Survival of the Dead

George A. Romero is known as the father of the zombie movie.  It makes sense...his Night of the Living Dead is a classic, and the movie that kick-started the modern zombie movie.  His second movie, Dawn of the Dead, is usually considered his best movie, and also helped to introduce more of a social message into zombie movies.  Personally, I like Night of the Living Dead better, and I like Snyder's Dawn of the Dead better...but that's neither here nor there.

It's no secret that Romero's zombie movies have been in a steady decline recently.  I liked Land of the Dead, but I didn't love it.  It appears as though I'm in the minority of people who enjoyed Diary of the Dead...but, again, I didn't love it.  The message was extremely heavy-handed, and I really only enjoyed the movie because of some of the characters involved.

I can say, with no amount of uncertainty, that Survival of the Dead is Romero's worst movie.  It follows a minor character from Diary of the Dead...one of the jackass soldiers that showed up and took the RV.  It didn't help the movie that this guy was one of the worst actors I have ever seen.  I actually started to watch this movie with Daniel...but he forced me to shut it off after he delivered a terrible line in the worst way possible: "You're dangerous kid, but not as dangerous as me."  It should be noted that he said this to some punk kid, who was not a great actor, himself.

Jackass

Needless to say, I went back and watched the entire movie at a later date.

I wish I had not done that.

I guess the story wasn't terrible.  It was set up like a modern western, but with zombies.  I know...it sounds pretty cool.  The majority of the movie took place on an island that housed two warring families.  One of the families believed that zombies could not be cured and should be killed.  The other family believed that zombies could be taught to be useful members in society.  They also believed that zombies could be taught to eat something other than human flesh (they believed that zombies would also feast on horses).  While we start on the side of the first family (zombies must be killed), we begin to see the point of the second family when we see zombies bringing mail in from mailboxes and whatnot.

The movie ends in classic western fashion...a showdown between the two families in a corral.  A gunfight while using bales of hay, trees and fences for cover.  With, of course, zombies roaming around.

When I write it out, it doesn't sound that bad.  Trust me...it is.  As I mentioned, the acting is atrocious.  The story, while not terrible, didn't have much depth to it.  The zombies looked decent, but the death scenes were terrible.  Instead of using exploding blood capsules, they opted for CGI blood splatter, which looked awful.  

Still...it's Romero.  If you're a fan of Romero, you're going to watch it regardless.  But this is just not a good movie.  There are other good zombie movies that have been released over the past couple of years...watch one of those, instead.  Colin showed what a zombie movie can be, even with next to no money.

I was unable to embed the trailer, but you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLTBnzJ7nRA

Tombs of the Blind Dead

About a month ago, we had a meeting of Zombie Club. It had been a while, but, since Cris was in the process of moving, we didn't have access to any of his zombie movies. That left us scrounging around for a movie at the last minute. We settled on Tombs of the Blind Dead, which I had picked up a couple of years ago on the recommendation of a zombie-loving coworker.

The story centered around a man, a woman, and the female friend that the woman had "experimented with" from many years ago. By "experimented with", I mean, "Sat around and lightly touched each others arms," (according to the flashbacks, anyway). The woman gets upset when her boyfriend starts hitting on her girlfriend in a train, so she jumps out and runs to a deserted castle to sleep for the night.

This castle is the resting place of the Satanic wing of the Knights Templar. These were the knights who thought it would be fun to strip women naked and sacrifice them to Satan. They were killed somehow, but still reside in the castle area. Apparently they come out at night to hunt for flesh. Or something of that sort.
The knights were less zombies and more skeletons. They had no eyes, which seems like a disadvantage, until you realize that they can hear a human's heartbeat. There's no way to stop that, and so they killed the woman that ran into the castle (after a very long and slow chase). There was a chase scene with the knights riding on horses...but the horses moved in slow motion. The maker of this movie didn't bother trying to make the horses look slow...he just made the film go in slow motion. This is kind of forgivable (it was made in the 70s on a small budget, after all), but it made no sense when the woman found a non-zombie horse and began to ride away from the knights, only to find that her horse also moved in slow motion. What?

(At this point most of these details are a bit fuzzy, and for that I [kind of] apologize. The movie was so dull [there was a span of 20 minutes with no dialogue] that, at the halfway point, we fast-forwarded the to the end [x4 speed]. I don't think we missed too much.)

Here is what I remember from the last half of the movie.

The woman who ran into the castle was bitten by the knights, and became a zombie. She walked around like Frankenstein's monster for a while, then got set on fire. Tragic, really.

For a zombie, she didn't look half bad.

The man and woman who were still on the train try to find her. They find some sleezy looking guy from town to find him, and he brings along his whore. The woman from the train and the sleezy guy go into the castle together, while the man from the train and the whore go together. While sitting in the graveyard (at night...good idea, kids), the woman tells Captain Sleeze that she doesn't really like men because of an incident from her childhood. He responds to this statement by raping her on a tomb. Pure class, this guy.

If I remember correctly, the woman makes it out of the castle without being eaten, and makes it on to a train. Blah blah blah. I won't tell you how it ends, but the woman makes this face:

Yay!

The end.

In case you couldn't tell, this movie was terrible. It wasn't even funny bad (although we did laugh at a couple parts). Please don't watch this movie. I beg of you.

After this debacle, we decided to watch Diary of the Dead directly afterwards. I won't do a big review right now, but it was not universally loved. I liked it, but not everyone else agreed with me. Perhaps I'll do a review of that one within the next couple of weeks.

We have not had the best track record lately of watching good movies. We've watched a number of movies that we didn't know too much about, and it has come back to bite us. However, our luck may be changing.


Scott bought this book for me for my birthday. I've gone through it, and it seems to agree with our thoughts on the movies that we have watched. It likes the movies that we have liked and hates the movies that we have hated. For the next Zombie Club meeting, we will consult with this fabulous book before deciding on a movie. In doing this, we hope to be able to find some good zombie movies.

Automaton Transfusion

It's late, and I just got done watching this. Instead of a coherent review, I'll just throw this out there. These are some thoughts that I had while watching this movie.



Have you ever wanted to see a guy in a Ramones shirt reach into a pregnant woman's stomach, pull out the fetus, and eat it right in front of her as she screamed, cried, and, ultimately, died? If you answered yes to this question, then you would probably love Automaton Transfusion (or, at the very least, you would love one scene of Automaton Transfusion).

The acting was awful. The characters were all unlikeable (at best). The gore was pretty good for the most part. One girl had her jaw completely ripped from her face. Another was torn limb-from-limb. One guy was forced to kill his own father by pushing his eye onto a shard of glass (kind of like the splinter in Zombi II, but nowhere near as graphic or cool). But, when people weren't being ripped apart like animals, this was a terrible movie. And it was right from the opening credits.

I've never felt inclined to comment on the opening credits of a movie before, but these were terrible. Every couple of seconds, there would be a big flash of light. I felt like I almost had a seizure while I was watching it.

As one of the characters picked up a chainsaw, he said, "Ash would be so proud." That was good for a chuckle.

Our hero is a kid named Chris...some punk who thinks he's smarter than people and makes the worst possible decision available to him at that time. One of these decisions was to make his way across town to get a serum to make him immune to zombie bites...but he has conveniently blocked out the part about most of his friends being eaten alive. I'd say getting bitten is the least of his worries. Another of his decisions was to leave a perfectly safe garage in order to get to the school. His reasoning? "There will be survivors at the school." Never mind the fact that one of the big rules in dealing with zombies is to stay away from populated areas.

He's also terrible under pressure. When rummaging through a lab looking for the serum, his girlfriend cries out, "Where is it? What are we even looking for?" To which our hero replies, "Anything that can save us." I'm pretty sure she meant, "What does the bottle look like? Is there a label? How will I know when I've found this serum?" Jackass. She should have left him right then and there.

The ending will make you madder than you have any reason to be for a movie this terrible. I don't want to ruin anything by saying how it ended, but you will be mad.

In conclusion: if they were to splice together all the action scenes, it would make for a pretty cool 20 minutes. Suffice it to say, that's not what they did here. This was a bad movie with a couple of good moments...but those good moments didn't even come close to making up for the diaper stain that was Automaton Transfusion. That quote on the front of the movie that says, "One of the best zombie films in decades"? An out-and-out lie.

Why...hello there. What's your name?

The Dead Pit

A couple of weeks ago, we had our first meeting of Zombie Club in a couple of months. The playoffs were in full swing, but there wasn't a game on Sunday night. Thus, Zombie Club.
We watched The Dead Pit, a movie we were extremely excited about. After the debacle that was Zombie Holocaust, we wanted to watch a movie with some actual zombies in it. This movie stated that, not only were there zombies, but that we would be cheering for these zombies by the end of the movie. What could go wrong?

As it turns out, a lot could go wrong. And it did. Were there zombies? Yes...but they didn't show up until one hour and six minutes into the movie, leaving plenty of time for a terrific story, filled with intrigue, gripping dialogue, and a doctor with red eyes and a gunshot wound to his forehead.


Okay...so the doctor with the red eyes was the only thing present. There was a story, it was just a terrible one. It had to do with a scantily clad girl with amnesia and daddy issues in a mental institution. She befriended an explosives expert who tried really hard to sound like Sean Connery. Sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he didn't. He was one of the most entertaining parts of the movie.

There was a dream sequence that showed the girl running around in her underwear and a mid-riff, looking like an extra in a bad 80s hair rock video ("Motorin'! What's your price for flight?"). She proceeded to get tied up and sprayed with a fire hose until her shirt disintegrated. The nurse who was doing these terrible things to her (was it Nurse Ratchet? I couldn't tell) laughed manically the entire time. At the very end of the dream sequence, the water began to take a part of her face off. They didn't show much of that, which was disappointing (it should be noted that this was the part of the movie that the pizza guy showed up).

The rest of the movie went on and on until the zombies showed up. Unfortunately, they didn't do much. We never actually saw them eating anyone...it was just kind of assumed that they killed people, even if we didn't get to see them. There was a lot of blood, and some dead bodies scattered around, but you never saw the live bodies become dead, and you never see the blood leave their body. It happens off-screen somewhere. There better be some fantastic deleted scenes running around somewhere.

These zombies proceeded to sit around the mental institution and study/play with the brains that they had somehow acquired. They kind of reminded me of The Thinker...only there's a lot of them, they have bloody brains in their hands, and they're undead. Also, they're treating the brains as though they were water-weanies. "Whoa...it's so slippery. I can keep moving my hands, and it just keep sliding through them...like a snake or something. I would much rather do this than try to eat someone."

So what killed these ridiculous excuses for zombies? Destroying the brain or removing the head? Of course not. That would be ridiculous.

It's holy water. That's right...throw some holy water on these zombies, and they will melt.

Just because it's a dumb way to kill a zombie doesn't mean it didn't look awesome.

And how did they find this out? Oh...because a crazy nun just so happened to throw some holy water on a zombie. No one said it had to make sense.

I won't tell you how the movie ended, but it involved a water tower and the explosives expert doing his thing.

And no, it wasn't as cool as that sounds.

This movie wasn't even fun-bad. It was just bad.

It did bring up an interesting bit of discussion though. Cris asked if zombies liked to eat brains or if they just liked to eat people in general. I believe that zombies don't necessarily go after the brain. Since they're non-thinking undead beings, they don't really process any information. They eat living humans and are completely indiscriminate about what parts they eat. Cris, on the other hand, believes that zombies may be drawn to humans brains, and enjoy that above mere flesh.
"The Zombie Survival" guide doesn't mention whether or not zombies are drawn to brains. Nevertheless, it is a view that is held by a lot of people and shows up in a number of movies. There is research that supports both sides of this argument.
What do you think? Give us a shout in the comments and let us know your take on the matter.

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.

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!!!