With the filmmaker of "Dawn of the Dead," it may be hard to reconcile the Zack Snyder of the "Justice League" #SnyderCut, the too accurate "Watchmen" adaption, and the style-over-substance pairing of "300" and "Sucker Punch."The 2004 remake, directed by Zack Snyder and based on George Romero's 1978 original, is not without its charm. The first twelve minutes are a career-launching onslaught, featuring one of the genre's best opening title sequences. Many people find parallels between "Dawn of the Dead" and Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" because of the presence of speedy zombies in both films. This prologue is an excellent dynamic counterpart to that image.
Although the remainder of "Dawn of the Dead" never quite lives up to the promise shown in these opening scenes, the screenplay written by James Gunn, who would go on to helm "Guardians of the Galaxy," manages to keep things fascinating all the way through. It is important to point out that remaking a masterpiece is a recipe for disaster ("disaster" being something that Snyder would again court when tackling the work of Alan Moore and the entire DC universe), but by avoiding Romero's social commentary, Snyder was able to carve out his own space in the cinematic zombie universe.
And it's a corner he'll return to with Netflix's "Army of the Dead" in 2021.
Natas causes a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland. One guy hunts Flesh Eaters for fun and atonement while escaping his past.
He decides to assist a small group of survivors who are fast running out of resources after colliding with them. The Hunter's powers are put to the test as the flesh-eating Flesh Eaters attack them unexpectedly.
Who wouldn't want to see Danny Trejo fight hordes of zombies in slow motion? Director K. King looks to be aiming for a Machete/Planet Terror-esque grindhouse retro vibe, so we're eager to see how this will play out. With this attractive poster, the marketing team has surely succeeded.
This week's review is up and ready for all, Zombie Hunter, starring Danny Trejo in a minor role as it actually stars someone completely different!https://t.co/cf2hUgKcee
— Decker Shado (@DeckerShado) June 15, 2022
But that's not to say Trejo's role isn't important, or memorable. Man's a badass, what can I say?
Lupita Nyong'o, who is renowned for her dark roles, portrays a more cheerful character in Little Monsters. She may be teaching a kindergarten class on a field trip when a zombie epidemic occurs, but she looks to be having a great time. The actress's second horror film of the year (the first being Jordan Peele's more well-known "Us") was released in 2019.
But she can do it without any problems at all. The film is "dedicated to all of the kindergarten teachers who encourage children to study, fill them with confidence, and rescue them from being devoured by zombies," as stated in the official press notes. Yes, I think that covers every base. In "Little Monsters," Alexander England portrays an effete, has-been musician who is accompanying his nephew on a field trip and who happens to be in love (or maybe lust) with Lupita Nyong'o, while Josh Gad plays an obnoxious, renowned kid performer. Nyong'o appears alongside both of these characters. The year 2014 saw the publication of "Little Monsters."
What you get is an interesting blend of horror and romantic comedy, which gives new life to both genres.
Since then, the zombie outbreak hasn't showed any signs of abating. (It is said that a few of them have even picked up running.) Although "The Walking Dead" is the most obvious example, zombies have appeared in everything from discovered footage movies (like "REC") to romantic comedies (like "Warm Bodies") to homages to the classics (like "The Walking Dead") (Planet Terror).
Simultaneously, a global subgenre sprung developed in response to Romero's works.
Lucio Fulci, an Italian horror classic, took up the premise and ran with it, first with Zombi 2 (aka Zombie), then with his far more weird and experimental "Gates of Hell" trilogy.
Dan O'Bannon, Fred Dekker, and Stuart Gordon came along and played with the rules of the genre. They were fans of Romero's work who used his work as a base to explore and expand what a zombie movie could be. Then, as quickly as the zombie trend took off, it went out of style.
Outside of continuous horror sequels (Return of the Living Dead, Zombie), low-budget fright pictures, and the rare genre oddity (My Boyfriend's Back, Cemetery Man, and Dead Alive), the undead no longer roamed the earth.Where else could we begin? White Zombie was the first full-length "zombie" horror film and the first to popularize the notion of Haitian voodoo zombies in Hollywood, decades before the current George Romero ghoul.
White Zombie is simple to obtain nowadays; you can watch its 67-minute length on YouTube, if you'd like, since it is a public domain mainstay included in almost every budget zombie film collection ever created. Bela Lugosi portrays a witch doctor whose moniker is literally "Murder" since the studio was still a few years away from finding nuance at this time.
The Svengali-like Lugosi ends up zombifying a young lady who is engaged to be married, seeking to bend her to the will of a cruel plantation owner, and... well, it's fairly dry, wooden stuff. The one bright point, unsurprisingly, is Lugosi, but you had to start somewhere. Following White Zombie, voodoo zombie films sprang out in Hollywood on a regular basis for years, the most of them are now in the public domain.
Rob Zombie's music was, of course, also influenced by the movie. Some lists of the best zombie movies give it a lot of attention, but let's be honest: in 2016, most people wouldn't like this movie. This item is number 50 on the list almost entirely because of how important it is to history.
Planet Terror, which Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez wrote together, is the better half of their Grindhouse double feature. The movie is about a go-go dancer, a bioweapon that goes wrong, and how the people of a small Texas town become shuffling, pustulous monsters. Planet Terror's exploding tongue is firmly planted in its rotten cheek as it embraces its B-movie roots with missing reels, rough editing, and hammy overdubbed dialogue.
In other zombie movies an outrageously exciting conclusion with over-the-top gore and oozing effects, Rose McGowan's hero Cherry Darling has her severed arm replaced with a machine gun. Gather 'round, people: I'd want to eat your knowledge in order to grow mine.
Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead is a Troma movie, so you can expect a few things. It will be a lot of garbage. It will get rough. It will have no limits and no sense of what is right or wrong. The real question, as with all Troma movies, is, "Is it boring?" In this case, the answer is "absolutely not."
For a musical that is marketed as a "zom-com," if that makes any sense, the satire of consumer society is quite subtle. But why are you watching a movie about chickens that come back to life and take over a restaurant that looks like KFC and is built on a Native American burial ground? Don't believe that. To enjoy a Troma movie, you have to think that the violence, scatological jokes, and bad production are all part of the fun. You also have to like the thoughtless plot.
Therefore, Poultrygeist is only 103 minutes of filthy, gory, obscene craziness.
While zombie movies have existed for more than 80 years (in 1932 we had White Zombie, in 1943 I Walked With a Zombie), it’s largely recognized the subgenre as we know it today didn’t develop until 1968, when George A. Romero released Night of the Living Dead.
The budget for the independent film Night was slightly over $100,000. The film's unforgettable hordes of gaunt, voracious zombies were a big part of why it was so successful, but the film's obtuse plot, shocking gore, progressive casting, and societal commentary all contributed. "Godfather of Zombies" director George A. Romero directed five further installments in the Dead franchise. This book covers the two most famous of these flicks, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead.
Even though Night of the Living Dead had an impact, it was not until the late 1970s and especially the 1980s that a lot of important American zombie movies came out. Shock Waves might have been the first "Nazi zombie" movie. It came out just before Dawn of the Dead, which made zombies a lot more popular as scary bad guys.
A group of shipwrecked humans arrive on an unexplored island where a sunken SS submarine has released its crew of zombies as part of a Nazi experiment. In the same year that he scoffed at Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope, did Hammer Horror great Peter Cushing appear as a miscast and befuddled-looking SS commander? It seemed improbable.
At least 16 Nazi zombie movies have been produced since then, which is probably more than most people realize. This one is notable at the very least for being the first to combine the portmanteau of famous cinematic villains. More Nazi zombie movies have been created since then than most people realize.
Shock Waves is ultimately responsible for films like the Dead Snow trilogy.
It's not easy to come up with a fresh perspective on the zombie film, but Colm McCarthy's The Girl With All The Gifts, based on Mike Carey's novel, succeeds in doing so while also giving great genre thrills.
In this instance, the zombie state is the product of a fungal virus akin to The Last of Us that has converted the majority of the people into 'hungries.' But that's really in the background of the plot, which concentrates on Melanie, a little girl getting an unorthodox education in a highly guarded institution from Gemma Arterton's instructor Helen.
Melanie, a'second-generation' hungry, still desires to consume human flesh but can think and feel. Her presence might hold the key to the future.
This gore-fest gives the typical zombie a Scandinavian twist by adding the Draugr, a legendary undead monster from Scandinavian mythology that is known for fiercely guarding its gold. In Dead Snow, these draugr are actually former SS soldiers who terrorized a small Norwegian town and stole from its people before being killed or driven into the snowy mountains.
I have to give Dead Snow credit for coming up with this. It's funny, gory, and satisfyingly brutal, with elements of Evil Dead and "teen sex/slasher" films. Furthermore, since Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead is a sequel, fans may anticipate more of the same.
It's possible that the story behind The Dead Next Door is more interesting than the movie itself: Sam Raimi made it possible for his friend J. R. Bookwalter to direct the low-budget zombie epic of his dreams by giving him some of the money he made from Evil Dead II. Raimi is listed as an executive producer under the name "The Master Cylinder," and Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell does double duty—not on screen, but as the voice of not one but two characters, since the whole movie seems to have been re-dubbed in post-production. It's no surprise that this gives The Dead Next Door a dreamy, unreal feel, and that's before we even say that the whole movie was shot on Super 8 instead of 32 mm film.
The Dead Next Door is a genre-first. A low-budget zombie action-drama with amateur acting and surprise professionalism.
Forget about the plot; you're just here for the blood and guts. You're not watching this for the narrative, which involves a "elite team" of zombie exterminators who stumble into a cult that worships zombies. At points, The Dead Next Door resembles a low-budget effort to recreate Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, complete with the film's trademark deranged bloodletting and laughably obvious genre allusions. The movie seems like it was produced so the cast and crew could get some experience with actual blood effects and beheadings. Those names "Dr. Savini" and "Officer Raimi" come to mind. What's up, "Commander Carpenter"?They're all in a zombie movie that looks and feels like it was produced only for the director's family. Even still, there's a certain allure to that type of messy intimacy.
It's crazy to see how popular zombie movies have become. For a long time, monsters mostly lived in the worlds of Voodoo mythology, radioactive humanoids, and the iconic images of E.C. comics. When they were alive, zombies were not the flesh-eating, cannibalistic monsters we know and love today.
Cemetery Man (also known as Dellamorte Dellamore), directed by Dario Argento's student Michele Soavi, is a bizarre, psychedelic head trip in which the undead are portrayed as more of a nuisance than a serious threat. In Cemetery Man, an adaptation of the comic book series Dylan Dog, Everett portrays the misanthropic gravedigger Francesco Dellamorte, who would rather be among the dead than with living people. The issue is why he would not. For promoting the incorrect perception that he is sterile, the living are jerks.
The only catch is that the deceased will not remain buried in his cemetery. Dellamorte falls head over heels with a lovely widow (Falchi) at her husband's funeral, pursues her in the gloomy hallways of his ossuary, and before you know it, they're stripped naked and steaming it up on top of her dead husband's grave. That's just the beginning of the strangeness.