It's difficult to reconcile the Zack Snyder who directed "Dawn of the Dead" with the Zack Snyder who brought us the #SnyderCut "Justice League," the far-too-faithful "Watchmen" adaptation, and the style-over-substance combo of "300" and "Sucker Punch."The 2004 version, which is based on the 1978 version by George Romero and was directed by Zack Snyder, is not, however, boring. The first twelve minutes are a career-launching assault, with one of the best opening title sequences in the history of the genre. People often compare "Dawn of the Dead" to Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" because both movies have a lot of fast zombies. This prologue is a great, fast-paced contrast to that picture.
The remainder of "Dawn of the Dead" never quite matches the intensity of the first few minutes, but the writing by future "Guardians of the Galaxy" director James Gunn keeps things fascinating throughout. It should be emphasized that replicating a classic was a formula for catastrophe (a fate Snyder would again face 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.
With Netflix's "Army of the Dead," he hopes to return to the genre in 2021.
The story unfolds in a dystopian future when the strange street drug "Natas" has turned the population into zombies. As the story progresses, we follow one guy as he hunts down Flesh Eaters, both for fun and atonement, and to escape his own history.
After crashing into a small group of survivors who are running out of supplies, he decides to help them. But the Flesh Eaters attack them out of the blue, putting the Hunter's skills to the test.
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 I'm sure she'll be able to handle it. According to the official press materials, "dedicated to all the kindergarten teachers who push kids to study, build their confidence, and keep them from getting eaten by zombies." And I think that's all I can think of. In "Little Monsters," Alexander England plays a ditzy, washed-up musician who is in love (or maybe lust) with Lupita Nyong'o. Josh Gad plays an annoying, famous child performer.
What you get is an interesting blend of horror and romantic comedy, which gives new life to 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.
Legendary Italian horror filmmaker Lucio Fulci went with the concept, first in his sequel Zombi (also known as Zombi) and later in his experimental and radically bizarre "Gates of Hell" trilogy.
Fans of Romero's work who built upon 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 film might be. The popularity of zombies thereafter decreased precipitously.
The undead had become a staple of horror films, but now they only appeared in sequels (like Return of the Living Dead and Zombie) and cheap B-movies like My Boyfriend's Back, Cemetery Man, and Dead Alive.
Where else could we begin? White Zombie was the first full-length "zombie" horror movie. It was also the first time the idea of Haitian voodoo zombies became popular in Hollywood, decades before the modern "ghoul" made by George Romero.
White Zombie is easy to find now because it is in the public domain and has been included in almost every cheap package of zombie movies ever put together. If you want, you can watch its 67-minute runtime on YouTube. Bela Lugosi, who had just played Dracula a year earlier and was enjoying his fame as one of Universal's go-to horror actors, plays a witch doctor named "Murder" because the studio hadn't discovered subtlety yet.
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 more information the public domain.
The film influenced Rob Zombie's music. It's on several "greatest zombie movie" lists, although most viewers wouldn't like it in 2016. It's #50 for historical reasons.
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.
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.
Since Troma is producing "Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead," some of the studio's signature touches might make an appearance. In other words, it will be of the worst possible quality. There will be brawling and fighting. Having no bounds or regard for beauty or taste, it will be completely unrestrained. The real question to ask of each Troma film is whether or not you find it dull. In this case, "no" is an appropriate answer.
It's billed as a "zom-com musical," and it's a little bit witty in its social satire of consumer culture—in an obvious manner. But is it really the reason you're seeing a movie about zombie chickens that come to life in a KFC-style restaurant constructed on an old Native American burial ground? I didn't believe so. Watching a Troma film entails accepting the gore, scatological comedy, and cheap production qualities, as well as just enjoying some thoughtless narrative.
As a result, Poultrygeist is essentially 103 minutes of dirty, vile, obscene insanity.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.
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.
A gang of wayward boaters find themselves on a remote island where a wrecked SS submarine has discharged its undead crew, a Nazi experiment. Peter Cushing plays a miscast and addled SS Commander the same year he sneered at Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope?
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 takes a lot to develop a really original zombie picture, but Colm McCarthy's adaptation of Mike Carey's book The Girl With All The Gifts is a brilliant and insightful remake that also delivers 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 craves human flesh but can think and feel – and her very existence may hold the key to the future.
The Draugr, a famous undead creature from Scandinavian folklore famed for its violent determination to defending its hoard of gold, is included in this gore-fest, giving it a Scandinavian touch. In Dead Snow, these draugr are really ex-SS troops who harassed and stole from the people of a Norwegian village before being slain or driven into the frigid 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.
The Dead Next Door is one of those rare occasions in which the film's backstory is probably more intriguing than the picture itself. Sam Raimi produced it with a fraction of the earnings from Evil Dead II so that his close buddy J. R. Bookwalter could create the low-budget zombie epic of his dreams. Raimi, for whatever reason, is listed as an executive producer under the moniker "The Master Cylinder," while Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell does double duty—not on screen, but as the voiceover for not one, but two characters, since the whole picture has been redubbed in post-production. Unsurprisingly, this gives The Dead Next Door a sense of dreamlike unreality, and that's before we even add that the whole picture was 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 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 are all present in this zombie movie, which gives off the impression that it was never intended for anybody other than the director's family members to see it. Nevertheless, there is a certain allure to the amount of sloppy closeness that was shared.
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 (or Dellamorte Dellamore), directed by Dario Argento apprentice Michele Soavi, is a strange, chaotic head trip of a film that sees the living dead as more of a nuisance than a lethal menace. Cemetery Man stars Everett as Francesco Dellamorte, a misanthropic gravedigger who loves the company of the dead to that of the living, and is based on the comic strip Dylan Dog. Why wouldn't he, after all? The living are jerks who keep spreading stories that he's powerless.
One problem, though: the dead won't stay in his graveyard. When he meets a beautiful widow (Falchi) at the funeral of her husband, Dellamorte falls in love with her. He pursues her in the spooky halls of his ossuary, and before you know it, they're naked and making out on top of her husband's grave. That's just the beginning of how strange things will get.