World War Z

Happy Monday, Imaginarians! Hope you all had a great weekend. I took my nephew to see one of my most highly anticipated films this year, World War Z. I was looking forward to this one because I was hoping they would liven up the book, which to me is very dry, being a series of interviews about the zombie apocalypse. Zombies must be active for me and happening right now, memories of the apocalypse are just passive and rather boring. So I was all geared up for this and was not disappointed.

The story moves fast, Brad and family are getting ready for the day and there are subtle hints that Brad has a past of some import. The little things said in the dialogue between him and his wife, played perfectly by Mirielle Enos, and the daughter questioning why his job is just to make breakfast. And the TV news in the background that he watches. Terrific, if brief character development for our hero. Soon all hell breaks loose while they just sitting in traffic. I really dug that as I've sat in rush hour traffic fantasizing about alien invasions, zombies, etc. and this movie went there. Hell to the yeah. The melee that ensues is spot on reaction by people.

From there it  relentless pace with some slow down time here and there so we can catch our breath. The action is stunning, using shaky cam effects to wonderful effect as it gives you the feeling of being right there in the midst of it all. We are creeping down the dim halls with Brad, there as the  zombies rush at him. The scenes in the apartment building as they are headed to the roof are chaotic and cool as hell. I thought it was brilliant that they taped magazines to their arms to help avoid bites.

I loved the CGI here, it was somewhat natural looking and not too cartoony as CGI can be. The scene where the horde envelops an Israeli city is amazing. And I thought the creepiest zombie ever was the woman in the glass cage at the World Health Organization lab. Yikes! Those snapping teeth and the unholy hissing along with her disturbing eyes was just ewww... I really dug the speed of the zombies and how they were drawn by noise. Forster created some wonderfully tense moments that had the audience in my theater gasping at every small sound.

There were some bad product placement, which I did not like, but I've seen worse. There was no swearing and no gore whatsoever, which are kind of important when dealing with the end of the world and zombies in my opinion. I think this movie was epic fun and you will enjoy it. I can't wait to own it.

It's the End of The World...NOT

Well it's December 21 and I want to know where the zombies are. I mean really, I was looking forward to starting my own crew ala Walking Dead and kicking some flesheater ass. There's nothing. Damn you, Mayans, what the heck? This means I have to pay my bills...Son of a bitch.  I'm sure the electric company won't accept "thought the world would end and I spent my money hoarding crossbows, katana swords, beef jerky and Diet Pepsi." Ah well...

Thanks for bearing with me while I've been gone. I'm in the midst of so many things right now I could scream. But thank God I am busy. I'll be back with a Christmas post after I finish some of the projects I've got going. And I am also working my way through all the fantastic comments you guys left on previous posts. In the mean time, a huge thanks for sticking and have a wonderful weekend.

I'm On Team Prison And Dancing

This weekend rocked for Yours Truly, oh yes it did. My Fighting Irish are playing for the National Championship for the first time since 1988. As a long suffering Irish fan who has had to endure jeers and smears this season, it is vindication. Who's undefeated now, bitches? I did the happy dance all night Saturday and all day yesterday. And continued into last night because my Bears laid the smackdown on the Vikings. Booyah!

Now, on to Team Prison...

SPOILERS AHOY!

The Walking Dead was incredible last night. Glenn rose to the occasion and is truly one badass mo fo. Zombie kill of the week for damn sure. I knew he would not be giving up the group. And poor Mags, she tried to hold out, but the Governor really is one giant bag of psycho dick. I want Michonne to emasculate him with her katana after he threatened Maggie with rape, making her strip like that. And Merle...Daryl needs to cut off his brother's other hand and feed him to the walkers after what he did to Glenn. But I have a feeling after seeing Glenn stare after Merle and the Governor, they really are dead men. Oh he was comforting Maggie, but he was plotting.

I thought Milton was a crazy bastard, but I've given him more thought. He's a shifty eyed dork totally out of his element.  I told a fellow fan that he's Burke from Aliens. He would shoot his mother in the knee and leave her for the walkers ala Shane if he thought that would save his life. Hope he gets to be walker nuggets soon, too.

Next week's midseason finale is going to be epic. Team Prison is off to confront Team Woodbury and I sure as hell hope we get a Daryl-Merle battle royal. I am not looking forward to the drought, though.

SPOILERS OVER

Tomorrow I will be having a guest post here by a great guy, Mind of Mine. He'll be talking about my favorite subject, kick ass girls. I am on a serious deadline so I won't be around this week. Forgive my absence, my friends, but I have got to get this story done. Be well and thanks for always being there. :)

The Walking Dead Season 3 Premiere

Hallelujah zombie fans, The Walking Dead finally made its third season debut and we rejoin the survivors under the new Ricktatorship. I have been dying for this all summer and was planted in front of my TV almost the whole weekend as AMC ran a marathon of all the previous eps. I love my walkers. ;)

All Ahead Spoilers!

Things have gotten pretty lean for the gang since we were last with them. They are on the run, scrounging for every last bit of food and ammo. The once timid Carol has learned to shoot and Carl, that little brat, has become a pint-sized zombie killer. All of the group has stepped up their game, except Laurie. That bitch is useless as ever only now she's a huge liability because she's in her third trimester. No offense to Sarah Wayne Callies, but honestly, Laurie is just a shit and I've been waiting for her to get served up buffet-style to the walkers.

We also got to meet the badass, katana wielding Michonne played by newcomer Danai Gurira. We see her slice and dice some walkers as she takes care of an ailing Andrea. I wish we could have seen more of her, but no, they had to spend extra time with Laurie. Grr... We see Herschel finally coming around, stepping up and being a real help to the group, no longer just the crazy landlord with the walkers in the barn.

Rick has led the group to a prison, where he hopes that they will be safe. They've cleared out the walkers in their way  for the most part and in one of the scariest tunnel scenes ever, almost lose another one of their own. They also find out that the prison has more than just a walker infestation. Cue the scary music.

The premiere more than lived up to all the hype and had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. It even had a dose of that macabre, gory humor I love as Rick literally rips the face from a prison guard walker. And for the Daryl fans out there like moi, there's a nice light-hearted moment between him and Carol.

Spoilers Over

Did you watch last night? If you haven't, will you watch? Talk to me.

Zombies and Women's Work...Seriously?

I am a huge Walking Dead fan. Huge. This show makes my Sunday nights. I love, love the walkers, the drama... Heck, just about everything. I've also had my share of things I didn't like as well. Namely Laurie and Shane. I just want to smack them upside their heads. Anyway...

During the lates episode, though, my inner feminist was on the war path. This is the zombie apocalypse and two of the lead female characters, Laurie and Andrea, were having this argument about who does what for the group. Then ol'Laurie breaks out with this idea that the men hunt the walkers and the women do the laundry and provide "normalcy" and "stability," that Andrea should stop trying to defend the group and wash some clothes or cook some dinner.

Excuse me?

Oh hell to the no she didn't. I wanted to clock that Neanderthal-minded bitch. This is the post-Apocalypse future and she's running on about women's work. Good God and jelly crackers, are you serious? And she actually said to Andrea that the men had it "handled" and that she would be better off "taking a turn" in the kitchen. My turn in the kitchen would have included me swinging an iron skillet at her head, then staking her ass to the side of the road as zombie snack cakes.

If I'm trying to survive zombies there is no way in hell I am doing someone else's damned laundry and cooking someone else's freakin' food unless we are all (women and men) taking care of this. Partners in survival is my motto. Fellas if you all are on my zombie crew come 2013, you best believe each one of us responsible for our own clothes. I wash nobody's skid marked drawers unless you are under the age of 12 or incapicitated.

I am not saying that in a group there shouldn't be tasks based on skill sets. I get that. But every one in the group needs to know every task in order to survive. I mean, someone here today, could be zombie potluck tomorrow. Now, if Laurie had come at Andrea with the "yo, you're a bad shot so maybe you should practice more and help out with laundry until you get better aim" I would have gone along. But to tell her that the men can take of the walkers and she should cook or wash clothes was W-R-O-N-G on so many levels.

Okay rant over. LOL What do you think? Equal work all the way around? Or am I just a raving lunatic?

Oh, before I forget, today, you can find my short feature, March's Frightening Flicks over Static Multimedia. Have an aweosme weekend!

I'm A Zombie

Check this out...I could totally be in The Walking Dead

Jeremy at iZombie Lover turned me into a zombie. Don't I look grotesquely cool? What an amazing artist he is. Thank you, Jeremy! Now if I could find someone to turn me into a werewolf...;)

By the way, my birthday is Thursday and we will party here like it's the end of the world. LOL To kick things off, Captain Ninja, himself, Alex J. Cavanaugh, will be here on Wednesday. Whoo Hoo!!

And let me say that in the midst of my ongoing mess, I am finding incredible inner strength and am seeing how truly super blessed I am in my friends. I could not ask for better people at my six. Now here's a bit of Pat Benatar to fire up your day. She's one of my fave rockers. Don't you just love the late 80's early 90's vibe of this vid? Why it's Attack of the Mullets. Movie script, perhaps? Seriously, though it's simple song with a very strong message. It perfectly describes my new found attitude toward all this crap. May we all have a kickass week!

N Is For...

N Is For...Night of the Living Dead

I love, love me the zombie films and this is the big granddaddy of them all. There's been so much written about it that I could not possibly add anything new, but here are some choice tidbits that I find interesting.

1. It was made for for approximately $114,000

2. The blood is Bosco Chocolate syrup

3. The flesh is roasted ham and entrails donated by a cast member who owned a chain of butcher shops.

4. The costumes were second hand clothes donated by the cast and purchases from Goodwill.

5. The Cooper family hiding the basement was played by real-life father and daughter Karl Hardman and Kyra Schon.

6. One publicity stunt for the film included an offer of a $50,000 insurance policy against anyone dying of a heart attack while watching.

7. The music used is stock music from the film Teenagers from Outer Space.

8. F/X master Tom Savini was hired to the do the makeup effects but was called up to Vietnam. Karl Hardman (Harry Cooper) and Marilyn Eastman (Helen Cooper)did the make up instead.

9. When this was released, there was was no MPAA rating system in place, so many a little kid got the shock of their young lives.

Check Out The Zombie Farm

Love zombie movies? Can't get enough of those shuffling flesh eaters? Well come and check out my review of this strange, campy, but somehow fun film The Zombie Farm aka Macumba over at Dead End horror blog. For some oddball reason I liked this movie. It was fun and weird and just the thing for a late night when I was stressed and having trouble sleeping.

Get Your Monster On: Zombies

Today I want to talk about zombies. Zombies have been woven into our popular culture, inhabiting books, films, video games, etc. We know them best as re-animated, brain-eating corpses, but did you also know that they are human beings controlled by another through the use of magic? It's time to get your monster on and discover what you may or may not know about these creatures as well as where they come from.

Stories of zombies originated in western culture through the West African spiritual tradition of voodoo. A dead person may be revived by a bokor or sorcerer and they remain under the bokor's control because they have no will of their own. These re-animated beings are used as laborers, carrying out the sorcerer's commands.

The bokor captures the zombi astral, a part of the human soul. He or she uses this to enhance their power.The zombi astral is kept inside a bottle and the bokor may sell this to a client for luck, business success and healing. Eventually, God does take the soul back so the zombi is only temporary.

Feeding salt to a zombie will make it return to the grave.

Zombi is also another name for the Vodou snake Iwa Damballah Wedo.

In 1937 Zora Neale Hurston was researching Haitian folklore when she encountered the case of Felicia Felix-Mentor, a woman who had died in 1907. She mysteriously re-appeared in her village.

In 1985 Wade Davis, a Harvard ethnobotanist, wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow, one of two books presenting his case for a pharmacological reason behind zombies. In 1982 he traveled to Haiti and as a result of his research, claimed that a living person could be turned into a zombie using two powders delivered directly into the blood stream. The first is a neurotoxin, tetrodotoxin (TTX), found in the flesh of the pufferfish. The second powder consists of a dissociative drug like datura. These powders together supposedly produce a death-like state leaving the person under the total control of the bokor. Davis encountered a man named Clairvius Narcisse, who claims to have survived such a state. Though this theory was dismissed in the scientific community, it spawned a 1988 Wes Craven film titled The Serpent and the Rainbow.

These magic, drug-induced zombies populated books like 1929's The Magic Island by W.B. Seabrook. Time magazine credits this novel with introducing zombie into the American lexicon.

Bela Lugosi starred in 1932's White Zombie, a film directed by Victor Halperin which features Lugosi as an evil magician with an army of zombie henchmen.This is considered the first legitimate zombie flick.

Another interesting tidbit about zombies comes from South Africa. In some communities there, people believe that a dead person can be turned into a zombie by a small child. The spell is so powerful that it can only be broken by a very strong sangoma or shaman.

So how about our beloved brain-eaters?

Well, they make their first appearance in the 1950's in EC Comics' Tales from the Crypt in stories such as H.P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West-Reanimator". One of the most seminal works is Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend about a futuristic Los Angeles overrun with undead. Although this is technically a vampire story, it heavily influenced the zombie genre by way of George A. Romero. The vampires in the story are the result of a worldwide contagion, a theme that dominates zombie films and literature.

Other zombie theories put forth around this time include alien technology (Plan 9 from Outer Space-1958) and mad science (Creature with the Atom Brain-1955). Invisible Invaders (1959) shows zombies being the result of alien possession.

It was not until a little film called Night of the Living Dead (1968) that we get our first look at the flesh-eating, brain-chomping zombies we know and love. This film broke all taboos and really frightened people. Though it offers little in the way of actual explanation for the rise of the zombies, it is one of the most influential works on the concept of zombies. This Romerian blend of zombie and vampire results in a monster that breaks down society and signals the end of life as we know it. And yet, they are not referred to as zombies, the news reports in the film call them ghouls. Romero doesn't call them zombies until his script for 1978's Dawn of the Dead.

Romero's zombies are slow-moving, shuffling creatures that overwhelm with numbers like a swarm. To destroy them, you have to shoot them in the head, then burn the corpses. Pretty simple when you're armed to the teeth and deal with them one on one.

In 1981, Hell of the Living Dead is the first film to portray a zombie apocalypse as the result of a mutagenic gas.

The concept of zombies craving brains comes from 1985's Return of the Living Dead, a horror comedy, where the zombies utter the word "brains" and proceed to chomp on people's skulls.

Zombies undergo a radical shift in the new millennium with films like Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002), Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (2004)remake and Zombieland, we see the zombie break out of the shuffling, listless undead mode and into highly mobile killing machines. These newer, faster zombies are still killed in the traditional way, bullet to the brain. Only now you need to be more heavily armed and in much better physical shape if you're going to survive.

In 1989, with the publication of the anthology, Book of the Dead, zombies officially became their own subgenre of literature. These stories are all united by the premise first seen Romero's films about zombies being the result of a worldwide infestation. These stories are the various reactions to that outbreak. The stories are authored by the likes of Stephen King, Richard Laymon and Chan Varney. Three years later, Still Dead: Book of the Dead II came out. 2003's The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks details ways for the average, ordinary citizen to survive zombie uprisings including chapter entitled Weapons and Combat Techniques, On the Run and Living in an Undead World.

Video games have also given rise to some truly terrifying zombies. House of the Dead by Sega and the Resident Evil series from Capcom all feature a fight to survive against hordes of undead that are fast and strong with huge appetites.Both spawned film versions with Evil becoming a successful franchise while House is generally panned.

Zombies are the hottest monster going right now and don't appear to be stopping. I suggest we all stock up on rifles, ammo, gasoline and non-perishables. It's going to be a hell of a ride.