Zombie Movies

[Jingus]

youknowwhat o' the day:

[Rec]: 6/10
Is it possible for a horror film to be too effective? There were a few moments in the Spanish first-person scare flick [Rec] which were so tense that I actually gelt myself disliking it. "Okay, this is a bit uncomfortable, can we get to the end pleez?" Those few moments were punctuated by a hell of a lot of long moments involving either absolutely nothing happening, or a bunch of people arguing and screaming at each other simultaneously. Naturally, that's kind of the whole point: the quiet moments set you up for the loud ones. And oh dear Lord are the loud moments loud, and terribly unpredictable in their offbeat timing. Over and over again I got my nerves blasted by some scare I didn't see coming, even though I generally knew that scares would be a-comin' sooner or later. It's almost like a stress test: how much can you endure?

Plot: a tv reporter and her cameraman follow around some firefighters, in order to produce a standard filler news piece about what firemen do on the job. They get called into an apartment building... where they run into a crazy blood-drenched old woman who promptly tries to kill them. No sooner do they turn around when suddenly the building has been sealed off by the government, trapping our protagonists and about a dozen other people inside. Sounds familiar? Yeah, they recently remade this into Quarantine. Although I have heard that the American version probably spends more effort on nauseating gore and spooky lighting effects, so it might lose some of the lo-fi realism which makes this one feel uncannily real at times. And yeah, it all takes place from the POV of the news crew's camera. Lots of people argue about exactly what the first movie was to first do this gimmick, but to my knowledge Blair Witch Project was the first horror flick to use it from start to finish for the entire film, so let's put the credit/blame there.

The voyeuristic nature of the style makes it very hard to do some things, like develop any depth in any of the characters; even our hero reporter remains mostly just a face we look at, we don't really know anything about her. Also, the movie is damnably stingy with any details regarding the nature of the monsters. (Everyone who's seen any of the ads for Quarantine already knows that zombies are involved, kinda, right?) They mostly act like 28 Things Later rage zombies, but there are some vague hints that something weirder might be going on. So with all the information which is withheld from us (not to mention a remarkably abrupt ending without much closure) it gives the annoying feeling that there's a lot more story here that they're just not telling. But still, those jump scenes are so well done that I can't give it a bad score; a scary horror flick is such a woefully rare thing. If nothing else, this beats the hell out of Diary of the Dead; when you can beat George Freaking Romero to the punch with a zombie concept and do it better than his version turns out to be, I 'spose that's good enough.

 

[vivisectvi]

[REC]: If you really want to torture yourself, watch the English dub track on that movie. I mean, holy Christ the main reporter's voice was fucking grating as hell. The only reason I even attempted to watch with the dub was because I was too tired to read subs and just wanted something to vege in front of as I fell asleep. Christ almighty was that a huge mistake.

 

[The Buzz]

Just saw Dance of the Dead and Splinter. Splinter isn't really a zombie movie, but its about a parasite or some type of symbiotic material that takes control of the bodies of living creatures and feeds on other living things. This is a very crude description of the movie, but I guess it would almost fit under the zombie banner. Splinter turned out to be a pretty well done horror movie, but it's not an all-time great or anything. Dance of the Dead was a lot better than the last Ghosthouse movie I saw (Brotherhood of Blood). Pretty well done on a shoestring budget. It falls into the comedy genre more than horror, but was worth a rental.

 

[Jingus]

It's rotting! It's shambling! It's fueled by brains! It's the Corpse o' teh Day!

Zombies Gone Wild: 0/10
Before I get on with the rest of the review, let me explain myself a bit. I don't hate no-budget movies shot on a camcorder with a bunch of buddies making an amateur movie. I've seen plenty of these that I actually liked a lot, from friends in high school who made surprisingly decent home movies, to the cheerfully bankrupt zero-budget copyright violators like Chris Seaver's Filthy McNasty and Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker, to the unfairly unknown public-access gods like Pete Wade, whose film Good Will Clothing is about a graduate student in advanced mathematics who secretly longs to be the world's greatest janitor. So I've earned my stripes in this field. So please believe me when I tell you that Zombies Gone Wild is one of the worst pieces of shit to ever actually be sold to unsuspecting paying customers. It's not THE worst amateur movie I've ever seen for sale in stores (that would be one called Fungicide, which makes Uwe Boll look downright competent) but it sickens me that you can actually go to Amazon right now and pay $17.99 to watch this shit, especially when that's probably about how much they had for a budget.

How do I describe this... alright, here's a list. Lighting: what's that? A tripod: well, all that shaky handheld camerawork is trendy now. Microphones: well there's a mic on the camcorder, right? Script: no need, we'll just improvise! Not enough "actors": we'll just have the same people play multiple parts, nobody will notice! Humor: everyone thinks that endless jokes about poopy are HILARIOUS, right? Actors: we don't know any real ones, but I'm sure all my drinking buddies will do just fine! Sets and locations: I'm sure that we can film this entire thing in a combination of houses, cars, parking lots, and backyards. Gore effects: ketchup bottle. Nuff said.

The "plot"... ah... heh... AHAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA. Ha. Sorry, I'm back now. It's about three retarded virgins in their mid-20s who go on a spring break roadtrip hoping to get laid for the first time, but they run into female zombies. That's pretty much the whole movie. Only it takes them an HOUR to run into those zombies, the rest of the movie spent filling time with wacky misadventures in public parks and hotel rooms. This movie was already goddamn worthless even before it stretched out to a Geneva Convention-violating length of one hundred and one minutes, prolonging the pain to heretofore unimagined levels. Rule #1 of no-budget filmmaking: unless your movie is REALLY FUCKING GOOD, never got longer than an hour. And isn't it an unforgivable bait-&-switch to have a movie about spring break which has zero nudity? I know, it's difficult to convince college chicks to get naked without paying them or at least giving them a t-shirt or pair of beads, but don't sell your entire fucking movie as a sex comedy and then show no skin. It all spirals down to an ending which I think was trying to be something unpredictable and whimsical in the Monty Python and the Holy Grail vein, but it just made me hate this even more. This is the kind of movie which makes you want to track down everyone who was involved in it and beat the living shit out of them.

 

[Gary]

Eh, here's two I posted at The Pit

Demons-8/10

First, two warnings-1.) This was produced by Dario Argento, so if you don't like him, then avoid, and 2.) It's director is Lamberto Bava, who did the MST3K "classic" "Devil Fish."

That out of the way, this is a blast from beginning to end. Basically, there's a theater showing a movie, and a weird mask that a girl scratches her face on. Then she turns into some kind of demon, then it starts to spread, and...you know what, describing the plot of this movie is fucking impossible. This is an incoherent movie at best, but damnit, if it isn't a really fun slice of hokey Italian gore, with bad dubbing (the dubbed voice for the black pimp is a guy doing his worse Mr. T impersonation), bad 80's music (Go West! Billy Idol! Motley Cru!), wall to wall gore, and the best product placement ever (snorting cocaine out of an empty Coke can.) Basically, this is a nearly impossible to describe twist on the zombie movie, only with demons replacing zombies. Those expecting "Suspiria" will be either disappointed or happy, depending on who you are. Those expecting a movie that makes any kind of sense will be pissed off. Those who want an over the top example of Italian horror at it's most nonsensical and fun will be in heaven.

Redneck Zombies-7/10

I really, really shouldn't like this as much as I do. The first shot on camcorder Zombie flick won't make any top ten lists, but it's undoubtedly the best shot on camcorder horror movie ever made-faint praise, but hey. That's most likely because those behind it realized that this is a shot on camcorder movie, and that nobody would take this seriously. As a result, it's an unremarkable, stupid, but undoubtedly fun zombie flick. It has a "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" parody that's actually amusing, unbelievably stupid humor (it's a movie called "Redneck Zombies", and it was distributed by Troma, what were you expecting), gay jokes (that culminates with the token gay stereotype being consumed by the Redneck Zombies after diving head first into them, hoping to live out his "Deliverance" fantasies and asking if they like watersports-I am not making any of this up), lot's of gore, the only way to kill the dead is with spray-on deodorant, "boing" sound FX that occur when someone bites into a sandwich, and more. Plus, it has this:

BURP

How can you possibly hate that?

 

[Jingus]

ARGH, I totally forgot about this thread! Here's some make-goods:

Diary of the Dead: 4/10
What a fucking letdown. This is the fifth zombie movie from the guy who invented the genre, George Romero, and it's by far his worst. It's a mockumentary about a zombie invasion, told from the p.o.v. of some film students who decide to record the whole thing. Problem is, Romero never seems to realize that's just a different way of telling a story, not the story itself. The movie makes a big deal about Myspace and viral videos and cellphone cameras and all the other new media for sharing information, but it doesn't say anything about them. The awesomely rambling and pretentious narration from one of the survivors mumbles a lot about the Deeper Meaning of this stuff, but it's done in such a shallow manner. It doesn't really think about how the internet has changed humanity, it just scatters the buzzwords around in some kind of attempt to be current.

The main characters are played by nobody you've heard of; the film was shot on the cheap, independently, in less than a month. It shows, too, with a lot of footage which feels like they just never had the time to do enough takes to get it all right. The story itself is the most generic one possible: the dead walk, a band of survivors group together and try to find a safe place, people tearfully execute their loved ones as they resurrect, so forth and so on. There is nothing here which hasn't been done in any of Romero's earlier movies, or even in the several billion copies, remakes, and ripoffs which people have made from his work. It's like "shoot it in first person!" was literally the only new idea he had for this entire movie.

Making things worse are the thin characters and the amateur-hour acting. Movies like Blair Witch and Cloverfield understood that for this kind of movie, you need to change the way that actors generally do their stuff. It needs to be a tiny bit more realistic, like people being themselves in a documentary, and less theatrical and mannered. Either Romero didn't understand that, or he wasn't able to hire actors capable of it. All the players here mug, yell, and chew scenery as if they're in just any standard slasher flick, which is the complete opposite of what a movie like this needs. Also not helping is the camerawork itself, which simply feels staged and phony. It feels less like a student documentary and more like a professional cinematographer trying to copy stuff like The Shield's sense of shaky handheld realism.

Despite how I might've made it sound, it's not all crap. Hell, this isn't even the worst "fake documentary" horror movie I've ever seen, The Last Broadcast probably has a permanent claim to that particular title. Thankfully, there are a couple diamonds buried in the rough here which keep the movie from being worthless. Little moments like the dorm thief, the Amish guy, the swimming pool, and the final shot are all interesting stuff which I won't forget soon. And there are a few really cool kills. But they're too little, too late in a film which feel like it should've come from one of George Romero's copycats and not the master himself.


Fido: 7/10
Wow, that was... different. Okay, remember the last couple minutes from Shaun of the Dead, showing a post-zombie outbreak society? Imagine making an entire movie about that. And take Bub from Day of the Dead and basically make him the main character, set it in an alternate-universe version of 1950's suburban America, and direct the whole thing as if it were a Disney kids' flick. It's a world where zombies have been harnessed for slave labor, and even elementary school kids all pack guns. That's the best summation I can come up with.

That's the setting, here's the plot: a young kid named Billy, who has a uptight, zombiephobic dad (Dylan Baker) who is so clueless that he can't tell his lonely, neglected wife (Carrie-Anne Moss) is about six months pregnant. Mom is embarassed that Dad's phobia has left them as the last family on the block who doesn't own their own zombie, so one day she buys Fido (Billy Connelly), and little Billy falls in love with him. Also hanging around are a gaggle of weird neighbors, like Tim Blake Nelson as a geeky pervert with a hot young zombie girlfriend.

Does it sound pretty fucking weird? It gets weirder, because when I said this movie was directed as though it were a Disney comedy I wasn't kidding; take out the flesh-eating undead and put in some pussy, and you'd have That Darn Cat. The dark material clashes jarringly with its sunny, whimsical presentation, complete with all that goofy artificial background music. It ain't for everyone, as the general populace will be grossed out by the whole thing, while hardcore zombie fans might be disappointed at the relative lack of gory brutality. Also, there are some dead spots where the movie just sorta zones out and twiddles its thumbs for a while, waiting for the next joke or something else to come in and wake us up. This film would probably only appeal to about 1% of the population... fortunately for me, I resemble that remark.


Boy Eats Girl: 3/10
This zombie flick is about a bunch of teenagers trying to fight off a zombie outbreak in their suburban town. In Ireland. Just having a zombie movie take place in Ireland is unfortuantely the only innovative thing in the picture. Boy Eats Girl has the best of intentions, just wanting to be a funny yet icky horror flick with plenty of 80s Teen Romantic Dramedy stuffed into it as well. Unfortunately, it makes SO many errors in the execution of its premise that I have to do the rest of this review dissection stylez.

-So we've got our hero, some improbably handsome and charming high school kid who's inexplicably unpopular and has absolutely zero other defining characteristics. We've also got the chaste nice girl he's in love with, the nice girl's asshole father who inexplicably hates the hero, his two comedic sidekick buddies, the hulking school bully, and the bully's slut girlfriend who's inexplicably in love with the hero. Yes, the stereotypes are exactly as stifling as I'm making them sound here. There's not a single interesting person in the entire movie.

-Of course, our hero and his love interest are not allowed to be happy together before the end! Therefore they're kept apart by some incredibly fucking ridiculous contrivances. Let's just say that the hero ends up convinced that the chick was blowing some other dude in his car, instead of coming to the private candlelit meeting where the hero planned to express his undying love for her. Yes, it's that bad. Like, "the military dad thinks his son is blowing Kevin Spacey in American Beauty" bad.

-In fact, this is one of those movies which really offends me with its strident views of sexuality. In this movie, not only does everyone who has sex end up eaten by zombies, but everyone who has sex is actually portrayed as being evil as well. The film goes out of its way to point out that all its villains having healthy functioning libidos, and that all our sympathetic protagonists are virgins. What the fuck is wrong with the people who write these scripts?

-This is one of those films where most of the high school students don't look a day under 25. And the high school has one of those Hollywood Proms which has live music and lavish decorations and catered refreshments and complex lighting rigs and all the students are openly getting drunk on the dance floor. Has any real prom in the history of this planet ever really looked like this?

-The film also rips off Return of the Living Dead Part 3 by having an undead yet sentient main character (the eponymous "Boy") and also hordes of more regular mindless zombies. Specifically, fast running zombies. Sweet Baby Assfucked Jebus, I am getting so desperately tired of all these modern zombie films which use the fast running version and do not use them well.

-The action scenes and kills are very poorly choreographed. Every time zombies attack, it happens like this: they sprint towards there victims. Then they suddenly stop a few feet away, and proceed to snarl all menacingly for a moment. THEN they attack. Length of time spent snarling is directly proportionate to how important a character their intended victim is. Also, most of the "zombie makeup" is just blood dripping down their mouths and dark circles under their eyes. And they never ever specify the rules about how these zombies work; it's totally random as to whether any given wound will make them drop dead, or just snarl more.

-This movie barely runs seventy minutes long. Yet the zombie stuff doesn't kick in until it's already halfway over. And some characters are still oblivious to the incipient zombiegeddon as close as fifteen minutes before the end credits roll.

And several more I can't discuss without SPOILING:

Spoiler

-The mom somehow didn't notice there was a page missing until the morning after she'd already performed the entire ritual? What?

-How the fuck can you die INSTANTLY from hanging? This wasn't "he drops through the trapdoor and his neck breaks" hanging, this is "the chair knocked over and he dropped half and inch and somehow was immediately strangled to death while his mom was standing right there". The worst part is there was no reason to HAVE the mom standing right there, when the entire glaring plot hole would've vanished if they'd just had her walk in a couple minutes later.

-I know that many movies enjoy portraying police officers as buffoons, but this is just ridiculous. Our hero bursts into the police station, says he's killed a girl, and offers to show the cops to her body. The cop inexplicably tells the kid to buzz off. Seriously, that's the entire scene. They didn't even try to invent a reason why the officer might not believe him. Fucking pathetic.

-How the hell was the Blowjob Kill supposed to work? The girl turned into a zombie in mid-fellatio? What?

-Even in a movie about voodoo magic bringing zombies back from the dead, there are some things I simply cannot accept. One of those things is them trying to make me believe that a rotting zombie can be instantly turned back into a live human just by getting bitten by a certain snake. WHAT.

-And we promptly forget about the snake! Nobody even tries to cure the rest of the zombiefied population, they only give a shit about fixing the main hero schmuck.

-Why did the town whore chick suddenly turn out to be level-headed and competent later on? Especially when she's killed in such a tossed-off manner, abandoned by the "heroes" who run away and don't even try to help her. Are we supposed to think the bitch deserved it, despite growing more sympathetic in some ways than our useless helpless nerdy heroes?

-The scene with the backhoe was at least energetic, which the movie badly needed by that point. Too bad it was such a blatant ripoff of the lawnmower scene in Dead-Alive. Also, how many backhoes come equipped with a customized woodchipper on an extendable articulated arm?

-What happened to the hero's mom? I guess it's implied she's dead, but it seemed like she just vanished. The boy completely forgets about his mama's probably hideous death via zombie in a damn hurry.

-And finally, the "happy" ending. I suppose all these fucking idiots we're stuck with as our main characters just kinda forgot that the entire fucking town had been taken over by the undead, and that despite having killed a dozen or two, there must be hundreds or thousands more still out there.

I will admit one positive: the acting is decent, especially the comedic sidekicks and the girl who plays the town whore. They seem to at least be attempting to play well-rounded people, no matter how insistent the script is on not letting them do so. And a couple of the jokes were funny. Sadly, that's all the compliments that I can give.


Undead: 8/10
Sometimes, words just fail me. How the hell do I even begin to describe this weird, weird movie? Okay, I'll do my best: imagine that someone gave the scripts for Dead Alive and any alien abduction flick to David Lynch, and told him to make 'em both into one movie, complete with plenty of John Woo-ish gunplay.

This was a labor-of-love indy flick made in Australia, which is perfect, cuz only an entire continent of half-mad people like them could've possibly produced this duckbilled platypus of a bizarre genre-exploding movie. Basically, the plot starts like any zombie movie: there's an outbreak, corpses rise from the dead and search out living prey, and a desperate band of people hole in in a farmhouse trying to fend off the army of darkness. But then acid rain starts falling and people begin getting sucked up into the sky, and I'm not spoiling a damn thing cuz that all happens in the first five minutes.

Undead was shot in bits and pieces over a period of almost three years, basically they picked up the camera again whenever they got more money to film. It shows, too: some scenes look almost Sci-Fi Channel Original Picture in their cheapness, but others are shockingly well-produced. (And is it just me, or does the lead hero Marion look a lot like Torgo from Manos, the Hands of Fate?) But still, I can't recommend this film strongly enough to anyone who's a fan of zombie flicks or just weird shit in general, because it's like nothing else I've ever seen. And oh yeah, it's funny. Truly laugh-out-loud-while-watching-it-by-yourself hilarious.

 

[Jingus]

Guys. Little help here? I've still got at least a couple weeks' worth of rotting shambling brains-fueled corpses locked up in the basement for daily usage, but even I can't keep this thread reanimated all by myself.

Resident Evil: Extinction: 2/10
Crap. Pure fucking crap. This movie was so lousy that towards the end, I actually starting MST3K-ing it just to amuse myself, because Christ knows the movie itself wasn't entertaining. I mean, for fuck's sake, it was directed by Russell "Hack" Mulcahy and written by Paul W. "Bigger Hack" S. Anderson, and just look at the cast: Milla Jovavich, Ali Larter, Oded Fehr, Linden Ashby, Ashanti, and Mike Epps. If that list doesn't make you recoil in horror, then you've got tougher sensibilities than I.

Every single thing about this movie is bad. Everything. Bad plot, bad dialogue, bad acting, bad photography, bad special effects, bad action scenes, bad ideas all around. Every possibility for something cool seems almost willfully sabotaged or ignored. And every single thing in this movie is directly ripped off from another movie. Everything. The basic plot is Road Warrior meets Land of the Dead, with a little X-Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Dawn of the Dead remake thrown in for spice. Milla Jovavich's character Alice is a combination of Jean Grey and Buffy, but first they got her stinking drunk and then repeatedly clubbed her over the head just to make sure that no intelligence survived.

To all you fans of the Resident Evil games: remember that one RE game where the entire world had fallen into zombiegeddon, and a bunch of survivors are living Mad Max-stylez out in the desert? Me neither, since it never fucking happened, but that didn't stop the filmmakers from pulling this lame scenario out of their ass. But the worst part about this movie's blatant contempt for the gaming fandom isn't the stuff they made up, but the laughably pathetic attempts they made at placating the fanboys. That is, there are three characters in this movie who share names and basic appearances with people from the games (Claire, Carlos, and Wesker), but everything else about them has been randomly changed so that name and appearance are the only thing they have in common with the originals. Unless I missed the game where Wesker was the CEO of Umbrella. But even if this was just a standalone movie which wasn't needlessly bastardizing its source material, it still sucked on toast.

 

[vivisectvi]

Jingus, you never should've went into RE: Extinction expecting it to have any game canon whatsoever.

 

[Jingus]

Yeah I know, but at least the first two were vaguely kinda sorta related to the original game plots. (With a new addition of an original Mary Sue for the main character.) This one just made it all up from scratch.

RSBFCotD

Cemetery Man: 8/10
This is an old favorite of mine which I hadn't seen in ages. Watching it now, the various flaws and rough parts are much more apparent, but I still love the whole bizarre mess. This movie (also known as Dellamorte, Dellamore) is right up there with Undead and Fido in the "weirdest zombie flick of all time" competition, and it might easily be the winner.

I don't know how Rupert Everett of all people got attached to this project, but he's perfect as Francesco Dellamorte, a gloomy gravedigger in an old cemetery in a small Italian city. Thing is, every single body which is buried in his graveyard comes back after a week as a zombie, and Dellamorte has to kill them and put them back in their graves. He's slowly being driven completely insane by this nightmarish Sisyphean labor, and it doesn't help that he's got no real friends to talk to. An old school buddy occasionally calls him to chat, but doesn't believe him about the corpses; all the townspeople spread rumors that he's impotent; and his only companion is Gnaghi, a mute hunchbacked retard who helps him dig the graves. (It must be mentioned that Fran?ois Hadji-Lazaro takes this unappealling role and somehow turns it into the best thing in the movie through sheer charisma.) Dellamorte's life seems like an endless spiral of death, until Anna Falchi appears in his life as a mysterious love interest; Falchi is no great actress, but her part doesn't require her to be much more than beautiful in an unearthly sort of way, and she manages that just perfectly.

It was directed, very well, by Michele Soavi, who was a protege of Dario Argento (though personally I like Cemetery Man way better than anything Argento's ever done) and has worked as second-unit director on several of both Argento and Terry Gilliam's movies. I've only seen one other, the so-so The Church, but I'm pretty confident in calling this one his masterpiece. It's unpredictable, has a wickedly warped sense of humor, and contains some startlingly gorgeous cinematography. Not all the subplots come together, and the movie feels a wee bit directionless as a whole, but I don't care, I love this strange flick.

 

[Sabre]

I still think Resident Evil: Apocalypse is the best one in the series. Main reason being i found Resi 1 to be quite boring and wasnt happy with a licker being the main boss of the movie, come on, you dispatch them like flies in resi evil 2!

 

[The Buzz]

I think my favorite RE movie is probably the cgi one that just came out, followed by part two. I agree with the nod for Cemetary Man. Just saw it for the first time a few years ago. Great movie.

 

[Gary]

I think this needs to be discussed
Night of the Zombies - Bad Zombie Film Logic

Let's talk terrible moments of zombie movie logic.

 

[Jingus]

Resident Evil: Apocalypse was the only one in the series which felt like it was within spitting distance of the general plot and tone of the original games, and even that one I barely tolerated. Didn't like the first one; a Resident Evil-based movie shouldn't be dumbed down to just a bunch of commandos fighting a bunch of zombies.


I keep forgetting to put updates here. On one hand, annoying and unprofessional. On the other, at least the gaps keep me from blasting through all my zombie reviews too fast, I think I've used almost half of 'em already.

Hood of the Living Dead: 4/10
Like Zombies Gone Wild, this is another no-budget camcorder movie; unlike that one, the only real problems here are all caused by lack of money and nothing else. The writer/director team the Quiroz brothers have churned out a long line of homemade gangsta flicks and hood comedies (possibly the only one you might've heard of is I Got Five On It), but judging by this they've got some talent. Unlike most of the other zero-budget flicks of this type, they clearly have the basic fundamentals of good filmmaking down pat, and are perfectly competent at writing, directing, editing, shooting, and working with actors. Now if they could only get their hands on some money (unlikey; how many Hispanic filmmakers in America can you name?), they could do something decent. I could easily imagine these guys directing an episode of The Shield and fitting right in.

Hood of the Living Dead doesn't just mindlessly ape other zombie flicks, though there were some Return of the Living Dead III similarities for those who look hard enough. It's about a guy named Ricky, who tirelessly works at his job as a lab technician in order to eventually move himself and his little brother out of Oakland and into a decent neighborhood. Too bad his brother gets killed in a drive-by first. Grieving and desperate, Ricky injects his dead bro with a "cellular regeneration compound" they've been experimenting with at work. Guess how that turns out. Then Ricky and some friends are running all over the city, trying to contain the zombie nightmare before it gets out of hand.

The lack of available funds ultimately keeps this movie from being too good, but I could spot the differences between a movie made with real care and effort like this from the Zombies Gone Wild of the world which had no desire other than to con audiences out of their money. Little things like the sound design, for example: the most common sin of DIY filmmaking is shitty sound, but the Quirozes obviously put a lot of work and time into getting all the dialgoue and effects to sound good. I wouldn't pay money to watch this movie, but I hope the filmmakers get greenlit to make a real film one of these days.

 

[Jingus]

RSBFCOTD

Dead Alive: 8/10
If this isn't the single goriest movie of all time, I'd like to know what beats it. Dead-Alive (also called Braindead) has such ridiculous quantities of blood and guts hurled at the screen, it's almost impossible to explain in print just how gross it really is. Apparently, the production really does hold the record on the sheer amount of fake blood actually used on the set, so I guess that makes if as close to official as you'll get.

By the way, the maniac responsible for this depraved ocean of butchery? None other than that master of billion-dollar high-class sentimental epics, Peter Jackson. (And I wouldn't even call this the single most disturbing movie he made back then, as Meet the Feebles and even Heavenly Creatures might have it licked there.) Fortunately, Jackson's filmmaking talent mainfested early, and he uses the shocking level of violence here to equally shocking comedic effect, making this the funniest undead slaughterhouse this side of Evil Dead 2.

I won't even bother describing the plot. It doesn't matter. The first hour of the movie has a lot of amusing bits, but it's basically just killing time until the epic mass-dismemberfest of the final thirty minutes. And once we get there... words fail me. Unless you've seen the Lawnmower Man sequence, there's no way for me to impart to you exactly what the hell is going on. If you've got a weak stomach or otherwise delicate sensibilities, don't watch one second of this movie; if you don't, well... it ain't like nothing else you'll ever see.

 

[vivisectvi]

Resident Evil: Apocalypse was the only one in the series which felt like it was within spitting distance of the general plot and tone of the original games, and even that one I barely tolerated. Didn't like the first one; a Resident Evil-based movie shouldn't be dumbed down to just a bunch of commandos fighting a bunch of zombies.

But, really, the original RE games boil down to a bunch of cops fighting a bunch of zombies, so it's really not that different aside from the finer points of the plot. I can forgive the story changes, personally. The movies are a different "universe" and don't necessarily need to follow the exact plot of the games. I actually would've found that a bit of a letdown seeing as I'd know all of the plot twists and the outcome of the movie before even seeing it.

 

[Jingus]

True, but still, there was a bunch of things I actively disliked about the first RE movie.

1. Milla Jovavich sucks. She is a bad actress. And the "hero wakes up with no memory and tries to find out who they are while fighting for their life" bit has been way overused, way too many times.
2. Lack of monsters. We got some zombies, and one licker. Not nearly enough, when the first game in the series had well over a dozen individual types of critters.
3. I didn't like the "Hive" concept. Aside from ripping off some stuff from Cube and similar "you're stuck in a hi-tech maze which is trying to kill you" flicks, it also took one of the occasional environments in the game (the underground lab you usually fight the last boss in) and made it into the entire setting of the film.
4. Computers which manifest as "creepy" little girls are by now cliches, not scary.
5. There were no characters from the games at all. None.
6. What kind of self-respecting zombie movie puts CGI gore on the zombies' faces? Was Tom Savini busy washing his hair when this movie went into production? Plus it was cheap and phony-looking CGI at that.

There's probably a lot more, but I only watched the movie once and that was several years ago.

 

[Jingus]

It's the Rotting Shambl- oh fuck it, you know the drill.

Re-Animator: 5/10
So this is the other "funny" supergory zombie cult "classic", eh? Not impressed. I just don't get the alleged "talent" of director Stuart Gordon. I've seen several of his movies (Robot Jox, The Pit & the Pendulum, Castle Freak, and Dagon) and all of them struck me as being too coldblooded, too sadistic, too dark-humored, too misogynistic. They're all cursed with wooden acting, unlikable characters, and implausible plot twists; and they always managed to look cheap no matter how big the budget was.

The plot is in theory an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's story "Herbert West: Re-Animator", but it really has almost nothing to do with the source material. (Considering that it was one of Lovecraft's very worst stories which contained some really nasty racism, that may be a good thing.) It's a basic Frankensteinian tale of medical students who tamper in God's domain, but I found it hard to care about any of it. Our heroes are all passive weak-willed victims who are constantly manipulated by the loathesome amoral villains, so there's absolutely nobody worth cheering for. The only exception is West himself, played nicely by Jeffery Combs, but the movie seems like it can't decide whether he's an eccentric but admirable genius or a murderous blood-soaked mad scientist.

Not helping is how damn long the movie takes to get the plot started; it finally picks up towards the end with some amusing stuff with the disembodied head, but that's not enough to make a good movie all by itself. And what's with the blatant soundtrack ripoff of Bernard Hermann? The theme music in this movie is a note-for-note steal from Psycho, I'm amazed they didn't get sued. I've heard this movie's cock sucked dry by many a zombie fanboy, but don't believe the hype.

 

[vivisectvi]

I love Re-Animator.. but it is 99% because of Jeffery Combs and his portrayal of West.

 

[vivisectvi]

I just picked up a Japanese Flick called "Tokyo Zombie: Premium of the Dead" - based on a manga of the same name and starring Tadanobu Asano (Ichi the Killer, Mongol) and Show Aikawa (Dead or Alive). Apparently it's the Japanese Shaun of the Dead, and what "Laurel and Hardy would make if they were still alive. And Japanese. And George Romero devotees." I'm psyched for this!

Tokyo Zombie Trailer

 

[Jingus]

I am so running out of reviews for this.

Versus: 7/10
This certainly isn't your traditional zombie movie. I know it was made in Japan in the late 90s, but it looks like something straight outta Hong Kong from the mid-80s. Your average movie nerd would call the gun-fu "John Woo-like", but I'm even nerdier, so I can say with authority that this far more resembles the goofier work of guys like Tsui Hark, with a little side dish of Sam Raimi and various spaghetti westerns. There's not much plot, and what little there is doesn't make much sense, but I'll try to explain. Some escaped prisoners, some Yakuza goons, some wacky cops, and a bunch of zombies all meet up in a mystical forest and have crazy battles against each other. There's a little more than that, but I won't bother going into it.

The main attraction here is the sheer asskickery of the action scenes. We've got kung-fu, gunfights, swordfights, and hybrid battles which mix all of the above, and it all rocks. It's especially amazing considering the super-low budget, less than half a million bucks; they saved money by basically shooting the entire thing out in the woods and not having to pay for sets, locations, or any of that stuff. But they keep the frenetic camerawork and blood-soaked action going so that you don't notice that it all appears to have been filmed in a park. There is one big damn problem though: it's way too fucking long. For this kind of material, two full hours is too much; the first sixty minutes is exhilirating, but it starts to drag in the second half. It's obvious what should've been cut out, too: the random body count-padding with the extra henchwomen, the pointless subplot with the cops, and a couple of the more repetitive fight scenes. If this had been pared down to 80 or 90 minutes, it could've been a classic of Evil Dead II proportions, especially since that's obviously one of its influences.

 

[griffinmills]

Rotting shambling brains-fueled corpse of the day:

House of the Dead: 0/10
grok

I really enjoyed this review Jingus! The only thing that really detracted from it for me was the use of grok. Not because I didn't know what it meant, but because I DO know what it means and I didn't like how you used it here. Grok always seemed to better used for ideas that should be understood so thoroughly as to be internalized, not as a a synonym for "understand" or such. It's a nit pick though and I apologize in advance.

I think you were really inspired here, perhaps well challenged by your self enforced no swearing rule. "Fuck Uwe" is the kind of word play that's right up my alley, swearing or not. :-D

 

[Jingus]

I don't wanna hijack the thread

Well, ya did. Happy now? (And I must say, aside from the homage to the original Halloween 2, that looks like one shitty trailer.) Now I gotta post one of my very few reviews I've got left in my dwindling pile just to drag it back on track.

The Ghost Galleon: 0/10
This film is the third in the Blind Dead series, a string of Spanish-made 70's horror flicks about ravenous animated corpses of blasphemous Knights Templars who hunt down their victims by sense of hearing. (It's also known as Horror of the Zombies and a bunch of other names, like many foreign horror flicks of the period.) Despite what the credits say, I do not believe that Amando de Ossorio, the director of the other Blind Dead movies, actually directed this.

Based on the evidence presented here, I'd say that Ossorio had some junior-level intern who somehow scraped up enough cash to rent a few sets purporting to be an old Spanish galleon, hire a few desperate actors who really needed that next paycheck, borrowed exactly four of the Blind Dead costumes, and then shot the whole flick over the weekend, then slapped Ossorio's name on the finished product in order to sell it to the distributors.

I hope it didn't make a dime, cuz this movie is BAD. The other Blind Dead flicks were crude examples of moviemaking, but at least they were real movies and could pass as serviceable entertainment to horror fans. This piece of shit cannot claim that. This movie reeks of having been made by people who never made a movie before, and with any luck never made a movie again.

We're talking full-on Manos: the Hands of Fate level badness here, folks, seriously. Don't believe me? Here's my synopsis of the ENTIRE plot: a couple of swimsuit models are crossing some unnamed ocean as part of an unexplained "publicity stunt". They run into The Ghost Galleon. One of the models goes aboard to look around, and the Templar zombies kill her (offscreen). The other model goes onboard to look for her, and the Templars kill her too. The businessman who was funding the "publicity stunt" takes a crew out to the boat to look for the models. Then they all die one way or another. That's it. That's the WHOLE movie. I'm not skipping anything. And it's all filmed in such an incredibly slow and drawn-out manner (probably to pad the length out to 90 minutes) that it could put even the most hardcore of bad-movie-lovers to sleep.

There's no nudity, basically no violence, nothing even vaguely resembling entertainment. And the hilariously awful English dubbing is one of the worst jobs I've ever heard, it makes kung-fu flicks from the same time period sound like Shakespeare in comparison. Even Speed Racer had better dubbing then this, it's so incompetent it has to be heard to be believed. But even that isn't enough to make me recommend this movie to anyone except the MST3K people, as evidence that there is still a great pressing need for that show to come back on the air.

EDIT: ohhhhh, "Zombie movies", now I get why you put it here.

 

[vivisectvi]

Worst Case Scenario Trailer 1

Worst Case Scenario Trailer 2

Apparently the story behind these is that the dude behind these made them in order to get producers interested. Sold the rights thinking it was going to be made.. but now the producer isn't interested. The good news is that apparently he's reworking the designs and going with a new title but that the movie is slated to finally be created.

Also, speaking of Nazi zombies.. Dead Snow:

Dead Snow

 

[Gary]

Dead Snow's getting a limited theatrical release and is OD on June 12th. Can't wait.

 

[The Buzz]

Gangs of the Dead turned out to be better than I expected. Still not a great movie, but exceeded my expectations.

 

[Jingus]

Poor lonely thread. I've mostly run out of my good reviews, so here's two short ones.

Flight of the Living Dead: 1/10
All you guys who bitched about how terrible Snakes on a Plane was need to watch this movie to remind yourselves what a REAL bad film looks like. Even if the neo-renaissance of great contemporary zombie flicks had never happened, this would still easily be the worst zombie movie I've seen in years. The script is shite, the characters are stereotypical, the dialogue is dumb, the acting is uniformly horrible, the zombies are the modern "fast" version, and some of the plot holes are so hysterical you almost gotta see them to believe 'em. (I'm still confused about how, half an hour after the zombies attacked, there were still people randomly running around the cabin in small herds, getting picked off by the undead.) This movie is so slipshod it never even bothers to clearly say exactly how to kill a zombie, because some of them seem to die from non-head wounds, but others survive a ludicrous amount of damage. From start to finish, just a godawful mess.

Dance of the Dead: 5/10
No, not the Masters of Horror episode, but a whimsical little movie in which a zombie uprising hits a small town on prom night. The only people left alive and free are the losers and misfits who weren't going to the dance, and it's up to them to save everyone else. It's... okay, I guess. It's short and energetic, it's got some decent comedy, and the actors are fairly appealling (and mostly look like they might actually be of high-schooler age, a rarity in this genre). But the low budget hurts it, especially the iffy gore effects. And this movie uses fast running zombies, and does not use them well. There's a lot of 80's teen shit involved, like the geeky guy who's in love with the hot cheerleader and the garage band who wasn't allowed to play at the prom and a bunch of other stuff which doesn't mix well here with the undead element. Also, by now, the premise is just tired. Hell, Buffy had supernatural hellspawn attacking a school dance on at least four different occasions which I can think of. So while for a romzomcom it's not too bad, it's not terribly great either in this post-Shaun of the Dead era in which the bar for zombie flicks has been raised so very high.

Also, has anyone heard anything about a flick currently making the festival rounds called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead? The concept sounded rather amusing to me, but I haven't heard any news of planned theatrical or DVD releases.

 

[Jingus]

I will not LET this thread sink down into obscurity! Not as long as there's still another zombie review I haven't yet posted here! Much like its rotting shambling brains-fueled corpse-of-the-day subjects, this thread WILL NOT DIE!

American Zombie: 4/10
You know how sometimes I'll say that a movie had an interesting concept, but didn't follow through on its potential? Well, this film was handicapped by a dumb starting idea right from the beginning. American Zombie is a mockumentary about Los Angeles undead citizens trying to go about their daily lives. Whoa, wait a minute, did I just say that this movie is about fucking zombies who are trying to act like regular humans? Aye, there's the rub. The "zombies" in this movie, though nominally dead, are still fairly typical examples of human individuals. They think, they talk, they eat regular food, their movements are coordinated, they barely have any makeup on them to even indicate their undead state. I understand that you can reinvent the standard "rules" for zombies and use that to great effect, like in 28 Weeks Later for example, but here the undead are so similar to the living that I don't see the point.

So yeah, it's a fake documentary, and a terminally dull one at that. It's a slow-moving film, mostly about rather pathetic or irritating individuals. It does attempt for some social commentary, with the exact same "zombies = minorities" cliche that every filmmaker since Romero has long ago sucked dry. (And then later in the film it even sabotages that; reminds me of The Craft, which first tried to present its excluded outsiders as sympathetic victims, but then turned around and said they were worthy of such exclusion.) Some of the actors are okay, the lonely Asian chick zombie and the Jonah Hill-esque living dead dude who works at a convenience store being the main standouts. But they're mostly hamstrung playing parts which, even if they're not assholes or creeps right up front, are eventually revealed to be liars or con men. Towards the end, the movie starts abandoning its earlier "gentle satire of weird people" typical faux-doc approach for something much more melodramatic, and I don't think either approach worked too well. And zombie flick fans will be bored and pissed off by the near-total absence of violence or gore. Add that to some dropped plot threads (what the hell was the deal with the blue vials?) and this is a sad failure which makes me wonder why it was even made in the first place. Well, aside from a missionary trying to convert the undead by saying "Jesus was the original zombie!". That was funny. But most of the rest is just tedium.

EDIT: and oh yeah, watch this.
Anchorman of the Dead

 

[Jingus]

People. Can't do this all by myself.

RSBFCOTDW:

Last of the Living: 3/10
Is the Silver Age of zombie movies we've been enjoying here in the 21st century finally coming to an end? It's been a few years since the last great zombie flick (28 Weeks Later) and recently I've been seeing more and more of these cheap copycats with little in the way of inspiration or innovation. Every country has been weighing in on the zomgeist, and now it's New Zealand's turn. Unfortunately, their contribution Last of the Living is a derivative and lamebrained affair, always going for a laugh when it should be trying for a scare and vice-versa. If for some reason you happen to feel an unstoppable urge to watch a Kiwi comedy/horror flick, go with Black Sheep instead.

I will give the filmmakers credit for one thing: unlike 90% of zombie films, this is not an origin story. Last of the Living takes place after the zompocalypse has already taken place, with our main characters being a trio of slackers who actually seem to be enjoying the end of the world. Okay, there are interesting things you can do with that, as the original Dawn of the Dead so memorably proved. Sadly, such commentary on humanity and society is far beyond this movie's abilities. These guys basically sit around all day getting drunk and playing video games, apparently not the least bit concerned about the facts that everyone they've ever known are all dead and that there are hordes of undead roaming the land. One day while out shopping for a new mansion, they happen to run into a hot chick, who also happens to be a scientist who can help find a cure for the plague if she can get a Macguffin to an island of researchers, and... y'know, I'll just stop here, because the plot becomes more stupid and full of holes the closer you look at it. The acting is uniformly amateurish, the budget is low, and the script keeps forgetting everything that happened more than five minutes previously.

The movie would've been mediocre no matter what, but what really kills it are the fucking terrible characters we've got as our protagonists. Imagine that Tom Green, Jason Mewes, and Dane Cook were the leads in a postapocalyptic horror movie. Seriously. The very worst is our main guy Morgan, a seemingly retarded motherfucker who combines rampant stupidity, egomaniacal selfishness, macho misogyny, obsessive homophobia, and endless toilet humor into one rednecky package. This is our hero, a moronic pig who cares more about getting laid than about keeping his friends alive. Oh sure eventually he has an Enlightened Epiphany where he decides to make a Heroic Sacrifice and shit, but it's an arbitrary outta-nowhere swerve from a character who's not shown a single selfless bone in his body until that point. I DO NOT WANT TO SPEND NINETY MINUTES WITH AN ASSHOLE LIKE THIS. There is exactly one genuinely funny moment (it involves a parachute) which seems to come naturally from the characters we're dealing with, but the rest of the time we're dealing with fucking idiots who surprise me by not finding a way to accidentally strangle themselves while tying their shoes.

Even on its basic brain-eating fundamentals, the movie fails. Are these slow-staggering zombies or fast-running zombies? Don't ask Last of the Living, since it alternates back and forth between both. Although it does provide multiple examples of flatulent zombies which fart as they stumble along. Wonderful. The physics of the action scenes are laughable bullshit: like, they've got a customized car with spikes on the front. They run over several zombies with this car. None of them ever stick to the spikes, or even leave the tiniest bit of blood on their shiny chrome surface. Also, I never knew you could cave in something as dense as the human skull with something as flimsy as a golf club, until this movie taught me the error of believing in elementary physics. There's even hardly any gore, and what little there is all looks phony. It just sucks all around. And just when you think it couldn't get any worse, the ending is a ridiculous piece of messy cinematic suicide which harshly clashes against the goofy tone of the rest of the film. Like, imagine if James Bond suddenly got shot dead at the end of the movie. That's the best comparison that the careless finale to this stupid piece of crap could possibly inspire.

I've only got two, maybe three reviews left, and they're all negative. Someone recommend some good newer zombie flicks to watch.

 

[vivisectvi]

Anyone seen Pontypool?

Bizarre zombie movie with barely any zombies.. Steven McHattie stars, and is great as usual. The rest of the cast, not so much. Really stupid premise, though. The English language is infected and is turning people into ravenous zombies. Ooookay then.

 

[Gary]

That's actually quite an inventive premise.