On AMC, the 'Dead' Walk Hard

It seems like AMC's The Walking Dead is showing no signs of stopping.


Mediaweek reports that last Sunday's episode -- the fifth in the six-episode first season -- scored 5.56 million viewers and hit it off with the 18-49 demographic to the tune of 3.71 million viewers.

That's a lot of eyes on the The Walking Dead, which Mediaweek also claims averages 5.09 million total viewers, more than the current season of Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

When the first season concludes this week, fans will be happy to know that AMC has already ordered a 13-episode second season.

It's not the zombies but the wait for new episodes that will kill us.

[SOURCE MEDIAWEEK]

The Horde (REVIEW)

REVIEW

The Horde (2009)

(aka. La Horde)

Directors: Yannick Dahan
and Benjamin Rocher

RATING:
4.5 / 5 zedheads
 

Ever since Night of the Living Dead, zombies have been routinely used as narrative and thematic devices to highlight humanity's predisposition toward inhumanity. Not only are zombies grotesque caricatures of the human condition, but the threat they pose brings out our most self-destructive tendencies: selfishness, violence, corruption, sexism, and racism. While the zombies in the French film The Horde are certainly bloodier, faster, and more feral than those in Romero's Night of the Living Dead, The Horde successfully delivers a fast-paced and action-packed zombie thriller while staying true to Night's spirit: a bleak look at petty humanity in times of social collapse.

A dental hygienist's nightmare

When the film begins, the line between hero and villain is already blurred. A quartet of masked gunmen infiltrate a rundown high rise tower block to take revenge on a gang of criminals led by a Nigerian-born gangster named Adewale (Eriq Ebouaney). Are these masked gunmen a rival gang  fighting over turf, money, and drugs? Not quite. These masked killers are actually cops. Lead by Ouessem (Jean-Pierre Martins), these rogue officers aim to take down Adewale for his gang's murder of a fellow cop. Ouessem has made a solemn promise to the dead's family to take justice into their own hands even if it means creating a blood bath. As this war between corrupt cops and cold-hearted murderers goes sour with deaths on both sides, the world around them suddenly and violently goes to shit. The dead are returning to life as savage, flesh-hungry creatures! The cops and the gangsters must put aside their bloody feud and form an uneasy alliance to survive the onslaught of a fast and powerful undead horde.  

This is what it looks like when zombies go to the petting zoo.

Along the way, both sides crack under the pressure and make fatal mistakes. They forge unexpected and troublesome new partnerships, turn on one another, and succumb to panic and petty power struggles. Friends become enemies, enemies become friends, and all become meat to be shredded between the hungry jaws of the horde. The Horde is primarily an action film following a team of survivors as they fight their way through crowds of zombies. What excites me more than this surface action is the sub-textual action and interplay between the characters. The Horde, like Night of the Living Dead, focuses on how different characters react to pressure and danger. There is some really great character development happening throughout the film that unravels subtlety and alongside the gore and gun play without distracting from it. You certainly won't find The Horde in the drama section of any video store, but that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of character drama to sink your teeth into. In particular, there's a great scene where Adewale admonishes his brother Boa (Doudou Masta) for abusing and threatening rape on an incapacitated female zombie. Adewale, who has proven to be a cold-hearted killer, nevertheless expresses a surprisingly moral streak when he chastises his brother for abusing the zombie; Boa has forgotten that he and his family were similarly abused in Nigeria during the cycles of political and religious violence that plague the region. This exchange is a convincing and subtle character moment. Moments like this, delivered with an acute sense of timing and drama, raise The Horde above other mindless zombie action movies.

"Are you ready to rock? I said, ARE YOU READY TO ROCK!"

The Horde is also visually impressive. Yes, the use of CGI blood spurts gets quite annoying by the end of the film, but The Horde makes up for it by featuring a literal horde of zombies. There are several sequences that are shocking and claustrophobic just based on the number of zombies filling the shot. Unlike many zombie films today that look like they were shot in someone's back yard with a handful of friends, The Horde brings together an impressive and athletic cast of zombies to swarm the screen. In one fantastic sequence, a parking garage is filled wall-to-wall with zombies, and a character is swallowed up in a sea of their hungry hands and mouths. It looks like colony of ants swarming over a morsel of food. The shot is breathtaking and reminds me of what makes zombies truly scary. It's not how fast they run or how decomposed they look, it's their sheer and overwhelming numbers. Not since Evil in the Time of Heroes (review) have I seen such an impressive cinematic horde. The Horde's certainly earns its title.

Although she speaks French, that look clearly says, "I mean business."

There's plenty of blood, gun play, and just enough flesh-feasting to satisfy horror and action fans. If like me, however, you also enjoy seeing how characters unravel under pressure and turn on each other, just as the dead have turned on the living, then make The Horde your next movie to watch. From start to finish, The Horde is a tight, exciting, and impressive example of popular modern zombie storytelling with a message about humanity. It drives its message home in the final scene: the character who has given up the most humanity is the last to survive.

If we abandon our humanity, then what's left of us but ceaselessly gnashing maw of the horde?

SUPPORT BLOOD AND DUST -- Help fund an Indie Zombie Film

Ever wanted to be a filmmaker? Well, the technology is ready and waiting. The only obstacle, however, is time and money. I haven't figured out how to donate time yet, so the least I can do is put a spotlight on promising, independent horror filmmakers who want to raise some money in order to raise some cinematic hell!

Case in point: BLOOD AND DUST. Help Trickster Moon Productions finance the creation of this short by contributing via the film's KICKSTARTER page. With donations as low as one dollar, you can help produce an independent zombie film.

The folks at Trickster Moon are looking to raise some funds and turn their gloriously bloody proof-of-concept trailer into a short zombie movie. They need to raise $25,000 by February15th to ensure they can turn this trailer into a fully-realized short film with all the violence, sexual situations and gore they have imagined. With a few hundred dollars and the help of friends, Dean Sasser and Morgan Elektra of Trickster Moon Productions have already created a very intriguing and very bloody sample of horror. I want to see their vision come to full fruition. Won't you help them?

The power of the Internet compels you! The power of the Internet compels you!

Blood and Dust Kickstarter DONATION PAGE: www.tinyurl.com/BloodandDust
Blood and Dust trailer (Youtube): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dul5RatSBHg

LEGO Zombie Apocalypse Vehicles

LEGO zombies. You say it, and everybody wants it, but LEGO doesn't yet make it. Why LEGO doesn't jump on the zombie bandwagon and begin to manufacture its own zombie brand of building blocks is beyond me. Until they do, we have artists like Andrew Becraft who create and build their own. And God bless'em.

Check out Andrew's badass post-apocalyptic zombie survival vehicles (ZSVs). They're Dead Reckoning in brick form.

[Via Jalopnik]

Zombie Cuisine (Short Film).

From director Rob Kelly, "Zombie Cuisine" is a charming short zombie film that begins as so many often do -- with a group of unsupecting teens being set upon by the hungry undead -- but then takes a quirky left turn into what Kelly calls the "docu-drama factual-theatre zombie cookery genre"



Zombie Cuisine from Rob Kelly on Vimeo.

Find out more about the film at

ZOMBIECUISINEMOVIE.COM

If you're in the mood for more tasty food-related zombie conent, check out all the archived posts from The Zed Word's recent ZOMBIE CUISINE WEEK

The Walking Dead: S01E01- Days Gone Bye (REVIEW)

Undoubtedly, the premiere of The Walking Dead was one of the most anticipated zombie events of the year for zombie fans, comic book fans, and all fans of horror on TV. I watched the episode for its Halloween premiere, and now that I've digested the episode, I have three things to say:

1. The Walking Dead represents the triumphant vindication of the slow zombie.
2. The Walking Dead sets a benchmark for visual TV horror.
3. The Walking Dead makes me remember why I fear zombies.

Episode one of The Walking Dead, "Days Gone Bye," aired on AMC on October 31, 2010. The episode is written and directed by series producer Frank Darabont. Based on the ongoing comic book written by Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead premiere introduces us to Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), a Sheriff's deputy who is gunned down on the job only to awake from a long coma into a world ravaged by the undead.

THE GOOD

As a zombie fan, but not necessarily a fan of the comic series, I thoroughly enjoyed The Walking Dead premiere. First and foremost, "Days Gone Bye" won me over with its depiction of the zombies as the slow, ravenous, and undead variety pioneered largely by George A. Romero in Night of the Living Dead (1968). For far too long, we've been saturated with fast-moving zombies who sprint across the screen in badly-edited and shaky scenes. 28 Days Later successfully pioneered the fast-moving zombie craze (although Return of the Living Dead in 1985 had some very mobile corpses) until others ran this new representation into the ground. While there's certainly a place for the fast zombie, this style of zombie too often lends itself to cheap jump scares. Sadly, I've even heard some people (zombie fans, mind you) say that slow zombies are no longer scary in our modern media landscape

I point to The Walking Dead and call "bullshit" on that. If slow zombies aren't scary, it's only because people haven't been doing them right. The Walking Dead does it right.

In an age of fast-paced, viral media, The Walking Dead breaks from the pack. It takes time to show the painfully silent and the eerily empty post-apocalyptic world to which Rick awakens The Walking Dead is not a non-stop action thrill-ride. Long stretches of scenes contain little or no music or sound. In this silence, Darabont plants the seeds of the thick, creeping tension that will grow and blossom as the episode unfolds and Rick finds bloody clues as to the violent fate of the world that has degenerated around him.

Into this world, Darabont introduces the undead. With the help of special effects masters at KNB effects, The Walking Dead can unequivocally boast of having the best-looking zombies ever seen ever TV and, perhaps, even on film. Truly grotesque, but still sadly human, the zombies look ... perfect. Each is unique and consists of more than just an extra in face paint. The camera lingers on them but they are not the stars. They are a deadly force of nature -- a swarm of hungry mouths and hands. For the first time in a long time, the sight of zombies gave me chills.

I watch a lot of horror and a lot of zombie movies. Little on film scares me these days. Although I've always said that the concept of zombies scares me, I don't get scared by zombie movies. The premiere of The Walking Dead, however, brought me back to that place of anxiety I first experienced when watching Night of the Living Dead as a young boy on Halloween night. The episode was shockingly grotesque by TV standards, yet it also enforced an emotional weight to the violence. This is not a cavalier video game experience where masses of zombies are repeatedly shot in the head or ground into bloody pulp. Every time a bullet is fired, it means something. This emotional weight and tension goes a long way to making zombies scary again.

THE BAD

The premiere of The Walking Dead was not an entirely satisfying experience. There is a vein of sexism prevalent in this episode that is plainly disturbing. Our introduction to Rick and his partner Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal) is predicated on a long discussion about the uselessness and inherent stupidity of women. When I first read the first few issues of The Walking Dead comics, I also detected a hint of misogyny in how the narrative was structured around placing much of the condemnation on Rick's wife. I'm worried that this trend will continue in the show. The episode's opening discussion about women didn't seem to serve much purpose other than to peg both Rick and Shane as unlikable men. We'll have to see how or if this trend progresses.

In terms of structure, the episode hits a few rough patches of unsubtle exposition dump. Because the premiere must also introduce Rick, place him into a post-apocalyptic world, and also make sure all audience members (not just zombie fans) understand the nature of the undead, we have to sit through several scenes of explanation that bog down the story slightly. Clunky first-episode scripting is to be expected.

Finally, while the zombies look amazing the other effects are clearly produced on a TV budget. I'm referring specially to CGI gun shots and blood effects. I easily overlook many of the rough effects based on the strengths of the episode's practical effects, set design, and makeup, but the CGI blood sticks up like a sore red thumb. What can you do? You have to shoot quickly and economically for TV, even for premium cable like AMC.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I eagerly await the next episode of The Walking Dead. The premiere is not perfect, but as a stand-alone experience it is easily one of the most exciting zombie projects I have seen in some time. I can't wait to see where Darabont and his team at AMC will be taking the show.

Count on me to be walking with the dead all the way to this season's finale.

Night of the Seagulls (1975)

Night of the Seagulls (1975)

(aka La noche de las gaviotas )

Director: Amando de Ossorio

RATING:
3 / 5 zedheads

For the fourth and final entry in the Blind Dead series, director Amando de Ossorio cherry picked the most effective concepts and scenes from his previous three films and stitched them together for one last tale of the blind and blood-thirsty Knights Templar. As a result, Night of the Seagulls may feel like a retread, but it's got enough of a new focus on idol worship and the secret and suspicious Spanish village setting to work as an effective hook.

FASHION CRIME: Wet paper bags are soooo last year.

The residents of an isolated fishing village in Spain harbour a shameful, dark secret. Every seven years, for seven nights, the villagers lead a virgin woman to the beach where she is sacrificed to the Blind Dead. The Blind Dead are undead Knights Templar who, since the Middle Ages, have been worshiping a demonic sea creature (in the form of a stone statue) and partaking in blood drinking and blood-letting to secure their immortality. In exchange for leaving the villagers in peace, the Blind Dead demand seven virgins a night once every seven years so that they may continue their unholy existence. The villagers do not speak to outsides about their evil pact, but when Dr. Henry Stein (Víctor Petit) moves to the village to take over as local doctor, he and his wife Joan (María Kosty) begin to uncover the satanic rituals. The sounds of the screeching seagulls begin to sound like the wailing souls of the virgins defiled in the name of the Blind Dead's lust for blood.

Between a rock and a hard place.

Night of the Seagulls retreads a lot of tropes from the previous films. A couple with romantic issues (and potential lesbian tensions) stop over in a rural village with a sprawling, ruinous castle (ala. Tombs of the Blind Dead) and must contend with a murderous group of mummified knights who do a lot of horse-riding, hacking/slashing with swords, and stalking of their victims on the street and barricaded in their homes (ala. Return of the Evil Dead). From a mentally-challenged and persecuted villager (ala. Return of the Evil Dead), they learn of the Blind Dead's connection to the sea (ala. The Ghost Galleon in which a nautical setting and atmosphere is most prevalent). Thankfully, de Ossorio has picked the most effective tropes of the Blind Dead mythos -- especially the renewed focus on sacrificial violence. Nevertheless, Night of the Seagulls can't help but feel more like a synthesis of the previous installments than a new story.

Warning to Bra-Stuffers: the Blind Dead 
seem very fond of busty sacrifices.

New to the Blind Dead mythos is the object of the Knights' worship. In previous installments, the Knights worshiped an abstract Satanic power, but in Night of the Seagulls they focus their attention on a stone carving. Shaped like a monstrous demon frog with a hollowed out mouth, the idol is sure to remind any fan of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction of the frog-like monsters and deep ones worshiped in his own weird tales. Take into consideration the secrecy of the villagers, Night of the Seagulls could play very well into Lovecraftian themes had the film wanted to develop a more atmospheric horror.

He's not a picky idol. He'll eat blood sausage,
blood pudding, blood pancakes...

All in all, if you enjoyed Tombs of the Blind Dead and Return of the Blind Dead, you'll probably enjoy Night of the Seagulls. I wanted to seem more focus on the Blind Dead's worship of their underwater deity, but we get more of the standard scenes of Blind Dead menace. There's not much atmosphere, and the Blind Dead are dispatched fairly quickly, but Night of the Seagulls is a perfectly good flick to pass the time if you're into low-budget Spanish horror.

I told him not to sit so close to the TV.

Happy Birthday, Nicole V.

This special birthday greeting goes out to little Nicole V. who turns nine years old today.

Nicole loves crayons, petting her unicorn, and arbitrarily denying her friends pillows at sleepovers. When she grows up, she says she wants to be a "straight up gangsta." How cute.

Happy Birthday, Nicole V. You are the Zed Word's Birthday Bite of the week.

ZombieWestern: It Came From The West (Review)

ZombieWestern: It
Came from the West (2007)

Director:  Tor Fruergaard

RATING:
3 / 5 zedheads



Naturally, I'd be excited for any zombie western. Even though ZombieWestern: It Came from the West is a short Danish-language film, I was guaranteed to watch it eventually because it sells itself as the first ever puppet zombie western. Great, right? After 17 minutes of puppet violence and gore, I can appreciate the appeal of the short. In the end, however, I really did not enjoy it much.

The human puppets were too ugly and awkward to enjoy

I love puppets. I grew up in the age of Jim Henson, but my taste in puppetry is diverse and extends beyond Muppets. The human puppets in ZombieWestern, however, are grotesque little caricatures with bulging eyes, rough and exaggerated features, and realistic human teeth shoved in their unrealistic mouths. As zombies, they look appropriately disgusting, don't get me wrong. As human characters that we need to identify with, they look like mutants. There is something about the use of realistic teeth protruding from unrealistic bodies that turned me off from this short film. In part, their faces are not very expressive and their hands are not very dexterous. They wobble around and look disturbing. Again, this works great for the zombie puppets. I just really didn't want to watch these human puppets at all.

A thing of nightmares

The miniature sets, the gore, the violence against zombie puppets, and the design of the zombies are all interesting. At the same time, there's very little motivation / interesting story in this 17 minute short. I just couldn't buy into the short based on the design of the non-zombie puppets.

Sella Turcica (REVIEW)

Sella Turcica  (2010)

Director: Fred Vogel

RATING:
2 / 5 zedheads



I have just returned from the Canadian premiere of Fred Vogel's Sella Turcica, presented by Horror in the Hammer at the Staircase Theatre as part of the Hamilton Film Festival. While I hate to be hackneyed in a review relating to the Hamilton Film Festival, I feel that only a horrible pun will truly prepare you for Sella Turcica. So let me put it this way: Sella Turcica is over an hour and a half of boredom ending with ten minutes of spectacular goredom. 

I feel dirty making that pun -- Gene Shallat dirty. But it's true. Sella Turcica is an insufferably boring family drama that explodes in its final moments with a shower of spectacular and brutal gore effects. The gore is impressive and shocking but not worth suffering through the rest of the movie to experience. 

Oh, the pain! The pain of it all!

Sgt. Bradley Roback (Damien A. Maruscak) returns to his family from duty in Iraq where he suffered an mysterious accident that has left him paralyzed from the waist down and in an increasingly degrading state. He's deathly pale and in chronic pain. He's hungry but food repulses him. Black goo is beginning to ooze from his orifices. Through it all, he feels a constant pressure in his sella turcica, the depressed structure of the skull that houses the pituitary gland. Although he attempts to hide his condition from his mother Karmen (Camille Keaton of I Spit on Your Grave), sister Ashley (Jade Risser), and brother Bruce (Sean McCarthy), his condition worsens until he eventually transforms into a violent, blood-thirsty zombie. 

Sella Turcia is clearly inspired by films like Deathdream (1974), Zombi 2, and Combat Shock. The comparisons with Deathdream are unavoidable: both feature a soldier who returns home from war as a violent zombie. Sella Turcica wears its other inspirations on its sleeve by openly name-checking Troma's Combat Shock in an exchange of dialogue and by naming the family pug "Fulci." One would expect TOETAG films to draw such inspiration from Fulci's gory Italian zombie films and Troma's independent "feel-bad" fare. One would not expect Sella Turcica to be such a family drama. It is a very different beast compared to Fred Vogel's past work on simulated snuff films like August Underground. Sella Turcica focuses more on family drama, character performance, and dialogue instead of the extremely graphic and brutal gore for which TOETAG has become infamous. Unfortunately, the film's drama is fumbled by unimaginative direction, a clunky script, shoddy acting, and painful music. The last ten minutes are an outright gore-hound's dream and guaranteed to please/shock horror and zombie fans, but you have to sit through over an hour and a half of painful dialogue and repetitive shots to get there.

Fred Vogel doesn't seem to hire many professional actors, and that may work in his other films but not when he builds a film on character and dialogue. The script is already clunky and overwrought, but the acting is flat and delivered with the disconnected line-to-line rhythm of bored porn stars and amateur high school play actors. The first two-thirds meander like a soap opera drained of its melodrama; a judicious editor could shave in excess of half an hour off this film and it'd be no worse for wear.

The only notable performance in the production is courtesy of Damien A. Maruscak as Bradley Roback. His line delivery may be stilted, but he turns out a commendable physical performance as a man tormented with mental and bodily pain. Watch for a dinner table scene in which the unspoken tension builds as Roback's family attempts to ignore his terrible sickness and the mental and physical strain he suffers when trying to tell a simple story. Throughout the film, we see Roback lose his grip on himself until he he transforms into a zombie. Jerky and stiff, powerful yet lumbering, Maruscak's zombie performance comes close to capturing the same level of commitment and intensity that David Emge showed as Flyboy in Dawn of the Dead (1978). The physical subtleties in his transformation scenes and his final emergence as a violent zombie are enough to garner this film a rating of two zedheads. Unfortunately, there's not enough horror in this horror drama. The drama itself is paper thin. This film, unfortunately, is not worth watching even for its arguably impressive, albeit short, zombie sequences. 

I'd hate to see those linens under UV light.

This November, Horror in the Hammer's Fright Night Theatre -- our monthly horror movie screening -- coincided with the opening night of the Hamilton Film Festival. We partnered with the Film Festival and chose to present Sella Turcica as our November pick for Fright Night Theatre because we love to support independent cinema and give exposure to all sorts of fringe and low-budget productions. I support independent film, for sure, but that doesn't mean I can always recommend independent films. Despite its lofty ambitions, Sella Turcica is a terminal bore. I get the film's latent metaphor about the pain and trauma that soldiers bring home from war. I get the subtext about the ways war turns men and women into destructive monsters. What I don't see, however, is any of these themes handled with any subtlety or visual artistry.

With a shorter running time and a more professional script, Sella Turcica could have been an impressively understated critique of war and the treatment of veterans. Instead, it's going to end up as a clip on Youtube in which someone uploads only the final scenes because these scenes are going to be the only scenes people will care to re-watch.