Zombie-Thon: October 2009

[ScottH]

Bravo Sirs, you are indeed heroes one and all.



I did write one up for Dance of the Dead on Friday but I was drunk and forgot how to imbed videos.

[GregMcduck]

We should do this every year, but with a different monster each time. Next year could be vampires, then werewolves, etc.

Anyway, even though I only got one movie in, this was a lot of fun.

[Compound]

Even though the month is over, I still have more to post. I'm a rebel, Dottie.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/kkYwvpFckLc" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/kkYwvpFckLc</a>


Days of Darkness
A couple returns from a camping trip to discover that a comet strike has turned many people into bloodthirsty zombies. They, along with other survivors, must try to survive at an abandoned radar station.

Well, this film takes inspiration from a whole bunch of zombie films. Comet strike? Night of the Comet. Abandoned military station? Day of the Dead. There's stuff from Species in there too. They toss in pretty much every rationale for the zombies rising as well, before finally ending up with a unique one.

Anyway, the cast is almost uniformly unlikeable. The film starts off with the standard "Toss a bunch of random people into a bad situation" and instead of working together to survive, they instead start bickering like it's Thanksgiving dinner at the Bluths'. Add in the stereotypes. Gay guy. Porn star. Religious nut. Action film guy. Black guy in a pink shirt. (All the same character, BTW.) It's standard zombie stuff for the first half, at which point the real rationale behind the zombies is revealed and the film goes insane.  Surprisingly, once that happens, it gets a little bit more enjoyable.

Best Part
The fight scenes are competently done.

Worst Part
Seriously folks. Can we have a moratorium  on "A religious person in a crisis sees it as a sign from God and does everything possible to make the situation worse?" Please? It's hideously overdone. 

Best Part for Bob
You know what keeps people from becoming zombies? Booze. It's the solution to the zombie apocalypse!

[Compound]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/Q1zodCpoYgw" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/Q1zodCpoYgw</a>


Vampires vs. Zombies
Vampires and zombies square off in an all out battle! Or not. the plot involves Dad, daughter and acquaintance  looks for acquaintance's daughter, who has been captured by the Queen vampire. And Queenie  (Brinke Stevens) wants to turn the other daughter into a vampire as well. Oh, and every once in a while, a zombie shows up. Towards the end, the director decides to toss in a M. Night twist and suggest that it's all just a dream of a lesbian mental patient, who is promptly eaten by zombies. Or is it?

Yeah, this is a mess. The zombies are pretty tangential to the story and the vampire plot is a mess. Skip, skip, skip it.

Best Scene:
The random appearance of a mysterious vampire slayer who rolls into a convenience store and then disappears from the movie.

Worst Scene:
The whole "Yeah, bored with this. It's all really in her mind!" bit. Dude, make a decent movie first, then complicate it.  You're trying to bake a seven layer cake with an egg, a half cup of flour and a Kit Kat Bar. Try for something less ambitious.

Funniest Scene
None. Seriously, this isn't quite bottom of the zombie film barrel, but it's not a good film at all.

[Compound]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/pQEC_91KkHo" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/pQEC_91KkHo</a>

Onechanbara: Samurai Bikini Squad
A mysterious bikini clad zombie slayer attempts to find her sister, who is lost among the walking dead. And blood is involved. A lot of it.

Based on the video game, which didn't have much of a plot either, this is pretty self explanatory. Zombie survivors try and survive while looking for a mysterious figure who killed someone's father and holds sis hostage. Or something. The movie's plot isn't much deeper than the game's plot, and that's pretty shallow. The acting is pretty substandard. (And when I can tell that someone's acting badly in another language, that says something. ) Aya's sidekicks are almost complete ciphers. This one mourns for her daughter and shoots things. The other one is really fat. The director also seems to have grabbed a page of two from the Uwe Boll school of video game film making so a lot of blood gets on the camera lens, just like in the game! Ugh. Anyway, skip it. There are better Japanese zombie films.

Best Scene:
There are a few scenes where the zombie slaying ramps up to proper levels with katanas swinging all about the place and guns a-blazing.

Worst Scene:
Where female sidekick dies. It's such a memorable scene that I immediately forgot about it until the end of the film where I noticed that she wasn't around, so I went back to check. Yep. She died.

Funniest Scene:
Can't remember anything noteworthy.

[Plastic Self-Cleaning Duck]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/KIWsMKZt3Eg&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/KIWsMKZt3Eg&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1</a>