Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse

Have you ever found yourself watching Superbad and thinking, "I wish there was a less well-written version of this with zombies and more annoying characters,"?  Then this movie is for you!

That sounds harsher than I mean it to.  I apologize to the scouts and their stripper friend.  Let's break it down.

Ben, Carter and Augie are sophomores in high school.  They are Boy Scouts.  Augie loves being a scout.  Ben and Carter are planning on quitting - because being a Boy Scout is super lame, you guys - but don't want to hurt Augie's feelings.  

The three of them are going on an overnight scout trip with Scout Leader Rodgers (a Dolly Parton-loving David Koechner) when Ben and Carter are invited to a super-secret high school party by Kendall's (Carter's hot sister, who Ben has a very obvious crush on) boyfriend.  But it's the same night as the camp-out!  What are these scouts going to do?

They're going to ditch Augie after he goes to sleep and go to the party, because that sounds like a plan that will go very well.  Somewhere along the line, they meet up with Denise, a former high school dropout who now works at a local strip club.

Pretty standard high school sex comedy stuff, really.  Until the zombies show up.
We see the outbreak at the beginning of the movie.  They are being studied at some local sciency place, which allows burnout janitors to just dance right into the zombie zone.  It seemed like they probably could have secured the area a little better, but that's just me being cautious, I guess.

At this point, Ben, Carter, Augie (who joins up with them after having some adventures by himself) and Denise are still trying to get to the party.  Not because they want to hook up with seniors (they do, though), but because they want to save everyone there from the zombies.  Also, the military is planning on wiping out the entire city to stop the zombie spread (as seen in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, The Crazies, Return of the Living Dead and many, many more). 

I just used a whole lot of words on a pretty simplistic plot.  I apologize.  I could have just said, "high school boys attempt to procure alcohol and bang girls way out of their league, also zombies."  Or, to kind of repeat myself from earlier, "Superbad: Rave To The Grave," complete with one of the characters (Carter) trying to be a skinny Jonah Hill in the worst way.  Anyway, let's get to some thoughts.

It was fine.  Carter's whole "Jonah Hill in Superbad," act got old really quick, and I didn't really care for bland Ben, but I really liked Augie and Denise.  I liked Augie because he wasn't ashamed of who he was (he also created the best weapon when it came to killin' time) and Denise because, underneath her gruff demeanor, was actually quite sweet.  Her and Ben formed a weird little friendship that I genuinely enjoyed watching.  She treated Carter like garbage, because he was a jackass and needed to be put in his place.  I liked that, because Carter deserves everything bad in this world.

Ultimately, we're talking about zombie comedy, so let's talk about the zombies.

It was unclear how they were going to play it.  The first zombies we see are typical Romero zombies.  We also see a zombie deer, so we know it can cross species.  

Also, cats.

Then we get to a scene early in the outbreak where our heroes are making a stand in a liquor store parking lot.  A horde of zombies are lurching towards them.  Suddenly, one of the zombies goes down on all fours and starts running at them like a flesh-eating ape.  Okay then.  We're dealing with Day of the Dead (remake) zombies.
We also find out that the zombies retain something of their pre-zombie memories, much like latter day Romero zombies (as first seen in the original Day of the Dead).  How do we find this out?  Why, the scouts sing "...Baby One More Time" to a zombie wearing a Britney Spears t-shirt, and the zombie attempts to sing along.  It's a highly scientific method.

"My loneliness is killing meeeeee..."

There is some decent gore, especially when the scouts "weapon up" and hit the party.  They created a bunch of zombie-killing weapons from random hardware store items, because apparently they had all earned their Weapon Making merit badges.  Lots of death, destruction, mayhem, etc.

If you like the image of someone using a zombie penis as a handle, only to tear that handle off and send it flying through the air, there is also a scene like that.  There is also a scene where someone takes a selfie with a pair of zombie boobs.  I did not care for those scenes.

I can't say I enjoyed this movie all the way through, but there were enough funny/bloody moments to keep me entertained.  There's something I had to keep in mind as I was watching this: I am 35 years old.  This movie was not really made with the "approaching middle-age man" in mind.  If I was in high school or college, I'm sure I would find this movie hilarious.  It's a bit of dumb fun with crude jokes, lots of gore and a little nudity.  It's fast-moving enough to make it easy to overlook its flaws.
Although, honestly, if you switch out Carter for a character who is less obnoxious, I'm sure I would have enjoyed this more than I did.  As it stands, this was a fun movie that I will probably never watch again.  If I do, it'll probably be on mute, in the background of a party.  

Who am I kidding?  I don't have parties.  I apologize for lying to you all.

Rating: 3/5

The Walking Dead: A Letter to Deanna

Hello Deanna.  I traveled with Rick’s group and kind of hung out in the background.  I now live in a house on the edge of town.  Don’t remember me?  I get that a lot.  I’m basically like Buddy in Community.

You don't know me, and, really, I don't know you too well, either.  I know you're a former congresswoman and once dreamed of being a poker pro.  "I'm good at reading people," you said, and I believed you.  I shouldn't have, but I did.

Rick and his people have done some bad things.  You knew this.  They told you as much.  Did you know they violently killed a group of people in a church?  That it was basically a re-creation of the final scene in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes?  Did you know that Rick killed his best friend?  That Carol burned two people alive and shot a little girl in the back of the head?  No, of course you didn’t.  You didn’t know the specifics.  You didn’t want to know.  The world is different outside the walls.  When you agreed to take them in, you knew they were good people at heart, and that the group of them sticking together and forming a loving family unit was difficult under such circumstances.  That Rick must be a great leader, and, no matter what he did, he did it for the good of his family.  Right decisions sometimes masquerade as bad ones, and it takes a great leader to know the difference.

While they were out there fighting and killing and dying, you’ve been sitting behind these walls, trying as hard as you can to stay blissfully ignorant of the horrors on the other side.  People left the confines of your idyllic community for supply runs, but you hadn’t really taken in anyone who had survived in the wild for years.  You didn’t see what they saw.  You didn’t know what they had to do.  Even good people can’t be good on the other side.  The nice ones – the immediately trusting ones – have long since died out.  Likely eaten by the not-so-nice people.  Surely you’ve seen Mad Max before this all went south?  You know what even a good man must do to survive out there.

Still, you said you were good at reading people.  Did you bring this group in just to turn on them at the first sign of savagery?  Do you trust Father Gabriel?  That dude killed his own congregation by locking them outside the church.  He has burned his collar and ripped pages out of a Bible, and then he comes ranting to you about how Rick and his group are Satan.  Tell me poker pro, do you trust that man?  Can you read him?
Can you read him like you read Nicholas?  The coward who caused the death of Noah?  Poor, sheltered Noah (who somehow learned how to use a gun in the short time he lived in Alexandria).  His face is in pieces because of Nicholas.  Do you trust him?  Do you get a better read off of him than you do from Glenn?  Either Nicholas is the best actor in the world or your career in the world of poker would have lasted a grand total of 5 minutes.

Finally, let’s talk about Pete.  I have some questions:

1. Why is chocolate kept under lock and key, while Pete somehow has unlimited access to alcohol?  Does he have a basement full of it?  Does he brew his own?  Are there prohibition tunnels under Alexandria?

2. What’s the point of keeping a surgeon in the town if he’s drunk all the time?  Like, all the time.  Who feels comfortable with that arrangement?  “Tara has a terrible head wound that the surgeon must check out.  I guess we’ll leave her in the shaky and drunken hands of abusive Pete.  Surely nothing bad will happen.”  Having a surgeon who is drunk all the time is worse than having no surgeon at all.

Perhaps Rick’s suggestion of killing him sounded a bit extreme, but what’s the alternative?  You suggested exile, but I’m with Rick on this.  Maybe he’ll die out there, in which case a death sentence is no different.  Or maybe he’ll find some others (say, the people who are carving Ws onto the heads of zombies), group them together and take down your little town.  Outside of a single sniper, you have no other defenses.  A well-organized group that knows the town’s weaknesses could overtake Alexandria with minimal casualties.
Rick is there to provide a perspective that is different from the people who have lived in Alexandria for years.  Granted, it’s kind of tough to take the advice of a man who waves guns at people in the street while being covered in the blood of his neighbor, but just because his methods are questionable doesn’t mean his logic is.
(By the way, do you know what the Pete solution should be?  Cut off his supply of alcohol and put him in a house by himself.  Is he still abusive?  If yes, kill him.  If no, then you have a non-drunk surgeon living in the town.)

I can only imagine how hard losing a son must be, but, for the sake of your community, you need to keep a level head.  Danger is right around the corner.  You can’t pretend that everything is fine, because it’s not.  If there’s one thing in this new world you need to learn, it’s this: if you have something nice, there is always someone who is going to want to take it from you.  You think Rick is bad?  Wait until you see what happens next.  You’ll be turning to Rick for guidance quicker than you know.  This time, listen to him.  He might be insane sometimes, but he understands how to survive beyond the walls better than you could ever hope to.  Just ask all the people with him.

Sincerely,
Dusty

Mini Review: Life After Beth

Description from IMDB:

A young man’s recently deceased girlfriend mysteriously returns from the dead, but he slowly realizes she is not the way he remembered her.

Notable actors: Aubrey Plaza, John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon, Cheryl Hines, Paul Reiser, Anna Kendrick, Dan DeHaan, Matthew Gray Gubler, Garry Marshall

It’s a well-known fact that I enjoy zombie movies.  Because I have seen so many, I find myself drawn to films that are a bit different from the norm.  I like seeing a familiar story from a different angle.  This is true of horror movies in general.  Fido.  Colin.  Shaun of the Dead.  The Cabin in the Woods.  Scream. And so on.  If there is a movie with a new way of looking at familiar tropes, chances are good that I’ll enjoy it.  (Not all of them, though.  American Zombie was terrible.)

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that I loved this movie.  It made me laugh pretty consistently throughout the entire movie.  It started off quickly (one of the first scenes is Beth’s funeral) and didn’t really hit any lulls.  The cast was terrific.  I wasn’t sold on Dane DeHaan at first, but he grew on me as the movie progressed.  I loved seeing how Plaza played Beth; she started as a sweet and fun amnesiac, and ended up being the flesh-craved zombie we knew she would become.  I loved John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon as her relentlessly naïve parents.  Most of all, I loved seeing this weird little story play out on the fringes of a citywide zombie outbreak.

My main complaint is that the music seemed to overtake the dialog from time to time.  I loved the atmosphere of the music (dissonant guitar squawls, courtesy of the great Black Rebel Motorcycle Club), but it had a tendency to be louder than it had any reason to me.  Perhaps that was to contribute to the chaos on screen, but I could have done with it being a little lower in the mix.  (Look at me, complaining about music being too loud.  I’m officially old now.)

That’s a minor complaint, though.  It’s not a perfect movie, but I had a lot of fun with this.  I’m already looking forward to watching it again.

Rating: 4/5

Mini Review: Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead

I will talk to anyone and everyone about the extent of my love for the first Dead Snow.  It's a little slow out of the gate, but it eventually delivers the full-fledged insanity I hoped that it would, while still developing characters I wanted to spend some time with.  It's one of my favorite zombie movies of the past 5 years.  What Tommy Wirkola was able to do on a small budget (roughly $800K) is nothing short of extraordinary.

As I mentioned in my Trailer Talk post, I was very much looking forward to the sequel.  Seeing as how Wirkola's Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters made $225 million on a $50 million budget, he was given a little more money to play with this time around.  It's tough to find exact numbers, but it looks like this film had a budget of around $5.5 million.

As near as I can tell, Wirkola took that money and immediately asked himself, "How can I make this movie crazier than the first?"  The answer, of course, was more.  More characters.  More zombies.  More fights.  More intestines.  More blood.  More deaths.  More weapons.  More laughs.  More insanity.

Daniel (Martin Starr), Blake (Ingrid Haas) and the Star Wars obsessed Monica (Jocelyn DeBoer) - self-appointed members of the Zombie Squad - travel from America to Norway to help Martin Hykkerud (the only survivor of the original) with his Nazi zombie problem.  "We've seen thousands of zombie movies," Daniel proclaims, as if this is enough information for Martin to have complete faith in their zombie-killing acumen.  Martin doesn't seem overly convinced, but put a hammer/shovel/hatchet in their hands, and they're more than willing to prove their worth.  Not to mention the fact that Blake has one of the all-time best zombie killing faces.

Martin had cut off his arm in the previous movie after being bitten.  In a case of mistaken identity (armdentity?), doctors attached a super-strength Nazi zombie arm to Martin.  At first, he found himself at war with it in a way that conjured up memories of Ash.  Eventually he learned to control it and found that he could bring the dead back to life.  Herzog - the leader of the Nazi zombies - has the same ability.  And so, as the trailer shows, we are treated to a massive zombie war: Herzog's zombies vs. Martin's zombies.  It's the kind of scene Wirkola didn't have money to do in the first film, and he's clearly holding nothing back here.  It's terrific.

The Evil Dead remake was a tense, nasty film, but it was clear the filmmakers were having fun as they dumped buckets of blood on the set.  That same feeling of glee is present here, only the events on the screen are much more comical.  Wirkola clearly had a lot of fun trying to think of new ways to kill people, or new ways to use their intestines.  With every new trick, I found myself grinning like an idiot.  I'm sure he was doing the same thing.

There's too much insanity to properly describe here.  If you like buckets of blood, miles of intestines and aren't easily offended, you need to watch this as soon as you can.  Even if you don't like zombie films, you're still likely to enjoy this one.

Rating: 5/5

Added note: I loved the chemistry between Martin and Roy (Stig Frode Henriksen) in the first film, so I was really happy to see Henriksen show up in this one as a different character.

What Comes Next: The Battery

You can read my review of this movie here, and you can read about the “What Comes Next” series here.

As always, there will be spoilers.  So if you haven’t seen this movie, you’ll need so before reading this article.  And I highly recommend that you watch this.

Before I get into the meat of this post, I want to explore Ben’s escape from the car at the end of the film.  Ben tells us (well, he really tells Annie – the woman who lives in the zombie-free colony – over the walkie talkie) how he is going to escape the car by finally telling the story of how he and Mickey escaped from the house they had been trapped in:

“We just opened the door.  They tried to pile in one side, and we just went out the other.”

It’s a novel idea, but I’m not entirely sure how well it would work.  When surrounding an object, zombies don’t really respond like lemmings.  Well, perhaps they do, but not fast-acting lemmings.  Very slow lemmings.  So, while I could possibly buy that this could work with a house (lots of room to maneuver and all that), I can’t see it working with a station wagon.  We see him opening the rear hatch (hatch?  I feel like it’s called a hatch), and the next scene is him on the road, running (more like hobbling, really) from the zombies.  With the car completely surrounded by zombies, I just don’t think there would’ve been a door vacated by zombies before the entire car was filled and Ben was bitten. 

(Not to mention the fact that a crowd of zombies groaning in one spot for a couple days was sure to attract the attention of more zombies.  By the time Ben tried his escape, there should have been hundreds of zombies, not dozens.)

Still, that’s how the movie ends, so that’s our starting point.

The last image we see of Ben is him hobbling from the zombies he just narrowly escaped.  It doesn’t look good.  He’s sleep deprived, malnourished (due to living on a diet of canned tuna and urine) and can’t move very quickly due to the gunshot wound in his leg.  With an undead horde about 10 feet behind him, it’s quite possible that his story ends a few minutes after the credits roll.  He can’t keep up his already plodding pace - inspiring Rock Plaza Central song be damned – and the zombies devour him on the road.

But there’s also a chance he gets away.  If there’s one thing we know about Ben, it’s that he’s a ruthless bastard.  Plus, these were his last words to Annie in that walkie talkie conversation:

“If it [escaping the car] doesn’t work this time, I’m just gonna put a bullet in my head.  But if it does, I’m gonna come and put one in yours.  I’ll see ya soon.”

He seemed to be having fun with the zombie apocalypse until he had to put a round in his best friend’s head.  After that, his mind unraveled faster than the baseball in his hand.  His voice got rough.  His eyes were empty.  He had two things on his mind: survival and revenge.  He was already on his way to survival (in his mind, escaping the car would be the hardest part of the plan, and he seemed to have pulled that off pretty well), which means his mind was already working on revenge.

He knows that the colony couldn’t be far.  They were in walkie talkie range.  So, while finding it would be difficult, it certainly wouldn’t be impossible.

The bigger question is what happens once he gets there?  We don’t know how big the colony is, but I’m going to assume – based on no evidence whatsoever – that there are somewhere between 20-50 people there. We know they’re careful.  We know they have guns.  And, since Ben threatened Annie over the walkie talkie, they’ll be on the lookout for trouble (even if they don’t think he’ll actually find them, they’ll still be on alert for a couple weeks). 

We also know that Ben is a good shot, and more than willing to kill someone if his own survival is at stake.  He shot a guy from around 20 yards, then had no qualms at walking up and shooting him in the head (because Ben knows that the line between life and death can be as thin as a double-tap).  But he’s also smart.  He won’t run at the colony guns blazing.  He’ll formulate a plan.  Separate and terminate.  Like a fatter, bearded version of Jim from 28 Days Later.

Even though I’d like to say that he would be able to pull it off, I just don’t think he’d be able to do it.  He may be able to take out a few of them, but not everyone in the colony.  Not if they’re prepared for him.  I imagine it’s walled off, and they would have guards.  Jim had been on the inside.  Knew the ins and outs.  Ben has no idea what he’s getting himself into.  Eventually, he would go down in a blaze of glory.  Maybe he is able to take Annie out as he’s being plugged, Sonny Corleone style. 

A crazed, bearded ex-ballplayer storming a walled-off community in search of revenge.  I would absolutely watch that movie.

Of course, he could also just lay in wait until Annie sets foot outside the colony and take his revenge at that point.  That would probably be a better option.  Less dramatic, but it would get the job done. 

Good luck on your murderous endeavors, Ben.

(If you have any ideas for a movie to cover in this series, leave it in the comments.)

The Battery

Description from IMDB:

The personalities of two former baseball players clash as they traverse the rural back roads of a post-plague New England teeming with the undead.

My thoughts:

More than anything, this movie really made me think about the differences in personality and how they would mesh in a zombie-infested world.  Ben – a realist – is clearly unhinged, but he seems to be adapting quite well.  He even appears to be enjoying himself.

Mickey – an optimist – seems defeated by it all.  I felt that it was only a matter of time before Mickey died, most likely as the result of just giving up.

I could identify more with Ben, but I doubt I would ever do a lot of things he does.

These differences in the characters also manifested itself with Annie.  They happen to hear Annie over their walkie-talkies.  She lives in some kind of zombie-free community with a group of others (named “The Orchard”).  It’s a concept that’s not unfamiliar to anyone who has seen many zombie movies.  But we never actually see it here.  We hear Annie say things like, “It’s not what you think it is.”  I really loved the idea of throwing a familiar zombie trope like that in here but never actually showing it. 

It’s Ben & Mickey’s responses to that information that tell us about their characters.  After Annie tells them to leave it alone, Mickey is still obsessed.  He can’t stop thinking about it.  It’s a haven for him.  A place to sleep without having to worry about being attacked.  Somewhere he can stop running.  However, Ben just stops thinking about it.  He’s happy with his life.  He doesn’t need a safe zone.  He’s fine right where he is.

Seriously though, Ben is probably a psychopath. I don’t like that I identify with him.

I didn’t really like either of the two characters.  But maybe that was the point.  After all, they didn’t really seem to like each other, either (unless they’re drunk, which I may need to try).  When Mickey is trying to convince Annie to let him join their community, he gives up Ben without much thought.  “We were ballplayers.  He was a starting catcher.  I was out in the bullpen.  We never hung out in the same circles.  I hardly even know him.” 

Tale as old as time…

I suppose that’s what the real zombie apocalypse would be like.  We wouldn’t necessarily be traveling with our loved ones.  In a perfect world we would, but a zombie apocalypse doesn’t happen in a perfect world.  In the event of a real zombie apocalypse, we would be stuck with whoever we happened to be with at the time of the outbreak, and, eventually, whoever survived from that group.  That means you have a better chance of trying to survive with your annoying coworker rather than your loved ones.  The good news is that it would be easier to kill one of your co-survivors once they become infected.  The bad news is that you may want to off yourself before it gets to that point.

I’m torn as to whether I really liked this movie or not.  There were parts I really liked, but there were also a ton of extremely slow moments.  For instance, we watch them brush their teeth for a full minute.  While I understand that it’s a big deal for them (they probably haven’t brushed their teeth in a long time), I didn’t necessarily feel the need to watch the entire teeth-brushing process. 

That’s a problem that’s indicative of the entire movie.  It tends to linger on shots for too long.  And most of them are boring, run-of-the-mill shots in the first place.  Looking out the window while driving.  Sitting around in chairs.  There’s really not much going on throughout a lot of this movie, yet the camera lingers too long on most of it.  I’m not begging for action, but I tend to get tired of watching scene after scene where nothing happens, yet having the camera linger on each of the scenes.

While I understand this is most likely what it would be like to live in a zombie apocalypse (a little bit of action, but not a ton going on the majority of the time), that doesn’t mean I want to watch it.  When the apocalypse comes, I’ll deal with the minutiae of my own life.  I don’t necessarily need to live through someone else’s.

I also have some major problems with the end, but I don’t really want to get into spoilers here.  If I do end up getting into that, I’ll do it in a future post.  I’ve been wanting to get my “What Comes Next” series off the ground, anyway.

That’s not to say it was a completely boring movie.  There were a lot of slow moments, but there were also some really great scenes.  There is a fantastic scene in an apple orchard.  There’s no dialogue (a song plays the entire time), but it’s perfect.  Everything I would want in the event of a zombie apocalypse.  Running wild.  Having fun.  Doing anything you want to do, because there’s no one around to tell you that you can’t.  After watching these two guys bicker for the last hour, it’s good to see them having some fun and smashing the hell out of some rotten apples with a bat.  It’s an amazing scene.  And the music is terrific.

I was also a huge fan of the scene where they get drunk in their car.  Because apparently having fun during a zombie apocalypse is something that is appealing to me.

The more I think about it, the more I think I really like this.  It’s not perfect, but there’s far more good than bad here.  If you can get past the lingering camera shots, you’ll find there’s a lot to like here.  It’s something different, and I like that.  And the soundtrack is dynamite. 

For my final thought, I’ll turn to a quote by Ben:

“Don’t you think we got enough to worry about without having to worry about each other?”  The central question of every zombie movie, going back to Night of the Living Dead: who should we fear the most, zombies or humans?

Rating: 4/5

The Battery is currently available on VOD through iTunes, Amazon, Vudu and others.  Check the website.

Here’s the trailer:

Here are some extra posters that I enjoyed:

World War Z

Description from Netflix:

A U.N. employee (Gerry Lane) races against time and fate as he travels the world trying to stop the spread of a deadly zombie pandemic.  As the undead hordes gain strength across the globe, governments topple and Earth stands on the brink of total social collapse.

Notable actors: Brad Pitt, David Morse, Mireille Enos, Matthew Fox (barely)

My thoughts:

Let’s get some preliminary stuff out of the way.

I covered some of this in my post about the trailer, but I’ll repeat some of them here.

I love zombie movies.  I’ve seen a ton of them over the years.  Some of them terrific.  Some of them terrible (I bet I’ve seen more terrible zombie movies than good ones, but that’s the sacrifice I’ve chosen to make).  My all-time favorite zombie movie is the original Night of the Living Dead.  My point is this: I think I’ve built up a lot of zombie cred.

All that being said…

I have absolutely no issue with fast zombies.  None whatsoever.  I realize this is kind of a no-no among zombie purists, but I honestly don’t care.  If it’s a good movie, I don’t care what the zombies do.  The only thing I ask is that the rules that are laid out for that movie stay consistent throughout the movie.  If the movie starts with slow zombies, they stay slow zombies.  Don’t change the rules halfway through the movie.  (I saw this recently in Dead Season, and it annoyed me to no end.)

I love the World War Z book.  I read it right after it came out (actually, I believe I started it shortly before it came out, as I was able to snag an advance copy).  I have listened to the abridged audiobook twice, and am currently working my way through the newly released unabridged audiobook.  (If you have not listened to it, I highly recommend it.  It’s amazing.)

Seriously.  Buy this now.

So I was excited about this movie, but I knew it wouldn’t cling too closely to the source material.  It was pretty much impossible.  The only way to really stay close to the book would be to do some sort of PBS style documentary series on it.  (If any company is interested in hiring me on to help develop this, I’m easy to reach via email/Google+/Facebook/tin-can-and-cups).  After seeing the preview, I figured the movie would use Brad Pitt’s character (Gerry) as a way to connect some of the scenes/characters from the book, but that would be about it.  And, after struggling with that idea for a while, I found that I was okay with it.  I didn’t really care how closely it followed the book.  Honestly, I didn’t even care if it was a “good” movie.  All I really wanted was an entertaining movie.

Which it was.

But I found myself kind of shocked by how good it actually was.  It was extremely fast-paced.  There isn’t a whole lot of set-up involved.  A quick scene setting up Gerry and his family situation, then violence and zombies.  So much violence and zombies.  And once it started, it didn’t really let up.  This basically felt like a collection of huge action scenes, with the slower scenes added for the sole purpose of setting up the next big action scene.  It was exactly what I figured a blockbuster zombie movie would be: more action movie than atmospheric zombie movie. 

But there’s not really anything wrong with that.  I don’t always need a thought-provoking zombie film.  I don’t always need a zombie film to be making a statement about society.  I don’t always need the zombies to stand for something.  To paraphrase a (possibly made-up) Freud quote, “Sometimes a zombie is just a zombie.”  Sometimes I just want to see a lot of zombies.  A lot of people killing those zombies.  A lot of destruction. 

Which we got.  We got a lot of that.  A lot of intense, violent scenes.  But not much blood.  To get a PG-13 rating, they had to dial down the gore we’re used to seeing in our zombie films.  (I suspect an unrated version will come out on DVD with all of that blood and gore added in, much like what was done with Live Free or Die Hard.)  But, even with the extreme lack of blood, we were still treated to some good zombie-killing.  Just because we didn’t see the crowbar go into a zombie’s face doesn’t mean we didn’t feel it.  (Still, I would’ve liked to have seen it.  Because I’m a monster.)

There was one major difference between this film and a lot of other zombie films.  The vast majority of zombie films follow a small group of survivors and their varied attempts at survival.  Some decide to take refuge in a house or some other establishment (this seems to be the majority of them, due in no small part to Romero kicking the modern zombie film off in a farm house, to a wonderful claustrophobic effect).  Others find the group moving from place to place, desperately trying to find a place they may be able to settle down (The Walking Dead is currently doing this, which makes sense.  You can’t spend an entire television series in one location.  No one wants to see 7 seasons in Hershel’s farmhouse).

But I’ve never seen anything on such a grand scale as this. There were still some moments that found that panicked claustrophobia (the scene in the apartment and the scene in the medical lab were both fantastic).  But, for the most part, this was a movie that took place on a huge, global scale.  We weren’t following a small band of survivors: we were following one man, desperately trying to find a way to defeat the zombies.  It was a different feel for a zombie movie.  Most zombie films allude to the fact that the virus is widespread, but we don’t actually see how widespread it is.  In World War Z, we see it.  We don’t need to hear that the world has been taken over by zombies, because we’ve seen it.  Even though I had good feeling that Gerry would find what he was looking for, it still felt kind of hopeless.  There were so many zombies, and they had decimated the world in such a short time.  Even if a solution were found, none of the damage could be undone.  The world would never be the same.  I had never seen something like that before in a zombie film, and it was pretty amazing to see here.  (28 Days Later does an amazing job of showing the destruction of London, but that’s just one city.  Romero’s world shows different areas of zombie infestation, but only very small sections in each movie.  And so on.)

 This was not a deep movie.  This was not a thought-provoking movie.  But it was an extremely fun, action-packed movie, filled with lots of zombies and lots of people killing those zombies.  It was tense and chaotic throughout the majority of the film.  It had some depth and heart to it as well, but make no mistake: this was a big movie, crawling with zombies.  And it was a joy to watch.  I was positively giddy walking out of the theater.

And only part of that giddiness was due to watching Brad Pitt for 2 hours

I have a few gripes with the movie.  But most of them are nitpicky, and writing them down makes me sound like a heartless fiend, so I’ll refrain from doing that at the moment. 

Rating: 5/5

Zombie talk:

As mentioned numerous times already, these were fast zombies. 

Gerry’s main goal in this movie was to find a way to defeat the zombies.  He travels around the world in an attempt to figure out where/how the virus originated.  The idea being that finding the origin would allow them to find a way to beat it.  There’s not really a cure, but he is attempting to find a way to defeat the zombies.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but I really loved what he found, and what that meant in the fight against zombies.  It was a cool little wrinkle in the film, and something I had never seen before.

This is also one of the few movies where the characters refer to the zombies as “zombies”.  Not really a surprise considering the source material, but still pretty cool to see.

I really loved some of the “preparing to face zombies” stuff they did here.  In an early scene, Gerry tapes some magazines to his forearms to ward off bites, and duct tapes a knife to the end of his rifle.  That stuff had me grinning like an idiot.

Again, please buy the audiobook as soon as possible.  I cannot stress this enough.

V/H/S/2

First things first.  I watched the first movie at some point last year and reviewed it.  You can read it here, or I can just sum it up for you: I didn’t like it very much.  I gave it 2/5, and I probably could’ve gone a little lower.  I don’t really have a desire to ever watch it again, if that tells you anything.

Needless to say, I wasn’t overly excited about watching this one.  But I’m a professional (like, an unpaid professional.  So I guess not really much of a professional at all), so I decided to put my head down and power through.

Let’s get right to it.

  

“Tape 49” [Directed by Simon Barrett]

We follow Larry (a private investigator) and Ayesha (his wife/girlfriend/P.I.C./whatever) as they investigate a missing college student.  They break into his house and find a very familiar sight (to us, at least): a bank of TVs and a stack of VHS tapes.  As the characters in this series are wont to do, Ayesha decided to start watching the tapes.

Like the first one, we catch glimpses of the house between the tapes.  The normal things happen.  We see a strange figure (presumably the missing student) moving in the doorways.  We see Ayesha being affected a little more by each tape.

As far as a wraparound story goes, it was pretty good.  There were even some genuinely creepy moments, which surprised me a little bit.  At the very least, it was a good set-up for the rest of the movies.

“Phase 1 Clinical Trials” [Directed by Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die, V/H/S “Tape 56”)]

A man who lost his eye in an accident receives a robotic eye.  The person who installs it tells him that it’s new technology, and there are bound to be glitches.  He may see strange things.

Nope.  Everything seems fine so far.

Of course, he immediately begins seeing strange things, in the form of an undead man and little girl in his house.  Naturally, these are not glitches, and he soon finds himself hiding in his bathroom while they try to break the door down.

He ends up running across a woman who had a similar experience when they fixed her hearing.  She began hearing sounds of dead people.  She tells him “the more you interact with them, the more they can hurt you.”  When the dead show back up, they attempt to ignore them by focusing on each other.

With sexy results

Of course, the dead will not be ignored so easily.

Especially the fat dead

The verdict: I really liked this story.  There were quite a few jump scares, and most of them worked really well.  I was on edge for the majority of this story. 

I really liked how they worked the camera into this.  We see what he sees.  It was a creative way to work the camera into the story, and it was very effective for scares.

  

“A Ride in the Park” [Directed by Eduardo Sanchez (The Blair Witch Project, Lovely Molly) & Gregg Hale]

A man goes on a bike ride with a camera on his helmet.  Before long, he comes across a bloodied woman.  The biker finds figures slowly shambling in his direction.  He turns back to the woman only to find that she has been turned into a zombie.  She bites him.  He falls.  He dies.  He reanimates.  He attacks a pair of bikers.  He munches on them.  They die.  They reanimate.  The big happy group of them attack a children’s birthday party in the park.

Just what I wanted, Mommy.  Corpses!

The verdict: Needless to say, once I saw this was going to turn into a POV zombie movie, I was thrilled.  And it delivered.  This was my favorite story of the bunch.  It didn’t really have the scares/tension of the other movies in this collection (it was the funniest one in the bunch), but it was really well done.  I absolutely loved this one.

“Safe Haven” [Directed by Gareth Huw Evans (The Raid: Redemption) & Timo Tjahjanto (ABCs of Death “L isfor Libido”)]

A documentary crew is granted permission to go inside the compound of an Indonesian cult, headed up by a strange man who refers to himself as “The Father”.  Once inside, the crew realizes that there might be more going on than mind control and the possible rape of underage girls (not that those things aren’t horrible.  Because they are.  I cannot stress this enough).  “Father” becomes crazed, violent, and borderline incoherent.  And then it all goes to hell.

The verdict: Even though I really liked this one, I had a few problems with it.  Nothing that stopped me from loving it in the end, but they were big enough problems that I feel the need to talk about them.

1. It started out really slow.  I could tell pretty quickly where the set-up was leading, but it still took a long time to get there. 

2. There was some drama between members of the documentary crew, but it felt pretty tacked on.  It didn’t add anything to the story.  In fact, it seemed to drag it down a bit.  This could’ve easily been cut.

3. There were some really terrible effects at the end of this one.  Laughably bad. 

“Chip, I’m gonna come at you like a spider monkey.  With a box cutter.”

Again, I really liked it, but these were issues that I had a hard time overlooking.  Still, once everything starting going bonkers towards the end, I thought it was a lot of fun.  Insane and fun.

“Slumber Party Alien Abduction” [Directed by Jason Eisener (Hobo With a Shotgun, ABCs of Death “Y is for Youngbuck”)]

The title does a pretty good job of telling you exactly what this story is.  A group of elementary school/middle school boys are having a slumber party at the house of one of the boys.  His older sister is having a slumber party of her own, mainly involving lake partying and sexytime.  The brother torments his sister.  The sister torments her brother.  Then the aliens show up.

We want to party with youuuuuuuu…

[Slight SPOILER ALERT]

The dog dies.  You’ve been warned.

[END SPOILER]

The verdict: I liked this one a lot.  The only problem I had with this (besides the spoiler listed above) was the noise that hit when the aliens showed up.  It was a loud, long horn, and it was a bit much after the second time.

Still, that’s a minor issue.  Once the aliens show up, this story is relentless.

Here’s how I have ranked all the stories in this collection:

1. “A Ride in the Park”

2. “Safe Haven”

3. “Slumber Party Alien Abduction”

4. “Phase 1 Clinical Trials”

5. “Tape 49”

Overall, I loved this movie.  At first I thought I only liked it because I had lowered my expectations after the V/H/S, but that wasn’t the case at all.  This is a great collection of films.  Not a dud in the bunch.  And, thankfully, the only sharking we see is a short clip from the first movie.

For the most part, this was a collection that was pretty scary and tense throughout, with more than a little humor sprinkled in for good measure.  This was a tremendous anthology film.  Highly recommended.

Rating: 5/5