Zombie Movie Rant - Have we reached Peak Z?

BrunoMattei said:
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.
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For me Day of the Dead wins out in terms of standard movie quality (i.e. story, characters, dialogue, etc) while Zombie wins on makeup (because holy fucking shit those are still the best and most creepy ass zombies ever put to screen), scares, cinematography, and of course music though this last category was surprisingly close due to how much of a soft spot I have for the Day of the Dead soundtrack. Setting is more or less a tie, as I like both the salt mine/silo and the jungle pretty much equally.

EDIT: I just realised that I neglected to compare gore/kills. Erm......imma give it Zombie because of how fucking gnarly and well shot the gore is, with Day of the Dead feeling a lil more goofy with its splatter though not in a bad way, obviously both have some of the best gore scenes in the genre.

Oh yeah and since I'm back on this thread I may as well shit the first plot details of the upcoming 28 Years Later trilogy....yes its gonna be a trilogy because fuck you....onto the page.
Fiennes explained of the plot, “Britain is 28 years into this terrible plague of infected people who are violent, rabid humans with a few pockets of uninfected communities. And it centers on a young boy who wants to find a doctor to help his dying mother. He leads his mother through this beautiful northern English terrain. But of course, around them hiding in forests and hills and woods are the infected. But he finds a doctor who is a man we might think is going to be weird and odd, but actually is a force for good.”
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Remember how at the end of 28 Days Later the last of the infected were starving to death? Pretty much the only halfway "realistic" part of that particular "realistic zombie" scenario? Yeah well forget about that because I guess they have been just chilling in the wilderness for like 30 years without any issue.......or Britain was repopulated and had ANOTHER mass outbreak that infected or killed everyone shortly before the movie begins

Either this or we are gonna see the 28 days later franchise go full circle and rip off fucking Crossed and have the infected learn how to develop their own functioning and long lasting society solely to prey on the uninfected....which reminds me that particular smug edgetard trainwreck of a comic line is set to be adapted next because the universe fucking hates me in particular.
 
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BrunoMattei said:
28 Weeks Later is better.

Fite me IRL.
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Eh....28 Days Later wins hard for music and visuals and general aesthetic but the more one thinks about it the dumber and more nonsensical the movie and characters and premise and plotline is which is why I have cooled on it substantially compared to cruder looking/sounding but a hell of a lot more structurally solid zombie flicks, as well as my distaste for MUH REALISTIC ZOMBIES having grown a hell of a lot bigger in recent years.

28 Weeks later is a lot less impressive aesthetically and is exceedingly dumb and nonsensical in its own right, even when separated from the wider dumb premise set up by the first movie, but once the main plotline gets going the script does feel a lot tighter and less "random stuff happens because I say so" like how the first movie felt after the first act, and it did do the horror side of things pretty well.
 
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Slurms McCorgi said:
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:
View attachment 6575822View attachment 6575817
If you can stomach Webtoon format/Webtoon tropes, it's good junk food entertainment.
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i was reading this when it was coming out issue by issue weekly and yeah it good. too bad they have paywalled it since
 
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It is a crime we have never gotten a truly great, novella-accurate version of I Am Legend.
BrunoMattei said:
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.
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What the fuck is wrong with these critics? Joe Pilato is great in DotD.
 
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The og Dawn Of The Dead is my favorite one, only time I’ve spent $50 on a deluxe DVD collection. It’s a perfect time capsule of the 70’s, the USA had become a buy-now-pay-later society after Nixon finalized the debasement of our currency that FDR started, the house of cards had been set. Everyone involved in Dawn was giving 110% & there’s a unique guerilla energy to it. This comicbook of a movie cemented my love for the subgenre.

The “brand” so to speak has been damaged by oversaturation in various media, but there’s still room for creativity. I’ll try to think of some good ones I haven’t seen mentioned...

Books: Day By Day Armageddon series by J.L.Bourne. Written like a logbook or diary, I tore through these books & I have trouble staying focused on novels. Author is a military vet who goes into autistic detail about his survival kit, he was supposed to write for the second State Of Decay game but I think he was fired for having the wrong political opinions.

Comics: Deadworld. This comic series predates TWD by like 15 years & has some suspicious similarities. It’s also worth reading, though its mythos is different and supernatural. The living dead are demon possessed & caste based, with some having intelligence and others being dumb canonfodder. The leader zeds like King Zombie reminded me of Eddie from Iron Maiden album covers.

TV Series: Dead Set is the most on-par with early TWD...made by Charlie Brooker of Black Mirror fame, this miniseries focuses on the cast & crew of a Big Brother reality show in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. In second place is Black Summer, made by the same crew behind the goofy Z-Nation, but with a much different tone...Netflix can suck my dick sideways for not ordering a third season. In The Flesh, like Dead Set, is another Brit miniseries that takes a unique dramatic approach where the undead can be treated & brought back to life with meds, like recovering addicts...think Fido meets Warm Bodies meets 2000’s BBC. The Kingdom is great, not much historical fiction zombie fare out there, Korea runs this genre lately (see also All Of Us Are Dead). Daybreak is a campy series based on an indie comic geared towards a YA crowd, but I found it entertaining despite the occasional annoyingness of a woke character. Like Black Summer, it also had the misfortune of being on Netflix.

Movies: Night Of The Creeps - space slug zombies, Tom Atkinson, quality 80’s gore & schlock, did the lawnmower zombie kill before Dead Alive...The Dead, 2010 movie made on the cheap in Africa, nothing groundbreaking but competent, grimy & creepy Romero style film with a sequel set in India that was even more of a nightmare to film (GoodBadFlicks did videos about the making of these, worth checking out)...Dellamorte Dellamore AKA Cemetery Man kind of an arthouse movie with some memorable Bava style shots, it’s hard to describe but it’s a fascinating movie with solid practical FX & beautiful women...The Night Eats The World this French movie is again nothing revolutionary but is a well-made character study.... #Alive if you like Last Train To Busan & other Korean zombie flicks you’ll appreciate this.
 
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I actually watched the first zombie movie yesterday and some of the stuff in it really shocked me because zombie media has really changed a lot.

The zombies feel fear, for example, and avoid fire and run away from people with guns if they're not outnumbered.

They also use tools, several times we see them smash shit with bricks and other detritus, and they seem to recognize the truck is a means of escape because they attack it when they can't reach the humans.

And the craziest part, I've been saying it for years, why don't people just get guns and form a local militia and slaughter the slow ass braindead mob before it gets out of hand? Well they do exactly that and the movie seems to imply it worked just fine (though I think sequels prove that's not the case)
 
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Dr. Ricearoni said:
And the craziest part, I've been saying it for years, why don't people just get guns and form a local militia and slaughter the slow ass braindead mob before it gets out of hand? Well they do exactly that and the movie seems to imply it worked just fine (though I think sequels prove that's not the case)
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Because Romero was not working with a baseline assumption that "the zombies always overrun civilisation immediately because they scary n shit" which was created by imitators and imitators of imitators who wanted to jump straight ahead to a "zombies rule the world" setting and thus had little difficulty recognising that while shit would be pretty fucking freaky the first few days (a radio broadcast in the movie implies its been going on for a little while by the start in certain areas and was slowly spreading) once organised and armed civilian/police forces started hunting the early swarms they would have very little actual difficulty in taking out the first few waves.

Dawn of the Dead had civilisation falling because of the sheer strain of weeks or months of the government having to send cops and soldiers (whose numbers were increasingly being eroded by desertion and suicide and fights with resisting civilians) out to both combat swarms of zombies and also to forcibly evacuate civilians to allow organised disposition of corpses, all while the civilian population is being actively non cooperative at best due to having lost all faith in the government's ability to protect them. or engaging in armed resistance at worst, and the situation is unfixable due to the fact that dead people are still getting up and killing no matter how many are shot in the head, meaning containment and quarantine is utterly impossible and there is no "end point" to the outbreak.

If memory serves, one of the only movies to have a "all dead people turn into zombies no matter what unless their brains are smashed up" outbreak in which society doesn't fall is Shaun of the Dead in which the first few waves are taken out by police/military and society just kinda rolls with the fact zombies are a thing now and even starts training them as menial labourers
 
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Judge Holden said:
Because Romero was not working with a baseline assumption that "the zombies always overrun civilisation immediately because they scary n shit" which was created by imitators and imitators of imitators who wanted to jump straight ahead to a "zombies rule the world" setting and thus had little difficulty recognising that while shit would be pretty fucking freaky the first few days (a radio broadcast in the movie implies its been going on for a little while by the start in certain areas and was slowly spreading) once organised and armed civilian/police forces started hunting the early swarms they would have very little actual difficulty in taking out the first few waves.
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I think that's why everyone started moving towards either fast super mutant zombies with super strength or by spreading it via other means (everyone is already infected in TWD, tlou has spores in the air that are more efficient, etc). If zombies acted like that then sure they could probably take over the world but I feel like we've lost a lot of the magic of the original zombie in the process. Fast zombies might cause more immediate panic, sure, but the dread of being surrounded by a horde of slow ones and only having walls and boarded up windows to keep them out and not nearly enough bullets to drive them back really suffers for it. Plenty of video games have proven you don't have to make them society ending threats to make them threatening, dead rising and resident evil both had them contained only to a single city and those are still probably some of the best zombie games around.
 
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I think that for a zombie movie to work, you have to add something new.
Something that differentiates your zombie flick from the rest.
Might be an ability your zombies have, the way they're created, some kind of plot gimmick, anything.
There are plenty that just copy other people's work and those blend together into 1 big zombie slop.
The ones that stand out have something unique about them.
 
I really liked the setting for the Dead Rising videogame series. The initial outbreak is an accident that the goverment failed to clean up completely, but even then, it's taken care of in a matter of days.

Every outbreak after that is seen more like a nuisance, and zombies end up becoming part of daily life. No post apocalypse, no anarchy. Zombies are even used as entertainment for crying out loud.

Something that ended up being terrifyingly accurate is that big pharma wastes no time finding a way to profit from the zombie outbreaks.
 
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Well, I'm sorry I didn't see this thread sooner, but here's my two cents:

While I am also sick of the zombie thing, I do have a fondness for certain zombie films, mostly older. If supernatural/Voodoo zombies interest you, I highly recommend not only the previously mentioned Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie, but also RKO's I Walked with a Zombie, a "B" picture saddled with a terrible name but a genuinely amazing watch in the romantic thriller vein with an undercurrent of family drama.

Moving up the timeline considerably, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue pits 60's mods against science-based zombies with entertaining results. Come for the frank depiction of drug abuse, crooked politics and some genuine edge of your seat moments, stay for the ultimately nihilistic yet somehow satisfying denouement that prevents me from saying much else without spoiling the whole affair.

Finally, one of my all time favorites: Dellamorte Dellamore, aka Cemetary Man, aka what happens when the zombie apocalypse starts, but the protagonist of your zombie apocalypse story is a lonely, possible shizo, almost certainly psychotic dude who is more interested in the pursuit and accidental - usually accidental, anyway - murder of any number of identical women he is convinced is...or are...the love of his life?

Last but certainly not least, I recommend...and no, I am not joking...Zombie Strippers. It does exactly what it says on the tin, but is tremendously more entertaining doing it than it has any right to be.
 
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