Posted By John Sears on May 12, 2011

Well, the trailer, anyway. This is pure genius:

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

Posted By John Sears on May 11, 2011

I got linked to a relatively new Zombie/Sci-Fi webcomic recently by BuyZombie, ‘The Horror of Colony 6′:

First off let me say that after zombies my favorite thing to watch is science fiction horror. In fact my love of scifi/horror may surpass that of the undead but there is so little of it that I tend to put it in the background. That being said I happily get to show off this ‘trailer’ for a newer zombie web comic entitled The Horror of Colony 6 and while it’s not far enough to get a true feel on how it’s going to go it is far enough into the plot to catch your interest. Well if you are into sci-fi horror at least.

Yes, that’s right, it’s a comic with a trailer:

Intrigued, ok, ‘concerned’ might be more like it, I went to the site to read the available archives, which start here.

The story in a nutshell: humanity has spread out into space, coming into contact with several other intelligent species along the way. The name of the game seems to be reckless colonization, like in the ‘Alien’ universe, although no particular explanation is given for what the rush is here. Profit, probably. Whose isn’t clear.

Naturally this leads them to place a colony where they haven’t properly scouted the local flora and fauna, which leads, unlike in ‘Aliens’, to Zombies rather than xenomorphic acid-blooded bugs.

The ‘Zombies’ in ‘The Horror of Colony 6′ are interesting from a purely academic perspective. Intelligent, ravenous for flesh, not technically Undead but rather infected with some sort of alien fungus. A fungus which drives them to… eat people. But only a little, leaving enough for that newly infected person to get up and ‘eat’ others. Lather, rinse, repeat.

So it’s a bit like ‘Aliens’ crossed with ‘Marvel Zombies’, really.

(Anti-Zombie media often suffers from these logical flaws, though ‘good story’ is being generous on the whole)

Just as an aside, why is it that security systems in sci-fi horror are often so laughable? In ’28 Weeks Later’, as in Colony 6, an automated quarantine procedure has to have been designed by an utter moron. In ’28 Weeks Later’, when trying to contain a super-contagious ailment (from their perspective), they use RFID cards as all-in-one security access. No keypads, no passwords, nothing. Just have to.. walk close enough to a scanner… with a card on you.

Needless to say, one of the ‘Infected’ doesn’t drop his card and thus it all falls apart.

In Colony 6, you have a security quarantine that can be overriden by, and I’m not making this up, a botanist or some such. A quarantine that only keeps people from re-entering the colony, not exiting. Needless to say, a low level person exits, then overrides the quarantine and re-enters.

Sigh.

Back to the important topic though: Zombie Rights. The Zombies here are treated, I have to say, quite shabbily. Sure they’re very hungry for flesh, but I mean, that’s no reason to abuse and segregate them. It’s just rude. On the other hand, as yet, they are only trying to ‘cure’ the Zombies, not kill them. That, sadly, is ahead of the curve for the usual treatment of the Differently Animated in fiction.

Thus the ZRC has decided to award ‘The Horror of Colony 6′ an Anti-Zombie rating as of this date. Things could obviously change as it is an ongoing series. We can’t recommend following it to find out about said changes, naturally.

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

Posted By John Sears on May 10, 2011

Last year when the ZRS had their previous hate-fest disguised as ‘Zombie Awareness Month’ we counter-protested with a ‘Zombie Cultural Awareness Month’. Admittedly, I’d kind of forgotten about that until I got a comment, not on this year’s post about the ZRS’ continued perfidy, but on last year’s, submitting a poem for our appraisal:

Stan Szczesny says:
May 9, 2011 at 9:57 pm (Edit)

I posted a poem for Zombie Awareness Month over at:
http://stansgreatbooksblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/poem-in-honor-of-zombie-appreciation.html Check it out!

We did take a look at the poem, and I have to say, Stan?

Why did you think we’d like a poem with lines like this:

It shambles side by side with others,
Inhuman, but in human form,
Unliving, but self-moving,
Dead, but hungry.
They shamble on a well-beaten path,
For they are many
Lemming-like legions,
marching on and on,
From the undiscovered country that holds
No mystery for them.
They eat and slay the Unfortunate Living,

Or this:

A cacophony of dissonant
Weeping and wailing in the wake of the
Groaning things which should not be.

‘Groaning things which should not be.’ Yeah… perhaps you didn’t notice the name of this blog. Or website. Or our mission statement.

We’re PRO-Zombie. I mean, really. What reaction is a Zombie Rights lobby going to have to a poem that declares our clients ‘should not be’?

Given that The ZRC blog has the unfortunate distinction of awarding our first rating for poetry, a solid ‘Living Supremacist’ at that.

For shame, Stan. For shame.

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

Posted By John Sears on May 10, 2011

There’s an interesting new social networking game that sounds fascinating to play… at first:

Ever wonder what it would be like to grow trees, build houses, plant flowers and interact with other real world players all on top of Google Maps? No, I hadn’t really thought of that either, but the people at Self Aware Games sure have. They’ve brought their idea to life via Fleck, a new browser-based game that’s currently in beta at Fleck.com.

…

Fleck’s gameplay can be most easily thought of as a combination of MMO and the established Facebook social game. You’ll enter into a real-time environment populated by dozens or even hundreds of other real-world players, depending on your geographical location, and can then interact with both those players, and the surrounding environment through a variety of activities. The novelty behind Fleck is the game’s world – the real world, as seen through Google Maps. That is, each environment in the game represents a real world place, but rather than seeing a completely animated background, filled with static buildings or plant life, you’ll see the white lines of streets, green shaded areas representing parks or forested areas and so on – just as though you were looking up a general location via the Google Maps service.

…

While your actions in Fleck are your own, your alterations are seen by all players, just like the world of an MMO. In this is the beauty of the game. Due to its Google Maps backdrop, you can literally travel anywhere within the United States or Canada, so long as you know an address. This allows you to stand on top of your own real-world home, planting flowers on the nearby streets, or, will even let you travel to what may be a particularly shady part of your real-world neighborhood and make it a better place – at least within the game.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? You can use your idle time to help make the world a better place, at least online. That’s sort of a recreational form of the ZRC’s agitation, isn’t it?

Well, no. As it turns out, the world of ‘Fleck’ doesn’t want any of YOUR help, Zombies and Zombie allies:

Oh, and did I mention there are zombies? Every now and again, you’ll come across a grave stone in the middle of a map’s area. These don’t seem to correlate one-to-one with real world cemeteries (that would be a bit too creepy, I think), but once you find one, you’ll be able to start a new zombie battle mini-game. The Zombies of fleck are unlike anything I’ve seen – bright purple mounds of hair that chase you around the map or spit at your from afar. Your character will automatically shoot at the undead, but you need to click around the map to move and avoid being lunch.

This is a real first. The developers at Fleck.com want to make absolutely sure there aren’t any bleeding heart Zombie-coddling pacifists playing their game, no sir. They’ll FORCE you to shoot the virtual Zombies, whether you like it or not.

Take that, filthy hippies.

Honestly, what precisely is the point of automating the violence in a game? What’s the point of a game that plays itself?

I suppose these people think that shooting Zombies should be such a reflex action by now that there’s no point in making it a user-interaction. Well, The ZRC finds that attitude repulsive.

I’m in the process of reviewing another social networking game at the moment, ‘Zombie Lane’ on Facebook, but I’ll get to Fleck soon enough so as to properly register our outrage at this travesty with a full review, rest assured.

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

Posted By John Sears on May 10, 2011

Call of Duty: Black Ops’ Anti-Zombie modes have been enormously successful, and that leads to some very dedicated fans:

A group of Call of Duty fans have put together a short fan film, based on the “Nazi Zombie” mode from Treyarch’s last two Call of Duty titles. As you might expect from a game that involves an endless stream of undead fascists, it does not end in smiles and kittens.

First of all, how do you know they’re all fascists? I think it’s an overgeneralization to say that everyone who fought in the German military during WWII was a Nazi or a fascist; they did have conscription you know.

Does anyone ask the Zombies to surrender and then inquire as to their political views? Of course not.

The video itself is extremely professional and highly disturbing, and the effect of translating the game’s Anti-Zombiism to another medium is striking:

To anyone who found it disturbing to see their videogame violence re-enacted with such real-life verisimilitude, guns pointed directly in faces, blasting away: congratulations. That’s what it’s like for the ZRC *every single time* we have to review these Anti-Zombie works.

Welcome to Sympathyland.

Maybe after seeing this video people will think twice about playing Call of Duty, or at least the Anti-Zombie game modes.

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

Posted By John Sears on May 10, 2011

This review marks one of the interesting conflicts I run into as the ZRC’s chief media watchdog. There are quite a few Anti-Zombie projects out there that, putting the Anti-Zombiism aside, are clearly works of talented people. ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘Dawn of the Dead’ in particular show that George Romero really knows how to frame a shot, to make things visually interesting. ’28 Days Later’ can be quite haunting and surreal. ‘Shaun of the Dead’ has some very funny moments; you get the idea. My point is that the ZRC’s focus requires us to put Zombie Friendliness or lack thereof first, before other artistic/literary concerns, and sometimes that means condemning in very strident terms something that, if only it wasn’t about defaming the Undead, might be a really enjoyable piece of art.

More rarely, we have the project that, although really Zombie Friendly, is, aside from Zombie Rights concerns, pretty terrible. It’s a nice problem to have, but it is a problem.

Which brings us to ‘Dylan Dog: Dead of Night’. First? It’s definitely Zombie Friendly, although the main Zombie character is relegated to sidekick status, his plight and Unlife are treated with a very sympathetic hand.

Second: it’s not a great movie. At all.

‘Dylan Dog’ is slow, unimaginative and feels derivative of so many other creative properties that you’ll swear you’ve seen this somewhere before. Shades of ‘Buffy’, ‘Angel’, ‘Underworld’, ‘Hellboy’ and countless other works will pass before your eyes as you sit in the theatre. And honestly? As entertainment goes, all of the above, even Underworld (though not its odious sequel) are better, more creative and interesting projects.

I expressed some excitement over this movie when I saw the trailer a while back, but trailers can lie. Truthfully, many of the problems present in the film are also there in the trailer if you look harder: the reliance on uncreative, not particularly funny comedy, the Zany Sidekick, and Brandon Routh’s acting, which, btw, is so wooden you could carve it into toothpicks.

It is time for an official moratorium on mocking Keanu Reeves’ range as a thespian; Brandon Routh far surpasses him. Keanu might walk through a scene emitting no detectable emotion, but Routh is a pathos black hole, sucking humanity out of the actors and actresses around him and emitting only a vague sarcasm.

Dear Cthulhu, he might be the male Milla Jovovich.

He narrates the film too, which doubles your narcoleptic fun.

Now, about the Zombies in Dylan Dog: there’s a surprising amount of sympathy here for Zombies. They’re depicted as people, albeit Undead ones, who have special dietary needs and a constant requirement for relatively fresh replacement parts. Of the three supernatural groups of people in the movie, Zombies seem at first to get the short end of the stick: basically no superpowers and a constant fight against decomposition. This is in line with what many critics say about Zombies, that they lack the personality and magnetism of, say, Vampires.

However as the movie lurches (no pun intended) onward, you see that in the Dylan Dog-o-verse, Zombies are your best bet amongst the Undead. Vampires seem prone to scheming and crime, selling their own blood as an addictive drug; Werewolves (here considered Undead despite having children and aging and so on) have violent, barely manageable tempers that turn them into raving beasts. Zombies are just… folks. Folks who have to use cleaning products like soap.

Bonus shout-out to having a Zombie support group in the film; shades again of someone else’s work, the Fresh Start Club from Discworld by Terry Pratchett, but hey; at least it plays fairly well.

Sam Huntington as a Zombie, on the other hand, makes me want to throttle someone or something. ‘Scene-stealing’ is code for ‘annoys the living daylights out of you’, here.

Sidekicks. Why do people think the Zany Sidekick is funny? They’re not.

Anita Briem rounds out the triad of main characters by desperately scrambling to show even less emotion than Routh, and almost succeeding.

The plot involves a scheme to bring about the apocalypse or something, and no points will be awarded for guessing if Dylan and his Zombie pal avert it or not, whether Dylan overcomes his trauma and goes back to being a defender of all Undead-kind instead of a burnt out private detective (is there any other kind in the movies?) etc. Totally by the numbers.

To recap: Dylan Dog is Zombie Friendly, but it isn’t good. Save the money, wait for it on cable, and buy a Terry Pratchett book instead.

Btw, on Rotten Tomatoes Dylan Dog is getting a 4% Fresh Rating. Ouch.

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

Posted By John Sears on May 9, 2011

Uggh.

Sometimes I get to have a spirited debate with a talented, witty and informed, if still hatefully bigoted, Anti-Zombie writer/creator.

Other times I read a column about Zombies that is so rife with factual errors and stupefyingly bad logic that I want to break open the tequila. Again.

That was the case today with Forbes blog by one Larry Olmsted, a man who would be hard-pressed to know less about Zombies and yet took it upon himself to critique all Zombie film and criticism of said film. After a lengthy introduction that practically screams ‘Get to the point already!’ and shows why some bloggers really do need editors, Mr. Olmsted starts his rant:

So why are the new crop of zombie films keeping me up at night?

Because they don’t have any zombies.

In the most recent issue of the Atlantic, James Parker wrote a less than inspired ode to the phenomenon in the entertainment section (Our Zombies, Ourselves) in which he perpetuated the biggest lie of the current zombie renaissance when he wrote, “Recent years have given us both the sprinting or Galloping zombie of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.”

He is not the alone, and joins a laundry list of otherwise respected critics attributing “zombie” status to Boyle’s thoroughly entertaining film and its equally likable sequel 28 Weeks Later (28 Months Later, the third in what may be a long list of nearly identical titles culminating with centuries, eons, or millennia, is scheduled for a 2013 release), despite the fact that neither movie includes a single non-living, non-breathing, zombie.

In reality (or at least celluloid reality) Boyle’s human characters face death at the hands of other human characters, humans who have been infected by the rage virus and are not undead brain eaters at all.

Splitting hairs?

Maybe, but I don’t think so. When you buy chocolate ice cream, you expect chocolate, not fudge ripple. It’s close but not as advertised. And in that sense it is not just the critics’ feedback: posters advertising 28 Days Later loudly proclaimed it the scariest zombie movie ever.

You know you’re in a special place when the critic takes it upon himself to actively refute the movie’s own advertising and correct the studio as to what it’s about. That’s a special kind of ego. Next up: Larry Olmsted tells off ‘Star Trek’ for not depicting a voyage of any great length.

Moving on, however, the staggering ignorance begins to peek around the ego:

I Googled “Best Zombie Films,” and got a lot of lists. Every single one I looked at, from the picks of (terrible) horror film director Rob Zombie himself to the site Zombierama had 28 Days Later on it. Interestingly few included another similar non-zombie zombie film, the Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend, a remake of the classic Charleston Heston film Omega Man. The absence of zombies (instead, more chemically infected – and ultimately curable – humans) did not stop numerous prominent reviewers from describing it with the “Z” word. NPR’s Bob Mondello (“as movie zombies always do…”), NY Observer’s Rex Reed (“carnivorous blood sucking zombies”), WSJ’s Joe Morgenstern (those damn zombies everywhere). While critic Steve Whitty of the Newark Star Ledger broke new ground by describing the infected humans as “vampires,” an even more appalling mischaracterization, it was the Globe & Mail’s Liam Lacy who took the cake (“generic zombie slaughter fest highly reminiscent of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and its sequel 28 Weeks Later) slurring three non-zombie films with the same misconception in just one sentence!

Ok. Back the trolly up. Although Mr. Olmsted seems shockingly unaware of this, ‘I Am Legend’ was written as a novel by Richard Matheson and published in 1954. It does, in fact, contain a number of vampire characters. A screenplay is floating around the net, also by Matheson, and it too involves a lot of vampires. That screenplay is available in book form
from major retailers like Amazon.com.

The infected individuals in ‘I Am Legend’ always WERE vampires. I haven’t seen the Will Smith movie because I value my time, but if Mr. Olmsted had read the book, the screenplay or even just seen the Vincent Price adaptation ‘The Last Man on Earth’ he would in fact know that the creatures in ‘I Am Legend’ are SUPPOSED TO BE VAMPIRES.

So he criticized a critic who may actually have been aware of the provenance of the film, unlike himself, for correctly identifying the antagonists as vampires. Wonderful; ignorance wins out.

Can he get worse? Oh my, yes:

Slow or fast, thinking or not, I don’t care. I can live with innovation and creativity, but some rules need to be followed. Like these:

Zombies should be dead. This most basic rule goes back to the very origin of the zombie myth in Haiti’s voodoo culture. (Or not myth if you buy into The Serpent and the Rainbow school of zombies-are-real academia, interesting book, terrible film.) This rules out living people overtaken by rage viruses, secret government nerve gas, or ill-advised anti-cancer vaccination.

Zombies need to want to bite/eat people.

Zombie condition needs to be highly contagious. The zombie itself is not scary, the outbreak and end of humanity that results is.

Being dead and then brought back to life does not make one a zombie. Scary (Pet Semetary), clever (Re-Animator), or classic (Frankenstein), maybe, but not zombie.

He’s willing to live with innovation, so long as ‘Zombie’ films slavishly follow the Romero-Russo formula. The problem with that is, as we’ve noted again and again here on the ZRC blog, Romero doesn’t do that himself; his conception, misguided as it is, of the Differently Animated has changed both over the course of his films and during the course of the internal continuity of his film universe. In ‘Night of the Living Dead’ they’re malicious, tool-using figures who form whenever anyone dies and are bent on murder first, not eating people. In ‘Dawn’ and ‘Day’ they’re decomposing Undead creatures hungry for flesh. In ‘Land of the Dead’ the Zombies are intelligent and capable of considerable planning, outwitting the Living humans and staging an amphibious invasion of a defended island. Etc. There’s not a lot of internal consistency and even Romero violates the rules that Olmsted clings to.

What really gets me is that he seems to think that ‘Re-Animator’ innovated off of Romero because ‘Re-Animator’ was made in 1985 (the same year as ‘Day of the Dead’ and ‘Return of the Living Dead’, btw). There’s a slight issue with that ‘innovation’ theory….

‘Re-Animator’ is an adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story from 1921-22. The tone was greatly altered, from horror to severely black comedy, but the nature of the ‘Re-Animated’ individuals was largely the same.

The only way that qualifies as innovating on Romero is if H.P. Lovecraft had access to a time machine, and if he did, as the art director pithily queried, ‘Why didn’t he come to our time and see an oncologist?’

I can already see a defense that might be levied against this; ‘Oh, but he references Voodoo too, so it’s not entirely Romero.’

Well, no, but Voodoo zombies don’t spread by infection, bring about the apocalypse or eat the living. That’s pure grade-A Romero there.

Let’s recap: Larry Olmsted wrote a blog entry complaining that other people and especially Hollywood don’t take Zombies seriously enough for failing to conform to the standard concocted out of whole cloth by George Romero and John Russo in the 60s, which has changed significantly over subsequent decades anyway. He lambastes a critic for describing ‘I Am Legend’ as being about vampires (which it originally was and was always meant to be), then describes a willingness to let Zombie movies innovate so long as they slavishly follow Romero, capping it off by stating that ‘Re-Animator’, whose source text predates ‘Night of the Living Dead’ by over forty years, is somehow illegitimate for not following Night’s rules.

Which it would have required the violation of space and time to achieve at any rate.

I say again: uggh.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Journamalism, Mainstream Media, Romero

Posted By John Sears on May 9, 2011

Horror Society pointed us toward this charming little indie film, very much in the style of ‘The Addams Family’ with perhaps a bit of ‘Edward Scissorhands’ and a healthy dash of Dr. Seuss thrown in:

Overall, considering the sardonic and cheerful tone (again, very Addams Family) I think we can overlook the slightly antisocial behavior and give this little movie a Zombie Friendly rating. It is after all very sympathetic to the Differently Animated, and besides, who hasn’t wanted to stab a preppie at least once in their life?

PS: We’re presuming the ‘Evil’ part is a reference to Evil Dead, but if not then it’s ironic, because clearly the Evil Dead Girl is not the bad guy here.

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

Posted By John Sears on May 8, 2011

Remember that 8in8 album I told you about with the Zombie Friendly video for one its songs?

Well, another fantastic video has surfaced, this time for ‘Because the Origami’, a very sad song about parents missing their runaway child. If only Zombie kids could get this kind of sympathy on the internet:

Because the Origami – 8in8 from Ben Jacobson on Vimeo.

I really need to get on crafting some Zombie Friendly fiction so that someone could make a movie like this about Zombies. It’d be great for The Cause.

Category: ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By John Sears on May 8, 2011

I just wanted to point out to our readers what might be the most epic spam comment of all time, which thankfully slipped by Akismet and brightened my morning.

Enjoy.

Here’s a sample btw:

ABSTRACT
SYNTHETIC Telepathy = TECHLEPATHY – NANOBOTS replacing Neurons = You tube) MOLECULAR TECHNOLOGY ARRAY Molecular Nano = Radio Frequency IDentification Mole nano-weapons = nano-electro-mecanical NEMS systems and the micro M.E.M.S
How it works (first time we have to say that nanotechnology is generally intended for consume.) Micro-nanotechnology materials are much tougher than their counterparts at the macro level. Nano-transitor ( the transistor was the key that opened the door to modern telecommunications) is equal to the perfectly transistor in physical diagram. So at the micro and nano levels fell this technology in the telecommunications than can achieve perfection. Each neuron have a nanobot ataced attracted for reverse polarity of electrical discharges (electrical pulse, pulse neuron) in neural synapse or between neuron and effectors organ. Each nanobot (= nanoweapons) is a Digital Object Identify (DOI) with a unique ID. All nanobots are coupled to the central and peripheral neural system. (Nano-weapons are coupled neural system especially the sensitive).

Category: ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Advertising