The Zombie Rights Campaign sent representatives as planned to the RiffTrax Live event on Thursday, expecting a fun evening featuring the satire of an old and remarkably terrible zombie movie.   Unfortunately, rather than providing a light-hearted look at outmoded zombie stereotypes, the show perpetuated modern lifeist prejudices against the undead community.

A particular low-point in the evening came during what this observer can only describe as a ‘zombie minstrel show’, where guest Jonathon Coulton performed his famous zombie-bashing song, ‘Re: Your Brains’ as a sing-a-long with the audience in Nashville (and, by extension, several hundred other theatres via satellite).  Inviting the audience to sing along, he instructed the viewers on how to sing like a zombie (in his twisted view), stating that zombies are largely bad singers and are always ‘disorganized’, insisting that the audience belt out their lines in the chorus out of tune, growling and groaning instead of using their normal singing voices.. because they’re supposed to be imitating zombies, who are of course, inferior.

While this was going on in front of the microphone, Kevin Murphy came out behind Coulton and began his version of a Zombie Amos and Andy show, capering and cavorting like one of the Romero-style undead, menacing Coulton as he tried to sing, pantomining eating his brains, and lurching back and forth across the stage in a stiff-limbed ‘zombie’ manner.  All he was lacking was bad zombie makeup and we could officially call this a ‘greenface’ performance.

Shame on you, Rifftrax, and in particular shame on you Kevin.  While Mr. Coulton’s lamentable anti-zombie beliefs are by this point well known in the undead community, there was no need to rub the faces of many a fine zombie or zombie-supporter in them.  Showcasing anti-zombie bigotry before tens of thousands of paying Rifftrax customers was cruel and unnecessary, and indeed has forever sullied what could have been a fun and all-inclusive evening of live entertainment.

Tags: Movies

This entry was posted by John Sears on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.