Give the Zombies a Rest!
There was a time I couldn’t get enough zombie movies. Seriously,
if there was anything in that video store with a walking corpse on the cover, I
had to have it. If it wasn’t in I would literally sit in the corner, on the
floor and wait for somebody to return it. Girlfriends came very late in my life.
Sure they were tough to come by (movies & girls) but that’s how I liked it. Fuck
that, I loved it. Do you know what it was like for a kid like me to come across
a film like RE-ANIMATOR or NIGHT OF THE CREEPS? Mind shattering to say the
least.
Nowadays I can’t go a week or two without coming across the
latest undead special. Zombies in planes, zombies in tha hood, zombie strippers
(twice last year!), zombies at prom, zombie musicals. It just won’t stop. I
don’t help matters, mind you. The same way these dumb ghouls mindlessly walk the
planet in search of human flesh, I hear about a movie with “Zombie’ in the title
and it’s in my DVD player by the end of the month. There’s some weird
subconscious attraction stemming from those days on the video store floor still
controlling my tastes.
They’re not all bad. The UK series called DEAT SET that ran
Halloween week last year was some of the best shit I’ve ever seen in the genre.
But for every breakthrough comes six unbearable shit piles. ZOMBIES VS.
STRIPPERS was so unbelievably horrible it almost made me swear off both zombies
and strippers. Almost. How can a movie so promising fail on every level
of expectations? The direct to DVD market is destroying this genre for
everybody. There’s no heart in this type of filmmaking, it’s all based on one or
two cool ideas and a bunch of filler bullshit.
Back when LAND OF THE DEAD was announced by George A. Romero in
2004 I was sure a long string of wannabes were going to be shown how it was
done. The genre was to be saved. The King was back. The thing was, it wasn’t,
not really. The dominance of Romero seemed washed out, no doubt, by the
abundance of copycats that flooded the screens over the past few years. DIARY OF
THE DEAD broke my heart. Not only because I had just watched THE ZOMBIE DIARIES,
which kind of beat him to the punch, but because both movies weren’t that good.
And now there’s a sequel. Sigh. Seeing a Romero zombie film should be an iconic
event in the world of horror, not a casual rental because there’s nothing else
to watch.
Maybe it’s the booze talking and I know this barely makes sense,
if at all, but I strive for those days when zombie movies were hard to find. A
time when every asshole with a video camera and a filmmaking Facebook group can
organize a shoot, Photoshop a decent cover, and trick my ass into renting it.
What once was a cult sensation has turned into a messy fad and anything good to
come out of the genre anymore is simply bunched together with all the other
laughable crap.