Living Dead Series & Other Zombie Flicks - When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth....

[Syaoran Li]

Alright, I figured I'd start a general discussion thread for one of my favorite horror sub-genres, the zombie flick, with special focus on the Living Dead films of George A. Romero, the Return of the Living Dead series, the different remakes (such as the awesome 1990 remake of Night and the awful remakes of Dawn and Day from the 2000's) and all the various rip-offs like Zombi 2 and its many spin-offs and sequels.

Feel free to also use this thread to discuss other zombie movies like 28 Days Later or pre-Romero voodoo zombie movies like White Zombie.

 

[Richard Harrow]

1990 NLD Remake is my favorite to date. Kept the spirit of the original with a few twists. It's honestly the only one that gave me a feeling of dread and impending doom. Like when Barbara looks out the window and there's only like 3 zombies but like 45 minutes later there's a crowd coming out of the woods. The relationship between the survivors is very stressful to watch. I think Romero did a great job showing us the darker, selfish side of human nature, even when survival depends on teamwork.

 

[Marco Fucko]

There's this underground movie called Zombieland that I heard is pretty good.

 

[Judge Holden]

Well lets mosey through this list...

Night of the Living Dead (196 - One of my all time favourite movies, and is in a very select club of films that genuinely creeped me out as a kid that still manage to bring back warm memories of fear even now. Out of the original Dead Trilogy, this one is the finest "Horror" movie with the black and white cinematography and orchestral horror soundtrack perfectly complimenting the story and character work.

Dawn of the Dead/Zombi (197 - The one. The only. The ultimate zombie film of not just the trilogy, but the genre as a whole. There is little I can really say about this movie that has not been said a thousand times before by others. Between the masterful use of zombies as an ever growing threat despite how individually weak they are, and the timeless portrayal of society ripping itself apart in fear, coupled with the eventual setting of one giant mall playground for the protagonists, this shit is aped by everyone for very good reason.

Day of the Dead (1985) - Honestly, its probably my favourite of the three original Dead Trilogy movies, even if I recognise the other two as technically superior. The atmosphere is so deliciously grim and joyless, and out of all the original trilogy movies it is IMO the most genuinely post-apocalyptic feeling, as the initial fear of Night and the madness and absurdity of Dawn has passed, leaving only bleak realisation that its basically game over for humanity

Return of the Living Dead (1985) - A horror comedy take on the zombie genre, that unlike its successors is far more tilted towards horror than comedy and it works beautifully, and manages to escape the Romero paradigm with its invincible brain obsessed and fully intelligent zombies which would go on to spawn its own wave of imitators in the two decades to come, and would indeed become largely seen by normies as the basic standard for zombies until Romero style zombies once again became the norm in the late 00s

Return of the Living Dead Part II (198 - Not worth watching. Duller, tamer, and with more emphasis on goofy comedy, its just an uninteresting and defanged rehash of what came before

Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993) - Erm....yeah. Technically the second best Return of the Living Dead movie because of how shit the other entries other than the first were, and not exactly terrible in its own right but boy howdy was someone whackin off behind the camera at every moment of this literal fetish film. Still it had good gore, a somewhat unique spin on the franchise, and even something resembling a heart. A skeevy, S&M fetishist heart sure, but a heart nonetheless.

Zombi 2/Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) - Hooboy some good shit. I have sperged at length before about how this is one of my all time favourite non-romero zombie movies, and to cut my textwall down to size, I will simply say that aside from fantastical sound design with the memorable tropical flavoured score and the nasty ass sounds of tearing flesh, the beautiful jungle setting which goes from paradise to hell over the course of the movie, the fantastic gore effects which have earned this movie a spot in splatter history for moments like the eye scene, and shit like a literal "zombie vs shark" scene, this movie has in my opinion the absolute finest zombies ever put to screen, both with the sickening makeup and the sinister as fuck sleepwalking portrayal. These things looked like they had just been dug out the ground and they looked like they wanted to rip you apart. The only tradeoff is that the characters are dull and it takes a longass time to get going, but once it does then shit gets great fast

Hell of the Living Dead (1980) - Eh....if you like bruno mattai films you will probably enjoy this. If not, then you will find it yet another generic and barely watchable collection of scenes and ideas and visuals and music ripped off from better films...sometimes literally in the case of this movies soundtrack being directly lifted from Dawn of the Dead.

Night of the Living Dead (1990 Remake) - Visually I love it, and it is easily the best of the Romero Remakes. In terms of acting....yeah sadly everyone seems to be overacting the shit out of their parts to the point where they lose all relatability and become parodies of their original characters, with the partial exception of Tony Todd who aside from a few overblown moments was the only one who halfway understood the idea of subtlety. All in all its a perfectly serviceable remake that doesn't particularly annoy me and I would happily watch again.

Dawn of the Dead (2004 Remake) - While I have been really harsh on this in the past, I will grant this movie a limited degree of respect for having some of the absolute finest "worldbuilding" in its portrayal of the initial stages of the zombie outbreak which even to this day have only been rarely matched. After this initial stage is over though, everything gets real generic and forgettable real fast with masses of barely fleshed out characters doing contrived shit to push the plot along, though the zombie baby scene manages to be atleast somewhat interesting for the time.

Day of the Dead (2008 Remake) - Yeah....this is absolute fucking roadtrash. Its literally a shitty asylum level movie with the most generic "zombie outbreak" plot imaginable and the names of characters in the original slapped on people with absolutely zero similarity or link. The zombies

Land of the Dead (2005) - First of the "ok who gave grandpa romero a camera?" trilogy. On paper the concept is great, and is what he originally wanted to do for Day of the Dead. In practice though, the mix of overacting, heavy handed and entirely unsubtle political metaphor that completely burns through any suspension of disbelief, stupid CGI, and the inexplicable decision to have the majority of the action/gore scenes shot in the dark make this a complete disappointment and a sad waste of potential.

Diary of the Dead (200 - A shallow as hell and obnoxiously filmed attempt to do "found footage" horror which falls flat on its face within the first few minutes, and Romero seems to have been actively trying to be even less subtle than his previous entry.

Survival of the Dead (2010) - Havent actually seen it yet. Never saw the need, though I might watch it eventually should curiosity take me

Day of the Dead 2: Contagium (2005) - Asylum tier trash thats even worse than the remake. Skip

Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (2005) - IIRC this movie and the sequel completely neuter the zombies into generic romero style zombies, and they filmed a bunch of it in chernobyl to try and get attention. I definitely watched it but it was so fucking worthless I dont remember anything about it

Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005) - Same as above but with added dumb teen comedy elements.

 

[Rice Is Ready]

For Italian zombies this one can't be beat. It takes place in a fucking castle and has an incestuous midget lusting after his mother.


And this one is for true SOV connoisseurs.

 

[Judge Holden]

Nah, real zombie connoisseurs look to that strange Post Night of the living Dead/Pre Dawn of the Dead era when different directors and writers were doing their own spin on the newfangled "hordes of living corpse who feed on the living" concept, which wound up giving us shit like the Blind Dead franchise and my personal favourite from this era, The Living Dead in Manchester Morgue which is almost a proto Return of the Living Dead with its concept and the unkillable zombies, not to mention the birth of the "rage virus" genre with Romero's own The Crazies which would later be adopted by david Cronenberg with Rabid and would go on to spawn the occasional flick like Warning Sign until this semi-sorta-subgenre fully merged with the zombie genre with 28 days later

 

[Dom Cruise]

Night of The Living Dead was the warm up, but Dawn of The Dead was the first real zombie movie as we know it today, so I'd pick it as the overall top one for setting the standard.

But The Night of The Living Dead 1990 remake is way underrated, I honestly prefer it to the original although the original is great too.

Day of The Dead is great although I wouldn't pick it as my favorite.

I'm actually pretty fond of the 2004 Dawn of The Dead remake, I even think Land of The Dead is underrated.

So it was a pretty great series both originals and remakes up until Land, unfortunately that was all I bothered with, I made a note to avoid the Day of The Dead remake and I've also never seen Diary or Survival.

As for the rest, Return of The Living Dead is great as well, but I don't like it's sequels, I've also not seen Zombi 2 yet.

On a side note, has anyone ever read Romero's original script for Day of The Dead? The one before he a took a budget hit in order to have the amount of gore he wanted, it's similar to the final movie but on a much grander scale and in my opinion better, it's a shame it didn't get made although the final movie is solid too.

 

[The Cunting Death]

I got to see a re-release of Night in theaters years ago and it still blows me away at how great it is, even 50 years later.

As for good Living Dead films


All the Romero films until Land
Return 1 and 3 were good
First two remakes are solid

 

[The Cunting Death]

Now THE CRAZIES

That's also top quality

 

[AnOminous]

Survival of the Dead (2010) - Havent actually seen it yet. Never saw the need, though I might watch it eventually should curiosity take me

It is catastrophically terrible, one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Not sure what got into Romero for that piece of shit.

I'm not surprised not to see it, but an interesting oddball movie would be I, Zombie, a weird, fucked up Fangoria movie that can't seem to decide whether it's a gross out or an art flick. It's about exactly what you'd think, a guy slowly degenerating into a zombie after being bitten by one, turning into a flesh eating cannibal while slowly losing his mind. I can't say it's exactly good but it's unique. Also it has that scene. If you've seen it you know which one.

I'm actually pretty fond of the 2004 Dawn of The Dead remake, I even think Land of The Dead is underrated.

Land is criminally underrated. The 2004 Dawn is better viewed as a dumb action version of 28 Days Later, i.e. a Zack Snyder film, than a real remake of the original DotD, imo the absolute best zombie movie of all time. That said it had great performances from Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Mekhi Phifer, Ty Burrell, and others. And nice cameos from Ken Foree and Tom Savini, Matt (Max Headroom) Frewer, and other less well known people like Michael Kelly who plays the idiot security chief of the mall.

 

[Ex Cummunicated Sasser HD]

Day of the dead for me, there is just something so futile about it. Even the ending of Dawn, there is still some hope left, although apparently the original ending had Francine commit suicide by thrusting her head into the helicopter's blades. Her decapitated body was then eaten by the zombies on the roof.

Spoiler

In 1968, George A Romero ushered in a new kind of zombie with Night of the Living Dead. On an isolated farm in rural Pennsylvania, characters have found refuge in a barn but cannot agree on the way to survive against the hungry undead. Ben, a black man, is the most capable – but racial tensions ice his leadership. As he survives to the end, the arriving police-force mistake him for a ghoul, shooting him in the head. In images evoking lynchings, his body is dragged onto a fire as the credits roll.

A decade later, Romero released Dawn of the Dead, which turns 40 this year. With the images of zombies swaying comically to muzak, the film is often referred to as an allegory about consumer culture, but its early sequences, as a police force open indiscriminate fire on residents of a housing project, digs even deeper. Consumerism is not just a numbing force but a tool in complacency. It is not consumption, per say, that has crowded the bowels of hell but the broken systems that perpetuate violence and apathy.

The film instantly achieved iconic status within the horror genre, but you may not be aware that Romero wrote an alternate ending. Where the final cut has Peter and Francine flying away on a helicopter towards an uncertain future, in the working script their fate was significantly bleaker. Okay, so the version that made it to screen is hardly the feel-good ending of the year, but there is an inkling of hope that the pair might find a new refuge. They’ve survived the first chapter of the apocalypse – maybe they’ll survive another.

In the working script, things pan out in familiar fashion as Francine, Stephen and Peter make their way to the roof. Stephen becomes a zombie and Peter shoots him in the head. Then comes the moment where things diverge. As Francine and Peter are separated, she makes her way to the roof and he locks himself in a room, and from the outside, we hear a gunshot – the zombies crash in, we understand that Peter has killed himself. On the roof, Francine has started up the helicopter. Zombies break their way through the skylight and advance, in the working script, it says:

‘Fran steps out onto the running board; the creatures very close now. She crouches, watching for a moment, then looks up at the spinning blades. She stands straight up, driving her head into the spinning blades. A headless form falls to the roof. The Zombies advance.’

The film’s credits scrawl up, the helicopter’s engine sputters and dies. Even if they were to escape, they would have never made it more than a few feet before dying in a fiery blaze.

Special effects designer and makeup artist Tom Savini has argued that Romero shot the so-called “suicide ending.” The director largely denied it, although in the 1985 documentary Document of the Dead he does admit that version of the ending was partially shot. In any case, many have speculated that even if it were to have existed at some point, the footage is likely lost by now.

The change in ending stemmed from something that happened on set. Over the course of the production, it became apparent that the film had a brighter comic book feel than Night of the Living Dead. According to Savini, after they had begun shooting the film’s bleak ending Romero held a meeting to inform the crew that they we were “going to have an ‘up’ ending”. Romero had also grown attached to the characters – he didn’t want to see them die.

It’s fun to speculate on what would have happened if all the characters died before their escape. Was it, as Romero felt, that the ending would have been tonally out of touch with the rest of the film? In many ways, Romero found a comfortable middle ground between hopelessness and optimism in his changed ending, which still hinted at probable annihilation. Would the ending be better if all hope was erased?

On a commercial level, it’s clear that a mass audience would be unlikely to embrace that kind of downer ending. An inkling of hope is always better than none at all, people are reticent to accept that humanity might lose. It doesn’t really matter that the entirety of the franchise suggests that humanity will never prevail, we want to believe we have power over death. The small victories of individuals over the slow, ever encroaching monsters are enough to make us forget that we are not escaping fate, merely delaying it.

 

[Tootsie Bear]

28 Days Later: Fuck! I remember randomly seeing 28 Days Later on DVD for sell at Target and picked it up on the whim. I wasn't disappointed.

What hooked me was the opening, after the crazed vegans released the infected apes, the dude wakes up at the hospital to discover it both trashed and abandon. He then walks the streets of London where, like the hospital, is both abandon and where litter is scattered everywhere you look.

Just the thought of hopelessness displayed by the protagonists from being the lone survivor of the apocalypse but is helpless because he's alone and scared will always haunt my dreams.

 

[AnOminous]

28 Days Later: Fuck! I remember randomly seeing 28 Days Later on DVD for sell at Target and picked it up on the whim. I wasn't disappointed.

John Murphy's theme also made that movie.

And using Godspeed You! Black Emperor's East Hastings.

 

[Ex Cummunicated Sasser HD]

28 Days Later: Fuck! I remember randomly seeing 28 Days Later on DVD for sell at Target and picked it up on the whim. I wasn't disappointed.

What hooked me was the opening, after the crazed vegans released the infected apes, the dude wakes up at the hospital to discover it both trashed and abandon. He then walks the streets of London where, like the hospital, is both abandon and where litter is scattered everywhere you look.

Just the thought of hopelessness displayed by the protagonists from being the lone survivor of the apocalypse but is helpless because he's alone and scared will always haunt my dreams.

I had a very small part in this film... as a couple of the rage victims at the start of the film (uncredited). Set dressings like the bus were rushed in at 2am, filming started at 3.50am and wrapped up by 4.30am for the deserted London scenes in the height of summer, and everything was like it hadn't even happened by the start of the London rush hour, because that was the only way to close the roads off, without paying the city of London megabucks.

It was like a military operation because there was only one chance, and it was fascinating to see first hand how quick it all got brought in and tore down again.

That's why the lighting looks so weird, it was still almost night time, and colour corrected to hell and back to make it look like daytime. It was actually still pretty much dark at the time, and was really impressed with how it looks like early morning. Sadly I didn't even get 10 seconds of screen time, and was a dead body, but it's a good story.

edit: best thing about the film is there is literally no real difference between the DVD and the Blu Ray release as it was filmed on 480p modified digital Handicams for the most part, but with great lenses and extra equipment, so the DVD looks almost indistinguishable from the Blu Ray, has more special features, and can be found in most charity shops for next to nothing. (The DVD release also incidentally has a higher bitrate than the original footage did, and all the Blu Ray did was upscale it and add noise.

The only advantage the Blu Ray has is the last scenes in the stately home which was actually 35mm and there you can obviously tell the difference, but I prefer the DVD as it isn't such a jarring jump in quality. I got to see it at the Premiere in London and especially then, I really noticed how jarring the change in film was. More so than Natural Born Killers was at the time. It's why I think the best edition of NBK was the 3 disc six sided CAV Laserdisc edition that was a ballache for watching the film as you had to flip the disc over or swap it every 30 minutes but it really makes the film less jarring. The Blu Ray gives me a headache.

 

[GreenJacket]

Return of the Living Dead is top quality shit B)

 

[Dyn]

The Battery Official Trailer #1 (2012) - Zombie Movie HD

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www.youtube.com

This one was really good.

 

[Rudol von Stroheim]

Day of the Dead is one of my favourite zombie movies, purely because of the bleak atmosphere and the fact that a group of people would turn on one another like they do in that movie. Sort of reminds of when cliques form and you end up having your friends verses 'their' friends. I also think Bub is cool. Plus, I kind of like how both sides have their reasons and really you could identify with either side. The scientists are generally nicer and determined to find a cure, but they also are putting lives at risks and not on the front line like the army. The army are douchebags and they're getting unhinged, but they're also pretty much sacrificing their men for a cure that's not being found. I love that social unease.
A great underrated gem is Zombi 3. If I remember correctly, Lucio Fulci began directing it but decided it was shit and passed it on to Claudio Fragrasso, aka the man who directed / co-wrote Troll 2 and Bruno Mattei (an expert in making absolutely shit movies). The movie is nonsensical, full of stupid characters, ridiculous scenes and some quality practical effects. If you want a laugh, watch this movie. There's a scene where a head flies out of a fridge and kills a dude.
Also saw Burial Ground get mentioned - absolute fucking madman of a movie. That kid that's played by a dwarf that wants to fuck his mom is just wild.

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

With this viral pandemic going on right now, get ready for more and more zombie shit.

Also, you forgot Shaun of the Dead.

 

[Richard Harrow]

Anyone mention The Girl With All the Gifts? I thought it was well executed and the fungal idea was a good deviation from the norm. And WTF, Glenn Close signed up for it, kinda random. Not my favorite but I actually enjoyed it

 

[Dyn]

Anyone mention The Girl With All the Gifts? I thought it was well executed and the fungal idea was a good deviation from the norm. And WTF, Glenn Close signed up for it, kinda random. Not my favorite but I actually enjoyed it

Girl with All the Gifts and The Crazies are the absolute best not-quite-zombie movies ever made.