Zombie Club Update/Zombi 2

We haven't given up on Zombie Club. In fact, Cris has bought a ton of great movies that we're really excited about watching. But the girls have decided to have their book club only on Sunday nights. With it being football season and all, we have been a little preoccupied on Sunday nights. So it's looking like Zombie Club is on hiatus until football season is over.
We did, however, watch a movie that was never talked about. So let's do that here.

We watched "Zombi 2" at our second meeting. This movie cover just says "Zombie", so allow me to explain that.
"Zombi" was the Italian version of "Dawn of the Dead". So, when "Zombi 2" was released in America, it was just referred to as "Zombie", seeing as how our "Zombi" was "Dawn of the Dead". Does that make sense?

Like I said, we watched this movie at our second meeting. We had heard good things about it, but we didn't know what to expect. There were two scenes in particular that we had heard about. One of them was a zombie fighting a shark, while the other one was a woman getting a wood splinter in her eye.
Neither of them disappointed.
The zombie/shark fight scene was a little slow, but it was about what you would expect. An underwater zombie slowly grappling a shark, repeatedly trying to bite it (I think the shark was bit, but there was no blood, so it was tough to tell). Chad had questions about how a zombie was able to "survive" underwater. We consulted "The Zombie Survival Guide" and found a section on respiration, which states:
"The lungs of the undead continue to function in that they draw air into and expel it from the body. This function ccounts for a zombie's signature moan. What the lungs and body chemistry fail to accomplish, however, is to extract oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. Given that Solanum obviate the need for both of thee functions, the entire human respiratory system is obsolete in the body of a ghoul. This explains how the living dead can 'walk underwater' or survive in environments lethal to humans. Their brains, as noted earlier, are oxygen-independent." (pg 12)

The other scene, the one with the woman getting a sliver in her eye, was pretty fantastic. It was slow. It was gruesome. It (somehow) took off half of her head. And it started like this:


The movie started kind of slow, but, once it got going, it was actually really good. The special effects left quite a bit to be desired (especially the Molotov cocktail fight at the end), but it was still extremely enjoyable to watch.

Highly recommended.

Zombie Sighting

This picture was taken at Chad and Molly's wedding. Check out the short kid on the right. It's a good thing Scotty bashed in his head with a chair seconds after this picture was taken...otherwise, the reception would've been remembered less for all the fun and more for the zombie apocalypse that it no doubt would've started.


Thanks Scott.

Zombie Holocaust

So, if you saw a movie that was called Zombie Holocaust, what would you expect? I can tell you what we expected. Zombies. Lots of zombies. Most likely, a bunch of zombies that were taking over the world. But, mainly, we just wanted a lot of zombies.
What did we get? Not a single zombie. That's right...not one. Look at the title again. Zombie Holocaust. Look at that picture? Does it look like a zombie? Yeah...kind of. Guess what it is. It's some sort of man who has had his face mutilated and his brain switched out with another person. All of this was done by a mad scientist.
But those aren't the only evils in the movie. Zombies? No...of course not. That would be ridiculous. There are some cannibals, though.
"Undead cannibals?"
Nope...just cannibals.
Somewhere in all this garbage were two of the slowest fight scenes I have ever seen, a borderline attractive brunette reporter who got scalped (one of the zombie-looking creations was wearing the top of her head as a wig), a scary blond woman who got naked for no reason in particular (including a scene when she was completely naked in front of the cannibals, yet still found it necessary to strut and pose), a British-ish guy who scratched his chest all the time (with absolutely no explanation for it at all), and some other guy who got his chest ripped open, his entrails eaten, and his eyes literally ripped out of his head and eaten by cannibals.
(Actually, that part was pretty cool.)
There was a pretty cool scene involving a creature and a motorboat.

That fight ended exactly like we thought it would.

It was a terrible movie. Granted, there were a couple of kind of cool moments, but it didn't make up for the fact that the rest of the movie was ridiculously boring. And it certainly didn't make up for the fact that we sat through a movie called Zombie Holocaust that featured the same amount of zombies that Mona Lisa Smile had...zero.
A lot of the set was taken from Zombi 2 (which we watched at our last Zombie Club), so it was kind of funny to be able to pick out different buildings, settings, vehicles, and even some stock footage from Zombi 2.
And all of this without mentioning that the ending was terrible and confusing. In fact, I still don't know exactly what happened. Do you want to know a secret? I don't even care what happened or how it happened.


Oh yeah...there were also waaaaay too many naked guys.

No 3D Extravaganza This Time

It is with great regret that I must inform the ZC that I have been unable to locate a copy of NOTLD in 3D. They have the 2D version at Best Buy (it's even called "Night of the Living Dead 3D: 2D Version) but that would be pointless. The 3D one is on Amazon, but I would not be able to get it before the next meeting. I was looking at the reviews, and they seem to slam the movie and the 3D quality of the movie. I might be having second thoughts about this one. After all, there's always "Zombie Holocaust".

Alias'

I also used an Alias, I think "Dusty" is the foolish one. When is Zombie Club Sunday? Is it around 7:30 again or are they having book club at a different time?

Day of the Dead

Let's get this thing started...

We watched this movie at the very first Zombie Club. We were pretty excited about it. "If the remake of Dawn of the Dead was good, then the remake of Day of the Dead should be good, too." Right?
The original Day of the Dead was relatively boring...but so was the original Dawn of the Dead. We had high hopes for this movie.
Those hopes were set, it seems, a little too high.
Let's start out with the cast.
It starred Mena Suvari as a member of the army (I don't remember her position, and I don't really care to). Her job was to make sure the zombie outbreak didn't get out of the little po-dunk town that this movie was set in. As it so happens, it was her hometown, so you can just imagine the loads of hilarious jokes that came as a result of this.
Nick Cannon played the overly stereotypical black guy. He was also in the army, and his name was Salazar.
Ving Rhames was the army captain in charge of this rag-tag group.
There were some other characters (the horny brother and his quasi-hot girlfriend, the geeky love interest, the mother, the jackass who started it all, etc.), but most of them were too boring to even talk about.
Were there some good scenes? Yes. For instance, some high school kid went home to find that his mother (or someone) had eaten the rest of his family. There was a pretty wicked ending scene, involving a big explosion and a super-zombie (I won't give anything away, but I will say that the reasoning behind the super-zombie was inplausible at best and murderously retarded at worst).
There was also a scene in which a fat man turned into a zombie and attacked the quasi-hot girl in a radio station. You can see it coming from a mile away, but it still was one of the more entertaining parts of the movie.
A big flaw in this movie was the zombies. According to "The Zombie Survival Guide", zombies are slow by nature. Since they are the undead, they do not possess any supernatural powers. Try telling that to these zombies, who could run faster than the average man. Oh yeah...they could also climb on walls and ceilings and whatnot.

Last but not least, this movie had absolutely nothing to do with the original Day of the Dead. Here were the similiarities: it was called Day of the Dead. It had zombies. There was one zombie that had some memories of his pre-zombie life.
That's it.
Did a zombie learn to shoot a gun? No...at least, not that I remember. And that was the best part of the original.

It was not a good movie. In fact, I can't recommend this movie at all. The dialogue was terrible, and the acting was worse. As I said, the original Day of the Dead was not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination...but it was still better than this one by a long shot.
Also, I'm not sure, but I don't think Romero had anything to do with this "remake".

Zombies on the ceiling!!!

Welcome to Zombie Club

Zombie Club was created for two reasons:

1. We really like zombie movies.
2. Pretty much every woman we know is involved in a book club, which meets once a week.

Put these two thoughts together, and you have Zombie Club: a once-a-month meeting that focuses on watching zombie movies and talking about them. It's pretty simple, really.

I'm not exactly sure what we'll post here, but I'm sure we'll post some thoughts on each movie, as well as how consistent the actions were of the zombies involved. We'll be referencing Max Brooks' "The Zombie Survival Guide", as well as "World War Z".

Feel free to join in and comment on this stuff.

Oh yeah...here's a picture of zombies.