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Zombies

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14:39 / 24.08.04

Anybody out there a Zombie-lover?

I've never really seen a bonafide Zombie movie (people tell me that 28 DAYS LATER doesn't count), and I'm wondering if there are any out there that are worth watching and why.

What's the appeal of this genre? What are the main themes and subtext? I'm trying to understand what they're supposed to represent and why they're supposed to be scary.

What's so great about Zombies/Zombie movies?

15:33 / 24.08.04

Ahh Zombies, the greatest of all movie monsters. You have to start with Romero's "Dead" trilogy, they are the quintessential zombie movies, especially Night of the Living Dead. Other good zombie movies include "Re-animator" though it's a bit more comic horror. The recent remake of "Dawn of the Dead" is worth checking out, though it is in no way a classic.
I personally feel that the key to a good zombie movie is the apocalyptic nature of the zombie threat. They are everywhere, and though it is easy enough to escape one zombie, there is nowhere safe from them. Also the horror of being eaten alive is very primitive and effective one.
Otherwise you can find a thread on zombies here

16:29 / 24.08.04

28 Days Later does so count.

The essential series are probably George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (followed by Dawn and Day... the remakes aren't nearly as good), the more punk-rock/satirical Return of the Living Dead movies and, to a lesser degree, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy. I say to a lesser degree because those are more about interdimensional horrors and demons than about a zombie menace -- the zombies are a symptom, not the cause. They do have many of the hallmarks of a good zombie movie, though -- the main one being the transformation of a loved one into a mindless agent of destruction.

Those are the American classics. There's also a whole world of Italian zombie films out there. They tend more to surreality (and I mean that literally... they're self-consciously dream-like and artfully transgressive). I'm really only familiar with Cemetery Man (Rupert Everett as absurdly existential undertaker during zombie plague) and Zombie, which is a gory unofficial sequel to Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

There's also Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (which, outside of America, is called Brain Dead, I believe). It's kind of a goofy romantic comedy from the 1950s that gets overwhelmed by the rotting animated corpses of the living dead. Features an unforgettable scene with a modified lawnmower.

16:31 / 24.08.04

I'm sure somebody with more time than me will be able to link to various past topics we've had on zombie related matters, but in the meantime, a quick rundown of the essential classics;

Romero;

Night of the Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead
Day of the Dead

Raimi;

Evil Dead
Evil Dead II
Army of Darkness

various other essentials;

Zombie Flesh Eaters I & II
Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue
Braindead
I Walked with a Zombie
Plague of the Zombies
Wild Zero
Shaun of the Dead
Return of the Living Dead

20:40 / 24.08.04

28 Days Later doesn't count, they are not Zomibies, and the film is nothing more than a rip off of Day of the Triffids.

Demons could almost count, dead coming back to life.

Oh and for the high brow approach I highly recommend The Serpent and the Rainbow...

22:25 / 24.08.04

There's something about zombies and their essential mindlessness... a destructive force that cannot be reasoned with but can be outwitted. In Romero's Dawn of the Dead zombies can be seen as a critique of mindless consumerism... in Day of the Dead the uncritical thought that charicterizes the blind adherance to the military chain of command can be seen as a parallel.

The whole end of the world vibe is also a recurring motif, as characters travel further and further to discover the extent of zombie infestation - are they going to be safe if they can get into the city? Or out into the hills or onto an island?

As for recommendations - Rizla's list is pretty good. I'd also emphasize the Romero films and Evil Dead II as a must see film. And Zombie Flesh Eaters has many wonderful exploitation highlights, not least of which is the scene where the shark attacks the zombie.

On the 28 days later debate - the hate plague victims are not zombies, but do act in a virtually identical to them - but as has previously been pointed out the film owes as much to John Wyndhams work, most notablely Day of the Triffids, as it does to zombie flicks...

22:28 / 24.08.04

Oh i've heard the passion of the christ described as a zombie movie. What do people reckon to applying the same reasoning to Ring?

13:17 / 25.08.04

O.K., here's my list:
Night of the Living Dead (original, not remake)
Dawn of the Dead (original, haven't seen remake, might be good from reports)
Day of the Dead

Evil Dead 1, 2 and 3/Army of Darkness

Demons 1 and 2

Bad Taste (the aliens are so stupid they're zombies for all practical purposes)

Undead ("When I was a boy, we respected our elders, we didn't fucking eat them!")

Return of the Living Dead (the first only)

Brain Dead/Dead Alive ("Your mother ate my dog!" "Not all of it...")

Re-animator (haven't seen Beyond Re-Animator, could be good.)

Mr. Vampire films (technically, the hopping corpses are zombies until possessed by a hungry ghost. Then they're Gyonsi, Chinese hopping vampires, like Hsien-Ko from Darkstalkers.

Zombi films (Unauthorised Italian sequels to Dawn of the Dead. Mia Farrow's sister shows up...)

Resident Evil (fuck you. It's Leeloo Dallas Multipass kicking zombie bottom!)

28 Days Later (zombie is as zombie does)

Phantasm/The Never Dead ("This guy's not gonna leak all over my ice-cream, is he?")

Notable mention: Shockwaves (blue underwater nazi zombies!)
Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (the only Hammer/Golden Harvest coproduction. Had some great jogging zombies.)
Plan 9 From Outer Space ('nuff said.)
Nudist Colony of the Dead (it's a musical. O.K., it blows, but I couldn't stop singing "Kill Kill Kill all the Zealots")
Cusrse of the Screaming Dead/Curse of the Cannibal Confederates (Z-Grade schlock classic. Never mind Ed Wood switching from day to night scene to scene, these guys switch day to night back and forth in one DIALOGUE SCENE. And a burning toy car is passed off as the real thing.)

Avoid: House of the Dead. Uwe Boll is a demon from hell sent to torment humanity through crap film.

13:54 / 25.08.04

Night of the Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead*
Day of the Dead

*The original dawn of the dead is okay until the last 30 minutes when the blonde police guy goes from nought-to-psycho in 6 seconds. Seriously, watch the bit when they go to steal the trucks, fastest/lamest mental breakdown EVER. Oh and the end when the other guy agonises and is about to shoot himself when suddenly he WANTS. TO. LIIIVE! And that football music. God. The 2004 remake is actually, I reckon, better. And the zombies actually MOVE.

Sorry, moving on:

Resident Evil [and the upcoming sequel, Apocalypse]
Return of the Living Dead [naked zombie-punkettes!]
28 Days Later [dicks in your face! if it walks like a zombie and
eats like a zombie, you shoot it in the head!]
Shock Waves [nazi hydrozombies / super-soldiers! peter cushing! the first time they walk out of the water!]

14:12 / 25.08.04

In the slightly more cheesey realm of the teen horror comedy, there are some marvelous zombie films.

I will always love Night of the Comet, in which a comet passes by the Earth, killing most of the population instantly, but leaving other in various stages of zombification depending on how much metal shielding was protecting them when the comet went by. The stars are two teenage girls who happen to know how to fire machine guns and like to shop. Best line: "This is a little game I like to call scary noises..."

There's also Night of the Creeps, in which alien parasites turn people into zombies. Some great stuff in there. Best line (which is always in the back of my brain somewhere): "Well, girls, the good news is your dates are here, the bad news is... they're dead!"

And more recently, I quite enjoyed Idle Hands about a teenage boy whose hand becomes evil (tagline: The touching story of a boy and his right hand.) He quickly kills his two best friends who spend the rest of the movie as wisecracking zombies (one of them being Seth Green).

14:43 / 25.08.04

Shit, how could I forget Idle Hands, I enjoyed it, though I was somewhat shitfaced at the time. And it stars Jessica Alba which can only be a good thing.
That's the other thing I like about zombie movies, for every really good serious zombie movie there's at least two low budget shlock horror comedy with zombies, like "Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town", one of Troma's finest.

Haus of Mystery

14:54 / 25.08.04

I agree with a good deal of the above (except 28 Days Later which is inexcusable car-advert wank), so my contribution - Cronenberg's 'Rabid'. It's a plague movie granted, but it's vision of a city terrorised by blood crazed 'zombies' falling under martial law, is as visceral and chilling as Romero's (the real deal IMHO).

Evil Dead trilogy and Bad Taste are completely brilliant, but everyone knows that.

15:52 / 25.08.04

God, how could I have forgotten Phantasm - they are fantastic films (one and two at least) and the Tall Man is one of the best horror villians ever.

Haus of Mystery

10:38 / 26.08.04

Is Phantasm a zombie film? The second one sure as hell ain't.

13:18 / 26.08.04

The Dwarves are reanimated lobotomised corpses used as slave labour by the Tall Man- crushed down to resist the heat and gravity of his home planet. The Spheres contain the higher brain centers of his victims, and are his main export- soldiers to fight some unimaginable war on the other side of the slipgate. The Dwarves are really just a useful sideproduct. I'm not sure if the Gravers are reanimated corpses or not, but the Tall Man does dabble in "custom job" monsters and creations made from corpse flesh, like the doppelgangers in part 2. Part 4 had a crew of graverobbers following the Tall Man's trail of destruction across smalltown America get killed by the heroes and then resurrected as more conventional zombies.

Oh, Nightlife was a pretty good little zombie film...

13:32 / 26.08.04

Whoops, I tell a lie, the graverobbers were in part 3.

16:44 / 26.08.04

Yep, the midgets are dead folk reanimated...

16:45 / 26.08.04

Opps Sorry Morgue, you just said that...

17:23 / 26.08.04

***LOTS OF SPOILERS FOR SEVERAL FILMS***

***OH, AND IF YOU WATCH PHANTASM ON DVD, FOR GOD'S SAKE FAST FORWARD THROUGH THE INTRODUCTION BY ANGUS SCRIMM OR THE WHOLE MOVIE WILL BE RUINED***

Phantasm, while great, really isn't a zombie movie. The second one sort of is -- the first movie is kind unquantifiable. It's really an alien invasion movie, but you don't realize that until about three-quarters of the way through. The second one, with the vacant towns and empty cemeteries, has much more of a zombie vibe... but even so, the faceless, mindless hordes aren't there. I think all of them do have the mindless bodies of the dead coming back to visit their loved ones, but it's all so one-on-one.

Rabid is kind of a zombie movie, but less "fleshy." The aspects of 28 Days Later that make it less zombie-ish are even more pronounced in Rabid. It's about a highly infectious disease that causes victims to be consumed with insane rage. (Sound familiar?) The story is really more about disease & urban life... the main character is the sort of "Typhoid Mary" of the plague, who spreads the disease basically by hugging people (thanks to a weird new organ that an experimental plastic surgery technique grew in her armpit, and I'm not making that up). The end is very zombie-ish, but the whole narrative isn't. The announcement about garbage bags at the very end is just a perfect horror moment.

It should be noted that Plan 9 would make a good double feature with the PG-rated Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things because they're both cheesy cheesy bad cheesy. The last two minutes of CSPWDT is pretty good, but the rest of it should be forgotten. I'm not sure that some of the other suggestions here aren't more campy than terrifying, but my memory isn't that good. Wasn't I Walked With a Zombie a b/w low budget exploitation flick? I might be getting mixed up with White Zombie, which is a sleepy Bela Lugosi exotic Caribbean island misadventure. (Call me jaded, but a lot of those horror films from the 30s and 40s make me really tired -- they're kind of dreamlike to start with.)

18:30 / 26.08.04

>> "Well, girls, the good news is your dates are here, the bad news is... they're dead!"

Awesome.

Haus of Mystery

20:11 / 26.08.04

The Dead Next Door should be included, if only for it's...erm..enthusiasm. It's pretty lame, but has a low budget charm.

If we're playing fast and loose with the term zombie, can I include Larry Cohen's wonderful 'It's Alive' trilogy. For all intents and purposes the babies are pretty zombified. And in a similar vein to Romero's 'Day of The Dead', they're weirdly sympathetic.

21:50 / 26.08.04

The original dawn of the dead is okay until the last 30 minutes when the blonde police guy goes from nought-to-psycho in 6 seconds. Seriously, watch the bit when they go to steal the trucks, fastest/lamest mental breakdown EVER. Oh and the end when the other guy agonises and is about to shoot himself when suddenly he WANTS. TO. LIIIVE! And that football music. God.

An apt enough analysis. Romero's films certainly epitomize the genre thematically, but ultimately my love for them is more conceptual than actual. Well, actually that's not quite fair; Dawn of the Dead really is two-thirds of a fantastic film. It only falls apart where the "actors" try to, you know, act. Said acting is bad even by B-movie standards (and I'm a great connoisseur of B-movies, mind you), so much so that it takes away greatly from the understated horror of the overall package (I tend to blame Romero himself, incidentally, as he draws similiarly ludicrous performances from a variety of different actors over the course of three films).

Still, as I said these films really do epitomize the genre, and none of the more competently acted films that followed have captured the sheer bleakness of the premise quite as well.

01:28 / 27.08.04

Dawn of the Dead-Humanity's last bastion of protection-the mall? Tom Savini as a biker you can't miss that!
Return of the Living Dead-Naked punk rockers dancing on graves(as well as resurrecting in toxic goo while screaming in a rotten mohawk-"If you wanna Party!" Most "logical" solution to any zombie and or unstoppable threat-nuke the place.
Evil Dead 2- I refuse to acept the Army of Darkness as a continuation of the Ash character( although I like the 3rd movie) I think the series ended wisely at this point with Ash killing the Deadite in medievil(hahha) times and screaming stuck forever in the past. Besides where else can you get a Zombie hand running amok for goodeness sake.
Friday the 13th Part 4? Come on we all knew Jason was dead in the first movie he just chose to kill rather than infect others ( until that is F13Part7?8? when the chick with pyskix powers resurrected her dad to Drag Jason back down into the bottomless depths of Crystal Lake).
Omega Man- Charleton Heston Fighting Light Sensitive mutants-(or were they vampires?) need I say more?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:24 / 27.08.04

The story is really more about disease & urban life...

Kind of like Romero's zombie movies, then?

I'd count 28 Days. Rabid also.

Fuck. What am I saying?

ALL ZOMBIE MOVIES ARE COOL, EVEN IF IT'S JUST FOR THE FACT THAT THEY HAVE ZOMBIES IN THEM. Well, except Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things/Zombie Graveyard, obviously.

But avoid like the plague the bells'n'whistles 25th Anniversary Night of the Living Dead. The bells consist of a crap new soundtrack and new scenes at the beginning and end which are awful. The whistles... Jesus, don't ask about the whistles.

Haus of Mystery

08:34 / 27.08.04

Saw Yuzna's 'Return of the Living Dead III recently (which in itself sounds like a parodic title). Aside from some prolonged and unpleasnt gore scenes (Yay!) it's pretty dire, eschewing the normal carnage for a cruddy Romeo & Juliet riff, and a load of bad acting. Notable also for addition of piercing/'body-art' into zombie-lore. All in all not so hot.

11:32 / 27.08.04

Cronenberg's Shivers/The Parasite Murders is a kind of sex-zombie thing. First they get really horny and lose all social inhibitions, (and Cronenberg plays that as a hella lot scarier than it sounds- hero's infected wife- "Disease is an act of love between two alien species!".) and try to rape anything that moves, then they become violent and riot, but they never lose their intelligence, which makes it more like "Bodysnatchers" at the end, when the smiling, infected holidaymakers drive off the resort in their cars to conquer the rest of the world.
Assault on Precinct 13 is almost a classic zombie film, with the endless hordes of silent killers besieging the police station in military ranks...
Hey, Billy Bob Thornton was in Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town, wasn't he?
And Omega Man, like Vincent Price's Last Man on Earth, was based on I Am Legend, the book that inspired Night of the Living Dead, with the last living human on Earth beseiged every night in his fortified home by vampires that call his name. Call his name because they are his neighbours, his friends, his family... He hunts them in their lairs by day, and tortures them in monstrous experiments to try and find a cure, but in the end he must accept death, for in their world he is the monster, he is legend.
There was going to be a more faithful-to-the-book remake with Arnie, and I think it could have worked with the new acting range he showed in End of Days and Collateral Damage, but now he's the Governator, no chance. Hey, there's always Dolph, he's always been a better actor than he got credit for.

13:22 / 27.08.04

Just wanted to second Rizla's recommendation of Tetsuro Takeuchi's "Wild Zero." While far from traditional, it may well be the most entertaining zombie movie I've ever seen.

14:40 / 27.08.04

1. Omega Man is a really good call, although I think there's too much mind there to make it a whole-hog zombie film. The original vampire stories (thinking of Byron's unfinished tale that got unfurled into Carmilla and Dracula) had a very similar theme that nowadays gets forgotten... the vampire as agent of corruption, taking your loved ones and "ruining" them, turning them against you and everything you stand for. That's an element of a zombie picture, but with zombies, the real cataclysm is that the loved ones become mindless.

2. Stoat: The story is really more about disease & urban life...

Kind of like Romero's zombie movies, then?

Kind of, yeah, but not exactly. There's a reason why Cronenberg (with Rabid as well as in Shivers) works as a metaphor for AIDS (or other venereal diseases) in a way that the zombie films don't. I think it might be a matter of Maslow's hierarchy... zombies are motivated by hunger and incapable of strategy. They're much more about ecology & overpopulation than about urbanity, I think. It's that mindlessness thing again -- in this case, the mindlessness of the species. And the kind of urbanity I see in Cronenberg is also based around ideas of courtship, desire, and the decadence of pleasure. The only decadence in a "true" zombie film is outright decay.

It's probably that relationship with pleasure that makes me think of 28 Days Later as a "real" zombie picture, even if the creatures aren't technically living dead. They're beyond pleasure... which means they're also beyond negotiation. I suppose the Rabid/Shivers hordes are beyond negotiation, too, but it's because of a surfeit of pleasure. Which makes the commentary more social and less ecological....

16:27 / 27.08.04

Prince of Darkness- schizophrenic homeless street people zombies lead by Alice Cooper. Anti-god who tries to come across from the other side of the mirror. Death to Zombies with a simple chopstick. Plus that uneasy feeling at the end where Simon and Simon guy feels uncomfortable around the medicine cabinet mirror. Zombies appear mindless at first but then they start to get creative.
Reaminator- talking molesting heads, zombie guts that attack? a cat that comes back from beyond, and the dead experiencing life again as the embalming fluid courses through their veins.

05:04 / 28.08.04

Oh yeah! Prince of Darkness was a hoot. Getting impaled on half a bicycle by Alice Cooper is how I wanna go.
And I loved the idea of the recurring dream that was actually a desperate message from the future, superluminary tachyons bounced off a distant object in space arrive before they are sent and manifest as a dream that becomes more complete as the eschaton immanentises- "This is not a dream. This is not a dream. What you are seeing is really happening."
Anyone remember Dead Heat? Good little zombie buddy cop film. There's this one scene in a Chinese restaurant where the reanimation device is turned on, and the heroes are attacked by lamb's fry and a hollowed-out, headless, hoofless beef carcass.
Oh, and The Curse- loose adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Colour From Outer Space", with Will Wheaton. He's pretty good in this one, you'll cry manly tears of joy when he spears the fat kid to the wall with the pitchfork.
Hey, the lead in Rabid was Marilyn Chambers, wasn't it? Don't know why she never really broke into straight film in a bigger way- she could actually act quite well.

06:43 / 28.08.04

Saw Yuzna's 'Return of the Living Dead III recently (which in itself sounds like a parodic title). Aside from some prolonged and unpleasnt gore scenes (Yay!) it's pretty dire, eschewing the normal carnage for a cruddy Romeo & Juliet riff, and a load of bad acting. Notable also for addition of piercing/'body-art' into zombie-lore. All in all not so hot.

I bought that recently for £1 or something.

It ain't a classic, is it?

Plenty of chomping and ugly zombie FX in the second half though, and the whole thing with the lead actress slowly losing her mind and turning into a scar-tissue covered goth zombie flesh mangler was.. pretty cool.

Haus of Mystery

16:17 / 28.08.04

No. Not cool. Gothy and shit. Sorry. And Grant, if you're arguing that '28 days' is more of a zombie film than 'Rabid' I'd say this is nit-picking in extremis.

01:55 / 30.08.04

It's just the way it feels to me -- the way the narrative is set up more than anything. In 28 Days, we follow this survivor trying to figure out why society has broken down. In Rabid, we're following a lonely lady who's creating a zombie menace because she really wants love. It's a difference in dynamic there that seems kind of key. To me, Rabid feels like a werewolf movie* that happens to have vampiric sex and zombies in it. Well, that and 28 Days keeps consciously referring to/ripping off the Romero trilogy.

* Central motif: "Oh, woe is me, I keep turning into a monster without meaning to."

18:50 / 30.08.04

Hey, I liked Resident Evil. I actually thought it was a pretty good movie, not because of Milla whasterface, but because of Michelle Rodriguez, who had a neat scowl on her face for the entire length of the movie.

07:55 / 31.08.04

She always looks like that. She only has two expressions, "I'm going to kill you", and "I'm going to kill you, can I have a hug?".

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