Have you seen Dead Snow or DØD SNØ? Do you think Nazis make good bad guys? Do you think Zombies are great monsters? You need to see this then. Basically, it's a teen horror movie. Put a bunch of kids in an isolated house and systematically kill them off. But the director seems to know what he's doing. . . or seemed to at least have had a great love for that type of film because he kept in all the things that make teen horrors fun and left out all the crap that slows them down or makes them stupid. They don't really explain why the Nazis have remained preserved other than they are imbued with evil. They don't try to teach you something "important" about "humanity" or try to make you "identify yourself" in a particular character. It's just a good horror flick that doesn't try to be more than it is. And if you're into having a good time with a movie, you should like it very much. Scandinavians have been making some pretty awesome movies lately when it comes to horror. I mean, have you seen Let the Right One In?
Try watching it with these frozen brrraaaains!
If you like fun, and you like zombies, and you hate Nazis, you'll love this movie. Check it out. Here's the trailer:
George A. Romero is doing a Q&A at BAM, and I wish I could go. I hate that things like this are so far away from me these days. I'm really kind of heart broken that I can't go to this. I would trade in all the concerts I've ever been to to go to this.
Have you seen, High Plains Drifter? Clint Eastwood plays "Nameless Stranger," returning from the dead to kill everyone? What's not to love?
There's nothing not to love. Basically, Clint Eastwood is a zombie or a ghost who rapes, kills, paints a whole town red, renames it Hell, and takes his sweet, sweet revenge. There are some funny parts, some parts that hold up over time and still make me cringe, and parts that reach across centuries to criticize our current societal situation.
When people talk about Clint Eastwood, they bring up a lot of his films, and this one doesn't always come up. I'm not sure why; it's one of my all time favorite westerns. It seriously pushes some envelopes while adhering to a sort of western opera/fantasy that people have always seemed to love. It doesn't stoop for easy symbols of good and evil, and there isn't much room for a tale of real redemption (though there is a "little"), and no one's off the hook—maybe not even the viewer.
Here are my five favorite westerns in no particular order. If you like any of them, and you haven't see High Plains Drifter, check it out:
A western with zombies and cowboys and Indians and forts and a theme song? Seriously? Makes me want to say "Whhhaaaaat? Yeeeaaah!"
Even if you hate Chris Katan, don't you want to see this?
Like all intentionally over-funny zombie movies, this one has its problems, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the best zombie flicks I've seen in a long time. It has a few great zombie deaths, and some parts that were truly hilarious. There's at least one fantastic jump-scare, and the ending is delicious. Some of the music is a little annoying for its levity and seems a little amateurish for how big everything else seems in this movie, but the theme song is a catchy little ear worm that's got a beat you can dance to.
Once again, the trailer makes this look way dumber than it is. But trust me, you'll love it.
I watched The Lost Boys last night. I got very nostalgic. Can you believe Cory Haim is dead? Can you believe I used to think his hair and Kiefer Southerland's hair was the coolest hair anyone could ever have?
This movie is still one of the best movies of its time. It's one of the very few movies with a perfect soundtrack, one of the very few vampire movies worth watching, and one of the very few good Joel Schumacher films.
The way the vampires fly is fantastic because you don't see much of it, so it doesn't look cheezey. The gore is choppy and scary without looking fake and lame or overboard or gratuitous. The story is timeless and reads well on many levels. It makes me miss Santa Cruz in particular but California in general. It's strange to have grown up in a place that one sees in films all the time. I think most people don't know what that feels like. Movies take people to places they've never seen most of the time, but I often feel like they're taking me home. This film still has very cozy place in my heart. . . maybe even cozier than it used to.
It might also be the movie that gave me my motorcycle fetish. I need a motorcycle.
Have you seen Night of the Living Dead? A hand full of people hunker down in a farmhouse to weather the zombie apocalypse? That's a story worth telling!
"They're coming for you Barbara" is the catch phrase of the movie. Some people say it's the catch phrase that started the popularity zombie movie. I'm not sure about that, but who am I to argue? There are bigger things to argue about with this flick, so let's do that.
I've heard a lot of times that George A. Romero wanted to "say something" about race relations with his 1968 movie. Never mind. Who cares? I don't see anything there, and I'm kind of sick of people looking at movies with authorial intent in mind. Sooo, you know what's awesome?
Ben kills zombies with a tire iron! Barbara is killed by her own brother, who's the first person to fall victim to the zombie scourge. Radioactive dust from space is what's causing all this? Space scared the crap out of people in the 60's. Isn't that quaint? What's the safest spot in your house should the zombie apocalypse occur? Discuss! That should be an assignment in high school classes. Everybody should understand the strongholds of one's domicile. The zombies are scary as hell. They don't make noise really, they aren't fast, they don't have a ton of makeup, but they're haunting. An ending that makes you go "man!"
If you haven't seen this movie, you owe it to yourself to see it. If you have seen it, watch it again. There are things in there that still surprise me even after having seen it a dozen times. It's like Hamlet that way.
All in all, I like this zombie movie over all the others I've seen, and I've seen a lot. There's something to its simplicity and its subtlety that lends it some class. It's funny in its own way without trying to be funny, and for the most part the story's told straight. It trusts its audience, and it trusts its actors, and I think, though it in many ways redefined its genre, trusted its genre in a way that most zombie and horror movies don't.
Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme reprising their roles as zombie super-soldiers? Hell yes!
Some might think that this looks stupid. It does. I admit it. But do you remember when you were a kid and watched the first Universal Soldier movie in the theater? Do you remember when the name "Roland Emmerich" didn't turn your stomach? I do. And even though this looks unwatchable, I gave it a try for the heroes of my youth, and I wasn't let down. In fact, it was a really, surprisingly good action movie.
You have to have seen the first film to enjoy much of the tension between Dolph and Van Damme, but that's OK. You can also just enjoy the awesome action. It's made like an 80's action movie director watched The Children of Men and went back in time to blow some shit up and do some karate and some skull smashing.
If that doesn't sound awesome, how about a clone bitches? How about a clone of a zombie being brought to life to kill a ten foot eastern European terrorist? How about a zombie clone who can kind of remember his former life just long enough to try and kill some kids and get his skull blown out by a shotgun shoved down a hole a pipe made in his forehead?
Not enough? How about Van Damme killing everyone with a machine gun until he runs out of bullets and is blown up a little, then pulling out what looks like an automatic glock (you saw one for the first time in one of the Matrix movies and wet yourself at the coolness of it) and killing everyone he sees until that runs out of bullets, then pulling out a Rambo knife and killing mad fools with that until the camera is covered in blood? Did I mention all that's one shot? I didn't? well it pretty much is, and if you can't get behind that, I don't know what to tell you...
...lemme see...
How about there's another universal soldier played by a guy whose middle name is "the pit-bull"? Dude's bigger than the aforementioned terrorist, and he's got a retractable sword thing that comes out of his body armor, and he kills people you actually care about, so that makes him a bad guy. Maybe he's the main bad guy. But with Dolph running around, who cares about him?
And the whole thing starts with a crazy car chase/kidnapping. Hell yes. This is the best zombie super soldier movie ever!
I don't get why this movie was so poorly advertised. It's a shame because I think that most people I know would at least passively really enjoy it. It's not a brainy movie, but it's sufficiently scary for what it is, and it's one of the most enjoyable flicks I've seen in a while.
Have you seen Against the Dark? Stephen Seagal killing Zompires? I'm in! Who wouldn't be?
You have to imagine how thrilled I was to hear that Steven Seagal had decided to go this way with his career. What could be cooler than Steven Seagal slaying zombies with a sword? Well, it turns out almost anything else. This thing was absolute crap.
Steven Seagal is bloated and bored. If you thought his other performances were uninspired, you ain't seen nothing. He's hardly in it anyway, though. The other characters might have been cool if they'd been developed at all. When they die, you don't care at all. There's nothing interesting about them. The thing's riddled with plot holes big enough for Mack Trucks. The MacGuffin Device is that the characters have to escape a hospital before the military blasts it with nukes. They all come in from different points, but there's only one way out somehow. For some reason Seagall really wants to save the people, and he's willing to let all his goth-chick slayer helpers die to do it. He's kind of sad when one of them dies, but it's too lame to really register. You never learn any of the slayers' names, I don't think. The characters call the creatures vampires, but they basically act like zombies, and they're credited as such in the end credits. Is this just semantics? Nah. It's as if the nature of the creatures was an afterthought or maybe was changed when marketers decided that vampires were "in" this season. It's annoying and sloppy.
You'd think this would all be worth it if there were at least some kind of cool one-liner or catch phrase or just some good-ol'-fashioned Seagal comedy, but there's only one, and it's so ridiculous that the belly laugh just forces you to realize you're wasting your time. I wish they'd gotten a real horror director who took the film too seriously. Accidental comedy would have been tolerable then. . . and there needs to be a couple genuine scares here. There are none. Yawn
Check out this preview, it's much more exciting than the film itself:
It's really good, and I can see why it's getting such good reviews. I saw it last night with my friend Jeff in Harrisonburg, which happens to be the only place in 50 miles playing the film. I'd think that they would market it in small city areas more aggressively since it takes place in a small town, but I'm not sure what film production companies are up to these days.
It's a remake of a Romero film, and George A. Romero produced it, and that means it's got to be at least pretty good. The zombies are super scary, though not pure Romero-style. They're kind of a mix between Return of the Living Dead and 28 Days Later. They're fast, they're ugly, but sometimes they're smarter than you'd expect. The characters are amazingly well-developed, considering that the action begins in the first scene of the film. The story is believable. The relationships are as real as can be. There's even a scene in which the soldiers are humanized, and it's touching.
This all makes for a fairly scary movie and a good time out, but I have a couple nits to pick :
Nothing is known about how "the virus" is passed from one person to another. The problem with the virus-turns-us-to-zombies bit is that we all know a little too much about viruses at this point to play it fast and loose. Dude stabs a zombie in the neck with a knife that has passed through the back of his hand, mixes all up in the zombie lady's blood, and he's not infected by the end? Come now, I can understand not having full-blown zombie, but at least Z.I.V. and a hunger problem?
If the military was going to kill everyone indiscriminately from the beginning, why bother with the ruse of sending a bunch of soldiers in to sweep the town, risking the secret getting out? I mean, they put boots on cars, separate families, tie people to beds, and then they torch the healthy people anyway and light the place up with a sub-nuke. Wha? Seems like they could have saved themselves some trouble.
Speaking of the military, I know that militariness is a major part of our lives these days, but I'm kind of bored with military stuff being in every movie I see. Everywhere I look, there are killing machines and the military "controlling us" stories. Are we really that afraid of soldiers these days? Remember when every movie was about clones? Before that it was robots. Before that it was diseases. Before that it was space-threats. Now everything's about soldiers killing people. It's getting tiresome.
I have never played this game, but here is a great article about it and games in general. I found out about the article at BoingBoing. I need to find Typing of the Dead 2 for the Mac.
This little iPhone game destroyed many a minute as I waited for Mary to count out at the café or waited for people late for meetings. It also made me late for work once.
It starts with a really good sample of a scream and dares you to tap the screen. When you do, you become a toothless redneck with a penchant for busting heads and robbing houses. You have to kill zombies and raid homes for money and ammo. The money buys you an extremely fun range of weapons from chainsaws to flamethrowers, from rocket launchers to magnums.
This is what it looks like when you kill a zombie:
The zombies get a little different, faster and stronger, and your weapons get increasingly more entertaining and difficult to use. The grenade launcher takes some getting used to, for example. Eventually there are so many zombies rising from the suburban sidewalks to eat your brains that it's impossible to continue. I wonder if there is an ending. I can't seem to come near to beating the Zombieville USA. But balancing the two commodities, money and bullets is interesting; which one is more important in a zombie apocalypse? It depends on what level you're on and how much life you have left.
This is what it looks like when the zombies kill you:
The animation is awesome, the soundtrack is quite good, the sound effects are pretty perfect, and the gameplay, as far as iPhone games, is nonpareil. The gore kind of reminds me of Metal Slug; remember that game? When you die, it tells you what level you got to and how many zombies you sent to hell. I've killed over 500 at level 20.
There's no saving your game and no continuing, which kind of blows, but the game's certainly worth a few bucks and a few hours of your life.
If you've ever wondered what it would be like to have a zombie's head in a jar, you can get the iPhone application that simulates such an incredible thing for super cheap. Actually, Zombie Nombie is even better than a zombie head in a jar. You can play with him, dress him up, and tease and torture him. Never before has anyone been able to get so close to a zombie head without becoming infected. You can even attach a timer to his forehead so as not to burn your noodles. It's the greatest kitchen timer ever. The more you play with Zombie Nombie, the more crap you can stick on him. Hipster glasses, eye patches, mustaches, false noses, flowers, an assortment of hats, and other accessories are available. One of the hats says "I heart Brains" and one of the mustaches makes Zombie Nombie look strikingly like John Waters. 50's-style horror music plays in the background, and if you shake your iPhone, the background image changes. The only thing he says is "BRAINS" in ways that range from expectant to angry. He kind of groans too. And sometimes he snarls before he forgets why he's mad. It's embarrassing how much I like to play spin the zombie. I wonder if Bruce Campbell has the high score.
You know what happens to those huge structures on tops of mountains that have big microwave receivers on them and tons of antennae? They become the settings of zombie movies, of course.
While camping, this one dude tries to get into his virginal GF's panties, but no dice--she wants to wait. She won't even drink a little champagne! A comet burns up in the Earth's atmosphere and rudely leaves its dust everywhere. Then zombies come out of nowhere and start biting chumps.
The opening zombie scene is brutal and exciting and makes you think, "hold the phone; is this going to be incredible?" But it gets pretty heavy-handed and lame. If it weren't for the excruciating gore, it would be crap.
See, people are zombies because they have aliens living in their sexual organs that are growing fast! You won't find out why many of them are zombie/alien free until the very end, when some seriously sick shit starts going down. The reluctant abstaining-from-sex hero has to cut open testicles with a pocket knife to investigate and finds homunculus-looking creatures that get bigger and attack. It's all quite gruesome, but the finale is even more so.
The story attempts to do some choir-preaching with a gay tough-guy, a porn actress mother, a Christian zealot hypocrite, pregnant virgins, a strong leading woman, and a big fat republican guy with a gun. It's all a little too obvious for the movie it started out being.
As far as zombie movies go, this is a really good one to laugh and squirm with, but the opening close call with the zombies sets standards high. So, it kind of nukes the fridge a little early.
The difference between "Messiah of Evil" a.k.a. "Dead People" and other lowish budget horror movies from the 70's is that "Messiah of Evil" will scare the hell out of you.
This artistic film reminded me of very recent Goddard flicks, and it was utterly surprising how intense this zombie movie really is.
If you think that Danny Boyle invented quick zombies, forget that. These zombies run and sneak and are quite clever. When they're out of meat, they go to the super market. When there's no one in town to eat, they wait for tourists in movie theaters. If they run out of bodies, they go to the next town, slit people's throats and bring them home for their friends to eat. Missing is a clumsy attempt to explain the zombie outbreak. There's a legend and a dark messenger that has something to do with the Donner party, but there's nothing foolishly scientific that wastes the audience's time or insults their intelligence. In fact, part of what's awesome about "Messiah of Evil" is that so little is explained. The film leaves many dots unconnected and doesn't bother asking you to connect them but expects you, rather, to just accept that some things won't make sense. . . like being frightened by a zombie movie.
Some websites call this a vampire movie, even though there is no mention of vamps and no long teeth or bats. The zombies are pretty quiet (occasionally they howl off camera), and their eyes bleed. The filmmakers also made "Howard the Duck," a slightly different type of movie.
Anyway, as far as zombie movies go, "Messiah of Evil" is a winner. Plus, it's in public domain, so you can find it for free or on the cheap very easily.
I think it might be the scariest zombie movie I've seen so far.
Imagine a world where a Nazi was luring American admirals to a little island where he would use transmogrification, zombification, and plain old Nazi nastiness to learn American super secrets during the big one.
Of course, he also has a hot niece and a hot wife.
And there's also plenty of Irish and black racist jokes to go around.
You would be watching KING OF THE ZOMBIES. Somehow the naivete of the movie made the racism in the thing a bit eye-rolling "they didn't know any better back then." Of course, they knew better, but KING OF THE ZOMBIE is certainly a product of its times. At times it's hokey, and at others it's as spooky as Skooby-Doo.
This is the trailer for "Onechanbara" the movie. I found a bit torrent for it and watched it a while ago, and is it is as good as it looks? Do Japanese bikini cowgirls killing zombies make for a good movie? Well, yes.
This film mixes Japanese monster movie camp, samurai movie fantasy, and sexploitation flick lustiness quite well. You have to keep a verry open mind when it comes to zombie movies, but I don't want to tell you how to watch them. If you don't know, you might never.
If you think that the idea of a bikini clad samurai cowgirl hunting zombies with a schoolgirl sister and another woman who has a shotgun with unlimited rounds and supernatural aim, then watch as they work their way to the top of the foodchain to take out the mad scientist who made this mess. Then gape at the irony of the realization that they were greater enemies to each other than a world full of zombies ever could be.
The sun's out. It's very livable in Staunton right now. Time for trainwreck union adventure. Went with Encyclopedia Brown and 10 across Matt, hopped a fence into the cemetery, and looked for a surname with a Q in it. Guess who won and what the name was.
Bikini Zombie Slayers. This makes me want to buy a video game console. This game comes out this month in USA on Wii and XBox 360. I'd like to review it. Oneechanbara. I like that title. Something about sisters. I don't know what bara means. I will not look it up. Bikini Zombie Slaying Sisters. Nice.
A Norwegian Movie about Zombie Nazis? Achtung!
Try watching it with these frozen brrraaaains!
Ben kills zombies with a tire iron!
