The 2004 remake, directed by Zack Snyder and based on George Romero's 1978 original, is not without its charms. The first twelve minutes are a career-launching onslaught, including one of the genre's best opening title sequences. Many people find parallels between "Dawn of the Dead" and Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" since both films feature speedy zombies. This prologue serves as a fantastic dynamic contrast to that image.
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 "Army of the Dead" on Netflix in 2021, he plans to return to this corner.
Set in a post-apocalyptic Zombie apocalypse brought on by the enigmatic street narcotic "Natas." We follow one guy as he hunts Flesh Eaters for fun and atonement while simultaneously fleeing his past.
After he had a collision with a small group of people who had survived the disaster and were becoming short on supplies, he made the decision to help them out. However, they are forced to flee as the Flesh Eaters launched an unexpected attack, putting the Hunter's abilities to the test.
Zombie Hunter seems to be entertainingly nasty B-Movie fodder — after all, who doesn't want to witness Danny Trejo combat swarms of zombies in slow motion? Director K. King looks to be striving for a Machete/Planet Terror grindhouse retro vibe, so we're looking forward to seeing how it pans out. The marketing team has done an excellent job with the sleek poster.
Lupita Nyong'o, who is known for playing sad characters, plays a happier one in Little Monsters. She may be taking her kindergarten class on a field trip when a zombie outbreak happens, but it looks like she's having a great time. This was the actress's second horror movie of 2019. Her first was Jordan Peele's "Us," which is better known.
But she is definitely up to the challenge. According to the official press materials, the movie is "dedicated to all the kindergarten teachers who inspire kids to learn, give them confidence, and keep them from being eaten by zombies." Yes, that pretty much says it all. Josh Gad plays an annoying, famous child entertainer, and Alexander England plays a snobby, washed-up musician who is taking his nephew on a field trip and is in love (or maybe just lust) with Lupita Nyong'o.
This results in a strange hybrid of horror and romantic comedy that manages to increase the thrills of both genres.
Since then, the zombie outbreak hasn't showed any signs of abating. (It is said that a few of them have even picked up running.) Although "The Walking Dead" is the most obvious example, zombies have appeared in everything from discovered footage movies (like "REC") to romantic comedies (like "Warm Bodies") to homages to the classics (like "The Walking Dead") (Planet Terror).
At the same time, all over the world, a whole genre grew up around Romero's works.
Lucio Fulci, a prominent figure in Italian horror, continued with the concept in his sequel Zombi (also known as Zombi) and later in his experimental and wildly surreal "Gates of Hell" trilogy.
Fans of Romero's work, like directors Dan O'Bannon, Fred Dekker, and Stuart Gordon, built on what he had started. They messed with the genre's rules and tried out new ideas for what a zombie movie could be. After that, zombies lost popularity very quickly.
The undead had become a fixture of horror films, although they now mainly featured 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.Is there another place to begin? White Zombie popularized the Hollywood concept of Haitian voodoo undead decades before the original George Romero ghoul.
It's simple to obtain White Zombie nowadays, since it's a public domain mainstay in just about every cheapo collection of zombie flicks ever assembled—you can just watch its 67-minute length on YouTube if you want. Bela Lugosi portrays a witch doctor, who is literally titled "Murder" since the studio was still a few years away from finding subtlety at the time. He was just a year out from Dracula and delighting in his reputation as one of Universal's go-to horror actors.
The Svengali-like Lugosi ends up zombifying a young lady who is engaged to be married, seeking to bend her to the will of a cruel plantation owner, and... well, it's fairly dry, wooden stuff. Lugosi is, inevitably, the one shining light, but you had to start somewhere. Following White Zombie, voodoo zombie films appeared seldom in Hollywood for years, the most of them are now in the public domain.
Of course, the film had an impact on Rob Zombie's musical career. Some "best zombie movie" lists include it prominently, but let's face it: in 2016, this isn't a movie that most people would like. This object is ranked fifty on the list almost exclusively because of its historical significance.
Planet Terror, which Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez wrote together, is the better half of their Grindhouse double feature. The movie is about a go-go dancer, a bioweapon that goes wrong, and how the people of a small Texas town become shuffling, pustulous monsters. Planet Terror's exploding tongue is firmly planted in its rotten cheek as it embraces its B-movie roots with missing reels, rough editing, and hammy overdubbed dialogue.
The film's conclusion, (zombies) 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 is a Troma movie, so you can expect a few things. It will be a lot of garbage. It will get rough. It will have no limits and no sense of what is right or wrong. The real question, as with all Troma movies, is, "Is it boring?" In this case, the answer is "absolutely not."
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 direct consequence of this, Poultrygeist is only 103 minutes of filthy, gruesome, and raunchy lunacy.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, 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.
Even though Night of the Living Dead was a big deal, it took a while for the public to remember it. Notable American zombie movies didn't start coming out until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Shock Waves may have been the first "Nazi zombie" movie. It came out just before Dawn of the Dead made zombies much more popular as scary enemies.
Honestly, it's a dull, slow-moving movie for most of its length. It's about a group of lost boaters who end up on a mysterious island where a Nazi experiment has turned the crew of a sunken SS submarine into zombies. In the same year that he sneered at Princess Leia in Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope, Peter Cushing played an SS commander who was badly cast and looked like he was going crazy. Hard to believe there's a New Hope!
Since then, there have been at least 16 Nazi zombie movies, which makes this one notable for merging two famous cinema villains first.
Shock Waves is responsible for the success of the Dead Snow films.
It's hard to make a really new zombie movie, but Colm McCarthy's version of Mike Carey's novel The Girl With All the Gifts is a smart, thoughtful reimagining that also has genre thrills.
The Last of Us-like fungal infection has transformed most of the populace into 'hungries' The plot centers on Melanie, who is taught by Gemma Arterton's instructor Helen in a heavily-armed institution.
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 gore-fest takes the standard zombie and gives it a Scandinavian twist by including the Draugr, a legendary undead monster from Scandinavian mythology known for its ferocious devotion to protecting its hoard of gold. In Dead Snow, these draugr are really ex-SS troopers who harassed a Norwegian hamlet and stole from its citizens before being killed or driven into the snowy mountains.
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.
It's possible that the story behind The Dead Next Door is more interesting than the movie itself: Sam Raimi made it possible for his friend J. R. Bookwalter to direct the low-budget zombie epic of his dreams by giving him some of the money he made from Evil Dead II. Raimi is listed as an executive producer under the name "The Master Cylinder," and Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell does double duty—not on screen, but as the voice of not one but two characters, since the whole movie seems to have been re-dubbed in post-production. It's no surprise that this gives The Dead Next Door a dreamy, unreal feel, and that's before we even say that the whole movie was shot on Super 8 instead of 32 mm film.
The Dead Next Door, then, is a genre first: a grainy, low-budget zombie action drama with cringe-inducing amateur acting performances and unexpected touches of polish.
An "elite team" of zombie exterminators stumbles onto a cult committed to the worship of the undead, but you're not there for the story; you're there for the gore. The Dead Next Door sometimes resembles a low-budget attempt to duplicate Peter Jackson's insane bloodletting in Dead Alive, only with gags so blatant that they're frightening. "Who is this Dr. Savini person anyway?" says the narrator. Is it okay if I refer to 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.
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), directed by Dario Argento apprentice Michele Soavi, is a strange, psychedelic head trip that portrays the undead as more of an annoyance than a lethal menace. Everett plays as Francesco Dellamorte, a misanthropic gravedigger who would rather be among the dead than with live people, in Cemetery Man, a film adaptation of the comic book series Dylan Dog. The question is, why wouldn't he? The living are jerks for spreading the false notion that he is sterile.
The dead will not stay buried in his cemetery, though. Dellamorte falls in love with Falchi, a beautiful widow he meets at the burial of her husband. After wooing her in the lonely corridors of his ossuary, they climax on her husband's tomb. Strangeness increases from here on out.