Posted By John Sears on November 25, 2010

As mentioned on the blog, we here at the ZRC spent the Thankstaking Day holiday relaxing and forcing ourselves to slog through Romero ‘classic’ films. Due to technical issues with Dawn of the Dead, we only got through Night and Dawn, missing the trifecta with Day.

Not bad for refreshing the old memory though, plus I feel comfortable really tackling the two films with a ZRC official review now.

Meanwhile, a few quick news articles that have been clogging up the old inbox:

Blood Drive, a Carmageddon clone where you mow down innocent Zombies with cars, is out now for the Xbox and PS3, I guess. From the review at Fearnet, it’s apparently not just bad for Zombies, it’s bad for anyone who got sick of Carmageddon way back when because, well, it sucked. It was boring and sloppy with awful controls, let’s be honest.

The PS3 is also getting Dead Nation, a new arcade-style shooter where you mow wave after wave of the Differently Animated down for no good reason. Kotaku says its good, but they completely ignore the Zombie Rights angle, which I can only chalk up to prejudice.

What’s up with the PS3 lately, and how can I convince Sony to send the ZRC a console for review purposes?

The Weekly World News published a brilliant satire of Zombie Apocalypses with this piece on a Zombie TURKEY Apocalypse. Stunning work, guys.

The Simpsons have a line of mini-figures out featuring the main family as Zombies; sadly, they seem to fall prey to vicious Anti-Zombie stereotypes in the process. Really, a femur for a pacifier for Maggie? That’s just spiteful.

Finally, the Video Game Awards look like they may be the launching pad for a new, huge Anti-Zombie game, judging by some annoyingly indirect viral marketing being conducted now on their behalf. People, listen; we here in the Zombie Rights community would appreciate it if you at least gave us some advance notice of the new horrors you’re about to unleash, and not in the form of oh-so-clever advertisements that never mention the product. Yeesh. It’s hard enough out here for us. A second ad is up now, and so far the ads combined spell out a message of ‘Murder Your ____’ with one to go.

If it’s ‘Murder Your Zombie’, we won’t be surprised, just extra-offended.

Category: Zombie Media, ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Movies, Romero, Social Justice, Television, Toys, Videogames

Posted By John Sears on November 24, 2010

Somehow, though I forget how at the moment, I learned of this Holy Taco article on the 6 ‘Types’, or as I indicated above, Stereotypes, of Zombies that have been found in The Walking Dead tv show to date (apparently).

I know, I know, it’s the biggest Zombie media product to hit America in years, and I believe it’s up on Hulu, but you have to remember, I read all this stuff years ago, and I doubt it’s improved with age (though at least on screen it should be easier to tell characters apart than it was in the comic books). I’m dreading the hours of my life I’ll have to spend categorizing the offensiveness of Kirkman’s vision as brought to the small screen.

Therefore, cheat-sheets like the Holy Taco piece are useful. However, the author’s enthusiasm for Zombies seems to be limited to media that depicts them as a menace, which is unfortunate. Their tack on evaluating the ‘Zombies’ found in the show is interesting, in that it’s less Naturalism and more Media Criticism, assuming that each fictional ‘Zombie’ in the AMC product is there to serve a specific need of the show (often in selling the horror that Zombies are supposed to represent).

Holy Taco points out one of the most venerable cliches found in Zombie media:

Background Shuffler – You can’t fault AMC for not being innovative enough to do away with this character who has been in every single “mob mentality” horror movie ever. Whether it’s a horde of zombies, vampires, CHUDs or whatever the things that weren’t trolls were in Troll 2, there’s always some douchers just standing around in the background because the director only wants monsters 1 through 7 to attack the hero because the fight choreographer wasn’t comfortable with any more than that. The result is that while the near-miss attack is going on, you’re sitting at home drinking your Yoo Hoo thinking “why the shit aren’t the rest of the zombie swarming on him yet? They could have eaten him six times by now.”

Indeed! Zombie movies sometimes even go so far as to reference this phenomenon themselves, like in the Tom Savini-helmed remake of Night of the Living Dead, where Barbara is consistently amazed by how slow her (allegedly) Zombile adversaries are, and how easy they should be to evade, if only the gang of Living humans could get their acts together.

All praise aside, we can’t condone this Holy Taco critical approach when it displays the following sort of callousness toward the Differently Animated:

The Heart String Tugger – The most effective zombie is the zombie you don’t want to shoot, if there is such a thing. But how do you make a 150lb sack of rot and ass sympathetic? It needs a backstory and it gets that by having family.

We here at the ZRC are well aware that products like The Walking Dead only use Zombies as means to an end, much like gladiators in Ancient Rome, but still, could we have a modicum of respect for the people being oppressed here?

Still, if this summary is any indication, The Walking Dead is getting points down for both creativity and Zombie Rights. What a failed opportunity to raise public awareness and sympathy for the Differently Animated. What a squandered chance.

A real shame.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Robert Kirkman, Television

Posted By John Sears on November 23, 2010

Via the Horror Society the ZRC has learned about a new, award winning indie song about Zombies:

The winners of the 2010 Davey Awards have been announced by the International Academy of the Visual Arts. “Zombie Boyfriend,” a music video produced by Brooklyn Girl Productions and directed by Jenine Mayring for indie artist Emii, won a Silver Davey Award.

If you just listen to the song on youtube or read the lyrics at the artist’s site, you might get the impression that, while not an entirely flattering portrayal of Zombiekind, Zombie Boyfriend is at least not a particularly Anti-Zombie song. I was leaning toward a Zombie Tolerant rating… until I saw the official and now award winning video.

Uggh. This is reminiscent of nothing so much as that awful Mega64 thing I wrote about some time back; here we have the ‘People playing videogames until they become Zombies’ trope repeated yet again. Such an.. ‘original’ thought, isn’t it?

Needless to say, of course, playing a videogame does not transform anyone into a Zombie, anymore than any other obsessive behavior, and comparing Zombies to solipsistic obsessive game players is insulting to the Zombies as well. Whats next? Reading too many books makes you Asian, or being too athletic could transform you into an African-American?

Where does it end?

The ZRC has to give this video our second-worst rating as a result of its blatant pandering. Thusly, the video for ‘Zombie Boyfriend’ receives the Anti-Zombie mark of shame, and, assuming it reflects the artist’s feelings when writing and singing the original song, so does the song itself.

For shame.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Mega64, Music

Posted By John Sears on November 23, 2010

It’s truly tragic that this article detailing the ‘history’ of Zombies in America is a cut above the average; sad, in that such a shallow and defamatory, not to mention dubiously ahistorical piece is still so much better than most.

What the io9 piece gets right, and almost everybody else misses, is that the history of the media’s treatment of Zombies here in America didn’t start with George Romero. Shocking as it seems to those of us in the Zombie Rights movement, most Americans are blissfully unaware of the entire existence of the Voodoo (or perhaps Vodoun) Zombie/Zombi, both in terms of their real world existences and their depiction on the silver screen. Amazingly enough, your average American has completely forgotten all about the Zombies they feared and defamed pre-Romero, having become fixated on Romero’s nasty vision.

Unfortunately, most of the rest of the io9 post is awful, simply dreadful. First, they attempt to create one unified history of the Zombie phenomenon in America, acting as if the Romero treatment of the Differently Animated was naturally derived from the earlier Hollywood Zombie movies like White Zombie or Revolt of the Zombies.

Theres just one little hitch with this theory; it’s not true, at least, not if you believe George Romero:

Q: So here you are again with the zombies.

A: Isn’t it weird?

Q: Can you account for your lifelong interest in them?

A: No. I’ve sort of been stuck with them in a weird way. I love it. I grew up on the DC comic books before they were censored. And I never thought of the things as zombies when we made Night of the Living Dead. Never called them zombies. They were ghouls, flesh-eaters. I thought I was coming up with some kind of new creature: neighbours. Dead neighbour walking.

Q: That’s a scary thought.

A: Neighbours are scary enough. When people started to write about the film, they called them zombies. I used the word only in Dawn of the Dead. Haven’t used it since. They call them Stenches in Land of the Dead. In this film they call them Deadheads. I just don’t like the sound of it. I can’t get my head out of the idea that zombies are rainbow boys down in the Caribbean. I don’t know what these creatures are. They’re neighbours. They’re dead neighbours.

Granted it’s an odd position for the ZRC to take, but we’re willing, barring evidence to the contrary, to accept Mr. Romero’s statement that, in fact, his defamatory vision of Zombies does not flow from the Carribean Zombie but from his own, twisted imagination.

Perhaps more unsettling is the re-presentation of io9 ‘research’ attempting to tie the bashing of Zombies on screen to specific social tragedies (as if social unrest is in any way a justification for such treatment):

Of course no fantasy icon as popular as the zombie can ever be boiled down neatly into an allegory about any single issue. Race and class conflicts are one part of zombie tales, as are fears about famine, disease and war. A few years ago, we at io9 even did a massive analysis of times in history when the most zombie movies came out, trying to discern a pattern. What we found was quite remarkable: Periods of social unrest and war were almost always followed by big spikes in zombie movie production.

…

If anything, what all these zombie movies have in common is a shared origin in mass historical trauma. When millions of people go through something horrific together – whether that’s slavery, war, or plague – they seem to hunger for stories about zombies.

They present a chart alongside this, allegedly tying spikes in Zombie movie production to the various historical events, derived from an earlier piece i09 did some time ago.There are at least three enormous problems with this methodology:

1) It assumes all Zombie bashing is derived from the same source, and are created in reflection of the same basic fears, despite the radically different origins of our various cinematic concepts of the Zombie. This ignores both the very different origins of domestic Anti-Zombie myth, as mentioned above, as well as the international contributions to our cinema of hate; clearly, the Italian Anti-Zombie tradition has far less to do with the African-Carribean experience, and the same can probably be said for the Spanish, British and Australian/New Zealand Zombie film genres. While it’s true that this is an article about Zombies in America, it’s also undeniable that filmmakers like Fulci, Argento, Bava, Boyle and Peter Jackson have had profound influences on American Zombie films. (If you click through to the original article, you’ll find that they do include some foreign Zombie movies in their sampling.)

2) It fails to properly account for differences in the number of movies made, and their status as indies vs studio pictures.
Yes, the original piece mentions the enormous increase in the number of films being made as the cost of independent filmmaking plunges due to better technology, as well as new methods of seeing and distributing such films emerge. However, it doesn’t attempt to actually quantify this in any meaningful way; what *percentage* of, say, major studio movies in 1930 vs. 2000 were Zombie-bashing? How about indies? Instead we get a handwave that, oh, gee, it obviously accounts for some of it.

3) The historical event analysis is shallow and flawed. Take a look at this:

Still, even correcting for the fact that there are more movies being made today, you can see that there are distinctive spikes in zombie popularity – and they always seem to fall slightly after a huge political or social event has caused mass fear, chaos, or suffering. That’s why World War II, Vietnam, and the current Iraq War are all followed by a zombie rush at theaters. Obviously, if you’re going to look at these historical correlations, you have to consider that movies inspired by a real-life event aren’t going to show up in theaters for at least six months to a year, so we’ve accounted for that.

Do you see the obvious problem? They are attempting to prove that historical traumas, as perceived by the United States, caused these ‘spikes’ in Zombie bashing on screen – while including non-US films in their samples!

Somehow I doubt that, say, the Vietnam war caused the same level of social unrest in Europe that it did here. Likewise, the current Iraq War’s social effects are doubtless very different in the US than in Europe or around the rest of the globe.

So in conclusion, i09 is still doing a terrible job informing the general public about Anti-Zombie films. As further insult, at no point is the enormous harm caused by these spikes in brutal hate-flicks against the Differently Animated mentioned. The suffering and social ostracism of the American Zombie is ignored in pursuit of some grand theory to explain their media popularity; it’s callous in the extreme.

And then, to top it all off, the author tries to assert her own theory that Zombies exist somehow to remind Living people of their own repressed memories and trauma. Zombies aren’t people too, says i09 writer Annalee Newitz, they’re just psychotherapy props for anxious Living individuals. I suppose Ms. Newitz would rather fight Zombies with therapy sessions than shotguns, but otherwise, she’s right up there with the Romeros and Russos of the world, pushing the ‘Zombies are a disease’ trope, only hers is psychological rather than physiological.

Shame on you for writing this, Ms. Newitz, and shame on i09 for publishing it.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Euro-zom, Fulci, Journamalism, Movies, Romero, Social Justice

Posted By John Sears on November 23, 2010

Well the trip to The Dark Carnival was tons of fun and went off without a hitch, right up until the day after we get back and I fall terribly ill while trying to get the media uploaded and some posts written about the trip.

Sorry about that.

We have returned from our triumphantly successful odyssey to Bloomington, Indiana, however, and the ZRC has a story to tell. The first, and main, batch of pictures is up on the flickr account now, and you can go look at them here. An overview of the whole shebang follows below, meanwhile.

Relative newcomers to Zombie Rights or this blog might be asking, at this point, ‘What is The Dark Carnival Film Festival, and why is it so important to The Cause?’ Well, curious readers, The Dark Carnival is the premiere independent horror film festival in the United States, critically acclaimed and very well known for its emphasis on the films and filmmakers (rather than merchandizing, the driving force behind so many horror events). As a result, it is both a great place to get a feel for the current state of affairs in the media regarding Zombie portrayals and tends to provide an early peek at how Zombies will be treated in the near future from the cutting edge of American cinema. With all the filmmakers who typically show up to the DC it’s also a great chance to advocate on behalf of the Differently Animated and agitate for the production of more Pro-Zombie, Zombie Friendly works, explaining The Cause to people in a position to influence the way that society at large perceives the Differently Animated.

This makes it one of The Zombie Rights Campaign’s favorite venues for public appearances and advocacy.

This year we were able to attend the entire festival and see every single film we had not previously viewed, which is another big first.

Friday night the festival opened with screenings at the Bloomington Playwright’s Project and featured a costume contest along with a full slate of movies, including two directly related to our Zombie Rights mandate, Cabine of the Dead (previously reviewed here) and Closure, an Israeli Zombie-hating film. A review of that one will be up soon. (The ZRC particularly loved Satan Hates You, which isn’t about the Differently Animated at all but instead is a horror comedy in the style of browbeating Christianist propaganda like Jack Chick.)

Here you can see the winner of the costume contest in her great Silent Hill getup. (Silent Hill is often lumped in with Resident Evil as they are both survival horror games, but Silent Hill features ghosts, delusions and demonic apparitions, not Zombies, so we’re more or less ok with it).

Friday night after the films there was an exclusive VIP banquet at the Scholar’s Inn, and the ZRC attended and talked Zombies and Zombie films with some of the attending luminaries. In particular we got to say hello to Deneen Melody and discuss the politics of W.O.R.M. with Anthony Sumner, which yielded some insight into how the creatures in W.O.R.M. came to be regarded as Zombies in the first place and the reasons behind marketing Slices of Life in part as a Zombie film, which is a fascinating topic for the ZRC: the construction of the Zombie identity in media.

Saturday was a full day of films and panels and discussions. We picketed against Cabine of the Dead, now that people had seen it at the festival and could appreciate its Living Supremacist stance for themselves. We saw a number of good movies, including fantastic faux-vintage film Maxwell Stein and three short films by Patrick Rea, including one thoughful short about vampires (thankfully non-sparkly) that makes me wish he’d do a Pro-Zombie piece at some point. Equal time, Mr. Rea?

(Here you can see Patrick Rea doing a Q&A session with horror hosting legend and Dark Carnival special guest Joe Bob Briggs)

In the evening screenings we saw several noteworthy movies, like By Her Hand She Draws You Down, the latest from Anthony Sumner (not a Zombie picture per se but a character is definitely Differently Animated), Roses, the latest from Clockwerk Pictures (a review will go up for this movie soon) and The Prometheus Project, which is a retelling of the Frankenstein story updated for the modern era (review forthcoming).

Saturday also featured the Dark Carnival Awards ceremony, an event that the ZRC helped in its own small way to enable, sponsoring two awards ourselves, Best Supporting Actor and the annual Outstanding Achievement award.

Since The Dark Carnival maintains complete editorial control over award nominations and the selection of winners, this could have presented an awkward situation for the ZRC, but fortunately our sponsored awards both went to deserving individuals without a lengthy history of Anti-Zombie activities. Alan Rowe Kelly won for Best Supporting Actor in Hypochondriac and Patrick Rea (whose short film about the menace of Girl Scouts, “Get Off My Porch”, is a ZRC favorite) won for Outstanding Achievement.

At some point we may want to discuss W.O.R.M. further with Mr. Kelly, however.

Saturday’s events also featured Baron Mardi winning another prestigious honor, as he is now the public face of indie horror filmmaking studio MuscleWolf Productions, selected by audience acclaim over several talented bodybuilders. This helps to illustrate the Baron’s magnetic personality and demonstrate how vital his work with the public can be for our movement.

Saturday night concluded with the late night Adults Only screening, featuring some truly bizarre films. El Monstro Del Mar is a great Australian Grindhousey exploitation style film about awakening a malevolent Kraken, while The Taint is one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen, where a plague of misogyny causes the end of civilization. Said end of the world scenario is utterly hilarious and graphically disgusting; you’ve never seen a movie quite like The Taint.

Joining the ZRC for this last set of screenings was longtime ZRC correspondent and Friend of Zombies everywhere, Michelle Hartz, who was nice enough to also give us a photo opportunity.

After grabbing a few hours sleep it was time to head back out Sunday morning. Before we went to the theatre, the ZRC engaged in a little pamphleteering, putting up some of our posters and informational brochures around town in the legally-designated spots, so as to be polite and avoid littering.

I think we got some responses too, as people were plainly taking brochures and posters down from where we placed them; no doubt to share their newly acquired wisdom with friends and family.

Back at the festival proper, Sunday’s screenings featured the aforementioned Hypochondriac, Marv Blauvelt’s project about a germophobic doctor attempting to practice medicine amongst a town of bizarre hillbillies’ House of Hope, a Bloomington, IN shot film about religious mania and kidnapping; Cyrus: Mind of a Serial Killer, starring The Lance himself, Lance Henriksen; as well as a particularly nasty and extremely short Anti-Zombie film called “Rise of the Living Corpse”.

Rise is less than a minute long, so I’ll probably put up a review of one sentence or less to be fair; it should never take longer to read a review than to watch the movie in question.

Sunday we also presented Baron Mardi with his Zombie of the Year award in person, and he was extremely happy to receive our prestigious honor. We’ll have a post with more on that, including a testimonial, very soon.

That about wraps it up for our overview post. Special ZRC thanks to The Dark Carnival, the Atomic Age Cinema monsters, Leya Taylor, Deneen Melody, Anthony Sumner, Michelle Hartz, Marv Blauvelt, Jason Hignite and many others.

Category: The Dark Carnival, Zombie Media, ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Movies, Public Appearance, Social Justice, The Dark Carnival, Videogames, Zombie of the Year 2010

Posted By John Sears on November 22, 2010

We are back from our trip to the premiere independent horror film festival in the country, The Dark Carnival Film Festival, and are digging out from the trip.

I have a couple gigs of photos and video to process (yes, gigs), and then reviews to write for a few things, topics to discuss, and some new books to read/movies to watch, so stay tuned.

Category: The Dark Carnival, ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By John Sears on November 18, 2010

We’ll be driving, err, pretty much all day to be at The Dark Carnival Film Festival for the whole weekend. I’ll check in when we get to the hotel, so hopefully the Zombie Rights related emergencies will be at a minimum today.

Category: The Dark Carnival, ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Movies, Public Appearance

Posted By John Sears on November 17, 2010

Full disclosure: Helpless is a novel written by Friend of the ZRC Michelle Hartz, who often helpfully supplies us with tips and leads on potential Zombie stories. With that out of the way…

When the Zombie Rights Campaign has business in Southern Illinois or Indiana, we often take a relatively Westerly route, heading down 1-39 to Bloomington-Normal or so; we traveled on this route to the Drunken Zombie Film Festival in Peoria recently. Going that way takes you directly through a decent sized wind farm (which Wikipedia has informed me is the Mendota Hills Wind Farm, in fact).

During the day the farm is a pretty view and a very welcome distraction from the otherwise, and this is being charitable, monotonous, sanity-crushing experience of driving through rural Illinois.

At night, however, it can be pretty spooky, with the tops of the towers often lit up with slowly blinking red lights, large black shapes looming up near the road, moving in relative silence, inaudible over the road sounds.

Why do I bring this up? Well, because now that I’ve read Helpless (available for purchase here on Amazon), I get to worry about a nasty car accident plunging me into a nightmare of carnage and supernatural horror.

Thanks, Michelle.

Before going any further, I’ll give you the approved synopsis in my attempt to avoid excessive spoilers:

After a car accident lands them in the field of a wind farm, 6 strangers split up to look for help. More than willing to assist, what the Helper is offering is not the type of help they are looking for. A chilling and surreal novel by first time author, Michelle Hartz.

Firstly, as to the wisdom of splitting up in any remotely spooky setting, I will quote from ‘How to Survive a Horror Movie’by Seth Grahame-Smith, who later went on to unfortunate Anti-Zombie fame with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Here, however, he is spot on, summarizing the risks of breaking up your group in a horror survival situation. From page 36:

“We can cover more ground if we split up.” You forgot to add ‘with blood’ between ‘ground’ and ‘if’.

That being said, what’s the harm, right? I mean, it’s a wind farm, and as we all know, wind-farms are a green and renewable energy source, critical to someday obtaining independence, first from foreign oil, and then, perhaps, staving off global warming before we all have to grow gills and our lives become a tone-deaf version of Atlantis from Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

Wrong. Windfarms are now a place where you go to die, not a way to keep the lights on.

Thanks again, Michelle.

I won’t go much further into the plot developments, as it’s a short book, an entertaining read, and affordable to boot so your excuses are limited. I do, however, need to discuss an important issue that has been brought to the fore by both this book and our previous review for Slices of Life: workplace conditions for the Differently Animated.

In Slices of Life we saw a lack of empathy for Zombies working in a white-collar environment, and Helpless presents us with the sad example of Differently Animated individuals who, while not Zombies in the conventional sense, are nevertheless most certainly animated in an unusual fashion, toiling in a more blue-collar field. What’s more, their workplace conditions are perhaps the scariest thing in this entire story.

Where, I wonder, is OSHA? Over the course of Helpless the reader sees DA individuals placed in a highly hazardous work environment, full of fast moving cars, dangerous automobile wrecks, highly electrified fencing and so forth, all without proper safety gear and supervision provided, let alone required while on the job.

Compounding the hazards of the workplace is the apparent lack of benefits or even compensation for their labor. I mean, I know it’s a tough economic climate, but surely wages of some sort are required. I don’t think any of the work done in this book qualifies as tip-based, so at a bare minimum, the Differently Animated in this book should be earning $7.25 an hour, yet no mention is made of paying them for their work.

I find that highly suspect.

Is it so much to ask that, after reanimating the recently dead and before sending them out to work, a prospective employer/necromancer/mad scientist/etc first negotiate an Unliving wage, sign an employment contract, perhaps have a rep from HR outline an acceptable health and vacation package?

So in addition to the night terrors that I’ve been led to believe loom along one of our routes to and from, say, The Dark Carnival (located in Michelle Hartz’s own town of Bloomington, Indiana), I have to be concerned that the Differently Animated workers being employed to staff said terrors are being grossly underpaid and subjected to a needlessly dangerous work environment.

I find it distinctly unfair that I am supposed to be terrified of these individuals in the course of their work even as I need to advocate on their behalf for better wages. Maybe it’s time to give that Zombie Unionization idea another crack.

Until that time, the ZRC has reluctantly concluded that it must give Helpless a Zombie Neutral rating, for documenting, but neither condemning nor condoning, the tragic lack of safe and rewarding employment opportunities for the Undead in the 21st Century Economy.

Category: The Dark Carnival, Zombie Media, ZRC News | 2 Comments »
Tags: Books, ZRC Reviews

Posted By John Sears on November 16, 2010

(Slices of Life cast and crew at the World Premiere during the Horror Society Film Festival)

Slices of Life is the new anthology series from director Anthony Sumner, comprised of three of his previous short films along with an all-new framing device tying the stories together (which, in the interests of full disclosure, features ZRC acquaintance Marv Blauvelt).

We first encountered a segment from this anthology several years ago at The Dark Carnival, where W.O.R.M., now retitled ‘Work Life’ within Slices, showed as a standalone short and won the 2007 award for Best Special Effects. The rest of the film, however, was new to the Zombie Rights Campaign.

(Coincidentally, W.O.R.M./Work Life also is the segment that most directly bears on the issue of Zombie Rights)

Slices of Life opens with a young woman sprawled outside a sleazy roadside motel, surrounded by papers and a sketchbook. She is awakened and apparently rescued by Irma (portrayed by Helen Alter-Dyche), the owner of the motel and her handyman Tiny (Marv Blauvelt), who inform her that she is an employee named Mira, unfortunately prone to episodes similar to the one that seems to have left her in her current condition, bereft of memory. They seem certain that she will recover, and escort her to her post at the front desk, where she passes the time examining the sketchbooks that double as her journals.

What these rather menacing looking books spell out, however, doesn’t seem to be anything about her life at all; rather, they contain three stories about other peoples’ lives, and as Mira reads them (and the audience sees them, this being a film), she struggles to sort out their relationship to her own unknown identity, even as the stories begin to bleed into the present day.

The first, called either ‘Home Life’ or ‘Amber Alert’, concerns Vonda (played by Toya Turner), a young pregnant woman who begins to see strange visions of missing children amidst a wave of child abductions, including a little girl who not only doesn’t seem to be missing, but in fact, doesn’t seem to exist.
As the abductions go on day after day, her condition, both physical and mental, seems to deteriorate, and the line between reality and nightmare begins to blur.

Amber Alert may be my personal favorite of the stories in Slices of Life; it also has next to nothing to do with our noble cause. Well-acted and written, it subtly mixes elements of personal isolation, the threat of potential insanity and body horror together with the apparently supernatural. Amber Alert is also noteworthy for featuring strong performances by African-American actors, which is something we see all too rarely in indie horror.

The second segment is the former W.O.R.M., or in the context of Slices, “Work Life”, and it concerns one William Robert Moss (Jack Guasta), who aspires to be promoted at a nanotech marketing company (which currently employs him to handle electronic trash and old files). William’s problem is that nobody will give him the time of day, because… well, he’s a human doormat. His roommate abuses their friendship, his coworkers ignore him when they’re not openly mocking him, and his recent proud achievement of a programming degree from an online college gets him no recognition. Will’s office colleagues barely even know his name; they all refer to him as… Worm.

Just when things seem their worst for Worm, he acquires the code for one of the firm’s actual nanotech programmer’s pet projects: a program that can implant hypnotic suggestions via computer peripherals; in essence, you can infect people via their keyboards and mice. The goal was to sell products, maybe designer clothes or soda; but what happens if you try to sell a person?

Not to give away too many details, but W.O.R.M. is the segment of Slices of Life that features ‘Zombies’, and so it’s of greatest concern to the ZRC here. W.O.R.M. is part of the recent phenomenon of what you might call the Post-Boyle Zombie in independent film; once again, as with older Zombie films, the Zombie condition is used for social satire, but now updated for a 21st century audience. In W.O.R.M., Zombies are given a new and trendier origin story (nanotechnology)* and employed to comment darkly on the Dilbert-esque world of the corporate cubicle farm.

The Zombie Rights Campaign was not, to be frank, pleased with W.O.R.M. It is certainly true that the Zombies presented here are treated with more depth and complexity than a Romero shambler, and come across as more complicated characters than a Russo brain-craver. It’s also true that, if we are to be perfectly fair, they’re no worse people in their Zombified condition than their previous Living forms; in fact, they may be more honest and forthright. Still, it’s clearly supposed to be a horrifying situation, and the film is quite unhelpful in dealing with the hot-button topic of Zombie Coworkers. How are we ever going to integrate our offices and workplaces if Living people continue to be afraid that the new guy in the cube next door wants to devour them? How can a Differently Animated co-worker convince their fellows to loan them a stapler instead of fleeing for their lives?

And don’t get me started on how rarely Zombies in the office get invited to social functions. The whole situation is just a tragedy.

Moving on, the last segment in Slices of Life, “Pink Snapper” or “Sex Life”, is a complicated story dealing with sex and dark family secrets. Susan Ballard, played by Deneen Melody (full disclosure: Facebook friend of the ZRC) is a young woman who finally snaps after years of abuse and beats her policeman uncle with a frying pan. Susan and her brother, unsure if their uncle will live or die and understandably wary of the local police, take off in a hastily devised escape plan. Low on gas and options, they seek shelter in a secluded mansion in the suburbs after giving aid to its injured owner lying along the roadside. Only, as it turns out, said mansion has a terrible secret locked inside.

As all secluded mansions should.

After reading the three stories, Mira, back at the motel, is now prepared to learn the truth about her forgotten past.

As for said truth: I can honestly say I did not see that one coming.

It’s a shame that one of the most skillful and entertaining independent features the ZRC has seen all year can’t get a better rating from us, but such is the dilemma faced by a Zombie Civil Rights Organization such as ours. Slices of Life is a great movie and a thoroughly entertaining experience, containing no fewer than four original stories and many noteworthy performances; it has a distinctive style and does a fantastic job of putting you as an audience in a real place and then twisting reality at the edges for a good, creepy time. Yet the unfortunate and counterproductive imagery of Zombies contained within W.O.R.M., while light-years better than the vast majority of ‘Zombie’ movies out there, is hurtful and injurious to the cause of Zombie Rights and the movement’s ongoing efforts at workplace integration.

For these reasons, the ZRC has to give the movie our Anti-Zombie rating. Separately, the non-W.O.R.M. portions of the film rate at a Zombie Neutral.

We look forward to Mr. Sumner’s next picture and hope that it can feature the Differently Animated in a more positive light. The same goes for all of the talented people, cast and crew, who worked on this production.

*At least it wasn’t stem cells. You wouldn’t believe how often stem cell Zombies come up these days.

Category: Zombie Media, ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Movies, ZRC Reviews

Posted By John Sears on November 14, 2010

This is an oldie, and it came as a surprise here at the ZRC – I had intended to purchase this game specifically to get *away* from Zombie games, or more precisely, Anti-Zombie games, for a bit; that, and the fact that it was cheap, and that it’s a spiritual successor to the massively underrated PS2 sleeper ‘God Hand‘.

So what is Madworld about? Well, if you have played God Hand, you’ll notice quite a few similiarities. Madworld is a comedic action brawler with elaborate boss fights and over the top comedic violence; however, whereas God Hand is a PG-13 sort of a game (despite the ESRB giving it a Mature rating), Madworld is soaked in violence and adult humor, thoroughly earning its Mature. Madworld’s controls are also obviously based around the Wii-mote from the very beginning, and the combination of excessive violence on-screen with controls that deliberately force you to use violent motions in the real world can be very.. immersive, not to mention occasionally cathartic.

At least, I found it cathartic.

What does this have to do with the ZRC? Well, Madworld has an entire multistage level built around.. Zombies.

Of a sort.

These Zombies, visually, look a lot more like Mummies, and they aren’t reanimated people per se; rather, they seem to be ghost-like entities that haunt a castle imported from ‘Zombigistan’ or some such place. They are, however, flesh and blood, and so you as a player brutally maim them for points and a better score.

Which doesn’t sound so different from your typical Anti-Zombie game, right? Fortunately, however, that’s not the case; Madworld isn’t Anti-Zombie at all.

Let me explain: In this game, you inflict horrible, bizarrely creative violence upon the Differently Animated. However, you inflict similar violence on all sorts of other people, of widely varying backgrounds. Yes, Madworld encourages you to virtually slaughter men and women, Caucasians and African and Asian-Americans, Zombies and giant Mutants, Aliens, Robots and more.

It’s a diverse rainbow of tolerance and inclusivity, although perhaps the only one that pushes you to impale virtual people on traffic signs and then throw them into jet engines to be turned into a bloody paste while still screaming.

Given that, even the legitimately hilarious announcers can be forgiven for the taunting and mockery of the Undead they engage in during this stage, since again, Zombies are just being treated like everyone else the main character Jack runs into (or runs through) in the game: very badly.

Isn’t Undead Equality our goal?

On the other hand, it wouldn’t quite be proper to say the game is Zombie Friendly either; slicing those you disagree with in half with a chainsaw isn’t the model of civic engagement the ZRC has in mind. Therefore we’re awarding Madworld a Zombie Neutral rating, as leaked in my earlier post on the new ZRC ratings system.

For such a blood-soaked videogame, that’s shockingly positive.

(Behind the cut is a sample video from Madworld, showing the gameplay; unfortunately as of this writing I haven’t located a good video of the Zombie stage, but this footage from the Asian Town levels should illustrate how broadly and comedically offensive Madworld strives to be to, well, all sentient peoples everywhere)

(more…)

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Videogames, ZRC Reviews