all the ones who have to watch a perfectly good zombie flick get ruined by this bullshit. It's not a complete failure on its own merits, but it sure as hell doesn't compare to the two movies that preceeded it.

 

[Gary]

Just saw a movie I must rent/buy: Attack Girls' Swim Team vs. the Undead.
It looks fantastic!

Don't. There's little gore, and in spite of all the T & A, it's boring as hell. Easily the worse Japanese zombie movie I've seen.

 

[Precious Roy]

For me it begins and ends with Dawn of the Dead. Day of the Dead is a worthy #2. Shaun of the Dead is really really smart and funny and pretty much untouchable as far as a loving parody of the genre goes.

I do not like the newer Romero movies and the remakes very much. And I def prefer the original Night of the Living Dead to the 80's remake.

 

[Precious Roy]

Actually I'll take that back, I liked Land of the Dead

 

[Jingus]

Rotting shambling brains-fueled corpse of the day:

House of the Dead: 0/10
I'm going to challenge myself here: I'm going to try to write this entire review without any swearing. I will probably fail. I've got a whole lot to say. I am afraid that I will fail to impart just how insanely incompetent this jaw-dropping atrocity is. Those who have not borne witness with their own scarred eyes might not believe the horror which this movie visits upon the mortal coil.

-Uwe Boll really is the modern Ed Wood. I say that in all seriousness, without a trace of irony or exaggeration. He is, by far, the consistently worst big-budget director working today. He has never made a good movie. He has never even made a movie which wasn't shockingly bad. And like Wood, he seems to have absolutely no idea how horrible his product is. Listening to interviews with him, you can tell that he's truly mystified why people around the world spit at the mention of his name. He is absolutely clueless about his complete and utter lack of any and all artistic ability or talent. And yet he really believes that he's making decent genre flicks! Boll is one of those people who makes me hopeful about making films myself, because there's no way on earth I could even accidentally make something as worthless as his film House of the Dead.

-This movie cuts its own throat right at the beginning, with the awful narration informing us that this one guy is alive, but that these other people are all dead. Wow, the suspense, it is killing me.

-Boll once again takes a big ol' dump over the heads of all the game fans in the world. The House of the Dead games are about some kind of soldiers fighting a variety of demonic creatures, in a gothic European city. The House of the Dead movie is about a bunch of yuppies who go to a rave on a Carribbean island and find themselves in a zombie film.

-But he does try to assuage the fanboys in the most brow-furrowing way possible: he puts footage from the actual video game into the movie itself! Not as in "the camera watches someone playing this video game", I mean like the audience is playing it. He actually flashes full-screen video from the game in random little clips throughout the movie. Absolutely mind-boggling. Too bad Sega got in their product placement via the giant "SEGA" banner in the middle of the rave (corporate sponsored rave, with no drugs, entirely populated by 30somethings, on a deserted island?), so that they couldn't disavow all knowledge of this travesty.

-There sure are a lot of cold-climate evergreen trees here in Vancouver the tropical Carribbean island.

-The characters in this film make the campers from any given Friday the 13th look erudite and likable. I'm not kidding. These are some really bad actors, being shepherded by a really bad director, intoning a really bad script, while playing characters who are so dimwitted and obnoxious that I'm amazed audiences didn't riot in the theaters after ten minutes of this garbage. I was going to go with a "I've seen better acting in my high school plays", but that's so literally true that it's not a fair comparison. Instead, I'll say that I have seen better acting from first-year wrestling rookies who've had less than a dozen matches. All of the main stars in this picture should look back upon their work here with shame. It's no surprise that this is by far the worst movie Jurgen Prochnow has ever been in (and remember that he's been in Dune, Wing Commander, Body of Evidence, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), but when I tell you that this movie stains the good reputation of CLINT HOWARD, and I'm NOT JOKING, please reflect and ponder upon that.

-How did all these drunken wannabe-hipster douchebags learn to fight and shoot like they're Jason Bourne, anyway?

-All the production people are seemingly retarded too. The lighting, makeup, costumes, sets, special effects, and editing would all feel cheap even on the SciFi Channel. Even the continuity checker was asleep: grok how Prochnow at one point takes a Colt .45 (which holds 7 bullets) and fires 13 times in a row. There's also at least a couple of times where the actors obviously flubbed their lines, but it was left in the finished movie anyway.

-Boll makes sure to give us ye old gratuitous nudity with at least three topless chicks in the first fifteen minutes. After that, we never see tits again. This is a typical symptom of the very worst in crass exploitation.

-This film actually contains the line "It's quiet... too quiet!"

-Until this film taught me, I had no idea that you could cut someone's face off and then wear it as a mask, and it will look so convincing that even the dead guy's best friends will instantly accept that you're really him.

-Why does Boll always have loud, hideous techno music blasting during all of the action scenes? He's done this in every movie of his that I've seen. Often the sound is mixed badly, and the earache-inducing music drowns out any dialogue or sound effects occuring at the same time. Maybe the editors thought the action scenes needed all the help they could get. Lord knows that one big shootout is one of the most astonishingly inept setpieces I've ever seen.

-Speaking of something Boll does in every movie: his shameless sequel-begging endings. Every single time, the movie ends with some sort of "this is only the beginning!" claptrap. The only thing worse than watching these movies is contemplating the possibility of even more of them being made in the future.

-Ya know what? I can't keep my promise. This movie is the worst Boll flick that I've seen, unbelievably terrible, and it offends me that the studios actually released this in theaters and that Boll actually got money to make more movies. So I gotta say it: Fuck Uwe!

 

[2GOLD]

The only good thing about Diary of the Dead was the drunk British guy. He was awesome. The rest? Miserable. Romero using catch phrases makes me very very sad.

 

[LuckyLopez]

The big battle scene in the middle of House of the Dead when it takes them roughly 30 minutes to get across 30 feet to the cabin remains the single most confusing scene I've ever seen in anything. How long it lasts. The bizarre profiles everyone gets. The fact that they're throwing grenades and just unloading round after round to get 30 feet and yet midway through actually seem to be further away from the cabin. The random video game scenes cut in. Its just the single most bizarre scene I've ever seen. The first time I saw it I swear I went through like 5 different reactions. That scene lasts SO long that I swear it hits "so bad its funny", then passes that and becomes offensive, and then gets funny a 2nd time.

But I'm told that if you watch the movie with the director commentary on that becomes the single funniest scene in film history. Supposedly to hear Uwe Boll explain his genius of that scene is pure comedy gold. I have however never verified this because that would mean giving money to and then listening to Uwe Boll.

There is a sequel and its actually a fairly unoffensive generic bad zombie film that has virtually nothing to do with the original. You know you're a bad director when the Sci-Fi Channel sequel to your film is better than your original.

 

[Jingus]

On today's very special episode of Rotting Brains-Fueled Corpse of the Day, it's a two-fer.

28 Days Later: 4/10
Vastly overrated zombie flick. It tries to do something a little different from most, and good on 'em for that, but ultimately in my opinion it remains a failed experiment. I think it got all the hype it did mainly for two gimmicks that were actually ripoffs: the idea of the protagonist waking up after civilization's fall and then wandering alone through the wasteland (straight outta The Stand, I Am Legend, and countless other apocalyptic stories) and the admittedly impressive visual of sprinting, screaming zombies (which was already done in the Return of the Living Dead series, and done much better in the Dawn of the Dead remake).

Still, the first hour or so is pretty damn good, with the impossible-not-to-sympathize-with story of a small group of terrified, desperate people trying to sustain life and love in a hostile world against overwhelming odds. If they'd stayed with that general thread, it would've been a much better movie. HOWever, (minor Spoiler) once they ran into the army guys the whole movie turned into one big Day of the Dead remake, and that's NOT a compliment. At one point, it's almost like someone flicked a switch, and the characters turned from interesting, fleshed-out real people who drove the story with their own motivations into cardboard stereotypes at the mercy of a hackneyed, contrived, manipulative script. Without giving too much away, let's just say that our heroes' response to the soldiers' real intentions seems like just a bit of an overreaction, given the situation they're all in.

The DVD has a couple of "alternate endings", but they're not all that different, and mostly just illustrate how utterly arbitrary the last half-hour of the movie is. The most interesting (and disappointing) part of the whole movie is a DVD extra called "Radical Alternate Ending", which details in storyboards a wholely different idea they had for the entire last act of the film, and let's just say that it looked far superior to what they eventually went with. Unfortunately, they decided to drop it, all because of one minor plot hole that easily could've been worked around with a bit of creative dialogue and McGuffin usage.

All in all, this movie reeks of having been made by good, competent filmmakers who, although they were fans of horror movies, really didn't fundamentally understand them or have much insight into what makes them really work.


28 Weeks Later: 8/10
Vastly superior sequel finally fulfills the potential of 28 Days Later in a manner the first movie barely dreamed of. It's nasty, brutal, unpredictable, and is altogether the most effective new horror flick I've seen since The Descent. This movie even reminded me of Children of Men at a couple of points, and coming from me that's some really fucking high praise indeed.

28 weeks after the Rage Virus outbreak, all the rage zombies have starved to death and the American military is in charge of London. Through a combination of the few outbreak survivors and a lot of English emigrants and vacationers now returning home, they've started to rebuild the city and establish something resembling a normal society. That could probably make a good movie right there, but obviously it wouldn't make much money, so sooner or later we know that once again the screaming infected will be rampaging through London's streets.

This time the chaos is on a much more epic scale than in the first movie, with some damned amazing setpieces and genuinely scary moments. One way that this film is a lot better than the first one is in its depiction of the military. The sorta "kill them all, let God sort them out" portrayal of the American army is obviously one big Middle Eastern commentary, but it's presented in a fairly reasonable way. Compare that to 28DL, where the general message was "all soldiers are rapists and murderers".

There are two specific flaws in this movie: number one, I found it really hard to believe that That One Zombie somehow kept up with the heroes like that. I understand it was kinda necessary for dramatic closure, but it could've been handled a little smarter. Secondly: the very end. WTF? I thought it was a leap, to say the least, to get to the last scene from the previous one with no real explanation of what happened. But I won't complain too much, since it does a fine job of setting up the hopefully inevitable 28 Months Later.

 

[vivisectvi]

I wholeheartedly disagree with that review of 28 Days Later, Jingus. It's at least a 6 or 7, IMO. I'll go on the record that I side with those who say it's not a zombie film (neither is the sequel).. it's more like the Crazies wherein the antagonists aren't dead but rather insane and rabid and impossible to communicate/reason with.. but since most viewed it as a zombie movie, it is essentially the film that inadvertantly re-ignited the genre earlier this decade. Yes, we got a lot of shitty movies from that re-ignition, but we got some gems out of it, as well.

I don't really gripe too much on flicks who rip off from other flicks. It's one thing to rip off plot and storyline, but simple aspects like those above are more inspirations than rip offs. I mean, if no one did that there'd be a lot of great movies that would've never been made.

*I should note that I find it awesome that 7 years later Danny Boyle is winning an oscar for Slumdog. He certainly is a versatile filmmaker!

 

[vivisectvi]

The big battle scene in the middle of House of the Dead when it takes them roughly 30 minutes to get across 30 feet to the cabin remains the single most confusing scene I've ever seen in anything. How long it lasts. The bizarre profiles everyone gets. The fact that they're throwing grenades and just unloading round after round to get 30 feet and yet midway through actually seem to be further away from the cabin. The random video game scenes cut in. Its just the single most bizarre scene I've ever seen. The first time I saw it I swear I went through like 5 different reactions. That scene lasts SO long that I swear it hits "so bad its funny", then passes that and becomes offensive, and then gets funny a 2nd time.

But I'm told that if you watch the movie with the director commentary on that becomes the single funniest scene in film history. Supposedly to hear Uwe Boll explain his genius of that scene is pure comedy gold. I have however never verified this because that would mean giving money to and then listening to Uwe Boll.

Oh man - that was classic. This movie is horrible but I love it so much. When the heroes die and they do that spinning view of their character? Awesome.

 

[LuckyLopez]

I think I probably rate 28 Days Later a bit better than Jingus but I completely agree with him on the horrible turn it takes with the army stuff. The movie just falls off a cliff with me as soon as it becomes about the evil soldiers where I was enjoying it as a simple little classic zombie story until then. And yeah, the radical ending would have made it a film I praised. Its amazing how differently my reaction is to those different endings.

Strangely I never really compared 28 Weeks Later to 28 Days Later, which of course makes no sense. I think I had THAT negative a reaction to the end of 28 Days Later that I just wrote it off and pretended like 28 Weeks Later was a new film. And I never compared the portrayal of the soldiers in the two films but Jingus is absolutely right. As horrible as the soldiers are portrayed in the 1st they're handled really well in the 2nd. The two scenes when the sniper and the chopper pilot have to debate their orders vs their morals are just really tense and well done. And while the soliders do some really screwed ups tuff they do make it clear WHY they're doing it and why it might even be the right decision. As opposed to turning into savage rapists and murderers after a month.

The opening scene of the film is also really good. Its weird because I never rated 28 Weeks Later high but as I sit and think it really does have a lot good going for it and I have no real complaints.

I've had a lot of "its not a zombie film" arguments and I never really got it. I mean, I GET it. I know why its argued they're technically not zombies. But they're clearly zombies in spirit. Mulberry Street was mentioned and those are not traditional "walking corpses" zombies either. But its a story type with only one specific changed. That specific doesn't fundamentally change the story, just the name of the threat. Its a zombie film in everything except the heartrate of the "zombies."

 

[Youth N Asia]

The only good thing about Diary of the Dead was the drunk British guy. He was awesome. The rest? Miserable. Romero using catch phrases makes me very very sad.

Just another cliche character. The teacher who's still teaching lessons during a zombie world take over.

I'm still annoyed at how bad the movie was.

The main character pretty much lets his friends get chased and attacked by zombies cause he needs to keep filming it...ok, while I think I get what George is going for, it's still all kinds of retarded.

And the kid at the end, the one in the mummy costume did the worst drunk acting job of all time in the last act