Zombie Movie Rant - Have we reached Peak Z?

[Cats]

As Spookyween draws near I find myself watching, listening to, and thinking about zombie movies more and more. The conclusion that I have come to is that the genre appears to have been eating nothing but downs syndrome brains for the last couple decades.

Let's talk about clichés and tropes. I don't know when the world collectively decided that the reason for a zombie invasion needed to be some sort of "infection" or "disease", but I'd really like to see a lot more creativity in the future of the zombie genre. Maybe more films where the cause of the undead is completely unknown to the audience and the characters or subtly hinted at being possibly supernatural in origin, if only to add an element of mystique. The original two Romero films did a decent job of this with mentions of wild things like Venusian radiation brought back from a space probe to voodoo and just all sorts of these little "suggestions" at what could be causing the dead to rise from their graves. That would be a great start to heal the damage that has been done to this genre. But it might be for nothing. It is possible we have already reached Peak Z.

1986's Return of the Living Dead (my favorite film by far) already took zombies in the coolest possible direction by making them goddamned invincible and giving them the perfect level of dramatic and comedic intelligence. This is the film that had the very first instance of zombies moaning "braiiiins", after all. The cause of the reanimation in this particular film was a mysterious chemical developed by the United States government known as 2-4-5 Trioxin, and it remains one of my favorite explanations of zombification that has been given in a film so far. All of the exposition in this film is handled perfectly, from how the action is kicked off, to the buildup of each act in the story, all of it. The reason for zombies eating the brains of the living is understood while remaining barely explained; in the movie, a captive zombie comments that "it hurts to be dead", and eating the brain "makes the pain go away". A living brain is packed with chemicals like oxytocin, serotonin and norepinephrine, along with many others that get released in massive quantities upon severe trauma or death. The zombie brain lacks these chemicals, because it is dead. The movie trusts the intelligence of its audience to realize that the zombies have a real legitimate reason for running around and screaming, killing humans to eat their brains, without actually explaining anything. It is a brilliant and simple and perfect piece of storytelling.

Contrast this with any scene from a modern day zombie film and the results are shameful.

The biggest problem I have with the disease or "infection" angle (I absolutely hate hearing zombies referred to as "the infected" it is just so tired) becoming the most widely accepted and even expected cause of a zombie attack is that, as a writer, you immediately paint yourself into an extremely predictable corner and lose immense amounts of potential for your story. The films suffer as a result. You can't have a character become bitten or wounded by a zombie anymore without the audience expecting them to turn into one of the undead, which limits you in a dramatic sense. This trope was born in 1978's Dawn of the Dead with the character of Roger, even though it wasn't explicitly stated that it was because of some special zombie viral "infection". Nevertheless, because of this one scene almost every zombie movie since Dawn has included almost these exact same beat-for-beat predictable items within their script...as soon as something happens in a modern day zombie movie, you know exactly where it is going to lead. This simply won't do. The Resident Evil game series treated "disease zombies" the best in my opinion, with 28 Days Later being my second choice for this unfortunately overused archetype. Resident Evil movies? as far as I'm concerned, they have never made any.

Mystery is one of the most crucial components of really good horror, and in an era where Hollywood overexplains everything, the concept of mystique has basically been put to death. Every franchise now requires reams upon reams of autistic "lore" and fandom-related junk to go along with it, usually in some document that gets conveniently "leaked" to the press. Modern "horror" movies in general are typically nothing more than the same dumbass widemouth ghost jumpscare nonsense over and over and over. But I don't have to tell any of you how pozzed the movie industry is. This is a rant about fictional monsters, not real ones.

I obviously haven't seen every zombie movie ever released and it is even less likely that I will have seen something if it was made recently. I have only seen bits and pieces of The Walking Dead. I liked some of what I saw, but the rest fell too far into "modern show aesthetic" territory for me. But that's why I made this thread, for us to talk about movies. Maybe there is a modern zombie movie I missed that is actually good. Is there a zombie movie that has been made recently that you like? Do you think you have an answer to the limits that these insufferable Hollywood faggots have placed upon this great genre? My vision for the revival is a very simple, low dialogue, dark and chaotic event that comes off as realistic and believable as possible without venturing into the realm of something dumb and gimmicky like "found footage" (no thank you). I think there is another good zombie movie in our future, but it's gonna have to be something really special.

I leave you with wishes to enjoy your Halloween and, please, if you haven't seen Return of the Living Dead yet, you need to go watch it immediately. Maybe one of you will finally be able to figure out what in gods name this thing is supposed to be:





t. Cats

 

[Raven of the Burning God]

1986's Return of the Living Dead (my favorite film by far)

Yeah, I'm sure the reason was the 2-4-5 Trioxin and not Linnea Quigley.

Dan O'Bannon does make some excellent monster films, though.

How far off the formulaic zombie tropes can a film stray before people start having trouble recognizing it as a zombie film?

Night of the Comet (1984)? Cell (2016)? The Stuff (1986)? Cooties (2014)? Deadgirl (200? Dreamcatcher (2013)? Dead-Alive (1992)? Fido (2006)? The Congress (2013)? Pontypool (200? It Follows (2014)? The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)?

 

[Dysnomia]

Some older films had supernatural zombies. Unfortunately that kind is not popular now. We mostly see virus zombies. It's getting old.

1932's White Zombie contains voodoo zombies and it considered the first zombie film. 1974's Sugar Hill is another voodoo zombie film. It's also blaxploitation horror. It's pretty good too. While it's not really exactly a zombie film, Night Of The Demons has the victims killed and turned into zombie-like beings after a demon summoning gone wrong.

 

[Cat tit bingo]

I always liked how the walking dead handled the "infection" concept by essentially making everybody already infected and doomed to turn when they die and the zombie bite is just garenteed death. There's just been way to many zombie movies to fast so unless it has some clever spin its hard to impress. The last zombie movie I liked was one cut of the dead which barely counts but is incredible and I would recommend to anybody, just don't look up anything about it since it has a major twist, trust me.
I really don't see what you can do with zombies nowadays, the "modern zombie" trend has been so utterly played out thst its arguably staler than classic Romero zombies ever where. The only thing I can think of is someone with actual talent just making a really well executed straight zombie flick but making something as good as the classic Romero trilogy or return of the living dead is a pretty fucking tall order, or maybe they can just stop being cowards and make a book accurate World War Z movie/series.

 

[Tanuki Mixed Nuts]

I leave you with wishes to enjoy your Halloween and, please, if you haven't seen Return of the Living Dead yet, you need to go watch it immediately. Maybe one of you will finally be able to figure out what in gods name this thing is supposed to be:

That is obviously one of the Chipettes

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

The infection angle does serve to explain how the spread of zombies can be so efficient, and how zombies can be a threat and can take over.

Imagine that your country was invaded by a horde of unarmed retarded mongoloids, who were easily hard countered by things such as locked doors, fences and ladders. Would they be a threat? Would society collapse? Hardly. Most likely they would be done away with extremely easily.

But if they could infect people and create more, then perhaps.

 

[LifeAlert]

I have also been watching several of these for Halloween this year. I've watched zombie stuff off and on over the years but for Romero I had only ever seen the original NOTLD before now. So far I've watched both Dawn films, Day of the Dead, the remake of NOTLD and Shaun of the Dead (fucking hilarious movie, if you like mean spirited and dry British humor definitely check it out). I think my favorite of the Romero trilogy is the original NOTLD because it's fun to watch this dysfunctional group of people fall apart while the zombies start closing in, there's always urgency, and there's a sense of dread throughout the whole movie because you know it's not going to end well.

I didn't care for Day of the Dead and I'm puzzled as to why it has received warmer reception over the years. It was extremely boring and there were several stupid/WTF moments such as characters struggling to load guns like retards (especially near the end when Rhodes fumbles around with the magazine before running off), half-hearted characterization like when the black guy decides not to kill Rhodes because he looks over at the corpse of one of his friends, like the movie's trying to say "if he kills a human he's no better than the crazed military dudes" while we all know Rhodes is just going to kill them all anyway so he basically just doomed the rest of the protags, and once Bub the friendly zombie is introduced I think any chance of taking the movie seriously goes out the window. The ending was fucking weird too, she goes in the helicopter and there's a zombie in it then it hard cuts to the three of them on an island. Did she just pass out and the other two saved her? Was the whole movie a flashback? I did enjoy the wild overacting from Rhodes and Frankenstein. I think the movie is best enjoyed when watching with the same mindset as if you're watching Troll 2 or The Room.

I absolutely hated the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead and so far it is the worst of my marathon. The original Dawn was experimental and felt like a bunch of guys having fun making a movie. The remake was oozing with levels of pretention that would make Quentin Tarantino blush and a sense of "ooh look at me, look what I can do with a camera and computer effects while my characters act so badass". Every time a slow-mo closeup shot happened I just shook my head. The Johnny Cash opening was cringe. The computer effects were embarrassing and a cheap copout compared to the practical effects of the old movies. It was checking all the boxes for mainstream slop designed to garner mass appeal. The only part I enjoyed was when Ving Rhames and a survivor in the building across from the mall were using signs to communicate with each other, maybe that could have worked as a short film. The whole movie felt like it was trying way too hard to be badass or cool. It was just shit. Not a surprise considering it was directed by Zack Snyder and written by James "If They're 3, They're For Me" Gunn.

Oh yeah, and goes without saying but the NOTLD remake also sucked. Just a pale imitation of the original with low-effort "twists" (Barbara is a boss bitch now, bitches) to "differentiate" it but ultimately pointless and forgettable. Still better than Dawn 04 though

Do you think you have an answer to the limits that these insufferable Hollywood faggots have placed upon this great genre?

Romero had the answer in 1968; go independent. But like you said, zombies are overdone and peak Z was decades ago. Zombies as a concept are really only a few steps above other ""genres"" like sharks or exorcisms. Pretty much everything you can do with zombies that's interesting has already been done.

if you haven't seen Return of the Living Dead yet, you need to go watch it immediately.

I will add that to my marathon. If you haven't already you should check out Zombie by Lucio Fulci, it had some gross/disturbing zombie makeup and there's a scene where a zombie fights a shark. It's an interesting watch.

 

[Helvítis Túristi]

This trope was born in 1978's Dawn of the Dead with the character of Roger, even though it wasn't explicitly stated that it was because of some special zombie viral "infection".

This occurred in the original night of the living dead when the young girl dies from a bite and then rises to kill her own parents. The whole concept of night of the living dead is a comet causes radiation that brings the dead to life. I'm not sure if dawn of the dead still brings up the comet or not from the first movie.

The movie demons has zombies instead as demons possessing people and it originally happened by someone putting on a cursed mask. Still spread through a sort of disease, but from any sort of injury and not just from a bite. The gates of hell series, particularly the beyond have lost souls escaping the gates of hell to kill people. There is no disease for that one.

Edit: Forgot to mention lifeforce which has the victims of vampires become zombies that must suck the lifeforce from other living beings, turning them into zombies as well.

 

[Cats]

This occurred in the original night of the living dead when the young girl dies from a bite

Yeah I had the "sidekick gets bitten" trope in my head at the time while I was writing that, so that's why I picked Dawn. I kind of consider Night to be its own sort of thing in many aspects of the zombie movie genre just because it was so old and sorta the first example of the kind of movie that I am thinking about when I say "zombie movie".

 

[scallion]

There is only one peak

 

[biggacracka]

Dead Snow has dead nazi zombies brought up by a curse IIRC.
No infection bites, they're more like draugrs

 

[Raven of the Burning God]

I thought about mentioning Lifeforce (1985) in my list of zombie-movies-that-aren't-zombie-movies, but didn't because it's pretty explicit in the film they're... uh... alien energy vampire bat succubi. But it's nice to see someone else has the same thought.

The line between "supernatural zombie film" and "vampire film" seems like it could get pretty blurry.

There are also quite a few recent monster films that use the same infection/disease trope to explain vampires, werewolves, etc. which makes them nearly interchangeable.

The theme of a comet/radiation in several zombie flicks makes me wonder if Maximum Overdrive (1986) is spiritually a zombie film, even though the risen undead are machines.

There's probably an alignment-chart type meme that could be made about this.

 

[Judge Holden]

As a life long zombie fan, ever since I was a tiny little sperglet who stumbled on an aged House of the Dead 2 arcade game at a shitty bowling alley birthday party when I was like 7....fuck that place was trash in hindsight....my own personal "Peak Zombie" moment hit in 2011, right when Walking Dead was turning into the lumbering media juggernaut it was, COD zombies was devouring vidya, and seemingly everyone was now aping the cringiest moments of my tween/teen obsession with the genre.

Its not that I stopped enjoying the genre, not remotely. I just decided what I now know to be a consoomer bandwagon was not what I wanted to hop aboard, and that I should not just slurp up any trash with zombies solely because it had zombies.

Let's talk about clichés and tropes. I don't know when the world collectively decided that the reason for a zombie invasion needed to be some sort of "infection" or "disease", but I'd really like to see a lot more creativity in the future of the zombie genre. Maybe more films where the cause of the undead is completely unknown to the audience and the characters or subtly hinted at being possibly supernatural in origin, if only to add an element of mystique. The original two Romero films did a decent job of this with mentions of wild things like Venusian radiation brought back from a space probe to voodoo and just all sorts of these little "suggestions" at what could be causing the dead to rise from their graves. That would be a great start to heal the damage that has been done to this genre. But it might be for nothing. It is possible we have already reached Peak Z.

I suspect a mix of applicability of metaphor/comparisons, and the inescapable obsession with "realism" among certain segments of the media creator sphere. Zombies happening because of spooky radiation or the overtly supernatural just doesnt "seem" real enough, and thus various fake diseases are imagined in their place, even if the end result is equally fucking unrealistic

1986's Return of the Living Dead (my favorite film by far) already took zombies in the coolest possible direction by making them goddamned invincible and giving them the perfect level of dramatic and comedic intelligence. This is the film that had the very first instance of zombies moaning "braiiiins", after all. The cause of the reanimation in this particular film was a mysterious chemical developed by the United States government known as 2-4-5 Trioxin, and it remains one of my favorite explanations of zombification that has been given in a film so far. All of the exposition in this film is handled perfectly, from how the action is kicked off, to the buildup of each act in the story, all of it. The reason for zombies eating the brains of the living is understood while remaining barely explained; in the movie, a captive zombie comments that "it hurts to be dead", and eating the brain "makes the pain go away". A living brain is packed with chemicals like oxytocin, serotonin and norepinephrine, along with many others that get released in massive quantities upon severe trauma or death. The zombie brain lacks these chemicals, because it is dead. The movie trusts the intelligence of its audience to realize that the zombies have a real legitimate reason for running around and screaming, killing humans to eat their brains, without actually explaining anything. It is a brilliant and simple and perfect piece of storytelling.

This movie's greatest strength, the then unique spin on the zombies themselves, became its biggest curse as it wound becoming the cliche for the genre until the early/mid 00s which is why any reference to zombies in the 90s in pop culture was about how they loved muh brains n shit, which along a disappointing sequel and a frankly bizarre BDSM romance second sequel iced this line of movies in the long run

The biggest problem I have with the disease or "infection" angle (I absolutely hate hearing zombies referred to as "the infected" it is just so tired) becoming the most widely accepted and even expected cause of a zombie attack is that, as a writer, you immediately paint yourself into an extremely predictable corner and lose immense amounts of potential for your story. The films suffer as a result. You can't have a character become bitten or wounded by a zombie anymore without the audience expecting them to turn into one of the undead, which limits you in a dramatic sense. This trope was born in 1978's Dawn of the Dead with the character of Roger, even though it wasn't explicitly stated that it was because of some special zombie viral "infection". Nevertheless, because of this one scene almost every zombie movie since Dawn has included almost these exact same beat-for-beat predictable items within their script...as soon as something happens in a modern day zombie movie, you know exactly where it is going to lead. This simply won't do. The Resident Evil game series treated "disease zombies" the best in my opinion, with 28 Days Later being my second choice for this unfortunately overused archetype. Resident Evil movies? as far as I'm concerned, they have never made any.

Honestly for me its the "bigger picture" of such hypothetical infections which loses any of my suspension of disbelief.

Any zombie disease that rather quickly turned people into hyper aggressive and mindless killers would be orders of magnitude easier than shit like Ebola or even the Coof to notice by authorities and also present a far more visceral "we gotta shoot/bomb the shit out of this fucking yesterday" impetus as well as providing by its own nature all the justification said authorities need to go full martial law/evacuation from at-risk areas/shoot on sight to the public, with any extremely hypothetical anti gubmint militia in infected areas either being armed enough to actually be helpful anyway by virtue of thinning out the zombies around them, or being unarmed and thus effectively irrelevant.

Furthermore, in like 99.99% of these stories there is a single city or town that the infection starts in, which then takes its sweet time overrunning and allowing word to spread before the zombies are inevitably left vaguely wandering in the direction of sounds in the distance....most of which would inevitably be coming from the town or city they are in due to how much shit was left on and shit like car alarms, and thus there would only be a slow drift of zombies in the outskirts towards other settlements, and at that point both local and national government would have found out about this shit happening and would have both started pouring in armed police/soldiers and evacuating the surrounding area. If any more surrounding towns are overrun, this response will become exponentially more aggressive and frantic, and the general "dont let cops/soldiers get too close to them, aim for the head, use loud sounds to draw packs of them in whatever direction is needed" lessons will be quickly learned if they were not already communicated by those in the first town or city to fall.

Long story short, with a single infection point the only way any government would allow the situation to spiral to apocalyptic levels would be if everyone in charge and all their subordinates actively wanted the apocalypse due to how insanely overt the initial infection would be along with how to take down the infected, as well as the nature of the zombies themselves as just going after whatever is in eyesight/earshot meaning they wont be strategically making beelines for the next settlement as soon as the current one is fully overrun.

As for the whole "swarms of zombies can just tank the gunfire and overrun organised groups of soldiers shooting at them" idiocy, humanity spent the 19th century perfecting the use of barely automatic gunfire to physically shred charging hordes of literal spear/sword wielding savages swarming towards battle lines, and since then the guns have only gotten bigger and faster and thats before you factor in how fucked a group of zombies that had a grenade go off among them would be. Sure they may still be crawling around on broken stumps but functionally they have been taken down in that engagement, and same goes for any zombie who gets a bullet or five to the legs.

Funnily enough as I have mentioned previously, one of the only franchises to actually have this happen was the Resident Evil games in which the government, upon finding out a large town was being overrun with zombies and getting direct confirmation by troops/police on the ground, bombed the shit out of the area, cordoned it off with troops, made shit extremely public to avoid any public backlash and to ensure that any future outbreak could be immediately recognised and dealt with while making sure police and military were trained to handle outbreaks, and within a few years the whole zombie virus thing was just another entry in the list of WMDs to make sure crazies and warlords never got their hands onto.

I obviously haven't seen every zombie movie ever released and it is even less likely that I will have seen something if it was made recently. I have only seen bits and pieces of The Walking Dead. I liked some of what I saw, but the rest fell too far into "modern show aesthetic" territory for me. But that's why I made this thread, for us to talk about movies. Maybe there is a modern zombie movie I missed that is actually good. Is there a zombie movie that has been made recently that you like? Do you think you have an answer to the limits that these insufferable Hollywood faggots have placed upon this great genre? My vision for the revival is a very simple, low dialogue, dark and chaotic event that comes off as realistic and believable as possible without venturing into the realm of something dumb and gimmicky like "found footage" (no thank you). I think there is another good zombie movie in our future, but it's gonna have to be something really special.

Walking Dead is one of the only zombie franchises out there to try the OG Romero "everyone on earth who dies for any reason unless their brain was shot/smashed in gets up and kills" formula, but only to completely gloss over it and focus on shit after society falls which devolved into an unending post apocalyptic melodrama. The original Night/Dawn/Day movies were surprisingly smart in showing just how and why society was falling apart, perhaps even accidentally smart to an extent.

By the end of Night of the Living dead everything seemed surprisingly optimistic, the zombies were being hunted down and shot en masse by both cops and civilian militias and the news reporters are upbeat about how shit is being taken care of...only its not. The "first wave" was taken down with a fuckload of collateral damage both in the small scale confines of the movie and implicitly on the larger scale elsewhere in the setting, and the dead are still rising with zero answer let alone a cure which means there is zero chance of any containment or ending this shit forever just by killing enough zombies. Every single thread of civilisation would have to very rapidly adapt to an extremely nasty new reality while still grappling the previously existing challenges and logistical tasks of keeping shit together, or else shit will spiral hard and fast and irreversibly towards the apocalypse.

Come the start of Dawn of the Dead set a couple weeks/months later and society is straight up falling apart. The first few scenes are unironically genius in showing just how fucked society has become with the fact humanity has been forced to deal with about the most horrifying existential change to existence imaginable and is unable to hold things together as civilisation is slowly but surely dying. A government spokesman is having a screaming argument with journalists and half raging and half sobbing about how the civilian population needs to just shut the fuck up cooperate with the police/military in getting every single dead body disposed of ASAP, while said journalists are equally chimping out about how the government has been feeding them bullshit for weeks and is expecting people to still believe them. Next we see one of the corpse disposal operations in progress in an inner city ghetto where half the cops and soldiers are fresh recruits/conscripts and much the other half are barely functional wrecks one second away from going on a killing spree or going AWOL or just fucking shooting themselves. In the next scene we see further evidence of how the endless pressure is breaking shit apart as entire squads of cops are running for the hills and random government workers are choosing suicide over facing more of this shit. The rest of the movie obviously is its own essay in terms of how it depicts the zombie apocalypse but I don't think I have ever seen any other zombie apocalypse work handle the "mid-apocalypse" aspect of the zombie apocalypse as well as this movie did in its first act.

By Day of The Dead everything is 1000% fucked beyond repair. The zombies have won. The soldiers are either the last dregs who were left to man the guns, or have been so broken by the apocalypse they have largely devolved to half feral psychopaths in their own right. The scientists are busy pissing away their time doing jack shit to find any answer to anything, with the exception of Doctor Frankenstein who finds out that zombies can be taught simple tasks in exchange for feeding them from the rapidly dwindling supply of fresh human flesh, and are implicitly slowly getting smarter which just further seals in how fucked humanity is. The civilians are the only half sane ones there and their solution to all this is just to fuck off with all the booze and fleshlights they can carry to a tropical beach to live out their last days in comfort because no matter what anyone does, it wont solve shit or even answer shit because corpses will still be getting up and killing people no matter what happens so just learning to live with it is the only thing they can do.

The TLDR of this rather extended sperg-out (subset of a wider sperg out) is that the best example of a zombie apocalypse completely threw away any notion of it being an infection or disease that spread out whatsoever and just made it a universal happening in the setting without an off switch, which is why it wound up taking down civilisation in a way thats not stupidly fucking contrived or retarded (i.e. World War Z)

 

[HodgePodgeRogerDodger]

I always like the ones where it’s just the director having fun in a scenario. Romero is a hack with delusions of grandeur who has to try to make a social message with his movies rather than just admitting they are horror movies. I have no issue with some guy making a horror movie and putting his beliefs in there as long as his beliefs aren’t retardedly center or fully retarded.

Night/ Dawn/ Day are fun movies, but it’s more because it’s a fun concept. It expands on the stuck in a cabin with bears outside idea.

 

[Raven of the Burning God]

The Girl With All The Gifts (2016) does the "I guess we doin' zombies now." post-apocalypse/post-human thing pretty well.

It could also be pretty nice if someone would do Omega Man/I Am Legend properly, but the 2007 Will Smith remake so phenomenally misses the point that it would probably be hard to recover. It's also tends to be interpreted as canonically vampires rather than zombies, but it's not really that important.

Daybreakers (2009) is explicitly about a post-human vampire civilization, but you can also interpret the blood shortage effects as a zombie theme.

 

[Cats]

which along a disappointing sequel and a frankly bizarre BDSM romance second sequel iced this line of movies in the long run

Yeah ROTLD 3 was ass lmao. I actually enjoyed 2 as a kid, even though it was goofy as hell.

 

[BirdUp]

 

[biggacracka]

The thumbnail has me sold. Wish I thought of that

 

[Slurms McCorgi]

I loved the monster designs and internal drama in Sweet Home, which is kind of a supernatural zombie story if you squint (Netflix adapted it into a disappointing miniseries, so it totally counts for this thread). People's souls are reset while their bodies wander around as horrific manifestations of their greatest wish. The steroid monster is a fan favorite:

If you can stomach Webtoon format/Webtoon tropes, it's good junk food entertainment.

 

[BrunoMattei]

I didn't read the gay essay but yeah, zombies...

My favorite would have to be a tie between Fulci's Zombie and Day of the Dead. I can't choose which one I like more. I saw both of them around the same time (Day of the Dead when I was either 9 or 10 and Zombie when I was 13) and both movies have that one flaw that critics latch onto. In Day of the Dead it's the character Rhodes and Joe Pilato's performance. And in Zombie's case, most of the characters are pretty retarded excluding Dr. Menard played by legit Shakespearian-trained actor Richard Johnson.

I can't choose which one I love. It's like choosing which testicle I prefer.