The Children

Sometimes there aren't words to sum up a movie.  This is one of those movies.   I'm not saying that I've been awed by the power of this film, but rather I was so bored I think I dozed off half way through.   The Children was made in the 1980 and tells the story of children who are accidentally irradiated.   A school bus full of children vanish and the town is surprisingly calm about it.   They assume their children are at friend's houses.  There are several conversations in which mothers ask each other about their missing children in a casual almost half hazard tone.

Finally,  the children come back and the mothers run to their young to have them suck the life from their bodies.  The children kill the town with their evil, deadly hugs.   The town doesn't seem to notice this either.  People are dying left and right.  Children are missing but everyone seems unaware of the doom that is creeping towards them.  When the heroes are finally beseiged by hordes of zombie children,  they don't even lock all the windows.  They kind of just shut the doors and hope for the best.   They put their one living son to bed and leave him completely unalone while they go into the kitchen and bicker.  Meanwhile,  the kids sneak into the other child's room and kill him.   It is mind boggling the idiocy and apathy that drive the plot of this less than b-grade film.   View this film at your own risk.

Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave

OK.  So this movie is obviously not a Classic.  Not even close.  However,  if you enjoy the Return of the Living Dead movies this is definately worth a watch.  Return of the Living Dead and it's offspring represent a significant departure from standard zombie movies.   Most zombie movies try to make you think.  They comment on society and the nature of good and evil within the living.  Return of the Living Dead  does nothing like this.  These movies are light hearted and silly.  They are full of gags, laughs, and stupid teenagers doing stupid things.  The zombies are funny and cry out for "brains!"   They trick the living into bringing more brains.

Return of the Living Dead:  Rave to the Grave stuck to the Return of the Living Dead formula.  It was packed full of stupid one liners and silly jokes.   There are hitch hiking zombies and male interpole police men dressed as Valkries slaying the undead with rocket launchers.  There are stupid teenagers and plenty of zombies crying out for brains.  The plot of this movie is pretty simple.  Two teens find their dead uncles stash of zombie filled canisters in the attic.  They take the cannisters to a friend who is a chemistry major for analysis.   The chemistry major thinks it would be a wonderful idea to turn the goo the zombie is floating in into some kind of x like drug.   He and his friends sell it to everyone at a Rave.   Zombie madness and silliness follows.   If you are in a silly mood and you want something ridiculous to watch,  this is the zombie movie to complete your evening.

What Kind of Zombie Scenario is Best For You?

Save Yourself from Zombies: Drink Trappist Ales

Trappist style ales are a rare gem.  They are some of the best beers on earth and a rare few of these are actually brewed by trappist monks.   Chimay Blue is my favorite of these, but others include Orval Trappist Ale and Koenings Hoeven.   Whatever the brand,  these beers are not only the best beers in the world, but they will make you zombie proof!  So drink up.  It may save your life.

Zombie Nightmare

Almost everything about this film is really, really horrible.  The acting is just silly.  The plot is ridiculous and the writing is beyond bad.  This is one of the worst zombie movies I have ever seen.  It is saved by the fact that it has moved beyond regular crap into a realm of horrible films like Attack of the Killer Shrews and Plan 9 from Outer Space.   It is so bad it is actually very funny.   There are wonderful scenes like the one in which a police officer interogated a rape victim whose rapist had his removed by a zombie in midrape in which the officer asks,  "What were you doing in an alley in the middle of the night with a man with a knife if you didn't want sex?"  I still don't know the answer to that question.

Staring Adam West from TV's Batman in a role that makes no sense and Tia Carrere in a role that makes even less sense,  the plot of his movie stumbles around in between voodoo rituals and body builder zombies into a climax that just left me thinking,  "What is going on?"   If you love B-grade cinema and want a good laugh,  this movie is perfect for you, otherwise leave this one alone. 

Breathers: A Zombie's Lament

There aren't a lot of really good zombie romances out there.  The shelves are cluttered with copies of  Twilight and other kissy, sicky sweet vampire romances, but it is really hard to find zombie love stories.   It makes no sense to me because this book is one of my all time favorites.   It is touching, beautiful, and more romantic than every vampire romance balled up into one.

Breathers is the story of a recently dead zombie every man.   In a world where zombies are hated,  he has to find a way to survive and find happiness.  This happiness comes from a zombie support group, where he meets a zombie with a penchant for rennaisance pornography,  a beautiful zombie addicted to shampoo, and a duo of zombies with a love fror the flesh of the living.   Together,  these zombie misfits turn the lives of the living and the dead upside down.   If you love zombie you'll love this book and you should read it at least twice.

The Night of the Creeps

It has been busy lately and my zombie passion was pushed aside.  However,  I have been watching zombie movies while I have been running.   My latest pick,  Night of the Creeps.   Night of the Creeps  is a brilliant homage to old b-movie classics.  

Night of the Creeps is about an alien experiment that is accidentally lost on Earth.    Brain eating slugs infest the brains of the living and the dead and turn them into zombies.  These slugs end up in a sorority house and this leads to all kinds of chaos and screaming girls and nerd love stories.   Interlaced with this amazing plot,  are subtle references to the b-movie classics that have inspired the movie.  A police man, in the middle of all this madness, stops to smell a single yellow in a salute to Plan 9 From Outer Space.   A woman watches Plan 9 From Outer Space right before she's killed by an axe carrying zombie.

The movie is also packed with wonderful one liners like "I've got good news and bads news.  The good news is your dates are here.  The bad news is their dead."

Night of the Living Dead (1990)

I read a recent list of the top ten zombie movies ever made somewhere and it was the first list I completely agreed with.  Featured prominently on the list was the remake of Night of the Living Dead.  Normally,  I dread remakes.  I hate the follow-up Omen and I am actually mad that they are remaking A Nightmare on Elm Street, but this movie is the exception.  

The original Night of the Living Dead was made on a shoe string budget and at the time Romero was frustrated by his inability to fully realize his vision.  In the 1990 remake, Romero was able to complete his vision with the budget he didn't have to begin with.  The difference between this remake and other remakes is that the same director remade it.   This was not another example of Hollywood running out of ideas so they steal someone else's.  The same team that made the original Night of the Living Dead made this film.

I know that this is heresy to many zombie movie fiends, but I have to admit I enjoyed this movie more than the original.   I wanted to kill that limp, blond bimbo in the first movie and I was happy to see the remake driven by a dynamic female heroin that was able to handle herself.  I also appreciated the modern zombie make-up and affects. I believe that this movie belongs on the top 10 zombie film list because it is the completion of Romero's vision.  This is the way he would have done it the first time if he had any money.

Fido

This zombie move makes me giddy.  I can't explain why and I don't pretend to make any sense but I just can't stop watching this one.  I really enjoy the basic boy and his dog story with a zombie theme.  It's touching in all the ways Lassie was.   Fido is what would happen if Pleasantville, Lassie, and Dawn of the Dead had a wonderful deformed baby and dressed it in pink bows and gave it a kiss. 

Fido has everything.  Zombie mamings.  Zombie love stories far more moving than any Julia Roberts movie and some bizarre zombie, bondage sex scenes that are probably more realistic than they should be.   Somewhere, sometime, after the zombie apocalypse, society has moved on and somehow reverted to photocopy of 1950's suburban America.  In this strange society,  zombies have become the fashionable slave labor that every family has to have.  One little boy doesn't have a zombie and is very sad.   When he finally gets his zombie,  a touching friendship is formed that makes his mother question her marriage and society question the role of zombies and everything else in their little universe.

I love everything about this movie, from the zombies devouring flesh to the love story between a forgotten house wife and her son's beloved pet zombie.  You should see this movie twice while eating popcorn with a box of tissues.

Diaries of the Living Dead: A Double Feature

This was a double feature of possibly the crappiest and least watchable zombie films I've ever seen.   These films weren't even funny b-movie fun bad.  They were just terrible, put you to sleep, hit yourself in the face, painful to watch bad.  Both of these films probably had a combined budget of $53 dollars and they look like they were made by some of my high school friends while spoking pot.  Everything about these two films is bad.  The acting is painful.  I could and have done better zombie makeup affects for halloween costumes using the zombie make-up pack at party city.  The cinematography made my stomach hurt and I'm not sure if there was a real director at all.   The script was probably written by a group of high school dropouts whose only education was watching Night of The Living Dead over a hundred times.   In short,  unless it is your goal to see every zombie movie ever made, you can probably skip this double feature

The plots of these films were summed up by netflix as follows:  In Dead Summer, a Pennsylvania community is quarantined after the undead invade, leaving only a group of young survivors and the military to stop the walking corpses in their tracks. In Deadhunter, a construction project in Seville, Spain, dredges up zombies, and it's up to a Special Forces unit to end the carnage; Beatriz Mated and María Miñagorri star.

Dellamorte Dellamore

Released in the states as Cemetery Man, Dellamorte Dellamore is a deliciously funny and well written zombie classic. This movie is a work of art.  It is the grand ending to a wonderous time in which Italian film ruled the world of the zombies, and what an ending.  Staring Rupert Everett as the keeper of a cemetery in which the dead wake nightly, this film is so beautiful and so strange I rewatch it on a regular basis just to sink myself back into it's disorienting mists.

Rupert Everett's primary duties as the keeper of a gothic cemetery in which the dead rise nightly is to prevent the living dead from escaping from the cemetery and feasting on the flesh of the living.  He is assisted in his job by his endearingly simple friend Gnaghi.  Gnaghi is Everett's antithesis.   Everett's character is a bored apathetic loner who seems unaware that killing the living dead for a profession is in any way odd.  He is quick witted and funny and lives only to mock the small self centered world of the living that surrounds the cemetery until he falls madly in love with a beautiful unnamed woman played by the exquisitely beautiful Anna Falchi.  After Falchi is killed while having sex with Everett,  Everett's grip on reality begins to weaken.  Everett attempt to keep Falchi's zombi as a love toy, but is thwarted by the good meaning Gnaghi.  When Gnaghi falls in love with a zombi head,  Everett's grip on reality completely slips and he begins killing the living as well as the dead as he mutters, "The living dead and the dying living are all the same."   Every woman Everett meets becomes his lost love and every female part is played by the lovely Falchi.  This strangeness is compacted by the fact that no one seems to notice that Everett has become an insane serial killer that shoots people for no reason at all.   The plot unwinds from here into a disorienting and surreal ending that leaves you wishing for more.

Technically speaking, this film is perfect.  It is beautifully shot and the director, Michele Soavi uses noteable close up photography and 360 degree camera shots through the cemetery to create an atmospheric zombie master piece.  The zombies have an unique, earthy look that seems to connect them to nature.  Roots protrude from their skulls and vines climb out of their bodies. 

Some might say this movie isn't for everyone.  It is cryptic and philosophical and somes times outrageously nonsensical, but it is a gem of a zombie film that stands alone amongst others.  This film is a must see for any zombie film fanatic.

Dead Snow

Wow.  I have to say that this movie is one of the must blood filled, intestine covered, dismemberingly violent Nazi zombie movies I've seen.  The movie starts when a group of young people go to an isolated cabin in an isolated Norwegian forest.  Did I mention this film is Norwegian?  Once the young people have arrived they engage in the typical activies young people engage in during horror films.  They drink beer, make fun of the locals, and have sex while taking a crap in the outhouse.  Far more vile to me is the scene in which a young woman licks her partner's fingers after he's crapped and not washed his hands.  Give me a good disemboweling any day,  this made me sick.  

The plot is pushed a long by one young man's missing girlfriend.  After a disturbing and wierd local stops by to tell the young victims about a group of Nazis that were lost in the mountains,  one young man goes off to find his missing girlfriend taking the only vehicle with him.  While he is gone, his friends play loud music, drink more beer, and some get completely eviscerated.  The eviscerations are fun and the first girl to die is pulled into the poop hole and has to climb out with her intestines in her hands completely covered in feces.  It is all down hill from here.  There is a brilliant scene in which one young man catches hold of zombie intestines and uses them as a rope to cling onto while climbing a cliff.  There's another scene in which two of the characters go crazy with a machete and a chain saw. 

After the only character I cared at all about was dismembered,  I lost a little interest, but that was OK because the zombies kept on coming and their relentless pursuit of these young people was a little satisfying for me because I really wanted to kill most of them myself in the first few scenes.  Overall, this is a fun zombie film.  It has some great zombie kill scenes and Nazi zombies are wonderful.  It has all the elements that make a b-grade zombie movie enjoyable.  They just should have held onto that one character that actually seemed to be worth saving a little longer so I wouldn't start cheering for the zombies so early in the film.

American Zombie

The best zombie movies are a commentary on human nature and society.  Films like Night of the Living Dead are great because they comment on how personality and human character are actually far more destructive than any horde of monsters.  Land of the Dead commented on the tendancy of the rich and strong to exploit the poor and weak.  There is a long tradition of zombie movies as a tool for social commentary.

American Zombie tries way to hard to take this trend even further.   American Zombie starts smoothly with an interesting plot.  It follows a film group doing a documenary on zombies.   This is an interesting idea and at first it was quite engaging, but as the film drags into its second hour of annoyingly bland and all too human zombies droning on about their art and the difficulties of their lives the interest fades and boredom settles in.  In its attempt to be socially relevant,  American Zombie just put me to sleep.  All the things that make zombie films wonderful,  the fear, the suspense, the tension, the blood and guts are all absent and  if you doze off and wake-up you might think for a minute that you were watching a documentary on major depressive disorder.  All the zombies are depressed and depressing.

This is not the worst zombie movie I've ever seen, but it is the most unzombie like zombie movie I've ever seen.  I would avoid this one and rent Dead Alive instead.

White Zombie

As far as my research shows,  this is the first zombie movie.  Made in 1932 and staring Bela Lugosi,  this is the prototype for all zombie movies.  These early zombie films are quite different to what modern zombie fans have gotten used to.   They are based on voodoo zombie legend and not on the living dead motif.   They play on Haitin settings and voodoo magic to brew a sinsiter atmosphere and create a fear that the characters could lose not just their lives, but their souls.

Lugosi stars as Murder, the owner of a Haitian plantation that seduces a young couple to come stay with them under the guise of kindness.  Unbeknownst to the lovestruck fools,  Murder (who would guess he's bad?) has been using voodoo magic to enslave the locals to work on his plantation, do his dirty work, and assist him in his nefarious plans.  As soon as Murder sees the beautiful lead actress, you know what Murder's diabolical plan is.  He wants to use voodoo magic to turn this beauty into his zombie love slave!

This movie is slow and is much like watching  any B-grade movie that comes from the thirties.  If you have seen Dracula or Frankenstien you know the pace that this movie will progress at.  It is overacted and Lugosi plays the role in the same melodramatic fashion he played Dracula.  I'm not a huge old B-grade horror fan so I will never have a passion for White Zombie, but I see in it the seeds of the movies to come.  In this tiny gem of a movie,  lies the beginning of all the zombie mayhem I love.   Every zombie lover should see this film at least once so they can fully understand the evolution of the genre.

Zombie

For those of you who are not zombie geeks,  this movie was the first in a series of zombie films made by the Italian director Lucio Fulci. Fulci is one of the premier zombie movie makers of the twentieth century and no complete study of zombie films would be complete without a look at this film.  Made in 1979, Zombie began a tradition of Italian zombie films which ended with the brilliant Italian movie, Cemetery Man.  Zombie was actually released in Italy as Zombie 2.   Dawn of the Dead had enormous success in Italy under the title Zombie.  Fulci called his film Zombie 2 to capilize on the enormous popularity of  Dawn of the Dead.

Fulci made several of these films, but Zombie was one of the best.   Zombie was made to be a sequal to Dawn of the Dead, although I never saw the connection myself.  The truth is Fulci was more deeply influenced by the 1943 classic zombie film,  I Walked With a Zombie and this influence is far more evident in the film than the Dawn of the Dead  influence. Zombie is a classic zombie movie about an hord of zombies that is slowly taking over a Caribbean island and then head straight for New York City.   Folci takes particular effort with his gore and has an eye gorging scene that is particularly greusome.   It was banned in the UK for its explicit violence at the time of  its release.

One of the most amazing scenes in this movie is a show down between a zombie and a shark.   First of all,  I've never seen anything like this and it is damn awewome.  Secondly,  the scene was done with a real great white shark and the man in the zombie suit fighting under water is the shark's trainer.   There is no CGI here.  That man is really wrestling a great white! 

Although this movie is a must see for any zombie fanatic,  it does have it's limitations.  The plot is thin and it is really held together mostly by blood and zombies.  The characters are a little flat and the dubbing is just terrible.  In fact, you really don't care if everyone is eaten by zombies and sometimes your just hoping they are.   Yet, this is a classic and if you really love zombie movies you can't ignore Fulci's importance in the genre and you really can't ignore this movie.   It may not be the greatest zombie movie, but it is a brain eating, eye gouging, shark wrestling good time!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

This novel was the start of a disturbing series of knock off novels.   In Seth Grahame-Smith's novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Smith artfully cut and pastes sections of Jane Austen's book with his own zombie action sequences.   The bulk of the book is still  Jane Austen's romantic tale of young girls seeking to find love in a world that doesn't favor women, however the women have been transformed into zombie killing ninjas who can take care of themselves when it comes to zombies but are unable to survive in real society.

I'm not going to lie,  I loved this book.   I'm not sure if it was Austen or Smith I loved, but Austen certainly was more compelling with ninja zombie fighting peppered throughout it.   Not to say I didn't like Pride and Prejudice on it's own and I think that this shell was still compelling.  The love story was still the same and the characters were the same.  They just needed to fight zombies off and on throughout their courtships.  I wasn't the only one that couldn't put this book down.  This book was such a huge success that it put Quirk Press on the map and there have been several follow-ups to this book that do not include zombies so I have completely ignored them.   It really was the zombies that made this marriage interesting and I just can't imagine the marriage of Austen and sea monsters would be anywhere near as interesting. 

Dead-Alive

Forget the Lord of the Rings.   Forget King Kong.  This is Peter Jackson's opus.  This is his best work.   It is funny, irreverent, and full of some of the most disgusting zombies ever put on film.   It was even rated by Fangoria as the goriest film of all time for many, many years.   This film is in a category all it's own. 

It is the story of a shut in young man who's become a slave to his disturbingly overbearing mother.  This young man finds love in the arms of a young woman but finds that he has many obstacles to his love, the least of which is his mother's slow degeneration into a complete zombie.  The best scenes in this movie are works of art.   There is a wonderful scene in which the mother has a dinner party while she slowly dissolves into her own soup and devours her ear. There is another scene in which the priest turns out to be a kung fu master and cries out,  "I kick ass for the Lord!".    Dead-Alive best scene is a classic scene in which our poor heroes are attacked by someone's colon.  This movie even comes with a zombie sex scene that leads to the birth of a bothersome zombie baby that the protagonist just can't bear to kill.

There just aren't enough good things you can say about this movie, so if you have a strong stomach and you love zombies this is one of the best.  It is a classic that will always be one of my all time favorite zombie features.  

Zombie Nation

This movie falls into the avoid at all costs category.   I decided to watch this movie even though I had never heard of it because it had good cover art and the back made it seem interesting.  However,  the movie had no scenes that resembled anything from the cover and the back was probably about some other movie the director liked because it couldn't have been about this movie.

This movie was about a serial killer who kills women who then come back to life to make a zombie nation and take revenge.  The acting is bad.  Not funny bad, but porn star bad.  The script is ridiculous and the movie has the feel of something made for less than five dollars.  Some zombie movies are so bad they are good.  They make you laugh and this is wonderful.  Zombie nation is not one of these movies.   It was flat and dead.  I fell asleep a coulple times during this movie and I'm someone who can make through all three Lord of the Rings played back to back.  It was a struggle to watch this movie and there wasn't even any good zombie action.   The zombie were hot chicks that had been brough back to find revenge while acting poorly.   There were no drippy, oozy, wonderful zombies. 

In short if you have a choice between spending your evening beating yourself upside the head with a two by four and watching this movie, beat yourself upside the head.   It will kill less brain cells and do less damage to your intellect.

Dead & Buried

This is hands down one of my favorite zombie movies.  It is slow and deliberate and it twists and turns to a surprising ending that harkens back to the old Carribean style zombies like the ones in White Zombie.  It begins with a scene so violent it makes your skin crawl and you never really have any idea where this movie is going or even what the hell is going on until the very end. 

The main character in this move is a police officer played by James Farentino.  He seems like a kind hearted fellow who is investigating a series of particularly brutal and violent murders that are taking place in the small New England town he lives in.  As the violence of the crimes escalates, the police officer begins to suspect his wife as a participant in the crimes.  Books on the black arts and a spine tingling piece of film footage convince him that his wife is only part of the evil that is seeping into his town.  This film plays with paranoia and shock and twists and turns through scenes in which the sweet townsfolk of this seemingly average town kill people in ways so sickening it makes you want to hurl.  All of this is happening and throughout the movie you'll be wondering,  where are the zombies?

Wait.... the zombies are coming.  They aren't your usual Romero style zombies, but they are there and in the end you'll almost wish there were typical zombies comming to eat your brains because the zombies in this film are much more disturbing.  This is a definate four star zombie movie and a must see for anyone with a real passion for the undead.