The Zack Snyder of the "Justice League" #SnyderCut, the far-too-faithful "Watchmen adaption," and the style over substance pair of "300" and "Sucker Punch" are fairly tough to reconcile with the Zack Snyder who directed "Dawn of the Dead."That's not to suggest Snyder's 2004 adaptation of George Romero's 1978 picture of the same name isn't stylish. The first 12 minutes of his career serve as an opening volley, featuring one of the finest opening title sequences in genre history. This beginning provides a good dynamic antidote to the picture to which "Dawn of the Dead" is sometimes compared: Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later," owing to the appearance of so-called "fast" zombies.
Dawn of the Dead's opening minutes are its high point, and although the rest of the picture never quite matches them, the script by future "Guardians of the Galaxy" director James Gunn keeps things interesting. Snyder avoided the tragedy that would inevitably follow his following take on Alan Moore's work and the DC universe as a whole by bypassing Romero's societal critique and establishing his own unique take on the zombie genre.
And it's a fork in the road he'll return to in 2021 with Netflix's "Army of the Dead."
Set in a post-apocalyptic zombie apocalypse brought forth by the strange street drug "Natas." We follow one guy as he pursues Flesh Eaters for fun, atonement, and escape from his past.
After seeing a small group of survivors who are running short on supplies, he resolves to assist them. A unexpected onslaught by the Flesh Eaters, however, causes them to flee and puts the Hunter's talents to the test.
The trailer for Zombie Hunter makes it look like the kind of bloody B-movie fun that everyone would love to see. We're interested to see how director K. King pays tribute to the style of movies like Machete and Planet Terror. The marketing team did a great job with the eye-catching poster.
In Little Monsters, Lupita Nyong'o, who is often cast in dramatic roles, portrays a more humorous character. She may be teaching a kindergarten class on a field trip that encounters a zombie epidemic, but she looks to be having a fun. The 2019 film was the actress's second attempt into the horror genre, after Jordan Peele's better-known "Us."
But she is up to the challenge. According to the official press materials, the video is "dedicated to all the kindergarten instructors who inspire children to study, instill confidence in them, and prevent them from being eaten by zombies." Indeed, that pretty well wraps it up. Also starring in "Little Monsters" are Josh Gad, who portrays an annoying, renowned kid performer, and Alexander England, who plays an effete, washed-up musician who accompanies his nephew on a field trip and is in love (or maybe lust) with Lupita Nyong'o.
What you get is an intriguing mix of horror and romantic comedy that breathes fresh life into both genres.
Since then, the zombie outbreak has continued unabated. (A few have even mastered the art of running.) The Walking Dead on television is the most prominent example, although zombies have also appeared in found footage ([REC]), romantic comedies ([REC]), and grindhouse homages (Warm Bodies) (Planet Terror).
Simultaneously, a whole genre sprung up around Romero's work that spanned the world.
Lucio Fulci, a titan in Italian horror, continued with the concept, first in his sequel Zombi (also known as Zombi) and later in his experimental and wildly bizarre "Gates of Hell" trilogy.
Fans of Romero's work who expanded upon his foundation—directors Dan O'Bannon, Fred Dekker, and Stuart Gordon, for example—came along and messed with the genre's constructions, exploring and expanding what a zombie movie might be. The popularity of zombies thereafter rapidly declined.
The undead had been a fixture of horror films, but they now mainly feature in sequels (such as Return of the Living Dead and Zombie) and low-budget B-movies (such as My Boyfriend's Back, Cemetery Man, and Dead Alive).What other place could we start? White Zombie was the first full-length "zombie" horror film, and it popularized the Hollywood notion of Haitian voodoo undead decades before George Romero's contemporary ghoul.
You can now watch White Zombie on YouTube, and you can also find it in almost any cheap collection of zombie movies. Bela Lugosi plays a witch doctor who is called "Murder" by the studio, which was still a few years away from understanding nuance. After his role in Dracula, Lugosi was well-known as one of Universal's go-to horror actors. This was just a year ago.
The Svengali-like Lugosi uses his various concoctions and powders to turn a betrothed young woman into a zombie in order to bind her to the will of a cruel plantation owner, and... well, it's fairly dry, wooden stuff. Predictably, the finest part is Bela Lugosi, but I guess you had to start somewhere. White Zombie was followed by a number of other Hollywood voodoo zombie films, the most of which are now freely accessible online.
Rob Zombie's musical output at the time also drew inspiration from the film. Some of the "best zombie movies" lists may include it prominently, but in 2016, the overwhelming majority of moviegoers aren't likely to find much enjoyment in a film like this. This item's high ranking is almost entirely attributable to the significance it has in history.
Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror is the superior half of the Grindhouse double-feature he concocted with Quentin Tarantino. The film tells the tale of a go-go dancer, a bioweapon gone bad, and Texan townspeople transformed into shuffling, pustulous creatures. Planet Terror leans heavily on its B-movie origins, with missing reels, rough editing, and hammy overdubbed dialogue, and its exploding tongue is firmly planted in its rotten cheek.
Its over-the-top gore and oozing effects are revolting, and it builds to a ridiculously hilarious ending in which Rose McGowan's hero Cherry Darling's severed leg is replaced with a machine gun. I'm going to consume your brains and learn all you know.
Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, being a Troma film, offers a few mainstays. It'll be completely tacky. It will be a bloodbath. It will be devoid of limits and a sense of taste. The actual question is, "Is it boring?" as it is with every Troma picture. "Absolutely not," says the response in this case.
The social satire of consumer society is quite subtle for a musical marketed as a "zom-com," if that makes any sense. Why, however, are you sitting in a movie about undead chickens who invade a KFC-like restaurant located on top of a Native American burial ground? Don't think so. Accepting the violence, scatological jokes, and shoddy production standards as part of the fun is essential to a Troma viewing, as does an appreciation for the thoughtless storyline.
As a result, Poultrygeist is just 103 minutes of dirty, vile, raunchy madness.
Even though zombie movies have been around for more than 80 years (White Zombie came out in 1932, and I Walked With a Zombie came out in 1943), most people agree that the subgenre didn't really start to take shape until 1968, when George A. Romero released Night of the Living Dead.
Independent film Night captivated viewers with its intriguing storyline, stunning gore, progressive casting, and social criticism, and its gaunt, ravenous undead. Romero created five additional Dead movies, including Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead.
In spite of Night of the Living Dead's impact, it took some time for the picture to percolate and develop clout in the public's mind before a slew of notable American zombie films emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Shock Waves may have been the first of all the "Nazi zombie" films, arriving just before Dawn of the Dead massively enhanced the appeal of zombies as horror adversaries.
The film follows a party of wayward boaters who get up on a mystery island where a submerged SS submarine has released its undead crew as a Nazi experiment. In the same year that he sneered at Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope, Hammer Horror star Peter Cushing plays a poorly miscast and befuddled-looking SS commander. A New Hope? Impossible!
There have been at least 16 Nazi zombie movies since this point, according to my amateur count—certainly more than one would realize—making this one noteworthy, if only for being the first to combine the portmanteau of famous cinematic villains.
Shock Waves is responsible for the success of the Dead Snow films.It's not easy to create a fresh perspective on the zombie film, but Colm McCarthy's The Girl With All The Gifts, based on Mike Carey's novel, succeeds while also giving some enjoyable genre thrills.
In this case, the zombies are caused by a fungal pathogen like the one in The Last of Us that has turned most of the people into "hungries." But that is mostly in the background of the story, which is mostly about Melanie, a young girl whose teacher, Helen, played by Gemma Arterton, gives her an unusual education in a heavily armed facility.
Melanie is a'second-generation' hungry; she craves human flesh but is also capable of thought and emotion, and her very existence may contain the secret to survival.
This bloodbath incorporates elements of the Draugr, a legendary Nordic zombie famed for its fierce loyalty to guarding its treasure hoard, with the traditional zombie formula, making for a very original take on the horror genre. In Dead Snow, these draugr are really former SS troops that terrorized a Norwegian village, stole their belongings, and were either killed or driven into the snowy mountains by the townspeople. Either they are killed or chased into the mountains by the people.
Dead Snow is unique. It's humorous, gruesome, and violent, with Evil Dead and "teen sex/slasher" aspects. If you enjoy it, Dead Snow: Red versus Dead has more.
Sometimes a movie's backstory is more interesting than the movie itself, and that's the case with The Dead Next Door. Sam Raimi paid for it with the money he made from Evil Dead II so that his friend J. R. Bookwalter could make his dream of making a low-budget zombie epic come true. The whole movie seems to have been redubbed after it was made, and Raimi is listed as an executive producer under the name "The Master Cylinder," while Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell voices not one but two zombie movie list characters. This gives The Dead Next Door a dreamlike, surreal feel, and that's before we even talk about the fact that it was all shot on Super 8 and not 32 mm film.
The Dead Next Door, then, offers something unique even in this genre: A grainy, low-budget zombie action-drama with cringe-inducing amateur acting performances and surprising professionalism thrown in for good measure.
The story is about a "elite team" of zombie killers who find a cult that worships zombies, but you don't watch this one for the plot, you watch it for the gore. The Dead Next Door seems to have been made just as a way to practice practical blood effects and beheadings. At times, it feels like a backyard attempt to copy the crazy bloodletting in Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, but with genre references that are so obvious you can't help but laugh. "Dr. Savini"? "Officer Raimi"? "Commander Carpenter"?
They're all in there, giving "The Walking Dead" an air of having been made just for the director's own private viewing pleasure. Yet, the messy proximity that was shared has its charms.
The meteoric surge in popularity of zombie movies has been fascinating to see. Voodoo myth, radioactive humans, and the classic monster imagery of E.C. comics were the primary ways in which the public learned about the creatures for a long time. They were either underrepresented or underdescribed in other sources. Rare sightings of zombies seldom resembled the modern stereotype of the brain-eating, flesh-craving zombie.
Cemetery Man (also known as Dellamorte Dellamore) is a weird, psychedelic head trip directed by Dario Argento disciple Michele Soavi that presents the undead as more of an irritation than a dangerous threat. In Cemetery Man, a cinematic version of the comic book series Dylan Dog, Everett portrays Francesco Dellamorte, a misanthropic gravedigger who would rather be among the dead than with living people. Why wouldn't he, you could ask? The living are idiots for promoting the myth that he is infertile.
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.