A lot of people have a hard time reconciling "Dawn of the Dead" director Zack Snyder with the Zack Snyder of the "Justice League" #SnyderCut, the far-too-faithful "Watchmen adaptation," and the style-over-substance combination of "300" and "Sucker Punch."Snyder's 2004 adaptation of George Romero's 1978 picture lacks style, however. The first 12 minutes are one of the finest opening title sequences in genre history. This opener acts as a dynamic antithesis to Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later," which features "fast" zombies.
The remainder of "Dawn of the Dead" never quite matches these first few minutes, but the writing by future "Guardians of the Galaxy" director James Gunn keeps things entertaining all the way through. It should be emphasized that replicating a classic was certain to fail (a fate Snyder would repeat when tackling Alan Moore's work and the whole DC world), but by forsaking Romero's social criticism, Snyder was able to carve out his own part of the cinematic zombie cosmos.
And it's a corner he'll be returning to in 2021 with "Army of the Dead," which will be streaming on Netflix.
The narrative takes place in a dystopian future in which a weird street drug known as "Natas" has transformed the people into zombies. We follow one man as he hunts down Flesh Eaters for joy and atonement, as well as to escape his own past, as the tale continues.
After colliding with a small group of survivors who are quickly running out of resources, he decides to aid them. A surprise attack by the flesh-eating Flesh Eaters forces them to run and tests the talents of the Hunter.
Zombie Hunter looks like a fun, bloody B-movie. I mean, who doesn't want to watch Danny Trejo fight hordes of zombies in slow motion? Director K. King seems to be going for a "grindhouse throwback" style like Machete or Planet Terror, so we're interested to see how that will turn out. With the stylish poster, the marketing team has done a great job.
In Little Monsters, Lupita Nyong'o, an actress known for her somber plays, takes on a more lighthearted character. She may be teaching a kindergarten class that meets a zombie outbreak while on a field trip, but it appears like she's having a blast. The 2019 movie was the actress's second foray into the horror genre that year (the first being Jordan Peele's more well-known "Us").
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 intriguing mix of horror and romantic comedy that breathes fresh life into both genres.
The zombie apocalypse has continued uninterrupted since then. (A select handful have even perfected the art of running.) Television's The Walking Dead is the most well-known example, although zombies have also featured in discovered footage ([REC]), romantic comedies ([REC]), and grindhouse homages (Warm Bodies) (Planet Terror).
Simultaneously, a whole genre sprung developed around Romero's works, spanning the world.
The master of Italian horror, Lucio Fulci, took the idea and ran with it in his own way, first with Zombi 2 (also known as Zombie), and then with his far more weird and experimental "Gates of Hell" trilogy. Fulci is credited with popularizing the zombie subgenre.
Fans of Romero's work who built on his foundation, such as filmmakers Dan O'Bannon, Fred Dekker, and Stuart Gordon, toyed with the genre's constructs, exploring and broadening what a zombie movie might be. The popularity of zombies quickly faded after that.
Outside of horror sequels (Return of the Living Dead, Zombie) and low-budget scare films, the zombies no longer wandered the world.
Is there somewhere else to begin? White Zombie was the first film to promote the idea of Haitian voodoo zombies in Hollywood, decades before the famous George Romero ghoul.
White Zombie is a public domain mainstay in just about every cheapo zombie film bundle. You can watch its 67-minute length on YouTube if you wish. Bela Lugosi, fresh off Dracula and Universal's go-to horror talent, portrays a witch doctor titled "Murder" since the company had yet to find subtlety.
Svengali-like Lugosi uses his potions and powders to zombify an engaged lady, aiming to submit her to the will of a sadistic plantation owner. It's dry, wooden stuff. Lugosi is the bright point, but you had to start. After White Zombie, Hollywood produced voodoo zombie movies for years, most of which 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, directed by Robert Rodriguez and co-written with Quentin Tarantino, is the superior half of their Grindhouse double feature. The film tells the tale of a go-go dancer, a bioweapon gone wrong, and the transformation of a small Texas town's inhabitants into shuffling, pustulous monsters. Planet Terror's exploding tongue is firmly planted in its rotten cheek as it embraces its B-movie origins with missing reels, rough editing, and hammy overdubbed dialogue.
The film's conclusion, in which Rose McGowan's character, Cherry Darling, has her severed leg replaced with a machine gun, is both disgusting and hysterically funny. I need to eat some of your brains to soak up some of your knowledge.
Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead seems to have some of the typical elements of a Troma film. It'll be a whole pile of garbage. It'll get quite bloody. There will be no limits or consideration for aesthetics. Just as with every other Troma picture, the true question is whether or not you find it dull. In this case, "definitely not" is the appropriate response.
In its social satire of consumer society, this "zom-com musical" is even a little bit clever—you know, in an obvious kind of way. But is that really why you're seeing a movie about zombie chickens at a KFC-style restaurant constructed on an old Native American burial ground? I did not believe so. To enjoy a Troma film, one must embrace the violence, scatological comedy, and cheap production qualities, as well as appreciate thoughtless narrative.
So, Poultrygeist is just 103 minutes of bloody, gross, and rude madness.While zombie films have been around for more than 80 years (White Zombie was released in 1932, and I Walked With a Zombie was released in 1943), it is widely believed that the subgenre as we know it today did not emerge until 1968, when George A. Romero released Night of the Living Dead.
Night, a low-budget independent film, attracted audiences with its dark tale, horrible violence, progressive casting, social commentary, and, of course, its legendary hordes of gaunt, voracious zombies. Romero, the acknowledged maestro of the zombie genre, went on to make five more films in the Dead series, the best of which are discussed here.
Despite Night of the Living Dead's effect, it took some time for that picture to gestate and develop cache in the popular awareness before a massive wave of notable American zombie movies sprouted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Shock Waves may have been the first "Nazi zombie" film, arriving soon before Dawn of the Dead, which massively increased the appeal of zombies as horror adversaries.
The story concerns a group of shipwrecked people who end themselves on an undiscovered island where a sunken SS submarine has released its crew of zombies, as part of a Nazi experiment. In the same year that he sneered at Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope, Hammer Horror great Peter Cushing makes a cameo as a miscast and addled-looking SS Commander? It doesn't seem to be doable.
I think there have been at least 16 Nazi zombie movies since this one, which is probably more than people realize. This one is notable at least for being the first to combine two great movie villains into one.
The Dead Snow movies have Shock Waves to thank for their success.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 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 still wants to eat human flesh, but she can also think and feel, and the fact that she is alive could be the key to the future.
The Draugr, an undead monster from Scandinavian legend that ferociously defends its treasure trove, is included into this splatter-fest, giving it a Nordic take on the standard zombie. In the case of Dead Snow, the draugr are former SS troopers that harassed a Norwegian hamlet and robbed their things before being killed or driven into the frigid mountains by the people.
This definitely earns marks for Dead Snow in the click here category of creativity. It is also an extremely amusing, nasty, and satisfyingly violent movie with aspects of Evil Dead and "teen sex/slasher" films interspersed throughout. Overall, the movie is quite entertaining. And if you like it, the original story continues in the sequel titled Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead.
It's one of those rare instances when the backstory behind a movie is perhaps more intriguing than the movie itself, and that's the case with The Dead Next Door: It was produced by Sam Raimi, who used some of the money he'd gained from Evil Dead II in order to give his buddy J. R. Bookwalter the opportunity to create the low-budget zombie epic of his dreams. Raimi, for whatever reason, is credited as an executive producer under the name "The Master Cylinder," while Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell pulls double duty—not on screen, but as a voiceover for not one, but two characters, because the entirety of the film appears to have been redubbed in post-production. It should not come as a surprise that this gives The Dead Next Door a sense of dreamlike unreality, and that is before we have even brought up the fact that this movie was shot entirely on super 8 rather than 32 mm film.
The Dead Next Door, then, offers something unprecedented in this genre: A grainy, low-budget zombie action-drama with cringe-inducing amateur acting performances and surprising hints of polish.
The premise focuses on a "elite squad" of zombie exterminators who stumble into a zombie-worshiping cult, but you're watching it for the gore, not the plot. The Dead Next Door sometimes seems like a backyard effort to imitate the psychotic bloodletting seen in Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, only with genre allusions that are so on-the-nose you can't help but giggle. "Doctor Savini"? "Officer Raimi," you say? "Command Carpenter," you say?
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 incredible to see how popular zombie movies have become. For a long time, monsters were primarily found in the worlds of Voodoo mythology, radioactive humanoids, and E.C. comics' famous images. Zombies were not always the cannibalistic, flesh-eating undead we've come to know and love.
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.
But there's a catch: the dead refuses to be buried in his own cemetery. Dellamorte meets a lovely widow (Falchi) during her husband's funeral and falls in love with her. They end up boiling it up on her husband's grave after wooing her in the dreary halls of his ossuary. It just gets weirder from here.