Showing posts with label horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horror. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 05, 2011

June Zombiepaloozapocolypse

Inspired by watching AMC's excellent Walking Dead series and my love for George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), I dedicated June to watching major (and often influential) works of zombie film:
Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Day of the Dead (the third of his zombie trilogy- 1985),
and Land of the Dead (his fourth movie - 2005)
Return of the Living Dead (1985- of which I had seen portions of years ago)
28 Days Later (2002)
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Zombieland (2009)

Shaun and Zombielands are more affectionate, comedic takes on zombie films than anything, although it's worth noting that Shaun does this extremely well and is a very funny movie, taking full advantage of zombie film conventions and turning them on their head in a clever way.  Zombieland starts out promising, particularly with it's "rules" for surviving zombie attacks, but after a stop at certain comedic icon's Hollywood mansion, fades into a rather by the numbers and not so funny zombie movie.  It never fully capitalizes on the fun premise of a zombie rulebook and throws its own film logic on its head at the end, unfortunately. Also, the promise of a zombie-infested Disneyland type amusement park is woefully under-delivered.