It's hard to think of "Dawn of the Dead" director Zack Snyder as the same person who made the "Justice League" #SnyderCut, the far-too-faithful "Watchmen" adaptation, and the "300" and "Sucker Punch" movies where style was more important than plot.Which is not to argue that Zack Snyder's 2004 adaptation of George Romero's 1978 picture with the same title has any sense of aesthetic. The first twelve minutes of the film act as an opening salvo for his career and include one of the most impressive opening title sequences in the annals of the genre's history. This introduction provides a fantastic dynamic counterpoint to the movie that "Dawn of the Dead" is sometimes linked to: Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later," mostly because to the involvement of zombies that are referred to as "quick."
Although the remainder of "Dawn of the Dead" never quite lives up to the promise shown in these opening scenes, the screenplay written by James Gunn, who would go on to helm "Guardians of the Galaxy," manages to keep things fascinating all the way through. It is important to point out that remaking a masterpiece is a recipe for disaster ("disaster" being something that Snyder would again court when tackling the work of Alan Moore and the entire DC universe), but by avoiding Romero's social commentary, Snyder was able to carve out his own space in the cinematic zombie universe.
It's a corner of the genre where he wants to go back with "Army of the Dead" on Netflix in 2021.
The action takes place in a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland brought about by the unknown street drug known as "Natas." As the story progresses, we follow one guy as he hunts Flesh Eaters for fun and atonement while also attempting to escape his past.
Following his collision with a small group of survivors who are rapidly running out of supplies, he makes the decision to help. A sudden assault by the flesh-eating Flesh Eaters forces them to flee and tests the Hunter's abilities.
The trailer for Zombie Hunter suggests that it will be the type of gruesome B-movie fun that everyone will enjoy. We're interested to see how filmmaker K. King handles a tribute to grindhouse classics like Machete and Planet Terror. The marketing team did an outstanding job with the eye-catching poster.
Lupita Nyong'o, who is known for playing sad characters, plays a happier one in Little Monsters. She may be taking her kindergarten class on a field trip when a zombie outbreak happens, but it looks like she's having a great time. This was the actress's second horror movie of 2019. Her first was Jordan Peele's "Us," which is better known.
But she is definitely up to the challenge. According to the official press materials, the movie is "dedicated to all the kindergarten teachers who inspire kids to learn, give them confidence, and keep them from being eaten by zombies." Yes, that pretty much says it all. Josh Gad plays an annoying, famous child entertainer, and Alexander England plays a snobby, washed-up musician who is taking his nephew on a field trip and is in love (or maybe just lust) with Lupita Nyong'o.
Thus, the result is an uncommon horror-romantic comedy fusion that energizes both genres.
Since then, zombies have showed no signs of abating. (Some have even learned how to run.) The Walking Dead is an easy giant to point to, but zombies have also appeared in discovered footage ([REC]), rom-coms (Warm Bodies), and grindhouse throwbacks (Planet Terror).
Simultaneously, a global subgenre sprung developed in response to Romero's works.
Lucio Fulci, a titan in Italian horror, continued with the concept, first in his sequel Zombi (also known as Zombi) and later in his experimental and wildly bizarre "Gates of Hell" trilogy.
Dan O'Bannon, Fred Dekker, and Stuart Gordon came along and played with the rules of the genre. They were fans of Romero's work who used his work as a base to explore and expand what a zombie movie could be. Then, as quickly as the zombie trend took off, it went out of style.
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.Where else could we possibly start looking? White Zombie was the first full-length "zombie" horror film, and it was also the first time the notion of Haitian voodoo zombies was popularized in Hollywood. This was decades before the current zombie films of George A. Romero.
Since it is now in the public domain, you may watch White Zombie for free or at a very minimal fee on almost any zombie film anthology. The whole 67-minute film is available for viewing on YouTube. Bela Lugosi, fresh off his success as Dracula and enjoying his status as one of Universal's top horror actors, portrays a witch doctor whose name is a direct translation of the word "murder." The reason behind this is because the studio had yet to learn the value of subtlety at this point in time, which would take a few more years.
In the end, the Svengali-like Lugosi uses his various concoctions and powders to zombify a young lady who is engaged to be married. He does this in an effort to bend her will to the will of a cruel plantation owner, and... well, it's pretty dry and wooden stuff. Lugosi is, as was to be expected, the lone shining light, but obviously you have to begin someplace. Following the success of "White Zombie," Hollywood continued to produce voodoo zombie films for many years, the majority of which are now considered to be in the public domain.
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, one half of the Grindhouse double feature starring Quentin Tarantino, is the superior film. In Planet Terror, a bioweapon goes wrong, turning regular Texans into shambling, pustulous monsters. The protagonist is a go-go dancer. Directing Planet Terror was Robert Rodriguez. Planet Terror sticks its proverbial exploding tongue squarely in its rotting cheek, drawing heavily from its B-movie roots with its shaky camerawork, sloppy editing, and hammy overdubbed dialogue.
In the end, the severed arm of Rose McGowan's character Cherry Darling is replaced with a machine gun in a ridiculously entertaining climax with lots of blood and oozing effects. Gather around, people, because I want to use your brains to grow mine.
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."
For a musical promoted as a "zom-com," if that makes any sense, the social satire of consumer culture is very subtle. Why are you, on the other hand, watching a film about zombie chickens invading a KFC-style restaurant built on top of a Native American burial ground? I don't believe so. Accepting the violence, scatological humor, and low production standards as part of the pleasure, as well as a respect for the haphazard plot, is required for a Troma watching.
Poultrygeist, as a consequence, is merely 103 minutes of filthy, nasty, raunchy lunacy.
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 was an independent movie with a budget just above six figures. It had a mysterious plot, shocking violence, progressive casting, social commentary, and, of course, hordes of ragged, hungry zombies that people will never forget. Romero was called the "godfather of zombies," and he went on to make five more Dead movies. The best of them, like Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, are in this guide.
Despite the effect of Night of the Living Dead, it took some time for the film to simmer and gain significance in the public's consciousness before a swarm of famous American zombie films appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Shock Waves was maybe the first of the "Nazi zombie" flicks, appearing soon before Dawn of the Dead, which significantly increased the popularity of zombies as horror foes.
It is, in all honesty, a gloomy and slow-paced film throughout the majority of its runtime, and it follows a group of lost boaters who end up on a mysterious island where a sunken SS submarine has jettisoned its crew of zombies as part of a Nazi experiment. The film follows the group as they try to escape from the island. In the same year that he was mocking Princess Leia in Star Wars: Episode IV, Hammer Horror legend Peter Cushing makes an appearance in this film as a poorly miscast and addled-looking SS Commander. A New Hope? That seems impossible!
Since then, there have been at least 16 Nazi zombie movies, which makes this one notable for merging two famous cinema villains first.
Shock Waves is responsible for the success of the Dead Snow films.
It takes a lot to develop 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 remake that also delivers genre thrills.
This particular outbreak of zombieism is caused by a fungal infection, similar to the one that wiped out humanity in The Last of Us. The plot centers on Melanie, a young girl being taught by Gemma Arterton's character, Helen, in a unique way in a highly secured 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.
This splatter-fest adds features of the Draugr, a Nordic undead beast that guards its treasure trove. In Dead Snow, these draugr are former SS troops that tormented a Norwegian hamlet and robbed its things before being killed or pursued into the mountains by the people.
Dead Snow gets bonus points for creativity on this one. It's also a really humorous, gruesome, and satisfyingly violent film, with aspects of Evil Dead and "teen sex/slasher" films thrown in for good measure. If you like it, there's more where that came from in Dead Snow: Red versus Dead, the sequel.
The Dead Next Door is one of those rare movies when the tale behind the movie is more interesting than the movie itself. The film was produced by Sam Raimi, who used the profits from Evil Dead II to help his friend J. R. Bookwalter realize his vision of a low-budget zombie epic. Despite the fact that the whole picture seems to have been redubbed in post-production, Raimi is listed as an executive producer under the moniker "The Master Cylinder," and Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell does double duty by providing the narration for not one but two different characters. Even without considering the fact that the whole picture was filmed on super 8 rather than 32 mm, it's clear that this contributes to The Dead Next Door's air of dreamy unreality.
The Dead Next Door provides something unheard of in this genre: a grainy, low-budget zombie action-drama with cringe-worthy amateur acting and surprisingly polished touches.
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 are all present in this zombie movie, which gives off the impression that it was never intended for anybody other than the director's family members to see it. Nevertheless, there is a certain allure to the amount of sloppy closeness that was shared.
The evolution of zombie films has been intriguing. 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 were seldom utilized, and when they were, they were nothing like the cannibalistic, flesh-hungry undead monsters we know and love today.
Cemetery Man, also known as Dellamorte Dellamore, is a film that was directed by Dario Argento's apprentice Michele Soavi. This film is a bizarre and chaotic head trip of a movie that portrays the living dead as more of an annoyance than a lethal menace. Cemetery Man is a film starring Everett as Francesco Dellamorte, a misanthropic gravedigger who favors the company of the dead to that of live people. The story is based on the comic book series Dylan Dog. Why on earth wouldn't he do that? The living are jerks, and they persist in circulating tales that he is unable to procreate.
The only catch is that after burial, the dead won't stay in his cemetery. At the funeral for her mentioned here husband, Dellamorte meets a beautiful widow (Falchi) and immediately falls in love with her. After wooing her in the gloom of his ossuary, the two of them end up steaming it up on her husband's tomb, fully clothed. Falchi is Dellamorte's on-screen new flame. That's only the start of how out of the ordinary things are going to become.