It's hard to reconcile the Zack Snyder who made "Dawn of the Dead" with the Zack Snyder who gave us the "Justice League" #SnyderCut, the "Watchmen" adaptation that stuck too close to the source material, and the "300" and "Sucker Punch" movies that were more about style than substance.The 2004 remake, directed by Zack Snyder and based on George Romero's 1978 original, is not without its charm. The first twelve minutes are a career-launching onslaught, featuring 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" because of the presence of speedy zombies in both films. This prologue is an excellent dynamic counterpart to that image.
The remainder of "Dawn of the Dead" never quite reaches the heights of its opening sequence, but the writing by future "Guardians of the Galaxy" director James Gunn keeps things fascinating throughout. It should be emphasized that replicating a classic was a formula for catastrophe (something that Snyder would again risk when tackling Alan Moore and the whole DC world), but by forsaking Romero's social criticism, Snyder was able to carve out his own niche in the cinematic zombie realm.
And it's a corner he'll return to with Netflix's "Army of the Dead" in 2021.
The plot takes place in a dystopian future in which the unusual street drug "Natas" has transformed the people into zombies. We follow one man as he hunts down Flesh Eaters for joy and atonement, as well as to escape his own past, as the tale continues.
After falling across a small group of survivors, he helps them. The Hunter's talents are tested as the Flesh Eaters strike unexpectedly.
The trailer for Zombie Hunter makes it seem like the kind of bloody B-movie fun that everyone would love seeing. We're curious to see how director K. King pulls off an homage to the grindhouse style of films like Machete and Planet Terror. With the eye-catching poster, the marketing team has done an excellent job.
Little Monsters is a surprising film by Lupita Nyong'o, who is known for her serious parts. But she seems to be having a great time as the teacher of a kindergarten class that faces a zombie outbreak on a field trip. The 2019 picture marked the actress' second, though lesser-known, foray into the horror genre that year (the other being Jordan Peele's "Us").
But I have no doubt that she can handle it. To to the official press materials, "dedicated to all the kindergarten teachers who push youngsters to study, build confidence in them, and save them from being eaten by zombies." And I think that about covers it. Alexander England portrays an effete, has-been musician who is in love (or maybe lust) with Lupita Nyong'o, and Josh Gad plays an annoying, renowned kid performer in "Little Monsters."
It's a horror-romantic comedy mix that energizes both genres.
Since then, the zombie outbreak has continued unabated. (A few have even mastered the art of running.) The Walking Dead on television is the most prominent example, although zombies have also appeared in found footage ([REC]), romantic comedies ([REC]), and grindhouse homages (Warm Bodies) (Planet Terror).
At the same time, all over the world, a whole genre grew up around Romero's works.
Legendary Italian horror filmmaker Lucio Fulci went with the concept, first in his sequel Zombi (also known as Zombi) and later in his experimental and radically bizarre "Gates of Hell" trilogy.
Dan O'Bannon, Fred Dekker, and Stuart Gordon explored and expanded what a zombie movie might be after Romero. The zombie craze rapidly faded.
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 any other place to start? The Hollywood notion of Haitian voodoo zombies was initially popularized in White Zombie, decades before the classic George Romero ghoul.
White Zombie is easy to find now because it is in the public domain and has been included in almost every cheap package of zombie movies ever put together. If you want, you can watch its 67-minute runtime on YouTube. Bela Lugosi, who had just played Dracula a year earlier and was enjoying his fame as one of Universal's go-to horror actors, plays a witch doctor named "Murder" because the studio hadn't discovered subtlety yet.
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. The one bright point, unsurprisingly, is Lugosi, but you had to start somewhere. Following White Zombie, voodoo zombie films sprang out in Hollywood on a regular basis for years, the most of them are now in the public domain.
Obviously, the film affected Rob Zombie's musical endeavors as well. Some "best zombie film" lists include it prominently, but let's be honest: in 2016, most viewers would not like this film. This object is ranked fifty on the list almost exclusively owing of its historical value.
Planet Terror is the better half of Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse double-bill with Quentin Tarantino, which tells the tale of a go-go dancer, a bioweapon gone wrong, and Texan peasants 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.
It includes over-the-top gore and oozing effects, and it builds to a ridiculously hilarious ending in which Rose McGowan's hero Cherry Darling's severed leg is replaced with a machine gun. All of a sudden, I'm going to consume your brains and learn all you know.
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 billed as a "zom-com musical," and it's a little bit witty in its social satire of consumer culture—in an obvious manner. But is it really the reason you're seeing a movie about zombie chickens that come to life in a KFC-style restaurant constructed on an old Native American burial ground? I didn't believe so. Watching a Troma film entails accepting the gore, scatological comedy, and cheap production qualities, as well as just enjoying some thoughtless narrative.
As a consequence, Poultrygeist is just 103 minutes of filthy, gruesome, bawdy mayhem.
Despite the fact that zombie films have been around for longer than 80 years (White Zombie was released in 1932, and I Walked With a Zombie was released in 1943), it is generally acknowledged that the zombie subgenre as it is known today did not emerge until 1968, when George A. Romero released Night of the Living Dead.
Night, an indie picture with a budget little around six figures, captivated spectators with its cryptic storyline, startling violence, progressive casting and social criticism, and, of course, its iconic hordes of gaunt, ravenous zombies. The greatest of Romero's five more Dead films, including Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, are presented in this guide. Romero is considered the godfather of zombie films.
It took some time for Night of the Living Dead to gestate and gain cache in the cultural consciousness before a huge wave of significant American zombie movies bloomed in the late 1970s and especially in the 1980s. This is despite the fact that Night of the Living Dead was a significant cultural influence. Shock Waves, which was released not long before Dawn of the Dead drastically enhanced the appeal of zombies as horror villains, is said to be the first of all the "Nazi zombie" films. It came out just before Dawn of the Dead.
The film follows a party of wayward boaters who get up on a mystery island where a submerged SS submarine has released its undead crew as a Nazi experiment. In the same year that he sneered at Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope, Hammer Horror star Peter Cushing plays a poorly miscast and befuddled-looking SS commander. A New Hope? Impossible!
By my estimation, there have been at least 16 Nazi zombie movies since this time, which is definitely more than one may expect, making this one remarkable for combining the portmanteau of famous cinematic villains first.
Shock Waves is to thank for how well the Dead Snow movies did.Colm McCarthy's adaptation of Mike Carey's book The Girl With All The Gifts is a brilliant and nuanced remake, with genre thrills to match.
In this instance, the zombie outbreak is caused by (this article) a fungal infection like to that shown in The Last Of Us, which has converted the majority of the population into 'hungry' zombies. But that's really in the background of the plot, which concentrates on little Melanie, who is getting an unorthodox education from 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.
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.
Dead Snow deserves credit for his ingenuity here. It's funny, gory, and satisfyingly brutal, with elements of Evil Dead and "teen sex/slasher" flicks. Furthermore, Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead is a sequel, so fans can anticipate more of the same.
Sometimes a movie's backstory is more interesting than the movie itself, and that's the case with The Dead Next Door. Sam Raimi paid for it with the money he made from Evil Dead II so that his friend J. R. Bookwalter could make his dream of making a low-budget zombie epic come true. The whole movie seems to have been redubbed after it was made, and Raimi is listed as an executive producer under the name "The Master Cylinder," while Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell voices not one but two characters. This gives The Dead Next Door a dreamlike, surreal feel, and that's before we even talk about the fact that it was all shot on Super 8 and not 32 mm film.
Therefore, what you have in The Dead Next Door is something that cannot be found in other works of the same genre: A grainy, low-budget zombie action-drama that has a blend of amateur acting performances that make you grimace and surprising moments of professionalism all at the same time.
An "elite squad" of zombie exterminators discover a cult dedicated to the worship of the undead, but you aren't watching this one for the narrative, you're watching it for the gore. Made for no other reason than to test out gore effects and realistic decapitations, The Dead Next Door sometimes resembles a low-budget effort to recreate Peter Jackson's psychotic bloodletting in Dead Alive, except with jokes so obvious that they're scary. To paraphrase: "Who is this Dr. Savini guy anyway?" Can I call you "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.
Incredible to see is the growth in popularity of zombie flicks. Long ago, monsters mostly lived in the worlds of Voodoo mythology, radioactive humanoids, and E.C. comics' distinctive iconography. When they existed, zombies were not the cannibalistic, flesh-hungry monsters we know and love today.
Cemetery Man (also called Dellamorte Dellamore), which was directed by Dario Argento's assistant Michele Soavi, is a weird, psychedelic head trip in which the undead are shown to be more of a nuisance than a dangerous threat. In Cemetery Man, a movie based on the comic book series Dylan Dog, Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte, a grumpy gravedigger who would rather be with the dead than with people who are still alive. Why wouldn't he? That's the question. People who are still alive are jerks for spreading the false idea that he can't have children.
But there's a catch: the dead refuses to be buried in his own cemetery. Dellamorte meets a lovely widow (Falchi) during her husband's funeral and falls in love with her. They end up boiling it up on her husband's grave after wooing her in the dreary halls of his ossuary. It just gets weirder from here.