I, Zombie

"And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid."
--The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T. S. Eliot

A Word on Zombies in General
I think what's so appealing about zombie movies is it's an interesting look at what happens when society breaks down. For those of us living a relatively cushy existence in a developed country like the US, it's hard to imagine a world in which he who draws the gun first gets to make all the rules, where you're afraid to walk outside for fear of getting killed.

These movies are a window into madness, into human nature, for these zombies are stripped down to their barest instincts; minus a sex drive, all these beasts want to do is eat and kill.

Especially in Romero's movies the zombies are actually something of a vague threat. Really, they're an inevitability. We all know death stalks us around the corner, but for the characters in these movies it's actively pounding on the glass outside, and it wants in real bad. Sure, you can out run it, but for how long? Eventually you'll have no where left to go, no strength to go on. It'll get you, one way or the other.

It is what you do in the mean time that is so fascinating and potentially so horrifying.

MoviesVideo Games
28 Days LaterHouse of the Dead
Burial GroundLand of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green
Corpses Are ForeverResident Evil 0
Dawn of the Dead ('78)Resident Evil
Dawn of the Dead: Ultimate EditionResident Evil 2
Dawn of the Dead ('04)Resident Evil 4
Day of the DeadResident Evil Outbreak
Dead AliveZombie Revenge
Dead MeatZombies Ate My Neighbors
Dead Men Walking
Feeding the MassesBooks
GhoulsCell
Hide and CreepDeadlands
House of the DeadMonster Island
House of the Dead II
Land of the DeadComics
Night of the Living Dead ('90)Blackgas
Night of the Living Dead ('68)Shaun of the Dead
Night of the ZombiesThe Walking Dead
Nightmare City
Resident EvilZombie-esque Stuff
Resident Evil: ApocalypseDay of the Triffids
Return of the Living Dead: NecropolisDog Soldiers
Shaun of the DeadJaws
Street Zombies
They Came Back
Undead
Zombie (Zombi 2)
Zombie 4: After Death
Zombie Night
Zombie Wedding

28 Days Later.
I didn't care for the monkey-virus thing that started it off, because goddamn that's a fast infection. It also seemed like way too much exposition (it was for that very reason I was bummed to learn that in the original Night of the Living Dead it was a radioactive space probe returning to Earth that brought forth the zombies. I like to speculate that it's an infection of the nervous system, but don't tell me; I don't really want to know. It's scarier that way), particularly for this genre.

But really, who cares? It's a damn fine movie.

Our buddy Jim wakes up from a coma in a London hospital, alone. The hospital's empty and a mess, and after finding some clothes he walks out in search of people (I like how the first thing he does is gather up some soda for later in a plastic bag. How pragmatic).

The thing is London is totally fucking empty.

It's always a trip to see a big city totally deserted (how do they do that, anyway? There's never any talk of that when they talk special effects), even more so when one can plainly see that something huge has happened, but what? And where the hell is everyone? He soon finds out after having the misjudgment to wander in a church and speak, prompting several zombies to tear like bats out of hell on his heels -- and these cats are fast, especially when running down a hospital patient.

He's bailed out by two masked people, who quickly fill him in on what's gone down in the past month: an infection has wiped out most of the British population, turning them into these bloodthirsty creatures, and causing a mass exodus (although the girl points out that last she heard there were outbreaks in New York and Paris. And then the airwaves went dead).

One of the greatest things about this movie is how freakin' British everyone is, offering each other drinks and taking even the latest zombie attack in stride.

I do think the movie made a couple of very general, although specific to the genre, missteps, but it's certainly nothing deal-breaking, and it remains one awesome flick. First, when the soldiers pop up and kill that guy...why couldn't they have waved hello a minute before, before they killed him? They must have heard them and seen that he wasn't infected. Why wait until that moment, especially since they then took the rest of them back to base? And why did no one ask them that very question? "Um, you shot my dad...couldn't you have just said, 'Oy!' when you saw him approach?"

Second, the story stretches itself a little too thin, quite literally. This is really a first-blush kind of observation, but noting how skillfully Romero used this technique, I don't see why anyone would do it any other way, unless they were going in a wholly different direction. See, the previous movies all relied on staying in pretty much a single location. The Dawn remake lost my interest when they made their breakout attempt -- I, for one, am much more interested in watching people slowly break down until flight is their only option, naturally too little too late. Plus, true horror, for me anyway, stems not from a few cheap haunted house tricks where some jerk-off jumps at you with a chainsaw or press-on nails on his hand, but as the situation grows more desperate and hope looks slimmer; the terror grows as the room shrinks as it were. 28 sort of reclaims it at the end with the army base, but I feel they should have been there either more time or less time, or even not at all -- the base would have made an awesome setting for a sequel, in which a group of men and women stumble in, and chaos ensues. Our main party could either keep searching like a Fellowship of the Cab, or finally make a last stand at a house on a lake (which would become quite a shock as they realized that the dead don't need to breathe and aren't afraid of water...).

The movie's still amazing, and it gets what I've come to think of as a principle rule of zombie movies absolutely right:

The humans are always, ALWAYS more frightening than the zombies.

It's about people in a Scottish castle, or something. This movie doesn't deserve an IMDB lookup, so I guess I'll remain ignorant. The dubbing was terrible, although I swear one of the girls who did it also did the dubbing for my favorite MST3K episode, Pod People. Everything about this film is a mess, from the lighting (what little there is of it), to the zombies, which were obviously just dudes in masks, walking slowly. One guy had several close ups, and no one seemed to notice his nose was sticking through the mask. Pathetic.

Utter crap. not even camp crap like Evil Dead. Just awful. Why my store carries this and not, say, good foreign films or the complete Godfather series is beyond me. I wouldn't have rented it, except it was mentioned in a blurb in my Day of the Dead DVD, and I figured I might as well see a bad example of zombie movies, to balance my fanaticism. Avoid at all costs.

Within the opening five minutes or so it looked like it would be a knowingly stupid movie, like Army of Darkness, that pays homage to, and riffs on, the classic movies that spawned it. "James Bond with zombies," is probably how the pitch meeting went.

Strike one: Written, directed, and starring one sunken-chested twat with delusions of being an action star. Strike two: Getting your friends to play soldiers, when it's clear they've never held a gun before in their lives, and can't even fake it (the army surplus camo doesn't help, either). Strike three, you're outta here: Shooting the movie like it's a porno, not only with lighting and what I'm guessing they tried to pass off as cinematography, but with random scantily clad chicks with big tits for no reason.

I couldn't bring myself to watch the whole thing. Even Burial Ground I forced myself through, because it, strangely, had an air of love about it. Someone nursed that baby through development hell, so like an Ed Wood movie, you get, if nothing else, a graphic example of the idiom, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

Most of the blame lies with the writer/director/star, and that teenage Van Dyke he's sporting. The script is garbage, the acting is worse. I could totally see what he was trying to do, blending detective, spy, and zombie movies together, but he's so untalented it's frightening. Worse is when he shows up to a crime scene in trench coat and fedora, and for all his earnestness he looks like a little kid playing Sam Spade in his daddy's overcoat.

And then he tries to do these ridiculous spinning back kicks that show no form or skill, let alone actual connection with the zombies.

The zombies, being an integral part of any zombie movie, are actually quite good. I'm sure I missed a couple of good, gruesome scenes where they tear a soldier or two to pieces, but I couldn't sit through that guy's awful acting for a second longer.

I tried listening to the commentary on the disc, because I figured that maybe it was his point to be so bad, but like my initial viewing of Army of Darkness, I just didn't get the joke. Nope. As far as I could tell, they were all totally serious, and self-congratulatory. All I could think through what I watched was, "Someone paid for this garbage. He probably makes money off this atrocity."

I would like to leave with a note for him: when applying blood, don't just throw it anywhere. It might do well for you to actually think about where the injury is. If we can't see a cut...why were you bleeding out of your forehead for no reason? And since when do people bleed from the eyes for being choked?

Don't watch this crap. Go watch a Romero movie, even one of the remakes. At least those cats can write. Or wait like five years until I get my zombie movie made...

Romero sneaks in lots of social commentary, starting with the opening half hour. A SWAT team member, on a mission to clear a tenement building of zombies and its more tenacious tenants, takes the opportunity to unleash his racial hatred on the Hispanics and blacks in the building, living dead or not.

Two SWAT members break away, though, and team up with a helicopter pilot and his traffic reporter girlfriend to find somewhere, anywhere to ride out the storm. They settle in a shopping mall, riddled with zombies like a shitty apartment is with roaches.

While they wait for rescue in the mall, Romero takes that time and puts it to good use by skewering consumer culture (I can't tell you how eerily familiar the scenes of zombies banging on the mall doors is to my idiot customers banging on the windows of the store when we've still got ten minutes until we open). It's less scary than Night, but it has more of an overall dread, like a good Poe story; they're alone, trapped in a mall, for all they know the last people on earth, still playing house. Creepy, surprisingly well acted for a group of unknowns, and still incredibly graphic. My only gripe is the "Hollywood" ending, something specifically avoided in the first movie, and which this movie doesn't really allow, given all that came before. Still, as Matt Cale of Ruthless Reviews says of Day of the Dead, "But we know they will eventually die, which is the way of all zombie cinema."

So I bought it.

It's actually three different versions of the movie: the theatrical, the extended edition, and the international edition, plus a couple hours of documentaries. I've seen (and reviewed) the first one, so I won't be covering it here. [Reviews of the disparate parts to come as I watch them...there's a lot of material and very little time on my end.]

Documentaries: The meat of Disc 4 is an hour long new (2002? Made before Land of the Dead, at any rate), documentary, with interviews of the principal players -- Romero, Fran (his wife), Savini, the four stars -- plus the DP, the Line Producer, Dario Argento, Goblin, and numerous zombie actors talking about their experiences. Most of it's information any Dawn fan already knew, but it takes you step by step through the process, from before Night to after Day.

But goddamn was it a fun ride.

Pretty much the same setup as the original, but many more people (and zombies), show up at the mall. The zombies are much faster this time, and much more savage, the director obviously having taken several pages from 28 Days Later.

It works -- these fuckers are frightening, and I doubt many of us could outrun them. They're fast, they're vicious, and they're hungry. Strangely enough, I feel that puts more emphasis on terror, rather than dread. See, what I like most about these movies is the idea that there's no where to run. You're only as safe as your ammo supply, by how much drinking water you have, and how many windows you have boarded up. Sure, in Night the main girl walks slowly past zombies without them coming for her, but to what end? That's where I think the real horror lies: there's no real escape, for anyone.

I was very hopeful when I saw the movie was written by James Gunn, an author whose book, The Toy Collector, I really like, and whose authorship of the Scooby-Doo movies I try to ignore, but he injects these useless tidbits of information about the characters in a very transparent attempt at depth. For example, one character goes on and on about how he's had so many jobs, and how he was a shitty father, etc. Who cares? They're all dead! Another girl obsesses over this dog they find (a great little plot point, and useful for action later, although I could help think of Mr. Fennyman's line in Shakespeare in Love: "It's comedy they want, Will. A few laughs, and a bit with a dog."), as she's "lost so many people close to her." So's everyone else, jackass! But it was highlighted even more by little tidbits from Night, where that one guy's in the tuxedo. All through the movie you're thinking, "Where was he before this? What's with the tuxedo?" But it doesn't matter, and by not revealing it, the world actually feels more real, because this contrived back story isn't heaped on your plate; the focus is on the characters in the here and now. It's the "Iceberg Theory": What you see of a given character is really only 10% of the total. 90% still lies below the surface, and it's only ever hinted at (was it a party? Is it a holiday? What's with the tux, man?).

Enough bagging on the movie. It was lots of fun, great attention to detail, lots of gore, and tons of believable head shots. I liked that the zombies were everywhere, and every foray past the safety of the mall came with danger. I liked how, as in the Romero movies, who you boo and cheer in the beginning isn't necessarily the same person by the end. Pressure and stress do interesting things to people, and the better moments of character development allow the characters to simply play off one another and the situation.

The ending is appropriately hopeful but dark -- they're safe, for now. Be sure to stay through the credits. Great bit of editing and Blair Witch-style camera work.

Keeping with the formula -- and if it ain't broke, don't fix it, I say -- the movie essentially takes place in a single location, inviting bouts of cabin fever even in the audience, let alone the actors.

Although I think it's rightly considered the weakest of the three (still very, very entertaining), the film made me immensely happy to see that Romero and I think along very similar lines. After watching his first two movies I started thinking about biological explanations for zombies. Granted, as they're presented they're impossible, but as they say, "The audience is more willing to believe the impossible than the improbable."

If we look at what the zombies have lost, compared to humans, we can start to picture what parts of their body are still functioning, particularly in the brain. They've lost fine motor control, speech, reason (they won't form a pyramid to storm the mall, or climb on top of trucks that don't have humans in them, for example), and all but the most deeply ingrained memory. They are, as is stated in each movie, creatures of instinct, doing all that they do in a twisted mockery of human life.

Thus it's safe to say that they've lost use of most of their brain, say at least 75% of it. Now, many people think it's brain size that separates humans from lower animals, but it is actually brain development, specifically in that humans have the most complex forebrain -- where higher brain functions like reason take place. Zombies have lost that. In fact, their entire nervous system has virtually collapsed, and so it's no coincidence that they shuffle around like stroke victims.

Rather than looking at zombies as degraded humans, that is humans that have lost certain functions, it would seem more logical to look at them as upgraded corpses, dead bodies that have gained extraordinary functions. So what the disease/curse/whatever is, is something that'll kickstart the nervous system again; if it infected a living person it'll kill them, then start the system back up again. A virus that basically completely takes over an organism -- to what end is unknown, but what purpose does it serve an AIDS virus to kill it's host? Sometimes things just don't have a reason (take that teleological theists!) Since the body's no longer functioning, the virus needs to find other sources of nourishment -- living people. Blood is vital (heh), although the real goal is brains, since that is what the infection targets, after all. And since all extraneous parts of the brain don't work, they don't feel pain because it's unnecessary (pain being the brain and body's way of protecting itself from danger; if something hurts enough, it'll get you to stop), although it does register, but it's obviously not a deterrent.

Back to the nervous system. What the zombie uses is the existing nerves throughout the body, the spinal cord, and the hind, or reptilian brain, but only for motor actions (the diaphragm still works, but since the infection doesn't really need blood, the zombie doesn't actually need to breathe). The jerky motions of the zombie are directly attributable to the spotty signals being sent from the spinal cord, fed by this need for more brains.

It all clicked for me when I thought about how a small child, say, three years old, whose brain hasn't developed fully yet, especially the motor skills, would pet a dog. Trying to imitate it's parents, the child would wind up patting the dog, often harder than it means to, and even accidentally hurting the dog, all because it doesn't have the control. The same can be said of those with brain damage...

...like zombies.

My point is, this is essentially the conclusion the doctor comes to -- all that needs to be isolated to keep the zombie "alive" is the hind brain and base of the spinal cord; everything else is extraneous. There are other bits, too, like the idea that particular zombies might remember some very specific actions of their former lives and could perform very simple tasks if put in the correct situation. Bub, in the movie, holds a book correctly and knows how to use a gun, given that he was a soldier. The zombies in Dawn of the Dead wander to the mall, since it was some place important in their lives.

So, not the best of the trilogy, but it gave me a whole new respect for Romero, and the genre, when I saw that others had put just as much thought into it as I had.

A young man lives under the thumb of his cruel, controlling mother, who won't even let him date...until she's bitten by a monkey at the zoo, which slowly turns her into a monster. Our young hero, in the meantime, tries to balance his burgeoning love life while hiding his mother's transformation from prying eyes.

All you really need to know is the gore in this movie is over the top, but in a good way. Jackson and friends must have had a blast thinking of all the ways to kill people, from lawn mowers to actually punching through some chick's skull to...I won't spoil it for you. Dead Alive is a horror movie gleefully in the vein of The Evil Dead, and later, The Bride of Chucky, where you're just as likely to laugh as to be frightened.

Plus, how can you not love a movie that has a karate-chopping priest with such classic lines as, "I kick ass for the Lord!"

However, for a low budget, first time flick, Dead Alive does a number of admirable bits: impressive use of light and dark (driving down the road the headlights of the jeep pick out scattered groups of zombies, for a really chilling effect, since you can never really tell what's beyond the edge of the light), the aforementioned gore, and just enough gallows humor to draw you in. Plus, this flick absolutely nails the ending. Let's just say the last minute is totally worth it (plus the rat bastard who wrote the movie completely stole my idea).

So I finally settled down to watch it. It's not a bad little horror movie -- it's a low budget indie made by guys who love the genre and the subgenre, with a believable script and actors that range from terrible to excellent. Consider that my ringing endorsement. "Much better than Corpses Are Forever."

Here's the premise: movie opens with dude blasting the hell out of a bunch of college kids all covered with blood and gore. We know they're zombies, he knows they're zombies, but the cops show up and figure he's just a murdering freak, so they throw him in jail. Thing is, this dude's Infected -- note the capital i -- and he infects the whole prison. This is about as much as you need to know: enclosed, labyrinthine space, lots of cannon fodder, lots of weapons.

The only things that hamper the movie, aside from some terrible acting (such as the lady from the CDC), and some stilted delivery, are the odd behavioral choices for the zombies. Dead Men Walking takes a kind middle ground between "modern" and "classic" zombies -- they can move kinda normally, but they mainly show their living dead status by being covered with blood and screaming a lot.

I will say this: the makeup and FX in this movie are awesome, like the black, foamy vomit the Infected dude chokes forth. I don't know how they did it, but for once it actually looks like it's coming from somewhere deep inside him.

Dead Men Walking is a solid entry into the crowded zombie field, and I frankly give it some extra points for its ability to fuse subgenres to make a sub-subgenre movie: viral zombies in prison.

Consider the source, eh?

Granted, it seemed like a bit of hyperbole, but I can deal with that. In a genre that's forever dominated by the Big Three, any reference, no matter how small, to those seminal films will get people to watch it. It was a bit of hyperbole, and a whole lot of bullshit.

I'll accept the fact that it was shot on DV, and just looks like a terrible movie, seeing as it had a really neat premise. In the midst of a zombie outbreak, a news team is sent out to cover fluff stories, completely ignoring the spreading infection.

To save you the rental fee and the two hours (see how nice I am to you?), total stinkbomb. Wow. Another great idea, lousy execution. Mostly, awful, awful acting, not at all helped by amateurish editing, and a script that's a pile of dogshit. God, the sad thing about these movies is they could be so good, but the people making them are so incompetent it hurts. There's hard ps on the mike, awful setups, no tension whatsoever. The whole thing's shot like a low budget porno, and that's not a good thing in any sense of the word. And the special effects are terrible. You know why Romero's so good? In Night, when he didn't have the money to show cool stuff like trucks flipping over he, one, didn't half-ass it and show a toy truck flipping over and getting set on fire, he had his characters tell us about what they saw -- it'll look cooler in your head anyway. Feeding the Masses obviously does not understand that.

If nothing else it hits all the notes that Dawn of the Dead hit thirty years ago, notes about consumerism, about human responses to emergencies, about how shitty human nature is, but it hits them in a snotty film student way, without any real bite.

That and they call them "zombies." Big no-no.

Good setup, terrible execution.

Look, guys, my first piece of advice, if you're going to shoot an office scene, don't shoot it in the office of your film company. There's just something that doesn't read right about it.

The whole thing is shot like a cheap porno, and everyone's angry and yelling and there are no real characters, just (bad) actors reciting their lines.

Even the gore's not that good. Usually I can give cheap horror movies a pass if the gore is over the top and creative. This was rather hum-drum, as if they were going down a checklist. "Ok, zombies kneeling in a circle around a corpse, eating intestines, check. Strong black character, check [a great bit part of some black dude who somehow managed to steal the show for me, telling the protagonist where the "ghouls" lurk]."

It sucked, but it was a work of love, so I don't hate it. I was just disappointed. Also, horror fans are either the dumbest or the most forgiving fans in the world, because this thing won several horror festival awards, to judge by the cover, but it was a piece of shit. Not even Evil Dead creative, nor Night of the Living Dead creepy.

Anyway, really the only part I really liked was the fact that the main guy was a video store clerk with a penchant for zombie movies and who delighted in fucking with customers, like giving one moron a copy of Citizen Kane instead of the action flick he wanted. The acting was pretty good, and the zombies weren't bad, given the low budget.

All in all, not that good, but pretty funny, and a neat look at zombies versus good ol' boys (think of it like the end of Night, but this time the heroes are the rednecks) Could've been a lot better had the makers focused more on making an original, "southern-fried" zombie movie, rather than trying to be a Kevin Smith movie with zombies (as evidenced by a long, stupid rant about Coke versus Pepsi. Very forced, not very funny).

What a stinking pile this one was. You know how I said Burial Ground was bad? This is worse. It's almost worse than Corpses Are Forever, since this had enough money to be good, it just didn't have anything else. Still, I hate that skinny little bastard in CAF, so he takes the prize.

The movie breaks the cardinal rule of zombie movies: there were no zombies within the first five to ten minutes. Still, Resident Evil managed to not be completely terrible after breaking that rule, but House of the Dead makes so many mistakes so spectacularly that it's hard to know where to begin.

The protagonists were all twats, and two of the male leads looked and dressed damn near identically, so it was impossible to tell them apart. Clint Howard was in it, which is never a good sign. The captain of a ship leaves port after being confronted by an FBI officer, even though she knows exactly who he is, let alone can easily see the ID numbers on the side of the boat. Director Boll flings the camera around like it's a football. There are clips from the video game spliced randomly into the movie. The characters commit every sin known to horror movies (wandering alone into an abandoned, spooky house, having sex, generally behaving like idiots). The sea captain just happens to have a trunk full of weapons and ammunition.

All right, so I'm not looking for Citizen Kane out of these movies, but some degree of competence wouldn't be so bad. Why, for example, is there a ten minute sequence of nothing but the main characters walking forward blasting zombies? The distance they have to walk is 100 yards at most, but still it takes them a quarter of an hour to get there? Not to mention they throw their ammunition away like candy, so whenever they say, "I'm out," I couldn't help but laugh and say, "No shit." (That's one thing I promise for my zombie movie: people will pay attention to how many bullets they have left. The new Dawn of the Dead at least paid lip service to it, even though they still shot everything they could.)

In short, House of the Dead is horrifically bad, even considering my expectations were incredibly low (ie, "Maybe the zombie makeup will be good."). Not even worth a spot in one's collection, unless you can pick it up for free. Avoid at all costs, unless you have a couple of friends to give it the ol' MST-ie treatment.

To give you the setup: Sid Haig (House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects, et al), plays Dr. Curien, a college professor out to discover the secret to immortality: he's got a zombie trapped in his lab and basically injects her blood into students to see what happens. Naturally, things get out of hand, and the whole campus is turned into Zombie University. AMS -- the organization responsible for managing the disaster in the video games -- rolls in to try to contain the infection.

O! If only the movie were as cool as that setup!

The writing is terrible. Even a veteran actor like Haig -- whose creepy and nuanced turn in the aforementioned Rob Zombie flicks demonstrated that Haig has the chops to be at turns hilarious and scary as fuck -- sounds like a community theater reject. This is not to say there's no wit in the movie; there are a number of very funny moments, and I feel the writer couldn't decide to go for the farce or the serious. That and the dude's terrible. If the writer got paid for this mess, someone needs to go to prison.

I will say this for what I hope is the last time: if you're going to put soldiers in your movie, make sure they act like soldiers. Soldiers move in formation, they act as a team. They obey orders. They follow a chain of command. If they're a member of a special ops force (as the army guys in this one are supposed to be), they're probably friends. You don't work on special ops without creating a strong bond with your teammates. These guys just flopped around, dropped to their sidearms after putting away their primary weapons, and basically acted as if they were anything but professional soldiers.

Oh, and small point, but: two women in the squad? Please. Think of these guys like S.E.A.L.s; find me a female S.E.A.L. and I'll give you a cookie. For comparison purposes I watched Day of the Dead directly after this movie, and I immediately believed that what was on screen was a military operation, particularly under the austere gaze of Capt. Rhodes. *shudder* Now there's a C.O.

Ultimately the movie is dragged down because it has no where to go; you will forgive me for this, for sounding like a high school English teacher, but it felt like this movie had no theme. Theme is particularly important in horror movies, whether it's the familiar and benign becoming terrible (Child's Play), tapping into powers beyond Man's reckoning (Hellraiser), or the breakdown of society (Night of the Living Dead). The characters are picked off one by one for no other reason than for thinning out the cast, but even with the loss of characters, the plot gets more convoluted and dim.

I will say this: there was one black guy on the squad who should have been the star. Now he I believed was a soldier. I'm gonna steal him for my movie.

So. Better than the first, and not wholly unenjoyable -- I could stomach watching it again, for example -- but its lofty ideas are hamstrung by awful, awful writing. Almost forgot! The FX! They were obviously on a limited budget, so you won't find Romero-esque ripping-the-intestines-out-of-everyone gore scenes; it's almost entirely cut-aways...and obvious ones at that. Small thing, but zombie flicks need gore, and the lack of gore detracts from the vital immediacy of the action.

I also enjoyed that, given it was a midnight, opening day showing, the theater was quite full, and there was a definite bent towards the zombie nut. At this theater there are no commercials, but an usher stands before the audience and gives a little info about the movie, as well as the requisite, "Turn your fucking phone off," speech. He made some comment about this being Romero's new zombie movie, and someone yelled out, "Don't say the 'zed' word!" It was also pretty neat that whenever a horror or zombie icon showed up on screen, pretty much everyone got it and clapped (such as Asia Argento, daughter of horror director Dario Argento, popping up on screen, as well as Tom Savini -- this time a zombified "Blades" -- and Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, of Shaun of the Dead fame). There were also numerous touches to the earlier films -- the "truck mission" music from DotD, as well as plenty of Spam ("Don't knock it. It's got it's own key.")

There are two questions I will answer right away before anything else. One, yes, I enjoyed the hell out of this movie. The day it comes out I'm buying it on DVD and watching it until it breaks. I will be going back to see it in theaters several times. Yes, I will force people (*cough--Jamie--cough*) to come with me. Two, no, it was not as good as the original Dawn of the Dead. However, it is an excellent entry into Romero's zombie series, and a fun, enjoyable movie all by its lonesome.

Zombies have taken over the earth and what few human survivors remain live in heavily fortified city-compounds, all but completely divorced from outside, civilized contact. We join a recon team as it sweeps a suburb for supplies, thinning out the zombie herd, it's mobile base a huge garbage truck/APC thing that is so fucking cool it becomes its own character. A zombie known as Big Daddy gets all PO'ed that "his people" are getting shot for no good reason leads his rag tag band to the human city to seek revenge.

The human city (ostensibly Pittsburgh, but never actually named), is a sight to be seen, and serves as the main physical metaphor in the movie. Here you have three classes: the poor, who do all the work and live in poverty, filth, and sickness on the streets, the rich, who live in a literal glass tower with all of life's amenities and none of it's hardships, and the military-police who keep the rich in power and the poor scared shitless. At the head of all of this is Dennis Hopper as Kaufman, the guy who created the city, and controls everything in it (a nice bloke who has his political enemies killed, then dumped in the garbage and zombie filled wasteland, when he's not throwing them into a pit to be eaten by chained zombies. Bets are taken to see who eats them first, the one with black paint, or with red.)

Perhaps its only because I'm reading it at the moment, but I saw incredible parallels between Land of the Dead and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I would go so far as to say that LotD is not only a call-to-arms for the poor and the disenfranchised, but a broad allegory for the whole of American history. Zinn's whole thesis seems to be that the American story is one of the rich constantly shitting on the poor, getting them whipped up by a number a distracting causes to act against their own self interest and keep the rich in power. In Land, the poor indulge in any vice Kaufmann can provide them, and do his dirty work all for the chance to eventually join the elites in the Tower. The zombies (read: Indians...and is it any wonder that the two zombies in the pit are painted red and black and made to fight each other?), are used as the constant threat to keep the poor in the elite's control.

This is beside the other obvious symbols, likening the City to post-911 America, as Romero has said in numerous interviews (guarded by a fence that doesn't work the way it really should, dubious loss of civil rights for non-existent gains in security, war profiteering, hate mongering).

Bad bits? Oh sure, there are a few. The ending didn't thrill me. Not to spoil it (though you can see it coming a mile away), but the protagonist, Riley, doesn't kill Big Daddy when he has the chance because "they're looking for a place to go, just like us." Sure, that's the point, but, O Romero! Where is your contempt for humanity! I'm also personally a little sad that he went the way of summer blockbuster action movie than small, cramped horror movie. One can never go home again, and Romero does an excellent job of keeping the sense of claustrophobia even when the story ranges over an entire city, but I chalk those up to simple stylistic differences. There's only so many times one can tell the "trapped in the [farmhouse/apartment/Winchester]" story...

Also, not enough Pillsbury. New fan favorite, I'm telling you right now.

Really, the thing that makes me most sad about this movie is the lack of marketing it received. Zombie movies are probably more popular than they've been since the '60s/'70s; Resident Evil, House of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, not to mention excellent indie projects like Dead Meat and They Came Back. Did Universal completely ignore the underground buzz for this movie? I've read in so many magazines and online forums of people who don't really care for zombie movies but say, "Oh, Romero's made another movie? I've got to see that. I love his movies!" Sure, they pushed that it was "George A. Romero's Land..." but what if people don't know who he is? The movie's not going to be bigger than Batman Begins, I'm not suggesting the impossible, but it's a shame that it got buried by shitty release and shitty marketing. It's an excellent flick, and for what is ultimately a popcorn movie it actually manages to say a few things to the audience, to get an intellectual response.

Most importantly, though, at one point I jumped out of my chair and nearly pissed myself.

Long Live the Living Dead!

"Woo, a graveyard, how frightening. Actually, you know what's really scary? The shoulder pads on that chick's shirt. Hey...what...what the fuck is going on?"

Yeah, I was pretty much hooked from the get-go.

The set-up is this: the newly dead are rising, and they're hungry for human flesh. No one knows why, or how, and as chaos ensues, seven strangers hide in a farm house, trying to keep the hordes of zombies from clawing their way in. The only thing that anyone can seem to figure out is, if they bite you, you become one when you die.

And that's not even the interesting part.

See, what I think Romero gets so right about this movie is the humans are every bit as frightening as the zombies. In fact, most of the tension comes from whether or not they're going to blow each other's heads off, or who's going to snap first and get the rest of them killed.

Another thing done right is how the film makers ascribe to the "Iceberg Theory" of character creation. Each character has a story, has a past, has desires, but none of that matters. All that matters is who can survive tonight, who has what it takes to get out alive. One dude's in a dress shirt, and another guy's in the remnants of a tuxedo, but the unsaid rule of the movie is: who you were before now is irrelevant. How do you plan to live out the night?

The zombies aren't particularly menacing, in and of themselves. One can walk right past them--jog, if they're of a faster variety. But it's not their speed that makes them scary, but their relentlessness. They don't get tired, they don't get frightened, and they don't get hurt. Hell, the only way to stop them is to shoot them in the brain.

Night of the Living Dead is, above all, claustrophobic. There's no way out. There's no communication with the outside world, if there even is an outside world any more. The audience gets to know all the corners of the house intimately, and by the end everyone goes a little stir crazy.

Skip the 30th Anniversary Edition, first of all. Despite some neat extra scenes towards the middle of the movie, such as a waitress and others chowing down on a car crash victim, it doesn't add to the movie any, and actually detracts from the central story. Not too much, but why watch some Anton LaVey-wannabee stroke a shih tszu if you don't have to?

You have to go into this movie thinking, "It was made in 1968," but really the only unfortunate part of the movie was the sound editing was uneven, and the foley wasn't as good as it could have been. Still, for a debut feature film made in the sixties Romero does some amazing things with a camera and gets great performances out of his amateur actors.

One shot that I found myself rewatching multiple times starts out on one zombie framed in a doorway. As he thrashes around, we get a glimpse of one off in the distance, over his shoulder. When he moves, there are more zombies...and more... and more keep pouring into the frame. Every time the zombies were shown en masse I couldn't help but think, "Where'd they all come from?" There's tons of 'em, and they're a little more determined than those in the remake, or indeed in Romero's other films. They're more sinister and a great deal faster.

I think this movie would make an excellent play, mostly because Romero does so many little technical storytelling things right. It's a low budget movie, so rather than trying to show all of the horrible things happening across the state -- gas tankers exploding, zombies overrunning a city, etc. -- the male lead, Ben, tells us all this while he boards up windows, doing two important things at once: securing the house for later in the story, and putting very graphic images in the best theater: the human mind. They barely leave the living room through the whole movie, so it's like the audience is sitting in the room with them, waiting for someone to make a move. Information comes to the audience at the same time it comes to the characters.

I like most of the actors in this version better, particularly Cooper and Judy (what a hottie!). It just never sits right with me how, in the '98 version, Cooper keeps calling people "Yo-yos."

Anyway, this movie's great, and I can totally see why it's gained a cult following. There's so much stuff to pick apart (new culture overtaking the old, social unrest, race relations, gender issues, class issues), and it's "just a zombie movie." Night of the Living Dead proves that good writing, a good story can overcome any hurdle, and you don't need big explosions or lots of action for a scary, intense movie.

So far, so good.

Even when the action shifts to a SWAT team fighting terrorists (protesting nuclear proliferation), I figured that Romero did it in Dawn, so why not here? From that point they add in another storyline of random vacationers lost in the jungles of Papua New Guinea (??). The three stories crash together in a way that just doesn't work, although it doesn't help that they also toss in this thing about voodoo and who knows what, because at that point I started fast-forwarding. A lot of these movies suffer from "Great Beginning, Shitty Second and Third Acts" syndrome. Granted, it takes a lot of work to carry the story to its conclusion, but I swear they're too often needlessly complicated (least of all for this stupid need to definitively establish what caused the epidemic. Who cares? Save that for a sequel...).

Best part? Zombie priest who gets his head smashed in on the goddamn altar.

But, they're not really zombies, and not just because they use weapons. Really, it's part of the script.

On the whole, it was pretty crappy, but I did love the interview with the director, who just came off as an arrogant prick. Look, dude, you're basically Ed Wood, stop pretending your movie was saying something.

Story: rubbish. Characters: flat (especially that one chick who kept looking out from under her eyelids, trying to look scary). Zombies: badass.

The gore's crazy, although not enough blood -- more movies need people decapitated by elevators is all I'm saying. There's a LOT of zombies, which is great, because they're always scarier when there's tons of them. Lots of really stupid "science stuff," like random pipes and redundant locks. Reminded me of the MST3K movie, "Push more buttons! More science noises!"

Some neat tie-ins to the video game, although not nearly enough. For example, towards the end there's a cool throw away line about the "Nemesis Project," and the Cerberus dogs move just like they do in the game.

The most significant thing, for me, was the RE explanation of zombies was exactly the same as the one I thought of when I watched Day of the Dead, minus all the military applications. Still, as documented here, I hadn't even seen Resident Evil when I thought of it, so I'm not ripping it off, no matter what Us Weekly eventually says.

I have no desire to ever see the movie again, since it's hella boring, but since the ending was actually well done, I'm now interested to see the second one. Good thing I work in a video store.

So how is he defeated in the end?

A fist fight.

Granted the chick is supposed to be some superhuman something or other, but how lame could they possibly get?

This was an awful, awful movie. The first one was bad, but the zombies were pretty good. This one, it's like they weren't even trying. Not even a little. What zombies there were were nothing special, and the characters were flat, when they weren't played absolutely woodenly by the talentless drones hired as actors. There's also entirely too many characters, most of whom were invented for the movie (what's the point of securing a license if you're going to ignore the great preponderance of what happens within that license?).

Stupid, stupid, stupid. A waste of time and money, and I'm sad to say it gets lumped in with other (good), zombie movies, because it's utter trash.

This movie, like so many others, has no idea what it wants to be. I could not, for the life of me, figure out if the campy-ness was intentional campy and funny, or if the makers of this movie thought they were making a solid horror movie and completely missed the...well, we'll get into that.

First, the good stuff. The movie kicks off in Russia, and it actually looks like it. Signs are in Russian, people speak it, etc. Around the ten minute mark we get our first grisly zombie attack, so that's always a check mark in the "plus" column. Speaking of zombie attacks, the gore is plentiful, something I never dislike. There were some fun nods to the '80s cheesefest that spawned the series -- dig the punk zombie with full on mohawk -- and a zombie killing a security guard, then using his intercom to try to get the main office to "Send more security guards."

Oh, yeah, these zombies talk and use tools and shit. I'll leave that discussion for when I inevitably buy and review the original Return.

Along those lines there were plenty of joke lines that were funny in an unintentional way, like the security guard who checks out a chick's ass and says, "Nice pooper." Ew, but funny.

However. The main plot involves a perfectly demographically diverse group of teens -- dig the token black guy -- riding their dirtbikes into the bowels of Umbrella, I mean "HybraTech," to free their friend from medical experimentation. I worry that the last part of that sentence has you nodding your head, saying, "Well, that doesn't sound so bad." Read it again. Dirtbikes.

The whole movie smacks of the late '80s cheesefests that made me hate horror movies for years -- the plot is cursory, an excuse for ridiculous action sequences (fifteen minutes of dirtbike riding. Fifteen, zombie-free minutes), and kids with six-shooters not only throwing away bullets like they were candy, but throwing away too many without reloading.

Yes, I count shots fired. I'm a nerd. It's basic continuity.

"I'm out of ammo." Yeah, maybe if you weren't shooting from the hip, into the body of a zombie, you'd have more ammo. Although, come to think of it, I like how they didn't explain that you have to shoot them in the head to kill them; if you're watching this movie you either love zombies and know this already or wanted to watch a cheesy horror movie and don't care.

I mentioned earlier that there's lots of gore. This is true, in that they had lots of squibs showing torsos being chewed up by gunfire, and heads being ripped off (too easily), but the gore shots were all very similar: zombies biting off the back of heads, multiple torsos punctured, etc. But it's not very real; when did the human skull develop the thickness of an egg? Think about it: do you think you could bite through the crown of someone's head? Happens all the time in this movie.

It's a cheesy movie, plain and simple, but I can't say it's a bad movie. It's more lazy than bad (montage, cookie cutter plot); certainly not Corpses Are Forever Bad. With a little more work one could easily see this as a theatrical release (I'm surprised they didn't try anyway).

Want an unfiltered look at my train of though? Check out my notes on the movie here.

The zombies were done right (ie in classic Romero style, a la Dawn of the Dead), and the movie was both scary and funny. Despite what you may think, the movie's less of a zombie parody, than a funny zombie movie (as the film makers put it, it's a romantic zombie comedy, or "rom-zom-com.")

Plus, anytime you have zombies being beaten to death in time with a Queen song, you have sheer cinematic genius.

Very British, very funny, and very well done. As cliche as it sounds, Shaun of the Dead is an instant classic in its own right, and nestles quite comfortably with it's Romero idols (AND! Shaun of the Dead breaks the cardinal five minute rule of zombie movies by not showing any zombies until about twenty minutes into it. It works, though, because there are enough nods to zombies to tide us over). Take a bow, boys, you earned it.

The one scene that really stuck with me was when the main character was dragged into a bar's basement, and made to fight in a cage match with a saw blade on a club. It sounds kinda lame on paper, but it was surprisingly intense and well done. Interesting side note: the "bad guy" in the pit was actually the lead actor's little brother.

Plus the drug lord is this Jabba the Hutt-thing, and it was actually really good for something cobbled together on a shoestring budget.

As I keep saying, it was a bad movie, but not for lack of effort. I have a soft spot for movies that are made with a lot of heart. A piece of shit like Corpses Are Forever was seemingly knocked together for the self-aggrandizement of the writer/director/douchebag (although frankly it amazes me that people put out movies like this when anyone who watches it can clearly see that it's terrible, just below a good porno in terms of production value), but Street Zombies was made because the writer and director really wanted to do it. They liked making movies, really liked the script, and paid for everything out of their own pockets (on the commentary the director described how people would work for all of fifty bucks, if anything, just because they wanted to make the thing so badly). There's no glitzy marketing, no shoddy camera tricks to try to seem cool, no test audiences. As bad as it is, it's pure film making. Take it for what it is, folks.

I don't want to spoil anything, but there's more than meets the eye with these walking corpses, and they start acting weird...even for zombies.

A zombie movie for people who don't like zombie movies (and those of us who do), They Came Back works so well because it emphasizes the human over the horror. Really, it's not a horror movie, but straight science fiction, but there's the walking dead, so it fits in nicely alongside Romero and Fulci.

Not to mention the nudity! Holy shit! The one chick who goes scuba diving has perhaps the most gorgeous body I've ever seen. I rewound and zoomed that scene so much I think I burned a hole in the DVD. Gotta hand it to the Italians: whereas Americans love to show everything just short of actual nudity, the Italians dive right in. They don't fuck around. "You want tits? Okay. Here you go." I give them props for the fact that they don't just throw tits out there to hold attention, it (sometimes), actually plays into charter or plot.

But!

The gore!

Over-the-fucking-top, man! I don't want to spoil it (partially because I am totally ripping/referencing this scene in my first zombie movie), but there's the "infamous eye scene." Tense, gross, and brutal. (Another odd Italian quirk: eyes getting gouged, and breasts being mutilated. I don't claim to understand it, but hey, it's their party.)

Definitely worth a watch, and the last shot(s) is (are) priceless. About as frightening as Day of the Dead's swarms of zombies outside the fence.

Oh yeah, and tits.

Strike one: making the viewer sit through two of the worst trailers ever created by man for bad movies no one's ever going to see. No skipping or Menu button allowed, apparently. Strike two: calling 'em zombies from the get-go. (Although, if it really happened, why wouldn't people call them that?) Ball one: saying the President's plane crashed somewhere near Philadelphia. Zombie fans will have a bit of chuckle over that, but it's not even a base hit as it's too cutesy to be good.

This movie bucks my personal trend that heart goes a long way...no amount of heart could save this cluster fuck.

These two annoying emo/punk wannabes get married and go to their honeymoon on the beach. We know they're punk because they did the wedding "their" way, and the dude gets road head on the way to the beach. Only punk girls do that. So they're sitting on the beach, and this bloated corpse comes out of the ocean and pukes black stuff on the dude, who gets sick and dies, then comes back to life in the hospital moments after being pronounced dead. Soon thereafter he starts to get unnatural cravings for humans. Or at least I think that's what happened. Way too much talking (for a script that's held together with chewing gum and paper clips, at any rate), way too much dead air.

The movie does have one redeeming quality: the chick. There's one bit in the hospital that got to me. Her new husband is laying on the slab, dead. She's still in her little polka-dot bathing suit with a picnic basket, bawling her eyes out. I got the feeling this is what the movie had been going for, real emotional punch but with a supernatural twist, but there's too much talking about emotion, not enough of the actual stuff.

Don't see this movie, but here's hoping that woman goes on to bigger and better things.

Now that I've become a full-blown zombie nut, I appreciate it on a whole new level. Putting you in the shoes of two survivors, you blast your way through a scientific complex, facing down bloated corpses, mutated vultures, and blowing open barrels for coins. It's pretty neat to actually see through the eyes of the characters when you're surrounded by zombies (or those occasional bits where you've got to kill the zombies before they harm your partner, which make the action a little more intense and dynamic), unlike, say, the Resident Evil series which, although intense, always keep the player somewhat detached from the action. That's not a bad thing -- RE games look and play like gripping zombie movies. HotD is a different beast entirely.

I've been playing with Mad Catz Xbox Blaster that is comfy and lightweight. One of the features I really like -- aside from the reload button built into the grip; all you have to do is squeeze the grip, no more shooting away from the screen -- is the wealth of shot options. With a press of a button you can cycle through "burst," "auto," and "shotgun." Putting it on "auto" makes the game quite a bit easier, although reflexes are still a must.

My only real complaints with the game are that it's still a little cartoony, the hit detection is a little weak (owing more to poor calibration than anything else), and it seems very weird that I can blow the head off a zombie, and they'll keep coming. Still, it's a total blast, and I can't wait to get a second gun so I can play through with a buddy. With a wealth of options and unlockables -- Survival and Time Attack right off the bat, and House of the Dead 2 after beating the main game -- I can see myself playing this game for quite a while.

Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green is very loosely based on the Romero film (even says so right on the box). You play a farmer who, once he begins to run low on rations, decides it's about time to head to the big city to find other living people, and see if they can't go somewhere safer. Ultimately, your goal is to get to the City of the Living and, more specifically Hoffman's giant new safehouse, Fiddler's Green, the giant apartment complex/mini-city seen in the movie.

First the good. The story itself, though simple and poorly linked and acted, is fair enough. There's a good variety of weapons and enemies (though, being zombies, they come in only two varieties: walking and crawling). At times the atmosphere is thoroughly creepy and tense, as it should be, and the locations are nicely varied as well, and you encounter different types of zombies in the different locations, doctors and patients -- still in their ass-exposing hospital gowns -- at the hospital, apron-wearing grandmothers when you're in the country.

Now for the bad. Unfortunately, it's quite lengthy.

The very first thing I noticed was how horrible the graphics and the level design were. It looks like it's running on the original Half-Life engine. Character models are actually quite nice, with more than sufficient amounts of detail and gore on the zombies, but the objects are uniformly...square. You'll see the same tables everywhere. The level design showed little to no inspiration in actual construction. Some, like the cornfield, were brilliant in concept and to a degree in execution (in the cornfield the stalks fill your vision. You can hear zombies, you just can't see them. Thanks to the lack of a radar it's easy to get disoriented, which can lead to some pretty intense "running-through-the-corn-to-get-away-from-zombies" moments). Others, like the hospital and the police station, are endless samey corridors, laid out in illogical patterns; in other words, they are built like no hospital or police station you have ever seen in your life.

The second big complaint -- bigger, in fact, than the first -- is that head shots may not necessarily kill a zombie. I just now took a sniper rifle point blank to a zombie's head and had to shoot it three or four times before it died. This is not an uncommon occurrence. I found that if I wanted one-hit kills I would have to use the fire axe and carefully aim and time it. This is not objectionable -- head shots are hard in real life -- but when you unload a full revolver on a zombie's face, you expect it to fall down. What exacerbates this is often, when you think you've gotten a sure head shot kill, you'll relax. Unfortunately, due to it's strange, hidden system, the computer has decided that a direct head shot through the eye isn't enough to kill a zombie, and the zombie unleashes a powerful, staggering attack from which it is difficult to uncover. (Also, sickness-puking zombies...where the fuck did they come from?) A small point it may seem to non-zombiephiles, as Resident Evil does not always equate head shots with instant kills. However, this game is specifically working within the world of George Romero, where it has been established in every movie that destroying the brain is the best -- and usually only -- way to kill a zombie. To fuck with the mythos like that makes me wonder why they bothered with getting the license in the first place (oh yeah...marketing and guaranteed sales to the Romero faithful).

I, for one, could live with ass graphics. Hell, look at Zombie Revenge. However, the gameplay is so utterly broken that I have to strain to find the redeeming qualities. What makes LotD: RtFG so sad is the fact that these redeeming qualities are glorious: great gore, well-made zombies, and basic run-and-gun gameplay that sticks closer to the source material than any zombie game before. Some major changes needed to be made to the core game, though: deadlier head shots (makes the game too easy? Give us more zombies! More zombies is never a bad thing), a radar, stronger, less dated level design, and more refined controls. I realize this is a budget title ($30 as a new release), and that they were trying to jam it in to coincide with the release of the DVD (they failed in that respect). But zombie fans are patient, like all hardcore fanboys. The audience that was going to buy the game before still would have bought it a few months down the line. It's also unwise to underestimate the popularity of Romero and his movies (I get questions all the time about why we don't carry Land of the Dead). A ray of hope does shine in the form of City of the Dead, a game being directed and written by Romero, and starring Tom Savini that's apparently going for a more arcade-like quality.

Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green: I love you for the game you could have been, but I hate you for the game you are.

Like (the still superior), Silent Hill, Resident Evil isn't so scary in and of itself. To get the most out of it, like horror movies in general, you have to suspend your disbelief. Play it after midnight, turn off the lights, turn up the surround sound, and get ready for some zombies.

The zombies themselves are actually pretty scary. They crash through windows, and many times you can hear them moaning somewhere just around the corner, but you can't see where the hell they are. RE also has a neat little thing where, even after you've killed a zombie, if you don't burn the body (with the scarce kerosene), about thirty minutes later it'll get up as an even stronger one.

Atmosphere is where the game really succeeds. It's totally creepy, and even playing it on "Easy," knowing I've killed all the zombies around, I still tiptoe around every corner, assault shotgun at the ready. Stupid game logic kills it somewhat. Who hides a gun in a tombstone, locked with a couple of wedges of metal? Who locks a door with a series of light puzzles and button presses? That and I just suck at obtuse puzzles, so every once and a while I have to pull up a walkthrough. Still, lots of fun, looking forward to the next games in the series.

Not that that's really a bad thing. The game's fun from beginning to end, but suffers from the numerous "Find X crest before proceeding" quests. Once you get past how ludicrous that idea is, the whole premise becomes much easier to swallow.

I'm sad that they didn't stay with the "Remake's" super zombies that come back to life after a few hours. Granted, there will be a few new zombies in previously cleared corridors, but the former placed more importance on the "survival" aspect of "survival horror."

Oh, and note to Japanese developers: Stop ripping off Square and have every villain be a white haired, white coated Sephiroth wannabe. Sephiroth isn't that cool anyway, and all it does is make the series -- which is supposed to be scary -- needlessly silly.

Capcom ratcheted up both the horror and the survival portions of the series, and dropped the mansion bit. Great decisions, all. You're technically not fighting zombies this time around, but rural Spanish villagers--called ganados or "cattle" in Spanish) that act like zombies. Except they use weapons. And they'll dodge your attacks. And they plan attacks with each other.

There's just so much to do in this game -- weapons to unlock, collectible figures to win -- that I played through it about three times and still didn't get everything. If you only play one RE game...well...you'd be hard pressed between this one and the Remake...but go with this one. Those chainsaw guys are terrifying.

However, the opening twenty minutes are worth a look, because they get the mood so right, and it's probably the most fun point of any zombie movie: when the zombies show up and start killing people before they're organized. Basically, you're trapped in a bar and zombies keep pouring in through the door, so you've got to figure out not only how to move your character, but where to move to, and what's expected of you, while seven zombies are trying to bite your fucking head off. It's actually what RE4 got so right, which is to keep putting the pressure on the player, overwhelming odds, and fighting for survival. I turned it off after I ran out of bullets (four inventory slots? Are you kidding me?), but it might be worth it if you can get three PS2s, three tvs, and three other friends together so you can actually talk to each other (i.e. you can play it online, but why would you?).

If the interminable loading screens don't kill you first.

Zombie Revenge is, at it's core, the game I would have designed had someone said, "Make me a zombie video game." Take Zombies Ate My Neighbors, cross it with Gauntlet and Resident Evil and Streets of Rage, and there you go.

Control could be a little better, and the story and the acting are crap, but it's a fun little game. Shoot or punch zombies, collect powerups, move through streets, repeat. Plus, towards the end the tie in with House of the Dead becomes much more obvious, as you actually move through the mansion from the first (two?) game(s).

Another one of those niche titles I really want someone to make a badass, upgraded sequel to, but no one ever will (see also Gun.Smoke, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Cubivore...).

Zombies Ate My Neighbors, aside from that odd sense of humor, has nothing to do with Toejam and Earl. Okay, awesome multiplayer, but that's it. I swear.

You play a teenage boy or girl that has to save your beleaguered neighbors from the wrath of zombies, demonic dolls, mummies, and chainsaw-wielding psychopaths. If you've seen it in a horror/splatter movie, it's been thrown in here.

You look me in the eye and say the shopping mall level wasn't a direct homage to Dawn of the Dead and I'll call you a goddamn liar.

What a great game. Wacky, colorful, fun, and tough. Plus, there's zombies. And pod people. And cheerleaders.

Mmmm...cheerleaders...

In the end, what was the point, though? We're all a step away from barbarism? There was a good idea in there, but it got jammed into a single trade half-baked.

It falters on some small bits, not enough to detract much from the book's success, but they're worth noting. I'm not crazy about the paneling. It's just not dynamic enough, but then at the moment I'm also coming off of reading Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, and man can that guy structure a page. I mean, The Watchmen for fuck's sake. Back to the issue at hand, though: TWD rockets through events. I really wish they'd slow down, as people die and I'm really unaffected by it, even when I know it's supposed to be emotional. This might also be due in part to the fact that it's in black and white and half the women seem to be blonde, there often isn't enough to completely differentiate between them.

As much as I want to like the series -- zombies and comics are, after all, a match made in geek heaven -- I just, well, don't. It is a refreshing change of pace, rather than all the hundreds of tights books on the racks, to finally see, say, a horror book. But the dialogue is flat, the characters are too, and there's nothing really scary about it. There was no what I've come to term the "Monster Island moment," when the guilty pleasure becomes something more (the "latch-click" I refer to in my review, and the ending, which hits on something very primal and human). Perhaps it's a result of the panels -- the short, regular panels give it a visual staccato, hammering out the action without regard to pace. Perhaps it's the lack of kineticsm in the action; while the art is by no means bad or ill-formed, it does lack the spark of, say, Frank Miller.

It might just be a case of me personally over-hyping the comic, then feeling let down that it didn't deliver what I envisioned, but I do think the flaws are serious enough to keep The Walking Dead in the realm of a "good" series, rather than the "great" series it has the potential to be.

Of course, here the monsters are killer plants called triffids, like a venus flytrap on steroids. Due to a freak accident, 99% of the world's population is blind, and it's up to guys like our protagonist to lead them to safety...unless they ditch 'em and run off to fend for themselves.

I swear the plot of 28 Days Later was ripped straight from this book, from the scenes of an abandoned London to a crazed military brigade. Not that Night of the Living Dead doesn't owe it a bit -- the one family trapped in the farm house sounds a might familiar.

Day of the Triffids is a great read, not just for zombie or SF fans, and very much deserves a better movie than this.

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