Shana Would Read This

Shana would totally read the novel from this Hijinks comic.

I haven't read Twilight, but I guess I really should at least see for myself how bad it really is....

Zombie Pinup Calendar (NSFW)

Oh, wow...

I'm impressed with the level of devotion to real zombie makeup here. The picture above is probably the least bloody and deformed of the lot.

I'm sure there are quite a few voraphiles now clicking furiously....

PS If you're reading this when it is posted... why aren't you out voting?

A .22 Not Enough For Zombie-Killing?

Wired has a piece up about how to survive a zombie onslaught. It includes this bit about the disutility of of the .22 round:

It's a questionable choice. While the .22LR has been a favored calibre for gangland killings , such shootings are carried out at point blank range and the victim has to be shot several times in the head to ensure a kill. The preference for .22LR here is probably more to do with being quiet and portable, it is certainly not a powerful round. In one bizarre case a man was actually shot in the head with a .22 while sleeping and did not realize it; the bullet was only found when he went to hospital complaining of a headache (his wife later admitted 'accidentally' shotting him in bed).

Of course it depends very much on what sort of .22LR ammunition you are using, as there are many varieties in this caliber, ranging from subsonic heavy bullets to smaller "hyper-velocity" rounds and they all have different properties. But it's worth remembering that .22LR had not been adopted as a military cartridge, in spite of the large number of conscripts out there using the 'spray and pray' technique, as it is considered more useful against small animals than humans. That's got to raise questions about its use as a zombie-stopper.

Max Brooks recommends a .22 in his Zombie Survival Guide, but he's thinking more in terms of long-term travel through zombie-infested country, whereas the Wired article is referring more to a Zombi-style limited outbreak. Those .22 cartridges probably look a lot more tempting when you're considering trekking cross-country with enough of them to make sure to deanimate any walking corpses in your path.

Another World War Z Script Review

Geek in the City has another script review for Straczynski's World War Z script. I fell in love with this book when it was first published, and this is probably the film that I'm most looking forward to right now. Here's the conclusion of this script review:

While based on the novel, Straczynski’s script stands alone as a classic in the zombie genre. Indeed, with the right cast and direction, World War Z could stand as one of the strongest dramas in the last decade. In a way, JMS added a new element to Max Brooks’ initial vision of a global zombie war. With The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z, and the Straczynski script; Max Brooks’ tale is finally complete.

Personally, I'd shoot this as a sort of Citizen Kane of zombies, with a narrator essentially going around and setting up a series of flashbacks that tell the story of the horrible events of the Z-War, and it looks like Straczynski's doing exactly that. Personally, after Children of Men, I'm pushing for Alfonso Cuaron to direct this, but I'm certainly open to seeing any talented director's take on the material.

Sweet Zombie Jesus!

Evolved and Rational has the ultimate bit of biblical literalism.

You'll Never Git Rid of the Undead That Way

Geekologie has a link to an ebay auction with a zombie survival kit. It's got a fake shotgun and five shells. Maybe if your family only has five members and you're hoping to spare your loved ones the sight of the zombie apocalypse by blowing their heads off this would work, but otherwise you're just boned.

Movielog, Land of the Dead

Land of the Dead, 2005
Written and Directed by George Romero
97 minutes (director's cut)

My favorite scene in Land of the Dead comes early on. It takes place in a sort of gaming and pleasure palace in Fiddler's Green, where all the richest people in a barricaded postapocalyptic city live. The poor, you see, live in the slums that make up the rest of the city, and make their living by getting the stuff that the rich people want.

The wealthy inhabitants of Fiddler's Green are inured to the nightmarish world in which they live to such a degree that they have made to such a degree that they have made zombies into objects of fun and games, such as target practice. Or in a sort of cockfight between two of the monsters, in which they are painted respectively red and black and are made to fight each other. "Zombies don't fight," one man obects. "They do when there's food."

And what food, as a woman named Slack (Asia Argento, daughter of Dario Argento, who produced Romero's masterpiece Dawn of the Dead) is thrown into the Thunderdome-like cage in place of the dog or cat that would normally be used. We later learn that she's a political dissident, a thorn in the side of Kaufman (Dennis Hopper, channeling Don Rumsfield) who owns this Dionysian pleasure palace. In the stands around her, people cheer on the ghouls, placing bets, and it's only when the hero of the movie Riley (Simon Baker) shoots the zombies that they scatter.

But why do they cheer? Do they know that she's a political dissident -- are they cheering for the destruction of someone who is attacking "their way of life?" Is Romero making some statement about the disconnect of these rich people from the other humans around them, that they are so isolated that they have lost their humanity? Or is he suggesting that it is the violence of this world, a world in which every person has most likely not only killed members of the undead, but also friends and family members who have turned into the undead, is so pervasive as to make human life seem not precious, but worthless? It is the genius of this film (like Romero's other zombie films) that it suggests these questions in the audience. It is the weakness of this film that it is so focused on the standard action plot it finds itself using that it doesn't attempt to answer them.

Let me back up a bit. Land of the Dead is the first of the Romero zombie movies that attempts to show how societies, rather than just random bands of survivors, will weather the shock of the rising of the dead. This is also the first of his zombie films that has an appreciable budget ($15 million, a shoestring for most filmmakers but a veritable feast for Ramero), which is not a coincidence. Romero uses his budget to pay for a larger cast, more impressive gore effects (this time not by Tom Savini but by the special-effects group KNB, headed by Greg Nicotero), and more expensive sets.

All of this gives the film a much more epic scope visually, but at 97 minutes (this is the unrated edition, which is about six minutes longer than the theatrical version -- most of the excess is taken up by a brief scene inside Fiddler's Green and with longer takes of some of the gorier effects that had to be cut to gain the R rating), Land is only a few minutes longer than the shortest of the Dead flicks, the first, which took place almost entirely in a single house. He also includes an action-oriented plot involving Cholo (John Leguizamo, perfect in the role) ,a poor mercenary, blackmailing Kaufman with bombing in an attempt to buy his way into Fiddler's Green. Romero uses this plot as a way of social commentary, but he's so focused on the needs of the action movie that he rushes past some of the more interesting points.

I realize this review is wandering all over, but I can't continue without mentioning one of the central points of the movie, which is the further development of the zombies. In Day of the Dead, Romero gave us a single zombie Bub who was able to perform simple tasks through imitation and through distant memories. Here, we have a whole group of zombies gaining some level of awareness of their surroundings, led by Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), who spends most of the movie trying to protect his fellow undead and to get his tribe to safety. One of the final images of the film suggests a future in which zombies and humans are able to coexist relatively peacefully.

There's so much I haven't mentioned about this movie, which just goes to show how much there is to like here. I'm a big fan of Romero's movies, and Land of the Dead is no exception, but I do think that Romero has either lost his nerve or given into corporate pressure in railroading his story along the action-movie plot the way he does. Night and Dawn are masterpieces of organic story, of rich connective tissue causing events to flow into one another like dominoes falling. These movies are not easily divisile into straightforward "acts," and resist analysis because of it. The later two films, Day and now Land have much more restrictive structures and are thus more predictable, which makes them not only less scary but less interesting to boot.

Diary of the Dead hasn't opened in my area yet, but I'm hoping that George has returned to his earlier roots in terms of structure as well as theme. It's gotten very mixed reviews, but then again so did Day and Land, and you can expect to see my review as soon as I can get ahold of it.

Movielog, Day of the Dead

Day of the Dead, 1985
Written and directed by George A. Romero
102 minutes

If Night of the Living Dead was about the revolutionary times of the late sixties, and Dawn of the Dead was a satire of late-seventies consumerism, then Day of the Dead is a parable about the militaristic gung-ho Reagan administration of the mid-eighties. By the time of this film, the zombie menace has taken over much of the surface of the planet (one character notes that the dead outnumber the living by 400,000 to one) and remaining humans are trapped underground, trying to find a way to combat the hordes of the undead.

There are twelve people in the facility, and they are broken up into three groups. The scientists are trying to find out as much as they can about the living dead and who seek to find a way of controlling them. The military just wants to put a bullet in the heads of all the zombies and be done with it (except, as one of the scientists intones, they don't have enough ammunition). And the civilians who man the radio and fly the helicopter, who just want to retreat to a tropical island with some booze and live out the rest of their short lives in peace.

It is a mark of the genius of Romero that all of these moves will seem plausible at some point or other. There are conflicts between the groups, sometimes bleeding towards violence, and the movie is really about whose ideas will reign supreme. Several characters are going a little crazy (and sometimes more than a little), especially the military commander, Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato). He bellows at the non-military personnel, makes impossible demands, and even threatens to shoot those who won't obey his nonsensical orders. In his behavior we see the real horror of this film isn't the zombies, but in the irrational behavior of those who would respond to the menace without considering their best options for doing so.

The effects in this movie are among the best effects a pre-CGI film can offer. The makeup by Tom Savini is remarkable, and there are some animatronics that are absolutely stunning. In particular a scene in which Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty) shows off some of his handiwork in dissecting members of the undead strapped to tables in a lab is haunting. Even knowing that these were just special effects, it was easy to be squicked and a little disturbed by some of the imagery here. Towards the end of the movie, as the action gets ramped up and the gore flows freely, the effects steal the show even more, the film wallowing in scenes of heads being ripped off and bodies eaten by armies of the undead. If gore is your thing, this is a great use of your time.

Dr. Logan is trying to pacify the zombies, to set up a system of rewards and punishments that will allow the remaining humans to make the undead do what they want. To this end he has kept a prize pupil (whom he names, "Bub", after his father's nickname, which becomes something of a harbinger of doom later on) chained to a wall. Bub is played by Sherman Howard (here credited as Howard Sherman), and his performance is probably the best in the film, as a zombie who is regaining some sense of his lost humanity. His movements are apelike, but purposeful, gentle at times, and it is the dynamic between his monster and Dr. Logan's earning of the epithet "Dr. Frankenstein" that informs their scenes together.

Which is a nice place to detour from praising the film, and discuss some of its flaws. If Bub's performance is solid and nuanced, many of the film's more human characters are anything but. In particular there are two obnoxious soldiers whose performances grate after awhile, and while partly this is to give Romero the chance to contrast the humanity of the undead Bub with the still-living military men, in general the simplistic tone of the portrayals of the military characters wears thin. The script here could have used a little work: the great triumph of the two previous pictures in this series was the feeling of formlessness, that the zombie menace could cause death to any character at any time, but here the film sticks much more closely to a standard three-act structure, and the final tally of who lives and who dies is much more predictable. The final third of the film is astonishing on a technical level, but as story it falls a bit flat.

Still, this is an incredibly effective film, even if it doesn't quite reach the heights of Night and Dawn, and any student of the horror genre should seek it out. When this film works, it works very well indeed, but it plays a bit too safe, keeping to a standard structure even when it should be letting loose and letting the blood fly freely. It's not the equal of the first two, but it's pretty damned good, and I'm still very much looking forward to Land of the Dead (which I'll see next week, most likely) and Diary of the Dead, which will be in theaters around the middle of this month.