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."That's not to suggest Snyder's 2004 adaptation of George Romero's 1978 picture of the same name isn't stylish. The first 12 minutes of his career serve as an opening volley, featuring one of the finest opening title sequences in genre history. This beginning provides a good dynamic antidote to the picture to which "Dawn of the Dead" is sometimes compared: Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later," owing to the appearance of so-called "fast" zombies.
The film's opening minutes are its high point, and although the rest of the picture never quite comes up to them, the scripting by future "Guardians of the Galaxy" director James Gunn keeps things interesting. Snyder avoided the catastrophe that would have followed 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.
Netflix's "Army of the Dead" will see him return to the genre in 2021.
Set in a post-apocalyptic Zombie apocalypse brought on by the enigmatic street narcotic "Natas." We follow one guy as he hunts down Flesh Eaters for fun and atonement while simultaneously trying to escape his past.
After running upon a small band of survivors who were running low on supplies, he decided to pitch in and assist. The Flesh Eaters, however, have launched an unexpected onslaught, and the Hunter's skills have been put to the test.
Who wouldn't want to see Danny Trejo fight hordes of zombies in slow motion? Director K. King looks to be aiming for a Machete/Planet Terror-esque grindhouse retro vibe, so we're eager to see how this will play out. With this attractive poster, the marketing team has surely succeeded.
In Little Monsters, Lupita Nyong'o, who is often cast in dramatic roles, portrays a more humorous character. She may be teaching a kindergarten class on a field trip that encounters a zombie epidemic, but she looks to be having a fun. The 2019 film was the actress's second attempt into the horror genre, after Jordan Peele's better-known "Us."
She'll be OK. According to the press notes, it's "dedicated to all the kindergarten instructors who push youngsters to study, build confidence, and save them from being eaten by zombies." That's it. Josh Gad portrays an annoying kid performer, and Alexander England plays a has-been musician in love (or lust) with Nyong'o.What you get is an intriguing mix of horror and romantic comedy that breathes fresh life into both genres.
Since then, there hasn't been a stop to the zombie outbreak. (Some of them have even learned how to run.) The most famous example is The Walking Dead on TV, but zombies have also been in found footage movies ([REC]), romantic comedies ([REC]), and homages to grindhouse movies (Warm Bodies) (Planet Terror).
Simultaneously, a whole genre sprung up around Romero's work that spanned the world.
Lucio Fulci, an Italian horror legend, took the idea and ran with it in his own way, first with Zombi 2 (also called Zombie) and then with his much stranger and more experimental "Gates of Hell" trilogy.
Fans of Romero's work who built on 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 movie might be. The popularity of zombies quickly faded after that.
The creature had become an important part of the horror genre, but outside of ongoing horror sequels (like Return of the Living Dead and Zombie) and the occasional genre oddity (like My Boyfriend's Back, Cemetery Man, and Dead Alive), the dead no longer walked the earth.
Exists any alternative starting point? White Zombie popularized the Hollywood concept of Haitian voodoo undead decades before the original George Romero zombie.
White Zombie is currently accessible for watching on YouTube, and it can also be found in practically any cheap zombie movie collection. Bela Lugosi plays a witch doctor called "Murder" since the studio was only a few years away from discovering subtlety at the time. Lugosi had just been a year away from being one of Universal's go-to horror performers after his appearance in Dracula.
Lugosi, playing the role of Svengali, utilizes a variety of potions and powders to transform a young woman into a zombie before her wedding. It's fairly dry and wooden stuff, but he's trying to break her will so that a terrible plantation owner can have his way with her. As was to be anticipated, Lugosi stands out as the only bright spot; nonetheless, every great story had a humble beginning. Since "White Zombie" was so successful, Hollywood has made several more voodoo zombie movies, the vast majority of which are now available to the public without any restrictions.
Rob Zombie's music was, of course, also influenced by the movie. Some lists of the best zombie movies give it a lot of attention, but let's be honest: in 2016, most people wouldn't like this movie. This item is number 50 on the list almost entirely because of how important it is to history.
Planet Terror is the better half of Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse double-bill with Quentin Tarantino, telling the tale of a go-go dancer, a botched bioweapon, and Texan townspeople transformed into shuffling, pustulous creatures. Planet Terror has its exploding tongue firmly entrenched in its rotten cheek, leaning heavily towards its B-movie heritage with missing reels, rough editing, and hammy overdubbed dialogue.
Eventually, Rose McGowan's hero Cherry Darling gets her severed limb replaced with a machine pistol in a ridiculously entertaining climax that has over-the-top gore and oozing effects. Gather 'round, folks: I want to consume your intellect in order to expand my own.
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."
It's even a little bit sophisticated in its social criticism of consumer culture—in an obvious kind of way—despite being billed as a "zom-com musical." Is that, however, the actual reason you're seeing a zombie chicken movie set in a KFC-style restaurant constructed on an old Native American burial ground? No, I don't believe so. Watching a Troma film entails accepting the gore, scatological comedy, and low-budget production standards, as well as just enjoying some thoughtless narrative.
As a result, Poultrygeist is essentially 103 minutes of dirty, vile, obscene insanity.While zombie films have been around for almost 80 years (White Zombie was produced in 1932, and I Walked With a Zombie was published in 1943), it's widely acknowledged 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, 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.
Despite Night of the Living Dead's effect, it took some time for the picture to mature and earn cultural cachet before a massive wave of notable American zombie films exploded in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Shock Waves may very well be the first of all the "Nazi zombie" films, arriving just before Dawn of the Dead drastically increased the appeal of zombies as horror adversaries.
The film depicts a group of shipwrecked people who get themselves on an unknown island where a sunken SS submarine has released its crew of zombies, a Nazi experiment. The same year he sneered at Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope, Hammer Horror veteran Peter Cushing appears as a miscast and addled-looking SS Commander. It doesn't seem conceivable.
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 responsible for the success of the Dead Snow films.
It takes a lot to produce 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 reworking that still has genre thrills to add. The film is based on the novel by the same name.
The bulk of the population has become "hungries" due to exposure to a fungal infection that is similar to the one shown in The Last of Us. However, such element plays a secondary role to the story of a little girl called Melanie. Melanie is being educated by Helen (Gemma Arterton), who has an unusual curriculum, in a heavily armed institution.
Melanie is a "second-generation" hungry. She wants to eat human flesh, but she can also think and feel, and her very existence may hold the key to survival.
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.
This shows that Dead Snow is creative, for sure. It's also very funny, bloody, and violent, and it has parts that remind you of Evil Dead and "teen sex/slasher" movies. And if you like it, the sequel, Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead, has more to offer.
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 one-of-a-kind experience, even in this genre: A grainy, low-budget zombie action film with cringe-inducing amateur acting performances and surprising professionalism thrown in for good measure.
You're not watching this one for the storyline; you're watching it for the gore. The premise centers on a "elite squad" of zombie exterminators who stumble onto a cult that worships zombies, but you're not watching this one for the plot. The Dead Next Door sometimes feels like a backyard attempt to replicate the demented bloodletting seen in Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, except with genre references that are so on-the-nose you can't help but laugh at them. The film seems to have been made as an excuse to simply practice blood effects and practical decapitations. "Dr. Savini"? "Officer Raimi"? "Commander Carpenter"?They're all in there, giving "The Walking Dead" an air of having been made just for the director's own private viewing pleasure. Yet, the messy proximity that was shared has its charms.
The journey of zombie films into the mainstream has been remarkable. Outside of Voodoo legend, radioactive humanoids, and the memorable imagery of E.C. comics, the monsters didn't have much of a presence or description for decades. Zombies weren't employed very often, and when they were, they weren't anything like the cannibalistic, flesh-hungry undead 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.
But there is a catch: the deceased won't remain buried in his cemetery. Dellamorte falls (zombie movie list) in love with a beautiful widow (Falchi) he meets at her husband's funeral. After courting her in the gloomy hallways of his ossuary, they end up steaming it up on her husband's grave. It gets stranger from here on out.