Posted By John Sears on August 13, 2011

This story is more than a tad bizarre, showing that, yes, they really will splash Zombies into just about anything these days:

Holy freakin’ crap, just look at those zombie balls.

You can thank the Jung van Matt/Elbe ad agency for this awesomeness. The bowling balls were designed to promote Germany’s 13th Street horror TV channel. I would say mission accomplished on that.

Now, on the face of it, we don’t have any objection to Zombie Bowling Balls here at the ZRC, though of course we would prefer they be done in a sympathetic and tasteful manner.

Judging from this promotional video, that certainly wasn’t the *intent* here:

13th STREET – Bowlingheads (Case Video) from RUOK on Vimeo.

Yeah.. hmm. I have to wonder if the spooked bowlers are plants or if that was real, but at any rate, between them and the spoooky editing (give it a rest with the shaky effects, guys, please), we’re obviously supposed to find these Zombie Bowling Balls terrifying.

Why is that, precisely? I can’t imagine. It’s bound to be a bit weird to seemingly jam your fingers into the image of *anyone’s* face, but why should a painted Zombie on a bowling ball be scarier?

I guess for some people Zombie will always equal Scary in their head, logic be damned.

Pity that. I suppose it still isn’t the worst Zombie related bowling thing we’ve seen lately.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Anti-Zombie Products, Youtube Mischief, Zombie Art

Posted By John Sears on August 12, 2011

Really? The Differently Animated community doesn’t have enough trouble without two jokers from Bloody-Disgusting.com hosting a little online cage match to determine the best stereotype of Zombies?

Welcome one and all to a brand new series here on Dead Pixels, home of all things geeky and videogame-y. TJ and I have been slaving over our hot computers to bring you what we affectionately refer to as the Duel to the Death. In this new series we’ll take popular characters, monsters, bosses and everything in-between and pit them against each other so we can watch the giblets fly. All you have to do is watch the fight, root for who you want to win, and if your side loses you can vent your rage in the comments. Easy, right?

…

In this issue it’s all about the zombies. But we’re not just talking about the classic, shambling undead made popular in Resident Evil – we’re expanding this duel to a few more contenders as well. Also in this match are the agile, “rage” zombies like what’s found in Left 4 Dead, the sort-of-but-not-really zombies from the last two Resident Evils, and the possessed townsfolk from Alan Wake and Deadly Premonition. Now, this isn’t a “who would win if we put one of each in an arena and watch them fight?” sort of scenario, this is more about which poses the biggest threat to humanity. So who wins? Let’s find out.

This is incredibly disgustingly disreputable and insulting. Zombies are people too, not cardboard cut-outs for you to rate on how much they terrify your adolescent, empathy deficient minds!

That being said, the list of Zombies they assemble is baffling on a number of levels. Even assuming that they’re sticking to videogame Zombies (which would leave out the ‘fast Zombies’ from Return of the Living Dead), why did they leave out the victims from ‘Dead Rising’? Seems like kind of a major oversight.

The factual errors and questionable assertions (like that Resident Evil Zombies are equivalent to Romero Zombies in terms of biological function; RE Zombies for example are not technically Undead, they’re genetically altered by the T-Virus, and viruses don’t actually infect dead tissue) pile up, but what’s most interesting for me is a passage about the lives of the ‘Non-Zombie’ victim characters from Resident Evil 4:

Adam: And don’t forget their ability to sustain themselves even when they’re not tearing up innocent people and eating them Jeffrey Dahmer style. In the village in Resident Evil 4 I’m pretty sure I came across a bunch tables set with rotting meals. I like picturing the townsfolk sitting at the table, saying grace before chowing down and talking about their day and how little Johnny got an A on his report card. Then suddenly, Leon comes into town and starts killing everyone. Somehow, Little Johnny is the only survivor, but he doesn’t know how to live without his mom’s cooking and he doesn’t want to go to bed until his dad reads him a few pages from that storybook he loves so much. So Johnny decides his only option is to take the chainsaw from his slain uncle who wore a bag over his head to cover the burns on his face that he got from saving two puppies from a burning building a few years back, then Johnny turns on the chainsaw and lies on top of it, sobbing until he breathes his final breath.

TJ: Holy shit, you’ve got me LOL’zing over here. I think I just read the official pitch for Resident Evil 4-2.

Laughing? For a split second there this ‘Adam’ character broke through the programming and indoctrinated hate and saw, well, what we see here at the ZRC, every single day.

A brief glimmer of hope, a tiny amount of light breaking through the clouds… alas. Transitory.

So what enemies from a Zombie videogame does the ZRC find most menacing? That’s easy: we’re terrified of the S.T.A.R.S. ‘police officers’ from the Resident Evil series.

Think about it. These highly trained, extremely heavily armed quasi-cops, seemingly accountable to no one, travel all over the city (later the world), busting down doors and shooting people in the face just for the way they look. Warrants? They don’t need no stinking warrants!

Where on earth do these jokers get their budget, anyway? It gets worse. As the games go on it appears that the S.T.A.R.S. become some sort of black-ops enforcer/terrorists with carte blanche to ignore international law and conduct raids deep into sovereign territory, where they then massacre, well, entire villages as they see fit (and described hauntingly above).

If you don’t find accountability-free, lawless, heavily armed, wealthy, secretive international assassins scarier than the mere existence of the Differently Animated then.. I don’t even know what’s wrong with you, really.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Journamalism, Mainstream Media, Social Justice, Videogames

Posted By John Sears on August 12, 2011

I really don’t know what to make of truly awful, mercenary and opportunistic ‘journalism’ like this sometimes:

Rioting, looting, muggings, cars and buildings on fire – London has witnesses apocalyptic scenes on its streets over the past three days.

Scenes which many said looked like those from a film depicting the end-of-the-world.

…

The star has been filming his big screen adaptation of World War Z – a world recovering from a global zombie war – in sleepy Cornwall.

The devastating aftermath of the attack on the capital would have provided the perfect set for a world struggling to recover from an attack from hundreds of millions of the living dead.

The piece goes on to note that, of course, the people who lived through real life tragedy would be unlikely to want to watch it again as background footage in a movie.

Honestly. Do you have to try and tie EVERYTHING bad, ever, anywhere, to Zombies

For the record though, this sort of blurring-the-lines between reality and fictional apocalypses has actually been done before. In the 2004 remake of ‘Dawn of the Dead’, the opening credits sequence plays out against a backdrop of a mixture of what appear to be real war/disaster footage clips and scenes shot for the film.

(Indeed, IMDB claims that some of that footage is real stock video of actual turmoil, but IMDB can be a bit flaky as the Cultural Historian points out, so take that with a grain of salt.)

That bit of unfortunate history aside, this latest attempt to marry the fictional, and farcical, notion of a ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ to actual tragedy is appalling. For shame, Daily Mail.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Journamalism, Mainstream Media, Max Brooks is a Jerk, Movies

Posted By John Sears on August 12, 2011

I guess I should block off some time to really protest this one but good:

Paramount Pictures announced that the zombie epic, World Word Z, will be released on December 21, 2012.

Ahh, the ZRS shows their usual, err, flair for accuracy with this post, but we thank them for the news nonetheless. *snicker*

Yes I am a bit childish, why do you ask?

At any rate, bizarrely, ‘World War Z’ is being released in the heart of Christmas season 2012. Let’s just hope that the theatres manage to keep impressionable tots there to see treacly holiday fare from wandering into the wrong theatre, it could scar their young minds for life.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Journamalism, Max Brooks is a Jerk, Movies

Posted By John Sears on August 11, 2011

At conventions we talk to a lot of Zombie fans, as well as, frankly, fans of Anti-Zombie media (who just need some counseling I think to reform completely) and we always get lots of suggestions.

‘Fido’ usually comes up. ‘Colin’ has been mentioned a lot lately too.

For a while there we heard quite a bit about ‘Pandorum’, and there’s a bit of a story here from the ZRC perspective. I *was* planning to see it around opening weekend, way back when, upon hearing rumors it might be Zombie-related.. but it bounced out of theatres so fast that I missed my opportunity.

So when I’d hear it mentioned at cons or film festivals I could not speak as to the movie and its position re: Zombie Rights. Now that I have seen it… I’m not entirely sure why everyone thinks it’s about Zombies at all.

‘Pandorum’ is best described by analogy. If you were to take one part ‘Alien’, one part ‘Red Dwarf’, one part ‘Sunshine’, mix them together with a dollop of the slick and kind of soulless visual style from ‘Resident Evil’ (ZRC nemesis Paul W.S. Anderson was a producer for this film), voila, you’d have ‘Pandorum’.

Notice that none of those movies are actually about Zombies, and really, I’m hard-pressed to say ‘Pandorum’ is either.

However, like race, Zombiism is a social construct as much as anything, and if so many in the general public believe ‘Pandorum’ is about Zombies then we need to at least address their concerns.

‘Pandorum’ opens with a man waking up alone in a futuristic space-ship medical bay in one of those hypersleep chambers (didn’t I say it was like ‘Alien’?). The process seems extremely unpleasant and being in storage so long apparently has a known side effect of wiping out personal memory, whilst leaving skills and training intact, so the man is quickly able to deduce his name (Bower) and role on board, but nothing else. The ship he is on is in terrible shape and he seems trapped in the room, until another crewman, apparently his superior (Payton), wakes up and begins to take command. Their immediate goal: open a door that will allow them to walk about 10 feet down the hall to the ship’s bridge and operate it.

This requires Bower to go through a series of access ducts, since the door is jammed shut without power. Oddly, instead of going a few yards toward the bridge he ends up going a long distance toward the other end of the ship, coming out into a cavernous space where he eventually runs into an agitated crew member from the previous shift.. and then a tribe of ‘monsters’ who eat him alive.

Yes, these are the ‘Zombies’ in Pandorum: Living, breathing, humanoid cannibals organized into a sort of stereotyped tribal civilization.. with fairly sophisticated metal working; definitely capable of making or working steel. Heck, their fancy stabby toys even have flamethrower type pilot light attachments, and they dress like outcasts from ‘Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’. So we’re not just talking about people here, but A People, a civilization, with culture and technology… and, let’s be honest, questionable fashion sense.

They really don’t seem so bad, which is probably why the movie goes out of its way to let you know they’re SUPPOSED to be monstrous by having the camera go lurchy whenever they’re around and by cranking the frame rate down dramatically when they move. Which is spooky, I guess, to people who didn’t see that trick done in a ton of Japanese horror properties.. years and years ago.

For lack of a better term the ZRC will refer to these people as ‘Pandorum-ites’ for the rest of this review.

As it is quickly hinted, about sixteen times actually, the ship has been adrift for a really, REALLY long time, and these Pandorum-ites actually evolved from something on board, they’re not alien invaders (‘Red Dwarf’, anyone?). They eat people, yes, but people seem to be the only food on board the ship. It was built to haul 60,000 people in cold storage, with only 3 awake to fly it at a time.

So I’m guessing the Hot Pockets ran out fast.

It emerges in the course of the film that the conventional humans awake on the ship also eat people, so once again we, the audience, are supposed to hold the Different to a double standard. It’s ok when someone who looks like you eats someone else in a crisis, but not the ‘Zombie’. Apparently.

Well, Bower picks up a couple of companions, the Stolid Ethnic Warrior Guy Who Doesn’t Speak English and the Butt Kicking Chick that seems to be a requirement for any movie Paul W.S. Anderson works on. I mean, seriously. Check this out:

What, Paul, Milla wasn’t available for this picture? Good grief man.

So are the Pandorum-ites ‘Zombies’? Well, they don’t fit into most conventional ideas of what a Zombie would be. They’re born that way, to quote the Lady of Gaga, not reanimated or transformed. They aren’t Undead, nor are they enchanted with any sort of magic, or are they drugged or hypnotized. For them, this isn’t so much Differently Animated as.. animated.

On the other hand, when it turns out the ship has been adrift not nearly long enough for a huge amount of evolution to have taken place, the movie introduces a Techno-MacGuffin, some kind of magic compound that the crew were infected with to help them ‘adapt’ to any new environment. Given that the entire point of their trip was that the world they were headed to was the one and only Just Like Earth, it seems kind of… extraneous, to say the least.

I guess this comes down to a question of whether other human subspecies are ‘Differently Animated’, especially if they were artificially created. I suppose the ZRC position will be that we will come to the aid of said subspecies if they face oppression from the Anti-Zombie crowd.

Given that the public labels them as Zombies and the movie demagogues against them I think it’s clear that the Pandorum-ites do face such oppression.

To recap: Bower wakes up on a ship that has been in the possession of an alien culture for a very long time. These altered humans, through no fault of their own, had to turn to cannibalism to survive because of a screwup by the original, Conventionally Human crew (no spoilers) that lead to the situation the film presents. This somehow excuses their casual slaughter by the Conventional humans in the pursuit of their own survival?

I don’t think so, ‘Pandorum’. We’re not letting your disgusting rhetoric go by unchallenged.

And speaking of disgusting, the film even goes so far as to fearmonger against adorable Pandorum-ite children like this one:

For all of the above reasons, The Zombie Rights Campaign rates ‘Pandorum’ as Anti-Zombie.

Category: Zombie Media | 6 Comments »
Tags: Movies, ZRC Reviews

Posted By John Sears on August 11, 2011

I actually signed up for this game and started playing it some time ago, but in a creepy way befitting its role as a ‘social game’/timesuck, kept delaying the actual review until I had seen just a bit more of the content, then a bit more, etc…

So what is ‘Zombie Lane’? Well, it’s like FarmVille, in a way, a browser app/social networking game you can play for free on Facebook. Only here, the focus isn’t just on farming vegetables (though you can do that as well), but rather on surviving the, you guessed it, Zombie Apocalypse.

Naturally and in keeping with similar games, the $0 price-point means that the developers have to make money in some fashion, and so the ‘game’ is designed with a nearly endless set of tedious goals that you can skip past to get to the ‘good stuff’.. if you pay them in real world money.

Mercenary AND prejudiced? Really? Really.

‘Zombie Lane’ follows in the footsteps of ‘Plants vs Zombies’ in attempting to sugar-coat the violent massacre of the Undead with cartoonish graphics and a light, almost absurdist tone.

They’re not fooling anyone, however. The game is rife with exhortations to violence and the goals are often constructed literally to drive the body count as high as possible, incentivizing the player toward ever-great-pogroms against the Differently Animated.

(That’s some real flattery there, Zombie Lane)

Zombies are depicted here as a bundle of stereotypes in the Romero-Russo tradition: trying to eat the Living, apparently fixated on brains, constantly clawing at any barricades within reach to get at the tasty warm-blooded (and therefore apparently upstanding) citizens inside.

(Don’t worry copper, you don’t have much to tempt them in that skull.)

Only.. not so much. In the presence of these supposedly implacable brain-eating Zombies your player character, at worst, gets shoved around a little, which we can’t help but think shows a remarkable amount of restraint on behalf of the Zombies who of course get no such gentle treatment from the player.

(Poor Zombie Waitresses! Not only does the game encourage you to be a thug, it wants you to be a cheapskate as well!)

Once the game has eased the player into the mechanics of point-and-click massacre, it begins to set up an extremely lengthy series of goals to advance (or regress, depending on one’s perspective), any of which can be instantly completed for cash. If that fails to get you to open your wallet, be aware that the game appears to manipulate the items dropped by the innocent Zombies you massacre in order to create artificial shortages that mire you down in one particular task for days, even weeks at a time.

(Getting your Spouse back is a major early game goal. You’ll see this kind of screen a lot.)

To some degree, *some* of these roadblocks can be dealt with by trading items amongst your Facebook friends playing the game, and that’s where the second sinister aspect of Zombie Lane comes into play: the game actively encourages you to spread the infectious time-devouring monstrosity to all of your Facebook friends and acquaintances.

Dastardly.

The larger your network of friends, the greater the chance that someone will have the dropped items you need to advance, and likewise, the greater the odds that you might have something they need in trade. The game comes with a variety of in-game tools to cajole and coerce your friends into playing ‘Zombie Lane’ themselves, and it also ties into other games available on Facebook from the same developer.

It’s an interesting model, essentially tricking players into becoming so enmeshed in a game they don’t actually like to play that they will pay good money to skip ahead and get it over with faster!

(You can pester your friends with updates about how much ‘fun’ you’re having in this awful game)

Thus is their hateful scheme truly laid bare. First, they use Facebook and cartoony graphics to lure bored people (usually wasting time at work) into playing a viciously Living Supremacist game. Then, in order to expand their online Anti-Zombie gathering, they coerce the players into ‘encouraging’ their friends to play the game as well, driving a wedge between Zombie Friendly and less enlightened friends in the process. Finally, they make advancement in the game harder and harder without the spending of real world lucre, relying on the Sunk Costs Fallacy to open up a steady stream of revenue.

Naturally The Zombie Rights Campaign condemns this game, or perhaps more properly, Anti-Zombie Indoctrination Tool, in the strongest possible terms. It encourages very public Anti-Zombie behavior and attitudes, spreads like syphilis and in the process drives a wedge between Zombie Allies and those who sadly have yet to awaken to our noble message, rendering Facebook a Zombie Intolerant Zone in the process.

The Zombie Rights Campaign therefore rates ‘Zombie Lane’ as being Living Supremacist.

Special Thanks to ZRC Pals Michelle Hartz and Jason Hignite for assisting in the full exploration and documentation of the atrocities in this game.

Our gallery of screenshots from this evil game can be seen here.

P.S. One interesting thing to note about Zombie Lane is that it strives to be tolerant and inclusive in general, except of course for the cruel mistreatment of the virtual Zombies. Note that the game allows same-sex spouses without any special tinkering:

Pity they couldn’t extend this tolerance to the Differently Animated.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Social Justice, The Internet, Videogames

Posted By John Sears on August 11, 2011

Anti-Zombie… Bigots.. in.. Spaaaaaaaaaaaace!

More or less:

Manned space exploration might be more dead then you thought. “Call of Duty: Black Ops” is getting a zombie-only update named “Rezurrection.” The undead expansion will include a new moon level, enhanced soundtrack, new zombie moon theme and four re-mastered zombie levels from the Call of Duty franchise.

Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, the ‘Zombies’ in Call of Duty are more or less mindless ravenous monsters, so… how do they manage to function on the moon? It’s hard enough for astronauts to manage, what with the ridiculously low gravity, lack of air, what have you. If you’re not careful just taking a step you’d go flying.

But somehow these supposedly savage and unintelligent creatures still pose a drastic threat there? Huh? Wouldn’t anyone on the moon have to have on a spacesuit and have come in a spacecraft, both of which would seemingly preclude easy flesh-chomping, if not rule it out entirely?

And what, Zombies don’t have the right to go to the moon as well? Since when? It doesn’t belong to anyone!

Zombies have every much of a right to be on the moon as the Living, The Zombie Rights Campaign believes.

Of course, “Call of Duty: Black Ops” has never been kind to Zombies, and that’s probably not going to change now.

For shame.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Videogames

Posted By John Sears on August 10, 2011

Given the prevalence, not to mention high sales, of Anti-Zombie games lately I suppose it should not have been a surprise that the Kinect, Microsoft’s hot new(ish) peripheral for the Xbox 360 might look to an Anti-Zombie game for some sales:

Color me excited. A 360 exclusive where you can use the Kinect as your interface to fight off zombies. While Sega may have forgotten long ago how to make a Sonic game they sure as hell still can make some fun horror themed games!

Excited? Color us appalled, if the admittedly hyper-vague trailer is anything to go by:

Fortunately, or rather, unfortunately, the press kit makes clear the game’s vicious Living Supremacism:

Survive one hellish night as you fight using the hands-free controls of Microsoft® Kinect.

Introducing Rise of Nightmares™, a truly mature experience for Microsoft Kinect. Survive one hellish night as you fight hand to hand against undead enemies and mad scientists using the hands-free controls of Microsoft Kinect. Using knives, chainsaws and your bare hands, rip your foes limb from limb while uncovering the location of your kidnapped wife.

So far this seems to follow in the long and ugly Sega tradition of the ‘House of the Dead’ games. Only of course now, instead of using a plastic quasi-gun to hurt the Undead, you’ll be using your bare hands.

Delightful.

They’re upping the ante however with some preorder bonuses that raised our eyebrows here at the ZRC:

• “Mini Zombie” from the game that will interact with the player’s Avatar on the Xbox 360® dashboard
• Gamestop-Exclusive Premium theme for their Xbox 360® dashboard, inspired by some of the game’s most terrifying locations
• Gamestop-Exclusive Gamer Picture pack that includes a total of ten pictures

Avatar pets are fairly common on the Xbox, and I believe there has been a Zombie ‘pet’ you could own before, but this one is still likely to be very offensive. I mean, what are the odds it asks the player’s avatar for a cup of tea and a nice chat?

I’d wager pretty close to zero.

We’ll keep an eye out for this one here at the ZRC blog; maybe even get a Kinect to try it out.

Though I’m not sure I could stomach ripping apart a virtual Zombie with my bare hands, even to study our enemies and advance The Cause.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Social Justice, Videogames, What's Up with Japan?

Posted By John Sears on August 9, 2011

I guess, no joke, that the gaming industry won’t be content until every genre of game has had Anti-Zombiism splashed in to increase sales:

Zombie Bowl-o-Rama is a casual, arcade game on the WildTangent games service. In Zombie Bowl-o-Rama, you’ll strike away the attacking zombies on the bowling lanes. Play Zombie Bowl-o-Rama on the WildTangent Games App today!

Seriously.

Apparently WildTangent is making the move to Android with its vast market for ‘casual’ games, and noticed that many of them are Anti-Zombie. How this inspired Anti-Zombie *bowling* is one of those mysteries for the historians I suppose.

The game in question looks repulsive, and even for a company plagued in the past with spyware/malware accusations like WildTangent, pummeling the Differently Animated with bowling balls represents a new low.

For shame. For shame.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Videogames

Posted By John Sears on August 9, 2011

We’ve reported before on ‘Zombie Bohemia’ here on the ZRC blog; it seems to be a movie with both the promise of actual thinking, feeling Zombie characters and, tragically, some Anti-Zombie stereotyping as well.

At any rate, the film continues to progress, and there has been a mass release of additional behind-the-scenes material:

Director Vince Brando just uploaded literally hundreds of new behind the scenes photos from his upcoming horror film, Zombie Bohemia, to Facebook.

…

Zombie Bohemia is a film about two rivals in the art world. Michael (played by Shawn James) is a zombie artist, literally. He is a zombie who makes zombie art, whether it is paintings, sculptures, or wood carvings. Michael is trying to make it in the New York art world, while his arch nemesis One (played by Tim Urian) has somehow captured fame and success with crappy art that is far less creative and wonderful than Michael’s. Throw in some unpleasant comments from One and a zombie who can’t be tamed, and yeah, bad stuff happens. Can you imagine the bad press Anton (played by Will Carey), Michael’s handler and agent, is going to have to deal with after trouble goes down?

I’m under the impression that Zombie Bohemia will be released this fall. So, to quench your thirst (and mine) until then, check out some of the new photos below!

You can see some of the new photos at the site of our good pals The Horror Society, and apparently many more on the Book of Faces.

The images don’t do a great deal to illuminate the central conflict/promise of this film for the Zombie Rights Movement, however; hopefully it will live up to our hopes and be a stirring and dramatic telling of the trouble and persecution a Zombie Artist can face in modern society.

Or at least, you know, not 90 minutes of gory stereotyping.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Movies, Zombie Art