Friday, August 25, 2006

Zombie movies

Now I feel the love, thanks everyone. So here’s to another attempt at nearly daily rants against the growing zombie menace!

First, this necessitates some kind of commentary: I was watching Futurama the other night on Adult Swim (yes, even zombie hunters need their daily cartoon dose). Regular watchers may remember Professor Farnsworth’s exclamation, “Holy Zombie Jesus!”. Such a proclamation was uttered the other night, however, the “Jesus” part was blanked out. Talk about censorship. Granted, this was probably done to appease the right wing religious regime, but as a result a valuable pop culture reference to America’s most popular zombie-worshiping religion was lost. And what a terrible loss it was.

Burial Ground does seem like an awful movie that is attempting (and probably failing) to capitalize on zombie fears. Unfortunately, there does seem to be an entire genre dedicated to exploiting these fears. Making a good zombie movie isn’t that difficult, zombie movie expectations are not that high. All that is required is:

1. Blood and gore
2. One interesting weapon choice
3. One initial, especially gruesome death to show the zombie threat (not necessarily a buxom blonde, i.e. Sarah Polley’s husband in Dawn of the Dead (redux)
4. At least one ironic death (thanks Slash)
5. A thinly veiled moral

Now, what the genre really needs is an instructional film. Something that tells you what do when the zombie menace strikes. Kind like Duck and Cover but for the undead.

Finally, I’ve been exposed to a new verb, “Braining”- as in, a means of killing zombies by destroying the brain. Courtesy of the Onion review of Dead Rising.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"ring wing religious regime"

I'm sure frodo was very pleased.

9:10 AM  
Blogger Melissa said...

Typo Corrected!
"right wing religious regime"
My typing was clouded by rage against censorship.
-Melissa

9:26 AM  

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