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.This is not to suggest that Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of George Romero's 1978 film The Walking Dead is aesthetically pleasing. This film's opening title sequence is among the best in the history of the genre, and its first twelve minutes serve as a prologue for his career. Since "Dawn of the Dead" has been compared to "28 Days Later" by Danny Boyle, mostly due to the presence of "quick" zombies, this prologue serves as a terrific dynamic counterpoint to that film.
The best part of "Dawn of the Dead" is the first few minutes. The rest of the movie never quite lives up to them, but future "Guardians of the Galaxy" director James Gunn's writing keeps things interesting. But by avoiding Romero's social criticism and putting his own spin on the zombie genre, Snyder was able to avoid the tragedy that was sure to follow his take on Alan Moore's work and the DC world as a whole.
He hopes to return to this genre area in 2021 with Netflix's "Army of the Dead."
The story unfolds in a dystopian future when the strange street drug "Natas" has turned the population into zombies. As the story progresses, we follow one guy as he hunts down Flesh Eaters, both for fun and atonement, and to escape his own history.
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's Little Monsters is an unexpected dramatic film. She's having a blast as a kindergarten teacher whose class meets zombies on a field trip. The 2019 picture was the actress' second horror attempt (after Jordan Peele's "Us").
But she is up to the challenge. According to the official press materials, the video is "dedicated to all the kindergarten instructors who inspire children to study, instill confidence in them, and prevent them from being eaten by zombies." Indeed, that pretty well wraps it up. Also starring in "Little Monsters" are Josh Gad, who portrays an annoying, renowned kid performer, and Alexander England, who plays an effete, washed-up musician who accompanies his nephew on a field trip and is in love (or maybe lust) with Lupita Nyong'o.
As a result, you get an unique horror—romantic comedy mix that amps up both genres.
Since that time, zombies have not shown any signs of slowing down. (There are even reports that some of them have learned how to run.) The Walking Dead is an easy giant to point towards, but in the realm of cinema, zombies have made their way into found footage films (like "REC"), romantic comedies (like "Warm Bodies"), and grindhouse throwbacks (like "The Walking Dead") (Planet Terror).
Meanwhile, in reaction to Romero's works, a global subgenre arose.
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, such as filmmakers Dan O'Bannon, Fred Dekker, and Stuart Gordon, came along and toyed with the genre's constructs, exploring and broadening what a zombie movie may be. Following that, the popularity of zombies drastically dropped.
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 another place to begin? White Zombie popularized the Hollywood concept of Haitian voodoo undead decades before the original George Romero ghoul.
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, who looks like Svengali, uses his different potions and powders to turn a young woman who is about to get married into a zombie so that she will do what a cruel plantation owner wants her to do, and... well, it's pretty dry and wooden stuff. Lugosi is the only bright spot, as expected, but you had to start somewhere. After White Zombie, there were a few voodoo zombie movies made in Hollywood every so often for many years. Most of them are now in the public domain.
The film influenced Rob Zombie's music. It's on several "greatest zombie movie" lists, although most viewers wouldn't like it in 2016. It's #50 for historical reasons.
Planet Terror is the better half of Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse double-bill with Quentin Tarantino. news source It's about a go-go dancer, a bioweapon gone wrong, and Texan villagers converted into pustulous monsters. Planet Terror embraces its B-movie origins with missing reels, rough cuts, and hammy overdubs.
In an outrageously exciting conclusion with over-the-top gore and oozing effects, Rose McGowan's hero Cherry Darling has her severed arm replaced with a machine gun. Gather 'round, people: I want to absorb your brain in order to enlarge mine.
Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead seems to include some of the hallmarks of a Troma picture. It'll be a heap of junk. It's going to be bloody. There will be no restrictions or regard for aesthetics. The real question, like with every other Troma film, is whether you find it boring. In this scenario, the correct answer is "absolutely not."
It's marketed as a "zom-com musical," and it is somewhat amusing in its sociological satire of consumer culture. However, does it really explain why you're going to watch a movie about zombie chickens that come to life in a KFC-style restaurant built on top of an ancient Native American burial ground? That just didn't seem plausible. Be prepared for some shoddy production values and scatological humor in addition to the blood and guts in a Troma film's mindless plot.
As a result, Poultrygeist is essentially 103 minutes of dirty, vile, obscene insanity.While zombie films have been around for over 80 years (White Zombie was released in 1932, and I Walked With a Zombie was released in 1943), it's often assumed that the subgenre as we know it today didn't take off until 1968, when George A. Romero released Night of the Living Dead.
Independent film Night captivated viewers with its intriguing storyline, stunning gore, progressive casting, and social criticism, and its gaunt, ravenous undead. Romero created five additional Dead movies, including Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead.
Despite its influence, it took some time for Night of the Living Dead to simmer and gain significance in the public's psyche before a wave of famous American zombie films appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Shock Waves may have been the first of all the "Nazi zombie" pictures, coming out soon before Dawn of the Dead, which dramatically increased the popularity of zombies as horror foes.
The movie is about a group of shipwrecked people who end up on an uncharted island where a Nazi experiment has turned the crew of a sunken SS submarine into zombies. In the same year that he made fun of Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope, Hammer Horror legend Peter Cushing shows up as an SS Commander who looks out of place and confused. It doesn't seem likely.
I think there have been at least 16 Nazi zombie movies since this one, which is probably more than people realize. This one is notable at least for being the first to combine two great movie villains into one.
Shock Waves influenced films like Dead Snow.It's not easy to come up with a fresh perspective on the zombie film, but Colm McCarthy's The Girl With All The Gifts, based on Mike Carey's novel, succeeds in doing so while also giving great genre thrills.
In this instance, the zombie state is the product of a fungal virus akin to The Last of Us that has converted the majority of the people into 'hungries.' But that's really in the background of the plot, which concentrates on Melanie, a little girl getting an unorthodox education in a highly guarded institution from Gemma Arterton's instructor Helen.
Melanie, a'second-generation' hungry, still craves human flesh but is capable of thinking and feeling – and her very existence may hold the key to the future.
This gore-fest takes the standard zombie and gives it a Scandinavian twist by including the Draugr, a legendary undead monster from Scandinavian mythology known for its ferocious devotion to protecting its hoard of gold. In Dead Snow, these draugr are really ex-SS troopers who harassed a Norwegian hamlet and stole from its citizens before being killed or driven into the snowy mountains.
I must give Dead Snow credit for originality here. It includes elements of Evil Dead and "teen sex/slasher" films, it is funny, violent, and satisfyingly brutal. Furthermore, Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead is the sequel, so fans can anticipate more of the same.
There are times when the tale behind a film is more compelling than the film itself, and The Dead Next Door is no exception. Sam Raimi used the money from Evil Dead II to finance its development so that his friend J. R. Bookwalter could achieve his ambition of a low-budget zombie epic. The whole film seems to have been re-dubbed in post-production, and Raimi is identified as executive producer under the name "The Master Cylinder," while Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell voices not one but two roles. The Dead Next Door has an air of dreamy surrealism due to the fact that it was filmed completely on Super 8 and not 32 mm film.
What you have with The Dead Next Door, then, is a genre-exclusive innovation. A grainy, low-budget zombie action-drama that simultaneously features cringe-inducing amateur acting and surprising hints of polish.
An "elite team" of zombie exterminators discovers a cult committed to the worship of the undead, but you're watching this for the gore, not the story. The Dead Next Door, made for no other purpose than to try out gore effects and realistic decapitations, often like a low-budget attempt to duplicate Peter Jackson's insane bloodletting in Dead Alive, only with gags so blatant that they're frightening. "Who, after all, is this Dr. Savini guy?" Can I address you as "Officer Raimi"? Carpenter, Commander?They're all here, in a zombie picture that seems like it was only ever intended for the director's family to witness. Even yet, there's a strange allure to that degree of lousy familiarity.
The journey of zombie movies to the big screen has been very interesting. For decades, the creatures didn't have much of a presence or definition outside of Voodoo legends, radioactive humanoids, and the unforgettable art of E.C. comics. Zombies weren't used very often, and when they were, they weren't like the flesh-eating, cannibalistic zombies we know and love today.
Cemetery Man (or Dellamorte Dellamore), helmed by Dario Argento protégé Michele Soavi, is a bizarre, psychotic head trip in which the living dead are portrayed as more of a nuisance than a lethal menace. Cemetery Man is based on the comic book series Dylan Dog and stars Everett as gravedigger Francesco Dellamorte, who prefers the company of the dead over that of the living. And why should he not? The living are scum, and they continue to propagate accusations that he is impotent.
But there is a catch: the deceased won't remain buried in his cemetery. Dellamorte falls 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.