Zombie movies

Friday, March 31, 2006

#18 Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies 1963

WTF?!

I had such high expectations with a title like that. Only to have them dashed against the rocky shore like the main character was at the end. This was billed as the first monster musical. There were 3 times more song and dance routines than there were zombies. There were only three zombies that caused anything that resembled mayhem. And they weren't really even zombies. They were guys that the boardwalk fortune teller had been hypnotized and then threw acid on their faces. It took an hour and eight minutes before we even saw one of the zombies.

I actually started reading a book about fractal geometry while watching this one. If being lame was a superpower, this movie would easily kick Magneto's ass.

1486m

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

#17 Dawn of the Dead 2004

Yes! Except for the baby part.

A slow zombie isn't that scary. A fast zombie is creepy. A thousand fast zombies is scary. A small group of humans hole up in a mall and wait to be rescuers who are not coming. Outside the parking lot is filling with consumer zombies who are drawn to the familiar location. These zombies are caused by a viral infection passed on by bite wounds. I have never seen the original Dawn of the Dead. I'll have to rent that one this weekend.

The closing credits are great, so don't shut it off until the very end.

1399m

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

#16 Kung Fu Zombie 1982

Contrary to what I previously said Zombies + Kungfu != Fucking Awesome.

This had a few funny moments but otherwise was totally lame on all fronts. I am so disappointed. It was very badly subtitled, so half the time I could not read what was being said. Often the characters would speak and there was no subtitle, not that it would have made any difference.

The bad guy tries to raise zombies to kill the main character Pang. That doesn't work and he ends up getting killed by them. Then his ghost tries repeatedly to get "reincarnated" by taking over the bodies of the dead. A different bad guy wants to kill Pang's father. Pang kills Baddy #2. Baddy #1 tries to take over the body of Baddy #2. Doesn't work because Baddy #2 comes back from the dead. Instead Baddy #1 takes over Pang's father's body. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1289m

Sunday, March 26, 2006

#15 Night of the Living Dead 1968

Excellent! Good acting, high tension, last person living in the house is black. That last part kind of surprised me considering the time period in which it was made.

This is really a change in direction for zombie movies. These are my favorite kind of zombies. No longer are they being controlled by a power mad human. They are only driven by their hunger for living flesh. Nothing can stop them and civilization collapses, at least temporarily.

There were a couple of little things that I found interesting. One was that they were never called zombies, only ghouls. Another was that a probe on its way back from Venus with an unexplained radiation was suggested as the source of their transformations. Also, they weren't entirely stupid. They would pick up weapons to kill people or break windows.

1209m

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Tracking

I went back and added the movie number in front of each title. At the end of each entry I also added the cumulative number of minutes I have wasted thus far.

#14 The Plague of the Zombies 1966

Now, I know what you are going to say. "How could they use a safety pin to secure the bandage on her finger when it is clearly August of 1860. The safety pin cannot possibly be that old." Well let me assure you that the safety pin has been around much longer than that and was "re-invented" in 1849.

Anyway this wasn't a bad movie. Good characters and acting. A Dr. comes to a small British village to help a former student figure out what is causing the deaths of local young males. Can you guess? Huh, can you?

Yep, voodoo. The village squire, Clive Hamilton, is using them as cheap labor in his tin mine.

1113m

Friday, March 24, 2006

#13 Versus 2000

Zombies + Kungfu = Fucking Awesome!

Do I really need to say anything else? Oh, there was a lot of gun and sword play too.

The movie should have ended when they rode off on the motorcycle. But they had to tack on a "99 years later" scene. That would have been okay except for the makeup. They had on those fake bald things and you could so clearly see the edge of it. Totally brought me out of my state of suspended disbelief.

One thing this movie taught me was I don't think I could pull off the leather pants thing.

1023m

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

#12 Blood of the Zombie 1961

After getting married John Carlton inherits the family plantation in Louisiana. But his cousin who has been running the plantation for years has other plans. If the new bride dies before the deed is transferred then the cousin gets to keep it. What better way to kill a person than to raise your brother who has been dead for 10 years. The problem is that on the way to the plantation the newlywed pick up a stranded motorist. Having two women in the house confuses the zombie and he kills the wrong one. Stupid zombie. Mayhem ensues.

After watching 3 b&w films yesterday I was just thrilled that this one was in color. Color rules!

904m

Monday, March 20, 2006

#11 Teenage Zombies 1957

Teenagers stumble upon an off shore plot to turn America into zombies. Cold war bioterrorism zombies at their best, or maybe worst.

If you are going to make a zombie gorilla you had better make damn sure that it stays a zombie. Improvements in gorilla suit technology in the last 50 years is truly amazing. The big fight scene between the teens and the foreign conspirators was more like Greco-Roman wrestling than kill or be killed. Not that there is anything wrong with Greco-Roman wrestling.

Acting sucked. Plot sucked. At least it was not a long movie.

833m

#10 Revolt of the Zombies 1936

This movies transports us all the way around the world to Cambodia. During WWI a group of US soldiers go there to discover the secret of making zombies, and destroy it lest it fall into the wrong hands. Of course falling into the wrong hands is exactly what happens. Two men fall in love with the same woman. The man who is spurned discovers the secret of creating zombies and takes control over everyone around him in an effort to make the woman marry him. However, here is one man he does not make into a zombie. That man's sage advice makes the zombie master realize the error of his ways and for the sake of his love he releases all of the others from his spell. Then they kill him.

I am not liking this zombie/love story movies. They make me sleepy.

760m

#9 King of the Zombies 1941

Three men crash on an unidentified island in the Caribbean, just a week after an U.S. Admiral went missing in the same area. They find a house with a Dr. who allows them to stay as his guests. One of the passengers, Jefferson Jackson, the valet of the other passenger, Mr. Summers, is the off-color comic relief of this film.

The zombies in this film are simply hypnotized people. The Dr. is working for a foreign government trying to get top secret information from the Admiral, who he captured before the three men crashed.

I enjoyed this one. The racial stereotyping was annoying but probably typical of the time period. Mantan Moreland's comedy carried the entire film.

695m

Sunday, March 19, 2006

#8 I Walked With A Zombie 1943

A Canadian nurse travels to the West Indies to care for the wife of a wealthy plantation owner. What is wrong with the wife? Why does she never speak and just walks around with a blank look on her face? Hmmm...could it be that she is a zombie?

It turns out that the wife was going to run off with the plantation owner's half brother, so their mother participated in a voodoo ritual to turn the wife into a zombie. The locals discover that she is a zombie and magically call her to them so they can destroy her. But the brother beats them to it. He loves her and puts her out of her misery.

Not a bad movie. Decent acting. A few plot twists. No brain eating and kind of like a soap opera but still pretty good.

628m

Saturday, March 18, 2006

#7 Army Of Darkness 1993

At the end of Evil Dead 2 Ash, the lead character, is sent back in time through a portal designed to dispose of the physical incarnation of the accidentally summoned demons. He is thrown back to 1300 A.D. and forced to fight for the Necronomicon then defend it against the army of darkness that he inadvertantly raises from the dead.

I was disappointed. They tried to make this one funnier than the last. But they tried to do that by using stooges slapstick. I got tired of it quickly.

559m

#6 Evil Dead 2 1987

"Who's laughing now?" So what do you do if demons have taken over your right hand and it keeps attacking you? Obviously you cut it off with a chainsaw then attach the chainsaw to the bloody stump. Duh. Just make sure you put the severed hand in a secure location so it does not keep attacking you.

This is the Evil Dead that I was remembering last night. Way funnier than the first one, but just as bloody. Still not a zombie movie in my opinion.

The first ten minutes was sort of a recap of the first film except that the back story was totally changed. But it made for a smoother transition to the second film. The end of this one clearly was setting up the third in the series which I am going to go watch now.

478m

Friday, March 17, 2006

#5 Evil Dead 1981

If you like lots of blood and gore then this is a film you will enjoy. Five friends go to a remote cabin for the weekend. They happen across a "Book of the dead" which is bound in human skin. There are also some audio tapes of the cabin's former occupant. The tapes have an ancient chat which invites demons to inhabit their bodies. Not really a zombie movies as much as a demon possession movie. One of Bruce Campbell's early films. He seems to get trapped under bookcases a lot. I saw this about 20 years ago, but remembered it being funny. Maybe I am remembering one of the other movies in the Evil Dead trilogy. I'll watch those sometimes this weekend.

Dr. Who was also on tonight. That prevented me from watching I walked with a zombie. That will be later this weekend after the trilogy.

393m

Thursday, March 16, 2006

#4 Scooby-Doo On Zombie Island 1998

"Yikes! It's a regular zombie jamboree." This is one of Scooby's better performances. But Velma was just phoning it in.

Tired of criminals in masks the gang reunites to go searching for a real supernatural story. They end up on Moon Scar Island in a haunted mansion. The ghosts bring back to life corpses of pirates, confederate soldiers and a few tourists. Turns out the zombies are the good guys. They are just trying to warn the gang that the island's owner is really a werecat creature out to suck the kid's lifeforce or souls or something.

I picked this one because I had my boys with me tonight and I did not think they could handle the other movies I had to choose from. I have already seen this one a half dozen times and I fell asleep for a moment or two, until the boys woke me up.

308m

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

#3 Carnival Of Souls 1962

I liked this movie, even though I would not call it a zombie movie. The creepy organ music really added to the atmosphere.

Spoiler Warning
A young woman mysteriously survives a car crash into the river. Then she travels to Salt Lake city to play the organ in a church there. Along the way she starts seeing dead people. Even though these dead people bare a striking resemblance to zombies, they are in fact ghosts. No one sees them except the young woman, they don't kill anyone and at the end they leave no footprints in the sand. She could maybe be considered a zombie because at the end when the ghosts capture her she disappears without a trace. Then they show the crashed car being towed out of the water with her body in it. So she was sort of walking around doing things even though she was really dead. Still more ghostly than zombily. Thats right I said zombily. What are you gonna do about it?

231m

Plot Summary

Schrödinger has requested that I include a brief plot summary for each film that I watch. So I will go back and describe the first two that I watched.

White Zombie -- A rich Haitian plantation owner invites an engaged couple to be married at his home. He enlists the help of a local practitioner of voodoo to make the bride into a zombie so he can have her for himself. The hydrocephalic groom and resident missionary attempt to halt his plans.

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things -- An acting troupe travels to an island to perform an ancient rite which will raise the dead. It is intended to be a prank by the troupe leader, but joke is on him when the spell actually works.

Monday, March 13, 2006

#2 Children shouldn't play with dead things 1972

I am so totally going to have nightmares after watching this movie. Not because the zombies were remotely convincing, but because the score was like a three armed deaf monkey pounding on a electric keyboard. Otherwise, it wasn't so bad considering when it was made. Some of the actors were over the top but that was intentional because the characters they were playing were actors. The people I thought would survive did not, which I consider a plus. I'm not sure but I think maybe it was supposed to be a comedy. The dialog was almost entirely composed of very bad puns.

153m

Sunday, March 12, 2006

#1 White Zombie 1932

I am not a reviewer. I am not a writer. I just watch movies and write down some of my thoughts. I may ruin an ending or spoil a surprise. I will no doubt offend someone too.

This movie was different than any I have seen in that the zombies are created by an individual to do his bidding. They don't rise from the grave on their own.

The groom, Neil, has a very large forehead. It is possible that he suffered from hydrocephalus.

I know nothing of film history. But apparently they had a different idea of what acting was back in 1932. Maybe it was because of the transition from silent film to talkies, or maybe from stage to film. They way overact.

While Bela Lugosi may have had some pretty cool clothes he also had some truly frightening eyebrows. If you can imagine taking slightly bushier than normal eyebrows and ripping them off someone's face then reattaching them to the opposite sides (left brow over right eye and vice versa) then pushing them closer together until they were almost touching you can see what I mean.
The most interesting part of watching this film was when the bride was telling the fortune of the groom by looking into his glass of wine. First she sees happiness, then love. Then she looks down and sees Bela's face, with his wild glowing eyes, in the glass. She slowly raises her head and stares blankly into the distance. "I see death". KRAKA-KA-BOW!! A great big clap of thunder explodes outside my house. Sure it had been raining and thundering all day. But this was the biggest loudest thunder yet and the timing could not have been more perfect. Clearly this is a sign from God that I am supposed to watch all of the zombie movies ever made. I am thinking either Zeus or Thor.

66m

Friday, March 10, 2006

So it begins

I placed a reserve on Book of the dead at my library. Finally it came in and I now feel I can begin. It has a large filmography that I think I will use as my inital list of films to watch.

I just checked out White Zombie from the library to watch tonight.

Monday, March 06, 2006

What the hell was I thinking?

Last Tuesday night I started making my list of films. I started with a list I found on Wikipedia, which had about 120 titles on it. This is small compared to some of the other lists I found. I looked up the runtimes for all of them I could. The total minutes was 9330. That is 155.5 hours or 6.48 days. That is the small list. The large list had twice as many titles on it.

My friend, who I shall call Schrödinger, helped me find movies that were not on my list. Thanks.