Zombie-Thon: October 2009

[mrbasehart]

...

I actually have a copy of Mansion Of The Living Dead around here somewhere. It's been awhile since i've watched it, but all i remember is a few naked women staying at a beach resort as they're murdered. Definitely some false advertising there. Although i have to admit, i wasn't completely bummed out by what i did see.

The main lady, Lina Romay, is very attractive, but the gang rape sequences weren't the funnest things in the world. 

[Rude]

...

http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/M-cIjPOJdFM

Zombieland

I know that i've been throwing spoilers out left and right in this thread. But unlike any of these other films so far, Zombieland is still in theaters. And i don't want to ruin any specific scenes for anyone just yet. So i won't say too much, other than i really enjoyed it.

-Rude

[Rude]

...

http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/sNMbzM21i5c

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

A trendy, douchebag art dealer practically kidnaps a young woman who accidentally ran over his motorcycle. Together they drive to her sister's home only to find themselves tangled up in a murder investigation. Meanwhile, a farm machine using some sort of ultrasonic technology inadvertently wakes the dead of the same small town.

Best Scene: I hated the main character, and thought he was pretty insufferable. So i actually enjoyed watching the police gun him down.

Worst Scene: Trying to pass off cute little babies as blood thirsty monsters by smearing fake blood on their tiny little fingers.

Grab Bag: Drug use, anti-science environmentalism, Satanism, fascism... this movie touches on them all rather clumsily.

-Rude

[Rude]

...

http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/5lzy5GJVT2Mhttp://www.youtube.com/watch/v/7bFoUkfyljw

The Dead Next Door

This was a huge, steaming pile of shite. I don't even want to describe the plot because i might inadvertently make it sound interesting, or worth your time somehow. As an alternative i've included a song of the same name by Billy Idol. Seriously... you could watch a clip from the "movie" or watch a still picture of Billy Idol as the song plays. I recommend the song.

-Rude

[Compound]

Automaton Transfusion

Yeah, that ending... big, big problem. I also had problems with the character's cluelessness, "Hmm. A thousand zombies seem to be running towards us. Should we hop in our SUV right behind us and drive away, or run randomly through the streets of a city where we don't live?", the complete lack of warning of a zombie outbreak, (Seriously, that town seemed to have at least 100k people. The zombies got them all and the suburb without anyone giving any sort of warning?) and the hyper zombies. I can accept the dead popping back to life. But zombies punching through humans? No. The human arm doesn't have that much strength. And I demand that my reanimated dead follow the laws of physics!

[Compound]

The Rising Dead
After the zombie apocalypse, a band of VIPs attempts to escape to an underground fallout shelter to survive. But their plane crashes, for inexplicable reasons, and the few survivors must make their way to the shelter on foot.

I'll give them points for trying, but wow. What a trainwreck. Where to start? Firstly, the acting is pretty bad. Not zombie film movie bad, but normal movie bad. The characters are idiots. Look, the zombies have been around for quite a while, we're told. But these folks no survival skills. For example, one of the survivors is a kid with a walker and another is a six year old girl. And the adult characters constantly wander off and leave them defenseless. "Oh, they'll be fine if a zombie shows up." Right. And those kids? They decide to wander aimlessly around outside. After all, what could possibly happen? (Head palm) To make matters worse, the adult survivors we find out later in the film are a highly respected Secret Service agent (Who somehow only has about a dozen shots for his gun. Nice planning there.) and the other survivor is the First Lady, who shows about the  same intelligence as Spongebob. Ugh. And all of these characters show no survival instincts at all in the film. The makeup's pretty bad too.  And the final part is just thrown together.  Still, it's unique and despite its flaws, it is watchable, which puts it head of a lot of zombie films.

Best Scene
There's not any scene that really rises above the rest of the film. It's a big plateau of film making. If I had to pick one, I'd have to say the World's Stupidest First Lady getting eaten by her zombie son.

Worst Scene
The ending. It seems that they couldn't find a good ending for their zombie film, so they grabbed a bit from Wrath of Khan.

Weirdest Bit
Casting. The secret service agent is almost a dead ringer for Tommy Wiseau. (And he has an inexplicable foreign accent as well.) And the President's son looks, well, like Barack Obama, which is odd as the film was made in 2006-7 when the President was a nobody. Here's proof:


And hey, lil' Barack smokes too!

[ScottotD]

It seems that they couldn't find a good ending for their zombie film, so they grabbed a bit from Wrath of Khan.

Which bit?  Zombie fan-dance?

[Rude]

...

I'm running a little behind on the zombie movies this week, but i'm not slacking off. In a few minutes i'll be heading out the door to see Alice Cooper's Theatre Of Death, and who knows what kinds of monsters will be in that show!

And originally, i had planned on seeing Brain-Dead Alive!!! on Halloween to sort of cap off the season. Well, that got moved up to this weekend instead. So that should be awesome. Can't wait to get completely soaked in blood... should be some good times at that show, and definitely plenty of zombie action!

Anyway, i should be back on the actual movies soon enough. It's only been two days, and Compound picked up the slack yesterday! I haven't really checked, but i think we're pretty damn close to one zombie movie a day. Any takers for tonight? 

-Rude

[RobtheBarbarian]

I'll see what I can scrounge up.

[Compound]

I've got a half dozen zombie films to toss in. I'll do another review in a sec.

[Compound]

Hey! Tyrant! Pay attention to this one!

Necroville
After losing their jobs at a video store, a pair of slackers in a town infested with vampires, zombies, werewolves, fishmen and chartered accountants become monster exterminators. Aside from dealing with scores of monsters, they must also deal with a gold digging girlfriend and her ex-boyfriend, who has become a vampire.

A low budget, but not badly done little zombie and a whole mess of other stuff film. Unlike in other films (I'm looking at you, Vampires vs. Zombies), the zombies actually have a fairly large place in the film. The basic synopsis is "Dante and Randall become Ghostandzombiebusters." Kinda. Anyway, the film's fairly watchable. The writing isn't Kevin Smith level. Or even Zack Snyder. But it's a lot better than, say, the writing in Motocross Zombies or Zombies Gone Wild. And believe me, writing that doesn't cause me to try and gouge my eardrums out is a rarity in many zombie films. And the setting is rather strange. There are enough creatures in town so that advertising for their extermination is a good idea. And panhandlers are asking for ammo, not cash. But yet, the video stores and delis are still open. It's very "Yeah. Zombies. Still have to go to work." It's not all sunshine though. The makeup sucks.  The zombies basically have blue paint on their faces. The vampires look okay. (There's not much to do that can mess fangs up. Yet I've seen it done.) The werewolves, oh, dear lord.



Yeah.

The blood effects are fine. I didn't notice them being especially graphic or embarrassingly bad. They're just serviceable. The acting's passable. None of them are Olivier, but they all give as good a performance as you'd find in the average horror film. Even if the lead actor seems to be channeling Matthew Lilliard. Still , I liked it. Not spectacular, but a decent 90 minutes. (Netflix claims 2 and a half hours on the DVD sleeve, which is thankfully inaccurate.)

Oh, and Tyrant? The Town of Necroville is just outside of Albuquerque. This may be the only New Mexico-set zombie film.

Best Scene
While not the most exciting scene the one I liked best was the lead up to the fight with the head vampire. Not for dazzling special effects or for fight choreography, but instead because it reminded me of an old Warner Brothers cartoon.

Worst Scene
Those werewolves. Ugh. One better makeup job would be preferable to 5 badly done ones. Plus they all look like teen Wolf, and that's not a plus for a horror film.

Oddest scene
Ahem. S&M zombieplay. I'm not going to elaborate.

Most Disturbing Scene
The head vampire snacking on a baby's skull. Although the S&M zombies come close.

[RobtheBarbarian]

Kung-Fu Zombie

Just as awesome as it sounds. It is at times genuinely funny, completely bizarre and hilariously bad.

A thug pays a monk to raise some corpses to do the grunt work for his revenge plot, but it all goes to hell and the thug ends up skewered on punjee sticks in a tiger pit when the guy he wanted to kill, a kung fu student named Pang, shoves him in. The thug then becomes a ghost and follows the monk around making his life miserable until he puts him back in a body.

Pang's father is also making Pang's life miserable, training him so that he'll be able to fight a guy named Long who has a blood feud with Pang's family. Long does indeed show up, is killed with kung fu by Pang, and turned in for the reward. Pang's father celebrates by getting wasted and having a heart attack.

Thug and Monk, who've been roving the city looking for a body to steal first try to use Long's body. They fail miserably, but seeing Pang burying his father, decide to dig him up and use him. It doesn't go quite right, and Thug ends up in the father's body but is all rotten and nasty looking. Monk takes off because Thug is pissed about the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Long, who was resurrected as some kind of zombie/vampire thing by accident, is running around doing hilariously evil things like tackling a hobo 50 yards through midair and kicking his fucking head off. He gets a red and black Dracula cape and the James Bond theme plays whenever he shows up. Somehow Pang and Draculong end up fighting one last time, leading to Long bursting into flames and the movie ending.

I really liked this movie. It's really endearing, in no small part due to the English dubbing, which is full of character. Pang in particular sounds like Billy West doing Stimpy.

You can watch the whole thing on youtube!

Best scene: Oh God. Long clotheslines this one guy so hard he does cartwheels around Long's arm six times in midair.

Worst scene: Pang's buddy is kind of irritating, but he's the guy getting clotheslined.

Most bizarre scene: A Buddhist monk shows up out of nowhere during the final battle, sticks a bunch of calligraphic scrolls on Pang and slides him back at Long like a shuffleboard puck.

[Compound]

Hey, let's go for two!

Yeah, that trailer sucks. Sorry.

Dead and Deader
Dean Cain is in the special forces and he and his unit are sent to investigate a science facility. In Cambodia. Yeah, not really a science powerhouse that Cambodia. Anyway, the scientists there have been infected by radioactive scorpions which cause them to return from the dead and crave human flesh. Yes, you read that correctly. Cain somehow only becomes half zombie... yes, that's how the synopsis describes it, and goes on a hunt to stop the infected members of his unit, along with a random hot chick and black comic relief sidekick.

Let's get this one out of the way. About halfway through watching this, I began to get a strong "Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie" vibe from it. Afterwards, I confirmed that was indeed the original source. So, don't get your hopes too high. However, production-wise it's one of the better Sci-Fi originals. The FX aren't graphic, due to the TV film nature of the film, but they're serviceable. The acting is better than the Sci-fi original baseline. The writing's okay. And the film makers tossed in a number of references to other horror films as well.  But while it's not as bad as, say, Mansquito, it's still a Sci-fi channel original. Which is better than most zombie films, but that doesn't make it a good film. The plot's a mess. There's a big setup for why the radioactive zombie scorpions (shakes head) are being made, but the last third of the film could have been avoided with a sedative and a blood sample. And earlier in the film, Cain's Army superiors don't believe his story about the dead coming back to life. Except Cain has no pulse and a room temperature body temp. Even an Army Medic will note that something's amiss there. Not to mention a doctor who previously started to perform an autopsy on him is still around and can confirm the weirdness of Cain's biology. Lousy writing there. Cain's sidekicks are right out of central casting: comic relief sidekick and romantic interest. Yawn. The zombies only really come out one or two at a time until the finale. Oh, and they make a few too many superhero jokes. 'Cause you know, he played Superman. Ha. Anyway, not the worst zombie film I've ever seen. Heck,  it's in the upper half of the ones that I've seen this week.  But that's not a very high bar. I'd skip it unless you're really desperate for a zombie film that you haven't seen.

Best Scene
An early scene where Cain and the not yet a sidekick sidekick are fighting a zombie in the kitchen. Nicely choreographed, effective use of scenery and things get progressively worse until stuff hits the fan.

Worst Scene
Cain, hot chick and sidekick trying on clothes after escaping from the authorities. Yes, hot chick strips as far down as Sci-Fi would allow (And for Dean Cain fans, he's shirtless too) but the film drops to a crawl while they do so, and the scene goes on and on and on... Plus Cain ends up dressed like Sonny Crockett and that look doesn't work in this decade.

Ewwwest Scene
A cougar putting the moves on Black Comic Relief Sidekick. Neither person in this pairing is particularly sexually appealing.

Still Shaking My Head Scene
Radioactive zombie scorpions. Really? (And yes, I've played Dead Rising. Those made sense.)

[RobtheBarbarian]

Hey, I have that movie!

It tries to be a comedy, but it's pretty obnoxious. It's full of pretentious movie buff shit, like that scene in the bar when the love interest quizzes the other two about TIE fighters and when two army guys driving a truck talk about James Bond actors. I listened to the commentary, too, and the writers really are just fucking in love with themselves.

[Rude]

...

Kick ass! Three in a row... well played. 

...

http://www.youtube.com/watch/v/yfDUv3ZjH2k

Shaun Of The Dead

You know it. You love it. And i think that it's one of the best zombie movies of all time! Yeah, it's even better than Beyonce's new music video. And with just about a week left in October, i think i've realized that i most enjoy the zombie films with a little humor in them. I still love the straight forward horror, but these kinds of movies are always good for some fun.

So is that a legit genre these days then, the "zom com" or "zombedy" or whatever? I mean, there's also the romantic zombie comedy, so is that a "rom zom com" or something? I think i want to see a science fiction zombie movie. Like... zombies on a spaceship or something. Is there such a thing yet; anyone got a recommendation?

Best Scene: "Oh! He's got an arm off!"

Worst Scene: None that i can think of. Although beating a zombie with pool cues in sync to Queen... that scene went on a little long for the joke.

Personal Trivia: I've mentioned it before, but i went as Shaun for Halloween a few years back. Got mad props on the street that night!

-Rude