A World on Fire - A Zombie Blog

It’s hard to believe that while we wait for the release of the first season of The Walking Dead, there has been some crazy speculation regarding the production of the second one. Rumors have suggested that the next series will begin shooting in February.

Well, Frank Darabont splashed some cold water on the theory in a great old man Smithers impression that will certainly depress the hardest of the hardcore. “Shooting in February? As tired as I am right now getting season one through post, I’d rather shoot myself,”. Umm … no gray area there.

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It’s really hard to describe this movie, and looking at the trailer, I can’t help but say it looks pretty awesome. Looking to combine good old fashioned apocalypse with some zombie horde behavior, Monsters appears to be the type of film that got me into zombies in the first place. Note, you can find the trailer by the following the link below.

So what are the monsters? I’m not quite sure. The trailer does an excellent job at concealing the hungry beasts, and while some of them looks to be of Godzilla proportions, I’m guessing from the giant “INFECTED AREA” signs means that this parasite crosses over to people as well.

Yeah, so what’s it about? Here’s what I managed to dig up:

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A few posts back, I found an bootleg copy of a cell phone recorded VHS copied passed around the gutter and lost in a sock drawer copy of The Walking Dead trailer as it was shown at Comic Con. The image quality looked like the movie were projected on someone’s armpit while it sounded like an impassioned debate between Charlie Brown cartoon adults set to a Mariachi band.

Thankfully, a much better trailer was released lately in of all its man on horse meets zombie action.

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Having seen the trailer for this upcoming movie, starring none other than Sith Lord Hayden Christensen, I find myself wondering if zombies should be considered 21st century’s equivalent of bacon. Add some zombies – to whatever the movie – and it’s guaranteed to be awesome. Well, here’s a movie that just begs for our undead friends to make an appearance. The trailer feels like a sandwich with only lettuce and tomato.

Now I can see some of you rolling your eyes at the thought of Hayden Christensen being in anything after his performance in the George Lucas sci-fi movie adaption of “Who wants to be a Billionaire?”. His incessant whining in the prequels made Luke Skywalker appear to be a stone faced monk. And yes, it was kind of funny to see a guy go from chicken chest to barrel chest at the end of Revenge of the Sith, but I will say – having seen him in other stuff – he’s not a bad actor. He was given a terrible script from a guy who was intent on making the most expensive Saturday morning cartoon in ever made and being that almost every performance was a slow motion car crash, I’m willing to cut the guy some slack.

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Thumbing through Glenn Kay’s awesome book, Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide I found a relatively obscure zombie film starring none other than Joe Piscopo with Vincent Price being noted as a supporting actor. My god … did I find the white whale of cheese movies? Titled, Dead Heat, this movie sounds about as good as you can imagine it to be.

Reading the blurb on it, Kay mentions how the MPAA forced the creators of the film to trim back some of the more obnoxious special effects else the movie would earn itself an X rating. Having recently watched Angels & Demons – a PG-13 film which features an assassin cutting open an investigators throat, a hanging priest being burned alive, and several officers being shot in the head – it seems rather quaint that a Joe Piscopo move could be slapped with such a warning,

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For those of you who like to live under rocks as much as I have been doing these days, you’d be interested to know that sci-fi themed site of io9 has managed to post a trailer for the upcoming AMC series, The Walking Dead. The trailer was actually recorded by a fan with a camcorder so it’s not exactly the best quality. The trailer looks to have been shown in some crowded room and during the moments when the screen cuts to black, you can see the “real” zombie horde, staring at the glass. It’s pretty funny.

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In the past few years, Cinemassacre has become a bit of magnet for all types of geeks – video game geeks, film geeks, and yes, even board game geeks. The site is the brainchild of James Rolfe who took his film making skills and love of video games to the internet. He created the hilarious personality – the Angry Video Game Nerd – and reviewed video games that have not been released for twenty years. Filled with f-bombs and lots of frustrated beer swills, James has managed to captivate millions of viewers, channeling the controller smashing rage of anyone who has tried to play a poorly designed video game.

While the Angry Video Game Nerd is definitely the most popular part of Cinemassacre, he also reviews movies, video games, and even visits famous movie landmarks. James is a pretty meticulous guy who finds a lot of interesting connections between things so his videos can be pretty interesting, and even educational if you don’t mind the colorful language.

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Either io9 is becoming a premium source for zombie news, or I’m getting a little bit lazy. I’m thinking it’s a little of the latter but in any case, they’re reporting on upcoming film that brings a little holiday cheer into slaying the living dead.

Titled A Cadaver Christmas, the movie tells the story about a group of unlikely folks on a college campus who defend themselves from the undead horde. It sounds like your basic zombie siege film with a splash of comedy thrown into the mix. Here’s a little blurb that I finched from the official website:

‘Twas the night before Christmas…

And somewhere a janitor mops the halls of a university…
A drunk sits at a lonely bar while his faithful bartender serves him mug after mug of pity beer…
A police officer makes an arrest…
A student security guard sits diligently at her desk…
And a science professor conducts a dangerous experiment with unimaginable consequences.

United by terrifying and bizarre circumstances, the janitor, the drunk, the bartender, the cop, his perp, and the student security guard must fight to undo the professor’s work. A dark force is at work in the cadaver lab this Christmas and this unconventional band of heroes are the only hope the world has against an army of living corpses that are quickly recruiting new members. The undead have been given the gift of life and it’s up to the janitor to take it back.

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I just stumbled across this article over io9 this morning about an upcoming film from Australia that takes a whole new twist on the zombie genre. First we had stumbling zombies. Then we had running zombies. And now, we have fire zombies.

Honestly, outside of being an illuminated target at night and pensive attempted strangulation, I’m not sure what the fire zombies bring to the genre. Still, it looks interesting in a “what the hell am I watching” kind of way. These kind of movies can break either way for me.

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Many thanks to Ben for sending this over. There’s probably a very good chance that if you are reading this blog post right now, then you have already seen Zombieland sometime in the last few months. The good news is that if you haven’t seen the movie, you can now view it online via. Netflix’s excellent streaming option.

Why should you see it? Well, it’s a fun post-apocalyptic film focusing the survival antics of an obsessive compulsive young man who manages to make his way through the throngs of infected “zombies”. The film swerves a bit and by the end of it, it kind of pukes all over itself, but I still think it is a fun watch. Just don’t go into the movie expecting much and you’ll have a good time.

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After a rather extended vacation through all the dark parts of the night, I thought I’d kick the site back into gear with a little visit to Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide by Glen Kay. If you love zombie movies and cannot get enough of our undead friends munching our living neighbors, you should pick yourself a copy this guide. It basically describes each zombie movie from the start of the cinema all the way to 2007. As you can imagine, that’s a lot of zombies yet each entry is a refreshing glimpse at a movie you might have missed.

Today’s entry features none other than the remake of Night of the Living Dead. I’m a huge fan of the original so the remake doesn’t interest me that much. That said, I found this entry to be a good read. Enjoy.

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As some of you may know, AMC is currently in production of a live action adaption of the very well read comic series, Walking Dead. Gotta say from the looks of one of the zombies alone, this looks to be an awesome. Having only read the first episode, I’ll go on record for saying that I’m cautiously optimistic. The only thing I can say to the true diehards is not to get too excited, because while Frank Darabont (Shawshank Redmption) is a fine director, I find that a lot of comic movies come out looking like this instead of looking like this.

In any case, the fine sci-fi minded folks over at io9 just ran a story about the upcoming production. Evidently, the creative folks behind this film decided to put their zombie extras through some zombie school. It’s pretty interesting to watch what they made people do on camera while keeping a straight face. I think this was a cool publicity gimmick but really … has anyone every seen a zombie movie with unbelievable zombies? (I’m not talking about you, spider zombie)

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It’s hard to believe that I’ve been reading Roger Ebert’s reviews for over a decade now. He’s a thoughtful writer and as much as I’ve disagreed with some of his reviews (he gave Anaconda four stars), I always find myself comparing opinions with him on some of my favorite gems. That said, he’s grumpy bastard if you have to work for him as I did in the early 2000′s, porting his television reviews to the web. Often times, we’d receive the shows too late in the day for our Monday posting deadline, resulting in a venomous phone call from his television people. When Ebert was unhappy, they were unhappy and were they were unhappy, life was miserable.

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John Herman recently wrote to me, promoting an upcoming series a videos aptly titled, “How to Survive the Strange”. I’m guessing this web series is not intended to be a “zombie only” production as the intro of the clip shows a young woman sitting down at dinner with a vacuum cleaner. I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean, but I’m guessing we will learn about this strange dinner in future episodes.

That said, this first episode deals with our undead friends, and co-creator Bryan White introduces the clip like it were an episode on how to build your own shed. I liked the zombies in this clip. The seemed to be very eager to take down a young man, sipping his drink in the sun. Seeing as John describes the world overrun by the dead, I’m think this man was been a little passive aggressive with his own suicide.

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Here’s an older zombie movie that I pulled up at random from Glenn Kay’s excellent Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide. This is a Fulci original and from how it sounds, it might be worth a look. The picture in the book alone is pretty interesting. In it, a young boy stares straight ahead, glassy eyed and distant. Blood pours down his face, for the top of his head is gone, revealing the jelly like contours of his exposed brain.

I’m guessing Fulci didn’t hold anything back which is just the way I like it :)

From the book:

The House by the Cemetery, also known as Quella villa accanto al cimitero was Lucio Fulci’s quick follow-up to The Beyond (1981) and the last zombie film of his most prolific filmmaking period. It once again stats Catriona (or Katherine) MacColl, as a mother who moves with her family to a small community in New England. After an amusing opening, MacColl quickly realizes that she and her family aren’t alone in their new home. Yes, this is a haunted house flick, but don’t expect any ghostly whispering and fluttering curtains. Expect murdered corpses to spring to life and kill people on gory, Fulci-esque fashion. It turns out that the house’s deceased former resident, the mad surgeon Dr. Freudstein (Giovanni De Nava), is hidden in the basement; he needs blood to maintain his wonderful pulpy skin tone and generally gooey appearance. And so he emerges every so often to violently claim a victim and leave an awful mess behind on the floor for the others to clean.

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