Posted By John Sears on April 23, 2011

I’m really stunned at some of the stuff we come across here at the ZRC.

For example, McPherson College, an allegedly liberal-arts oriented school, is actually putting out a viciously Living Supremacist comic book to promote the use of its library services:

Follow the link to enjoy our finished Zombie Guide to Miller Library! There is also a link on the main menu of the library website. Let us know what you think on our facebook page.

The print version will be available this fall, so get ready for that, as well.

Believe me, we shall indeed let them know. Bonus points: a library that doesn’t capitalize proper nouns like Facebook.

What’s the comic like? Well… you know those stilted and supposedly educational (but in reality, terminally dull) comic books that are occasionally pushed on elementary school children? The ones where an unconvincing plot, flat, dull characters and ridiculously contrived circumstances are supposed to teach history, or basic scientific principles? The ones that nobody in their right mind would ever want to read?

Well, it’s precisely like that, only with an added self-aware hipster quality that makes the bile rise up a bit faster.

The storyline, if one wants to call it that, involves two presumably undergraduate students fending off, guess what, the Zombie Apocalypse. They’re looking for a place to hide, but don’t notice the large library structure behind them until a librarian calls out to them.

Which is a great statement about your student population. ‘Fail to notice large campus facilities’ is a quality that will serve the students well while pursuing their degrees. McPherson might want to start holding classes out in the cornfields.

From there it’s, and I swear I’m not kidding, a tour of the Dewey Decimal system, the periodicals and a search in the stacks for books on fighting Zombies. When that fails, the librarian cobbles together a flamethrower.

Yes. He does. He seriously starts a massive petrochemical fire in a building dedicated to housing books, full of flammable paper. Amazingly, the sprinklers don’t come on and the fire doesn’t gut the place while all three of them scream hideously, flesh peeling off their bones, rising into the sky as ash.

Pity, it’s the ending I’d have written.

Instead, they escape to the rooftops and, again, *I am not joking*, are rescued by staff from the Science Library flying a giant book equipped with lasers.

It’s a good thing that, contrary to modern myth, Zombies aren’t all fixated on eating brains, or the fictional ones would never have gone to this school and there wouldn’t be a comic at all.

Am I expecting too much from McPherson? Well, with their illustrious reputation and the support of a sterling crop of alumni, surely they could do better than –

Notable alumni==
Jonathan Coachman – former World Wrestling Entertainment and current ESPN personality
Duane Earl Pope — convicted bank robber and murderer. Briefly on the FBI 10 Most Wanted List

Oops.

In all seriousness, am I being too unkind here? I don’t think so. I mean, here we have a school, purportedly an institution of higher learning, that turns to grotesque and clunky comic book violence against an oppressed minority population as a way to.. showcase library services?

Bashing the Differently Animated so you can create a Highlights for Drunken Co-Eds? Thanks, but no thanks.

Shame on you, McPherson College and special shame on the Miller Library and its obviously Living Supremacist staff for making Zombies and all manner of Undead feel unwelcome at your educational facility.

Category: Zombie Media | 3 Comments »
Tags: Academia, Comics

Posted By John Sears on April 23, 2011

BuyZombie brings us news of a ‘Shaun of the Dead’ shirt featuring some rather inflammatory imagery:

Shaun Shaun Shaun and your inability to ever really do anything right. Only you would let the zombies get close enough to your beer glasses to dirty them up this way. Even so we know you get things worked out in the end so let’s just celebrate with this awesome shirt.

Obviously we can’t agree with BuyZombie’s sarcastic take on this awful demagoguery in polycotton; it’s just too serious an issue. ‘Shaun of the Dead’ is back with a vengeance of late for some reason; Simon Pegg’s increasing US popularity as a parody film star might have something to do with it.

So when we have a t-shirt maker trying to cash in on the wave of hate that Shaun promotes, we have to call them on it.

This shirt is Anti-Zombie.

This shirt did get me to thinking about something I picked up a few years ago at Horrorhound, before regularly working on The Zombie Rights Campaign, which I had uncovered while sorting through some storage items recently: a very fiendishly detailed pint glass celebrating that awful, Living Supremacist movie in fairly unique fashion:

Needless to say, the ZRC doesn’t approve of that pint glass either. Wait for all of this to blow over? What, the Zombie population exercising their right not to stay dead? Is that what needs to ‘blow over’?

For shame. This glass is also Anti-Zombie.

Category: Zombie Media | 2 Comments »
Tags: Anti-Zombie Products, Movies

Posted By John Sears on April 23, 2011

(The hate-filled trailer for the game that seeks to make Zombie-bashing the new Easter celebration activity)

It’s no secret, and not hugely relevant for ZRC purposes, that I’m not a religious person. In some ways it might help me to view the Undead in a more evenhanded way, since I don’t approach the subject with any preconceptions about the morality of using ‘infernal black sorcery’ to raise the dead, say.

But still, it’s painful when Easter, the holiday celebrating rebirth from the grave itself, is used against Zombies, who, whether through supernatural or material means, have also traveled that lonely path back from the void:

Bunny the Zombie Slayer is clearly a name spoof on some TV series that was popular for awhile. Ignoring that it LOOKS pretty. I wish it was a side scroller and not just an Angry Birds styled game. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing just with it’s level of graphic greatness I wish it was more of a Jazzy The Jackrabbit rip off but regardless – it looks good!

Graphically, yes, it has polish, but that sheen is used to coat a vile hatred within, the pernicious propaganda that Zombies are here to ruin your holiday, steal your painted eggs and menace your children.

Which really, is a new wrinkle, even for us here at the ZRC.

Marring the holiday that, above all others, celebrates the dead coming back from the grave? With a game that seems derivative of other properties to begin with?

This is just low. For shame Hothead Games, for shame.

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

Posted By John Sears on April 22, 2011

Here’s another misuse of the Zed word for the list:

The glut of hotels built as the Celtic Tiger roared, has created a dangerous combination for Ireland’s tourism secter — too many hotels… many of which would have closed but were bailed out by the Irish banking system. The result… the Zombie Hotel – a hotel equivalent of the living dead… and they are being labeled the cannibals of an already hurting industry.

As the economists duke out their theories on how to handle the situation and while they try to convince the powers that be, tourists are finding some of the lowest accommodation prices in years.

Yes, it’s another case of ‘A Zombie is something I don’t personally like’. In this case, a construction bubble leading to excess hotel stock.

Of course, SOME people are going to like that very much, as the article linked above hints; low prices for hotel stays in Ireland may be the result. But nevermind; we have a new term for the lexicon, ‘Zombie’ hotels being hotels that you don’t like providing too much competition and lowering prices too far (for your tastes).

How completely unbiased and non-judgmental.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Don't Use the Zed Word, Journamalism

Posted By John Sears on April 22, 2011

It took a bit of work and quite a bit of waiting for the Region 2 DVD to get here from the UK in our heightened era of Terror Paranoia (which serves as the backdrop for many an Anti-Zombie story I might add) but the ZRC is now ready to review ‘Zombie Hotel’.

(It’s sad that you still have to tell people that Zombies don’t all want to bite them, but I suppose it’s best to get it out of the way.)

Our organization had very high hopes for this television series, based upon Youtube videos floating around and user commentary; a kids show about the peaceful friendship of two Zombie children and one Living boy, going to a mainstream school for mostly Living kids? Dare we hope that Zombie Friendly programming aimed at the next generation was actually being made?

Well, was, past-tense. ‘Zombie Hotel’ ran for one season in 2006. And although it’s been aired in many countries, and dubbed into many languages, it doesn’t appear to have ever been considered for the United States.

This is all the more tragic considering the fact that it is, in fact, both highly watchable children’s programming AND Zombie-Friendly entertainment.

‘Zombie Hotel’ is, as outlined above, primarily about the Unlives of two Zombie children, a Zombie girl named Maggot and a Zomboy named Fungus. Yes, those are really their names. In Addams Family-esque fashion, the Undead in this series tend to have outrageous names but be perfectly friendly to outsiders. Likewise, their father is named Rictus and their mother Funerella. Which, really, I think is stretching even this joke a bit far.

This nuclear family runs a small hotel on the outskirts of a cheery nondescript town in a thoroughly unidentifiable region of the world, as suits a program meant to be localized all over the place, I suppose. Again like the Addamses, their home and only their home is surrounded by perpetual gloom and dark clouds, with some sort of dimensional rift open in the sky above. Also like the Addams Family, their neighboring conventionally animated citizens completely gloss over the obvious bizarreness of this situation; perhaps an example of what Douglas Adams characterized as a ‘Somebody Else’s Problem Field’.

The first episode sets up the show, as the Zombie family has decided to send Maggot and Fungus to what they characterize as ‘Human school’. That brings us to my one real objection to ‘Zombie Hotel’; the Zombies don’t think of themselves as human, exactly. They definitely don’t feel inferior to Living people, aka Humans, but they don’t see themselves as part of the community either. That’s a shame, and even if it’s just imprecise language, not something I’d want put in the malleable minds of the young. Zombies are people too, as we often say. No more and no less.

That aside, Maggot and Fungus are apparently the driving force in this decision, as their father is supportive but their mother is driven to distraction with worry about how the kids will fare in Human company. She makes them swear to keep their Zombie natures a secret, which the children reluctantly agree to.

(Yes, they make the one small step reference, but it really is wonderfully progressive for Zombie kids to get to attend school with everyone else)

The other children in town prove as unable to recognize the fairly obvious as anyone else, and Maggot and Fungus catch flack less for their pallor and dark, Romero-esque circles under their eyes than their outmoded clothing. They eventually befriend a Living boy, Sam, who had been bullied by the same children picking on Maggot and Fungus, and the secret slips out: Maggot and Fungus are Zombies.

(Fungus accidentally takes his family out of the casket, and worries about the fallout)

Not, however, the ‘sleeps in dirt’ kind, they reassure Sam that’s only in the movies.

(The primary trio, three friends not separated by the presence or absence of pulses)

In actual fact, Maggot and Fungus have the coolest beds I’ve ever seen in fiction or anywhere else: giant, many-eyed, huge fanged monstrosities. The Zombie children sleep snugly in the monstrosities’ mouths.

(The bed open…)

(and closed. I want one so badly.)

Over the five episodes on the one and, again tragically, only DVD (at least from the BBC), the three kids work together on school projects, helping out the hotel denizens and generally getting by in elementary school life. It’s pretty heartwarming stuff; from a narrative perspective, nothing groundbreaking, except by allowing the Undead to participate as equal members of a fictional community at all! Treating Zombies like people, sadly, is still revolutionary for television.

I would be remiss if I didn’t cover the last episode in this DVD package though, where the kids are assigned a movie-making project at school and decide, in a possible bit of meta-commentary, to make their very own Zombie movie, with Maggot and Fungus as the hapless human victims.

(Recursion or commentary? You decide.)

That is just such an awesome idea, and it’s very well-executed too.

(Directing is hard work, or so directors tell you, at any rate.)

‘Zombie Hotel’ receives our highest rating, that of Zombie Friendly, for its low-key and open-minded approach toward Zombie-Living integration, whether in our schools or in our larger communities. Though relatively hard to obtain, we highly recommend it to all our readers.

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

Posted By John Sears on April 22, 2011

Mercifully, it omits a lot of the Anti-Zombie violence. Sadly, it doesn’t get rid of all of it, and the Scott Pilgrim-esque presentation trivializes the suffering of the Differently Animated a great deal:

For shame on all involved. A sober reexamination of the original, and heinous, alleged comedy ‘Shaun of the Dead’ is what was needed rather than this glib recitation of its core Living Supremacism.

Thanks to BuyZombie for bringing this to our attention.

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

Posted By John Sears on April 22, 2011

Truly sickening news, but then again this is a guy who makes his money coming up with torture porn:

Here’s how Whannell pitched a comedy script he’s recently wrapped:

I actually just wrote a comedy about a zombie virus that breaks out in a primary school but only effects people who haven’t been through puberty. There’s all these eight or nine year olds running around and the teachers are holed up inside the school. And the titles of the film is…? Cooties. That’s just an out and out comedy.

Yes, staging a Zombie Apocalypse scenario where children are affected (a-ffected, not e-ffected, btw) by a Zombie virus then cruelly abandoned by their caregivers when they need counseling and guidance the most, then, no doubt, slaughtered en masse for laughs. What could go wrong?

How about vomiting in the aisles in pure disgust? No, wait, what am I thinking; most of the people who show up would be ‘Saw’ fans, they probably can’t be sickened by any horrors on screen anymore.

We’ll keep an eye out for this one; personally, I’d love to picket something this odious.

From Bleeding Cool via BuyZombie.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Movies

Posted By John Sears on April 22, 2011

A movie supposedly told from the Zombies’ perspective is going to be on cable tonight:

“AAAH! ZOMBIES!!” stars The Vampire Diaries’ Matthew Davis, Betsy Beutler (Scrubs), Michael Terry (Bones) and Julianna Robinson with Tracey Walter (I Spit On Your Grave). Turning the zombie film genre on its head, “AAAH! ZOMBIES!!” is a horror comedy told from the perspective of the brain munching monsters themselves. The film festival favorite is fast becoming a cult classic with a rabid fan following across internet horror movie destinations and social networking websites.

“We’ve been extremely pleased with the amazing response the film has received from fans and critics and we’re very excited about premiering “AAAH! ZOMBIES!!” on Chiller,” said Sheldon Brigman, EVP of Level 33 Entertainment.

CHECK OUT SHOWTIMES FOR AAAH! ZOMBIES!! on CHILLER At www.chillertv.com

I know, from the description, that doesn’t sound promising, what with the ‘brain munching monsters’ and all. Still, I watched the trailer and…

Well, the trailer cuts both ways, and I’m going to have to snag it from Netflix and make a review. It could be Zombie Friendly, Anti-Zombie or anything in between, judging from this:

As you can see, it seems to revel in both stereotypical ‘Zombie’ behavior and exhibit considerable sympathy for the Zombies themselves. I question the premise somewhat. I mean, even if they can’t communicate with Living humans via speech anymore, why not a note? Is this some kind of bizarre, Undead aphasia where they can’t actually write anything that any Living person can read? Would it just come out as ‘Braaaaaaains’?

I suppose only a full viewing can solve this mystery.

Those of you with cable and this Chiller channel can find out for yourselves tonight as well.

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

Posted By John Sears on April 21, 2011

There’s quite a story behind the upcoming ‘Zombie Hotel’ review. Some months ago, the ZRC was tipped off to the existence of ‘Zombie Hotel’ by our resident Cultural Historian Andrew Leal, and I determined that this would make an excellent subject for review.

I did some research online and discovered that while the show had never had a US release of any sort, it was dubbed into English and put onto DVD by the BBC. I guess it’s actually been shown in a bunch of countries, albeit not the United States.

Sadly, as I was to learn later, only 5 non-sequential episodes of the one and only season of ‘Zombie Hotel’ seem to have made it to a BBC DVD release.

I hit the usual sites and eventually found a few copies of the Region 2 UK DVD from a seller willing to do international shipping on ebay. Using the magic of Paypal, I sent American dollars and they received dramatically fewer British pounds. Sufficient ones however; the disc was mailed relatively promptly over the Christmasy holiday season, and then…

Nothing. A week passed, and then a month, and then about two months, and I got concerned. I contacted the seller and they informed me that after the ‘ink cartridge bomber’ scare, small mail packages like this one were no longer allowed to piggyback on commercial flights, resulting in lengthy delays in getting anything from the UK to the US, at least, inexpensively.

Eventually however, it did arrive, and I felt a small amount of joy just seeing it in the ZRC mail box: the first product I had ever deliberately imported from another country for review for The Zombie Rights Campaign was in my hands.

I was all set to sit down and review this thing, but then, err, local events took over for a while. Between Capitol campouts, Zombie Walks, getting our mayoral candidates on record about Zombie Rights and making lots of picket signs, I sort of forgot that the first night I slept at the Capitol I had taken Zombie Hotel, thinking it would be a small group conducting a lonely vigil and I might have time for a quiet review session.

The DVD had been in my backpack ever since. Out of sight, out of mind, but that does mean it accompanied me overnight in the Capitol, traveled in picket lines and up and down State Street in protest marching.

On Wednesday I finally watched the series, somewhat reluctantly at first; I didn’t want to be disappointed, and frankly I have a low tolerance for children’s entertainment. Surprisingly, and delightfully, it wasn’t bad at all; the review will be mostly positive. I just have to grab a few more screenshots.

I’ve learned a few lessons from all this. One is that I should probably pay for expedited shipping on international orders. Another is that the War on Terror sadly can hamper the advancement of the Zombie Rights movement. But most importantly, I’ve learned that in order to find all the gems of Zombie Friendly entertainment out there the ZRC has to be willing to cast a wide net and be open to new opportunities, even, in this case, obscure kids’ cartoons from far-flung shores.

(The DVD in hand)

(Rather a lot of groups were involved in making this show)

Category: Zombie Media | 1 Comment »
Tags: Television, Zombie Products

Posted By John Sears on April 21, 2011

We mentioned the Columbus Zombie Walk benefiting the Mid-Ohio Food Bank earlier here on the ZRC blog, and got a comment on it a while later that I’ve been meaning to forward to you, our dedicated readership.

Basically, we can’t all be in Columbus, but through the magic of the internet, anyone can help them raise food. Or in this case, money, which is converted *to* food through hardworking public spirited, dare I say it, almost Zombie-like individuals.

The food bank’s page is located here, and you can donate by going to this page.

That way everyone can chip in and help Zombies do some good.

Category: Zombie Media | 2 Comments »
Tags: Social Justice, Zombies Doing Good