Posted By John Sears on June 16, 2011

You probably read about the Leicester Freedom of Information request that led the UK city to admit that, no, it didn’t have any particular plans to persecute the Differently Animated in the event of a ‘zombie invasion.’

Supposedly left-leaning newsrag ‘The Guardian’ thinks that was a great excuse to publish an opinion column advising how to prepare its readers for the very same delusional ‘invasion’ and bash Zombies:

The oncoming zombie apocalypse might sound like the chance to write off your debt and be the badass you were always born to be, but for fans of stuff like “not killing loved ones” and “still having skin” it’s going to be a rough ride. So what have you done to prepare? Hell, what has the government done? These guys can’t even handle the living, never mind the undead.

These were the thoughts of a concerned citizen from Leicester who, through the Freedom of Information Act, forced his city council to reveal it was woefully unprepared for a zombie uprising. “Having watched several films,” he wrote, “it is clear that preparation for such an event is poor and one that councils throughout the kingdom must prepare for.” You tell ‘em, concerned citizen.

The advice contained inside is the standard Brooksian nonsense about getting to the countryside, forming a barricade, Zombies being insatiable inexorable killing machines, etc. All disgusting, all repulsive Anti-Zombie bigotry. After having some fun at the expense, once again, of the Zombie population, the op-ed closes with this:

Have you noticed that in most zombie films, by the time we join our heroes, the military and government are already wiped out and the streets are lost? The reason for that is because what with so many natural predators, the armed forces and biting being a rubbish way spreading disease, zombies would probably all be re-dead before we know it. So don’t be too worried, Concerned Citizen of Leicester – it might not be so bad after all.

Oh yes, after defaming the Differently Animated, now you want to dismiss them by assuming that the armed forces will gladly step in and deal with the ‘invasion’, thus conveniently doing your dirty work for you.

Well, Mr. Stephen Kelly, I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that everyone in the armed forces shares your narrow-minded prejudice against the Undead. The ZRC, at least, holds out the hope that the professional military of the United Kingdom would not persecute its own citizens merely for no longer having a conventional metabolism. Perhaps you can’t get past your own parochialism and bias, Mr. Kelly, but with the burgeoning Zombie Rights movement in the UK getting off to a great start, the ZRC believes your society as a whole, naturally including its armed forces, has much more promise.

In the meantime, shame on both The Guardian for printing this hate-speech and Mr. Kelly for writing it.

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags: Euro-zom, Journamalism, Mainstream Media

Posted By John Sears on June 15, 2011

Ah, the noble and humble Freedom of Information request; how much government inaction, sloth, corruption and malfeasance has it uncovered? Far too much to estimate I’d say.

Still, opening the books of government to every Tom, Dick and Harry also occasionally means opening them to whackos who’ve read too much Max Brooks and seen too much Romero. Case in point, from our friends across the pond:

Leicester City Council ‘not ready’ for zombie attack

The FOI request said “councils across the kingdom” should be prepared for a potential zombie attack

A worried member of the public has forced Leicester City Council to admit it is unprepared for a zombie invasion.

The authority received a Freedom of Information request which said provisions to deal with an attack, often seen in horror films, were poor.

The “concerned citizen” said the possibility of such an event was one that councils should be aware of.

Why on Earth *should* a city council be ‘prepared’ for a ‘zombie invasion’? As we’ve been trying to demonstrate over and over here at the ZRC, Zombies are by and large peaceful, engaged fellow citizens, not some invading horde, but in fact, a very friendly horde patiently asking for their rights.

This ‘concerned citizen’ sounds like a crank and a jerk.

To be fair, it seems like Leicester may just be a bit nuttier than the average population:

Ms Wyeth said she was unaware of any specific reference to a zombie attack in the council’s emergency plan, however some elements of it could be applied if the situation arose.

Other submissions to the council have included requests for records of paranormal activity and haunted buildings within the city.

“To you it might seem frivolous and a waste of time… but to different people it actually means something,” said Ms Wyeth.

Yes; to bigots, the peaceable, taxpaying Differently Animated represent a threat, and to us, clients in need of civil rights. Differences do exist, but that doesn’t make all points of view worth listening to; hatemongers are best shunned by larger society.

Still, on balance, the ZRC applauds Leicester for both following the law and answering this request for information and for not, in fact, maintaining a hateful and prejudiced plan to harm their Zombie inhabitants in the event of a farcical ‘zombie invasion’.

Good on you, Leicester.

Category: Zombie Media | 1 Comment »
Tags: Euro-zom, Social Justice

Posted By John Sears on June 15, 2011

It’s hardly revolutionary to note that the American conception of the ‘Old West’ is an extremely romanticized picture of a very dark, bloody period of history, and one that most Americans have yet to come to terms with.

The fact that there’s even a *debate* over whether to acknowledge the genocide(s) of the various indigenous nations of North America indicates that we have a long way to go before we can deal with that period honestly.

Still, the shine has come off it quite a bit in popular culture. Gone are the days when children were indoctrinated into concepts of American masculinity and nationality by watching an endless parade of sanitized White Hats vs. Black Hats western action heroes on television every evening. Nor does contempoary Hollywood churn out a procession of feel-good movies about the noble iconoclastic gunslingers of the Old West, bringing ‘law’ to the lawless; in fact, if anything, the backlash against that whitewashed imagery has produced some of the greatest Western films, like ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.

Given all that, it’s worth noting that Westerns have been revived a bit recently by fusing them with ugly Anti-Zombie prejudice. I saw a Ken Foree Anti-Differently Animated Spaghetti Western called ‘Dead Bones’ at The Dark Carnival a few years ago now, and Marvel Zombies 5 featured a Zombie Apocalypse set in the Old West, for example.

It’s an uncommon marriage, but not unheard of.

We have a new entry in this Anti-Zombie Western subgenre today, it seems:

It’s 1849, and a bounty hunter in the old west’s Jamestown, gets more than he bargained for, when he finds the town over-run by zombies – victims of a virus unleashed by a meteor found in the gold rush.

Cowboys and native Indians unite to fight the undead horde, as guns blaze and mutants growl in this showdown for survival in the weird wild west.

Yes… I guess they thought it might make for a feel-good take on the Old West if you could contrive a situation where white settlers aren’t slowly annexing the entire continent away from its indigenous inhabitants; reasoning roughly along the lines of: “I know, let’s have BOTH sides pick on some Zombies!”

Repulsive. You can’t fight prejudice with prejudice! This isn’t catharsis or even black comedy, it’s just shifting the ‘acceptable’ target of cinematic massacre to its current boogeyman, the Zombie. In the 60s, it was Cowboys & Indians, and today, it’s ‘Cowboys & Zombies’.

For shame, people. For shame.

We’ve embedded the trailer below so that you can be equally appalled:

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Movies

Posted By John Sears on June 15, 2011

What may well be the post-Romero magnum opus of Zombie Hate on Screen, ‘World War Z’, continues to chug ahead with various bits of casting and backstage news trickling out. Here’s a double dose of downer for you:

According to Variety The Grey’s James Badge Dale (pictured right) is going back into battle, albeit against an already-dead enemy. Dale is in negotiations to join Brad Pitt in Paramount’s World War Z, set 10 years after a global zombie epidemic. If signed, Dale will play an American soldier who tries to alert authorities that the zombie threat is real. Paramount had no comment on the casting.

Oh yes, the poor Cassandra, unable to convince his sadly ineffectual government to persecute the Zombies hard enough!

About what we’d expect from a movie based on Max Brooks. But wait, there’s more I hadn’t heard before:

Brad Pitt is playing a U.N. worker gathering stories of the great zombie war, and his Plan B shingle is producing. Mireille Enos (“Big Love”, “The Killing”) will play his wife, a mother of two girls, and Anthony Mackie co-stars. J. Michael Straczynski and Matt Carnahan wrote the script.

J. Michael Straczynski?! Babylon 5′s J. Michael Straczynski?

Uggh. It’s so sad to see someone you admire stoop as low as this.

So very sad indeed. For shame, Straczynski, for shame.

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

Posted By John Sears on June 14, 2011

I know there’s a considerable audience for professional wrestling and its less-stage managed counterparts in the world of mixed martial arts and boxing, and on the whole, although I’m not particularly a fan of any of it, the ZRC doesn’t have an issue with consenting adults beating on each other to entertain their audience.

However, when the spectacle involved, even in a fictional combat situation, is used to stoke Anti-Undead prejudice, we have a problem, and that brings us to upcoming film ‘Monster Brawl’:

“Set in the tradition of a Pay-Per-View main event, comes a grotesque and hilarious fight to the death featuring a cast of eight classic combatants in all. Along with their colorful managers, these Monsters compete in visceral bloody combat in the ring to determine the most powerful monster of all time”

How, err, monstrous, if you’ll pardon the phrasing. Not only will this movie apparently glorify violence against the Undead, it does so in the name of black comedy and pits the Undead against various other Differently Animated sorts for the amusement of the in-movie and real life Living audiences. Judging from the trailer, it’s even supposed to make you laugh, definitely seeing itself as black comedy.

Very, very black and not-at-all funny ‘comedy’ to the ZRC’s mind.

We are of course disturbed and saddened by this development, and we think you will be too after seeing the trailer:

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Movies, Youtube Mischief

Posted By John Sears on June 14, 2011

I consider myself pretty well qualified to review almost any Zombie-related product that comes across my desk-like-arrangement of tables, but a Zombie wine? That one puzzled me for a bit.

As you can no doubt imagine, living in Wisconsin I’ve grown to appreciate beer as the first and foremost alcohol in my life. Before moving here I only really used alcohol for cooking.. and the art director *hates* wine. I do mean hates, too.

So I’ve had a couple bottles of ‘Zombie Zin’ around forever.

Yes, ‘Zombie Zin’. It’s a real wine:

Now, I’m clearly a recognized authority on Zombie advertising and media, so I can review the packaging for the wine, which I have to say is pretty good from a Zombie Rights perspective. It’s playful, a bit whimsical, the bottle art is both catchy and yet avoids demonizing the bottle Zombie or focusing exploitatively on any post-mortem injuries/slight decomposition… honestly, way better than I’d expect. No idea about the mohawk, but why can’t a Zombie wear a mohawk? No reason I can think of.

But what about the *wine* inside the bottle?

Well, when in doubt and pressed for time, check Wikipedia, right? Which tells me the following about Zinfandel:

The grapes typically produce a robust red wine, although a semi-sweet rosé (blush-style) wine called White Zinfandel has six times the sales of the red wine in the United States.[2] The grape’s high sugar content can be fermented into levels of alcohol exceeding 15 percent.[3]

The taste of the red wine depends on the ripeness of the grapes from which it is made. Red berry fruits like raspberry predominate in wines from cooler areas,[4] whereas blackberry, anise and pepper notes are more common in wines made in warmer areas[4] and in wines made from the earlier-ripening Primitivo clone.

At first, given that wine = snooty French drink in the ignorant gutter of the popular zeitgeist (ie, my subconscious), I decided to go all out and pair it with some locally made artisanal French-style sausage (from Naumann’s Own Artisan Sausages, btw, if you live in Madison you *really* have to get some of his stuff), a WI made French style cheese with truffles and some bread from the local, authentic, run-by-actual-Frogs French patisserie.

Which led to a meal where neither the art director nor I actually drank that much wine.

Since reviewing wine seems to be completely subjective, my thoughts as I remember them: Zombie Zin is indeed a fruity wine, tastes almost like a wine-ade really. Somewhat astringent, not at all bitter, citrusey almost; feels thin for a wine.

So basically, it tastes like grapes someone let rot in the sun. You know; wine.

Then of course I forgot to upload the pictures and write the review, and actually hit the above Wikipedia article for background, where I learned: Zinfandel isn’t a French wine at all; it’s a California/Italian wine. The name ‘Zinfandel’ refers to the grape when it’s grown in Cali, and it goes by another name in Italy. The wine community found out they were the same plant through DNA tests.

So… I needed to try it again, and I had wine left over; why not cook an Italian dish?

I did that tonight and made a very tasty spaghetti bolognese, using some Zombie Zin as the red wine called for in the recipe:

It worked out *great*, though mostly I think that was due to a lot of high quality ingredients, more Naumann sausage, fancy organic carrots and tomatoes and such.

Given that ‘Zombie Zin’ is a wine that portrays the Differently Animated in a fairly positive light, is, for wine, not completely rank and very useful as a sauce ingredient (the proper home of most wine to my mind), the ZRC is happy to grant it a Zombie Friendly rating.

Now when do I get my Zombie Craft Beer?

Category: Zombie Media | 5 Comments »
Tags: Zombie Products, ZRC Reviews

Posted By John Sears on June 12, 2011

I wanted to share with you this amazing photojournalism series about a Zombie Walk in Moscow, cruelly dispersed by an authoritarian crackdown against the Differently Animated:

This year’s Zombie Parade held for the 5th consecutive year, and it was noted by riot police arrests of participants. On Saturday at the Old Arbat, despite the rain, held a wonderful zombie Flash mob. Toward the end of the march, when the bulk of the crowd was dispersed, the police arrived. Riot police began to gently load of zombies and other bloodstained figures in keyway. Detained about 30 people, mostly boys and girls without documents.

Not every city can be another Madison or Chicago, tragically, and the Undead face oppression and persecution around the world, not just in the United States.

Here we had a perfectly civil and reasonable event, just some Differently Animated citizens out for a stroll, a public gathering to remind the Living community that yes, the Undead were still here (or there, as it were). But The Man had to come and bust up the festivities, and of course, they used the old canard of ‘papers’ as an excuse, as if the routine denial of paperwork to the Undead was not commonplace to begin with.

It’s a Catch-22 of Prejudice against Undeath.

I urge you to go to this site and bear witness to what clearly would have been a great event about celebrating Unlife if not for the arbitrary and harsh abuse of the rights of the Differently Animated by the Russian authorities.

For shame. For shame.

Category: Zombie Media, ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Zombie Art, Zombie Public Event

Posted By John Sears on June 12, 2011

Sadly, however, it was a bit of a tale of travel woe, so we don’t have our usual fun pictures of Zombies having fun in a socially meaningful public way for you.

In truth, we never actually hooked up with The March, though we did see a few straggler Zombies coming back from it; basically the pure, concentrated evil that is travel to or from the city of Chicago caught up with your humble Zombie Rights campaigners and taught us a valuable lesson: never, ever again shall the ZRC attempt to travel to downtown Chicago by car.

You know the stereotypes about driving in major cities, and many have their own claims to fame for being hostile and unpleasant. However I truly believe Chicago is underrated in this regard. We had, by GPS calculations, a roughly 2 hour and 20 minute drive to make, and indeed, it took about that long to travel *back* from the accursed Windy city. On the other hand, it took us over 4 1/2 hours to get from Madison to having disembarked our vehicle into Millennium Park.

First, there is the construction between Madison and Chicago, whose methods and purpose are seemingly the fruit of madness itself. There are several long stretches of work zone between the two cities, one 17 miles long, where one lane of the road has been torn up and apparently nothing is being done. On our Thursday trip to Slices we saw precisely one small crew laying tar all the way from Madison to Chicago. On the way back both times we saw some work being done at night by perhaps a half dozen people over literally dozens of miles of torn up road. Why, I ask myself. Why tear up many miles of road long before anything is to be done with it? At the rate we’ve seen work being done this ‘road resurfacing’ will take about 10 years to complete.

That, however, having been encountered on the day we went to Schaumburg for the Slices protest, I was prepared for. What I wasn’t prepared for was ‘how much Chicago sucks’, in the words of the art director. It took us 90 minutes to travel the last 9 miles into the city. We were nearly rear-ended innumerable times, cut off even more so, and generally the trip was a slow descent into hell itself.

Once we got downtown we discovered that the same road work and helter-skelter closed on/off ramps in Downtown Chicago from LAST YEAR’S trip to the Zombie March.. are still there! No progress being made whatsoever. Astonishing.

So we had to take extensive detours around the crumbling roadwork of the city to find the Park. Once we’d done *that* we discovered that every intersection was staffed by traffic cops trying in vain to manage the flow of cars, as the Zombie March was the same day as the Chicago Blues Festival. It would have been faster to travel by pogo stick.

Yet again we persevered, and somehow got to the city garage under the park where, of course, we paid 25 dollars to park our car in a labyrinthine, confusing network of underground garages where you expect to meet Theseus at any moment, but instead have to settle for foul odors and dankness.

We got to an elevator and got inside, only to have it repeatedly shudder and fail to work properly or move from between floors on our short trip to the surface; we seriously had to ponder spending the day trapped inside. Eventually it failed to reach our floor but groaned to a stop at another, and we got out in a hurry.

By this point we were now very late, but we wandered the park in vain for a couple hours, trying to catch the tail end of the March. Part of this is unfortunately my fault; the route and starting point for the march were clarified after I had put the details down in our travel itinerary and I never updated them. Apparently there is/was a whole route on the website and such posted.. yeah. So we were stumbling blind instead, having arrived so late. (I have to say, by the way, the route looks brilliant, having been planned to hit several news organizations buildings downtown to increase exposure)

In addition to all THAT, my camera battery suddenly failed, so even had we found the Zombies, we would not have been able to document the event. It’s an actual Canon battery too, recently charged. Not sure what’s up with that one.

We never managed to hook up with the march and after a couple hours walking around were tired and cold, so the ZRC had to call it a day. We left, dejected and thoroughly defeated, and went homeward. I have, however, learned a number of valuable lessons from this debacle.

1) I will never, ever attempt to drive to downtown Chicago again. Ever. With future events I will park and take the train. Dear dark gods.

2) Chicago does not now have nor will it ever have a functional system of streets. The roads currently placed there are an elaborate joke of some sadistic kind, or perhaps sigils carved into the Earth itself to allow Satan easier escape from Hell.

3) We need to get smartphones *yesterday* to upgrade the ZRC’s media and communications capabilities, provide backup camera support, GPS and so forth, and I’m moving that up as a priority for us budgetarily. If we have to skip a convention in order to avoid being ever cut out of the loop without a lifeline like this again, so be it.

4) If we ever go to downtown Chicago again, we’re taking mass transit. Special thanks to our governor Scott Walker for blocking the construction of a high speed train route from Madison, through Milwaukee, to Chicago which would take us there reliably and comfortably in 2 hours so we’d never have to do this again. Oh, how I hate that Anti-Zombie man.

Overall this was the worst trip/outing we’ve ever had for the Zombie Rights Campaign. Bad luck with technology, the outright hostile Chicago transportation network and mistakes in planning combined to bring it to ruin. I apologize.

Deneen Melody tried to warn us, but I did not listen. Oh, if only I had.

Category: ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Public Appearance

Posted By John Sears on June 11, 2011

The Zombie Rights Campaign went to Chicago yesterday, well, the greater Chicago area (Schaumburg) for a DVD signing and release event by the ’3 Slices of Life’ cast.

But first we had to prepare our inducements for Zombie Friendly behavior in the future; delicious, homemade chocolate chip cookies.

(I was tempted to just make one enormous cookie but that would have been hard to share.)

We traveled south to Schaumburg and eventually made our way through the ridiculously enormous Streets of Woodfield mall, which is.. huge. I mean, wow. It’s an edifice to soulless capitalism, a stunning city of commerce in and of itself.

Which is my completely legitimate excuse for being late in finding the F.Y.E. for the signing. Yessir.

(It’s hard to find, ok?)

Once there however, we were able to speak with our Twitter pal, Deneen Melody, sometimes nemesis and Slices director Anthony Sumner, Jack Gulasta (who played the villanious Anti-Zombie lead in ‘W.O.R.M.’ but seems very nice in person) the very talented Toya Turner, whose sympathy for the Differently Animated comes across very well in ‘Amber Alert’, even though that’s more ghosts than Zombies. We were also able to hand out literature and generally get the message out about The Cause to a wide variety of skilled individuals and fans of the film; I chalk it up to the cookie bribes really.

A strange thing happened afterward for a protest, however; the ZRC was invited to dinner after the signing. Never ones to turn down outreach, we accepted, and talked about a lot of things, including our work, the controversy surrounding ‘A Serbian Film’ and more.

Now I have to disclose something; technically, the ZRC is in Mr. Sumner’s debt, as he craftily paid for our meal via secret communication with the wait-staff. It was clearly a calculated move to try and obtain leverage over the world’s most trusted Zombie Rights lobbying body, but by admitting our lapse in paranoia here in public I hope to avoid any future conflict of interest.

This dastardly and very friendly sort of villainy won’t work, Mr. Sumner. Although for the record, the meal was quite tasty.

I would call this both an object lesson in watching crafty film directors for unexpected acts of blackmail/charity, which is supposed to be our gig, and of course for outreach with the film community and horror fans of Illinois.

Tomorrow: The Zombie March.

Category: Zombie Media, ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Movies, Public Appearance, Social Justice

Posted By John Sears on June 9, 2011

The ZRC was, and remains, very happy about the news that Academy Award-Winning actor Jeff Bridges has signed on to play a Zombie police officer in the upcoming movie ‘R.I.P.D.’

In fact, we’re so happy that I asked the art director to whip me up a little fan-art, based upon a suggested Twitter tag for the film by @PASSENGERFILMS.

I present to you: “Dawn of the Dude”

Available in a variety of Flickr-generated sizes and the original 8 meg image too, under our usual Creative Commons license. Go nuts!

I’m going to make it my laptop’s wallpaper as soon as I clear up this icon clutter.

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