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."Which is not to say that Snyder's 2004 remake of George Romero's 1978 movie of the same name, also called Dawn of the Dead, is not stylish. The first 12 minutes set the tone for the rest of his career, and the opening title sequence is one of the best in the history of the genre. This intro is a great physical counterpoint to the movie that "Dawn of the Dead" is often compared to: Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later," mostly because both movies have zombies that move quickly.
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.
With Netflix's "Army of the Dead," he hopes to return to the genre in 2021.
Natas causes a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland. One guy hunts Flesh Eaters for fun and atonement while escaping his past.
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.
The trailer for Zombie Hunter seems to be the kind of gruesome B-movie fun that everyone would enjoy. We're interested to see how filmmaker K. King manages to pay respect to the grindhouse aesthetic of films like Machete and Planet Terror. The marketing team did an outstanding job with the eye-catching poster.
Little Monsters is an unexpected movie from Lupita Nyong'o, who is best known for her dramatic roles. But it looks like she's having a lot of fun as a kindergarten teacher whose class is on a field trip when a zombie outbreak happens. The 2019 movie was the actress's second horror movie, but it wasn't as well known as Jordan Peele's "Us," which came out the same year.
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.
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).
At the same time, a whole subgenre was born out of Romero's works, and it quickly spread all over 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.
Dan O'Bannon, Fred Dekker, and Stuart Gordon came along and flirted with the genre constructions; they were lovers of Romero's work who built upon his base to further explore and broaden the possibilities of a zombie film. Then, as soon as it gained popularity, zombies fell out of style.
The undead had become a horror film fixture, although they now mainly featured in sequels (such as Return of the Living Dead and Zombie) and low-budget B-movies like My Boyfriend's Back, Cemetery Man, and Dead Alive.
Is there another place to begin? White Zombie popularized the Hollywood concept of Haitian voodoo undead decades before the original George Romero 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 ends up zombifying a young woman who is engaged to be married, attempting to bend her to the will of a cruel plantation owner, and... well, it's fairly dry, wooden stuff. Lugosi is, predictably, the finest part, but I guess you had to start somewhere. White Zombie was followed by a slew of additional voodoo zombie films from Hollywood, the most of which are now freely accessible online.
Obviously, the film also influenced Rob Zombie's musical work. It appears prominently on several "greatest zombie film" lists, but let's be honest: this is not a film that most viewers would enjoy seeing today 2016. It is ranked 50th mostly due to its historical importance.
Planet Terror is the better half of the Grindhouse double feature that Robert Rodriguez made with Quentin Tarantino. It's about a go-go dancer, a bioweapon that goes wrong, and Texan townspeople who turn into shuffling, pustule-covered monsters. Planet Terror is very much a B-movie, with missing reels, shaky edits, and cheesy overdubbed dialogue. Its exploding tongue is firmly planted in its rotting cheek.
It includes over-the-top gore and oozing effects, 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. All of a sudden, I'm going to consume your brains and learn all you know.
Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead promises a few Troma mainstays. It'll be completely tacky. It will be bloody. It will have no limits and no sense of taste. The true question, like with every Troma production, is "Is it boring?" In this case, the answer is "absolutely not."
For a musical promoted as a "zom-com," the social satire of consumer culture is surprisingly subtle. Why, though, are you watching a film about zombie chickens invading a KFC-like restaurant built over a Native American cemetery? Do not believe so. Accepting the violence, scatological humor, and lousy production values as part of the entertainment is vital to enjoying a Troma film, as is a respect for the mindless plot.
Poultrygeist, as a consequence, is merely 103 minutes of filthy, nasty, raunchy lunacy.While zombie films have been around for more than 80 years (White Zombie was produced in 1932, and I Walked With a Zombie was published in 1943), it's widely accepted that the subgenre as we know it today didn't emerge until 1968, when George A. Romero released Night of the Living Dead.
Night, a low-budget independent film with a disturbing tale, graphic violence, progressive casting, social commentary, and, of course, its famous hordes of gaunt, voracious zombies, enthralled audiences. Romero, the uncontested king of the zombie genre, went on to make five more films in the Dead franchise, the best of which is examined here.
Despite the influence of Night of the Living Dead, it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that a number of famous American zombie films were produced. Shock Waves may have been the first "Nazi zombie" film, released soon before Dawn of the Dead boosted the popularity of zombies as terrifying foes.
Throughout the most of its duration, it's a dismal, slow-paced thriller about a group of lost boaters who wind themselves on a mystery island where a submerged SS submarine has abandoned its crew of zombies, a Nazi experiment. The same year he sneered at Princess Leia in Star Wars: Episode III, Hammer Horror icon Peter Cushing appears as a poorly miscast and addled-looking SS Commander. It's difficult to comprehend that there is a New Hope!
Since then, there have been at least 16 Nazi zombie movies, which is a lot more than you might think. This one is important at least because it was the first to combine two great movie villains into one.
In the end, movies like the Dead Snow series owe everything to Shock Waves.It's not easy to develop a new take on the zombie picture, but Colm McCarthy's The Girl With All The Gifts, based on a book by Mike Carey, succeeds in doing so while also providing some satisfying genre thrills.
A fungal virus, similar to the one that wiped out mankind in The Last of Us, is to blame for this epidemic of zombieism. Melanie, a little girl, is being educated in a unique method in a highly protected facility by Gemma Arterton's character, Helen.
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.
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.
There are times when the backstory behind a picture is more intriguing than the film itself, and such is the case with The Dead Next Door. Sam Raimi funded its production out of the profits he received from Evil Dead II so that his buddy J. R. Bookwalter could realize his vision of a low-budget zombie epic. The whole picture seems to have been redubbed in post-production, and for some reason Raimi is listed as an executive producer under the moniker "The Master Cylinder," while Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell does double duty as the voiceover for not one but two characters. The Dead Next Door has an aura of dreamlike surrealism because of this, and that's before we even get to the fact that it was shot entirely on Super 8 and not 32 mm film.
The Dead Next Door provides something unheard of in this genre: a grainy, low-budget zombie action-drama with cringe-worthy amateur acting and surprisingly polished touches.
An "elite team" of zombie exterminators discovers a cult committed to the worship of the undead, but you're watching this for the gore, not the story. The Dead Next Door, made for no other purpose than to try out gore effects and realistic decapitations, often like a low-budget attempt to duplicate Peter Jackson's insane bloodletting in Dead Alive, only with gags so blatant that they're frightening. "Who, after all, is this Dr. Savini guy?" Can I address you as "Officer Raimi"? Carpenter, Commander?
They are all there in a zombie picture that seems like it was never intended for anybody other than the director's family. Nonetheless, there is an unsettling appeal to this degree of poor familiarity.
Incredible to see is the growth in popularity of zombie flicks. Long ago, monsters mostly lived in the worlds of Voodoo mythology, radioactive humanoids, and E.C. comics' distinctive iconography. When they existed, zombies were not the cannibalistic, flesh-hungry monsters we know and love today.
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 (check here) 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.