I made this card for Valerie’s birthday and thought it was too fun not to share:

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Topics: Birthdays, Illustration, Zombies

If you want to earn any kind of college degree, you’re going to have to take some courses that don’t appeal to you. An English major doesn’t get to skip the natural science courses. A political science major doesn’t get to skip the computer science class. No one gets to skip Math or English. To cope with subjects I find less than interesting I always look for ways to insert the things I do find interesting. Lucky for me, I am a lover of language; almost every class requires some use of the written word.

Opportunities for injecting my love of design are less frequent. When they happen I try to take full advantage. So that is exactly what I did with this math class project about housing:

Be sure to check out the last page for some Zombie shenanigans. (Zombie vectors courtesy of BenBlogged.com)

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Topics: School, Zombies

5. Undead

This movie has over the top zombie destruction, just the right amount of camp, and a twist ending that doesn’t come off as lame. Oh, and there are Zombie fish. You can’t beat that with a shovel.

Great quote: “When I was a kid, we respected our parents, we didn’t eat ‘em!”

4. Dead Alive (aka Braindead)

Peter Jackson’s zombie masterpiece revels in camp, gore, violence, and blasphemy. During the climax the hero straps a lawnmower to his chest to battle the undead. While the chainsaw and the shotgun are clearly the weapons of choice for fighting zombies, the lawnmower deserves honorable mention at the least.

Great quote: “I kick ass for the Lord!”

3 Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Yes, I like it better than the original. It’s just a tighter piece of cinema. Aside from the obvious improvements in special effects, the film flows better, and doesn’t suffer the pacing problems the original did.

Great quote: “I have an idea. We draw straws and the loser runs across the lot with a ham sandwich.”

2 Return of the Living Dead

This is 80’s horror movie camp at its finest, and funniest. If you’re a real zombie fanatic, you’ll notice a song by The Cramps on the soundtrack. Some other songs by this band also make references to the living dead.

Great quote: “You think this is a costume? This is a way of life!”

1 Shaun of the Dead

For me this film represents the pinnacle of the zombie movie pop culture resurgence. While most zombie comedies get their laughs with pure camp, Shaun of the Dead does so with brilliant writing, and great comedic timing.

Great quote: “Lizzy, how can you put your faith in a man you spectacularly binned for being unreliable? A man whose idea of a romantic nightspot and an impenetrable fortress are the same thing?”

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Topics: Movies, Zombies

George A. Romero gave birth to the zombie movie genre in 1968 with the legendary Night of the Living Dead. Last night I rented Diary of the Dead, and was sad to discover that Romero has rammed a tire iron through the genre’s skull.

Diary of the Dead is a lame attempt at satirizing the YouTube generation, filmed in an even lamer attempt at an amateur documentary/Blair Witch style. Aside from a few creative, and graphic, zombie death scenes, the film stinks like decayed flesh. It seems a fake documentary isn’t as easy to pull off as one might think. Diary fails for many reasons.

First, if you’re going to attempt this style of film, don’t try to hedge your bet with a bunch of fancy editing, including slow motion, music, and creepy sound effects. I don’t care if you set up a “reason” in the script for all that post production, it’s still a bad idea. You only succeed in reminding the viewer that what they are watching is not real. Either make it look like a documentary, or make it look like a traditional film. You can’t do both.

Second, for this type of film to work, the actors must have talent. The performances here were on a par with a high school play. Even if the actors were top-notch, the script would have crushed them. Jason, the guy toting around the camera, doesn’t have any regard for the feelings, or lives, of his friends, or even his own life. The other characters are there just to keep reminding us that Jason is a jerk, and that the real reason he won’t stop filming is because that would mean the end of the movie.

When this is the best the zombie master himself can muster, it means the outbreak has been contained. The genre is dead, and it won’t be getting up anytime soon to spread the infection with a bite on a loved one’s arm.

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Topics: Movies, Zombies

I’m a movie fanatic. Zombie cinema is one of my favorite genres. Zombie 90, and Zombie Doom, hardly qualify as cinema.

Excerpt:

Now, you take an island populated by a cult, run by a guy named Karl the Butcher, throw in a mad scientist, some zombies, and even a few ninjas, and you’d think you’d have one hell of an awesome movie. (Sounds like Oscar-worthy material to me anyway.) But when the costumes are straight out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail , the dubbing sounds like one guy is doing all the voices, and the whole mess looks like someone shot it with a 300 dollar camcorder, the scales of movie suckdom start to tip in the wrong direction.

Read the full review

Genre: non-fiction, movie review
Status: Published

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Topics: Movies, Published, Zombies