I Love Splatter!

… while [Rec] 3: Genesis is admittedly the campiest film in Director Paco Plaza’s zombie trilogy, it’s still a nice follow-up to his previous creations, and he manages to keep changing it up enough that it doesn’t feel tired.

Also, I love camp—especially when it involves a bride running around with a chainsaw.

My review of [Rec]3: Genesis! Awesome, splattery fun. 

Uh, wow. The Walking Dead Left Behind promo thinger on Facebook is pretty damn awesome. It’s the best way I’ve ever seen a company use FB integration, for sure. 

5 reasons you need to watch The Walking Dead

I’m always wary of something that has SO much hype surrounding it. But you guys. YOU GUYS. The Walking Dead was so awesome I’m having trouble even thinking about how to describe it—so I whittled it down to the 5 best reasons:

1. Andrew Lincoln (as Rick Grimes): This guy is kicking all kinds of acting ass, ranging from his initial breakdown to his necessary, but still reluctant, Zombie killing. I can’t wait to see what he does in the next episode!
2. Utter despair: Main character Rick is missing his wife and kid, and thinks they might be dead. Little does he know they’re alive…but wifey appears to have hooked up with his best friend (yikes).  Still, that’s even not as bad as the father & son he meets who have to deal with seeing Mom as a zombie every night.
3. The Zombies: Hoards and hoards of ‘em! They’re more traditional zombies, but they’re not exactly super slow either. Every close-up in the Pilot episode showed a near-flawless execution of makeup and special F/X. They all looked TERRIFYING. Especially the little girl at the beginning, and the crawling half-corpse that tries to eat Rick.
4. The Directing: Oh, Frank Darabont. You rule so hard. So many beautiful shots, but the one that got to me the most was when Rick leaves the hospital and stumbles upon body after body after body. That, and the aerial shot at the end pretty much took my breath away.
5. The Splatter: MOST importantly, the splatter! Gunshot splatter, baseball bat splatter, crowbar splatter – so. much. awesome. splatter. The blood sprays were almost beautiful in their execution and the sheer amount of gore is impressive. I’m in love, AMC. Thank you for treating this mini-series like a quality film, and not mid-season filler. 

31 Horror Movies I Own #29: Dead Alive (AKA Braindead)

My second favorite Peter Jackson film (Heavenly Creatures is the first), Dead Alive is a hilarious 1992 blood-fest from the LOTR master that makes me extremely happy.

Shy Lionel Cosgrove is trying to escape his overbearing mother’s clutches so he can woo the girl of his dreams, when oops! Mom is bitten by a Sumatran Rat Monkey (omfg. The monkey! makes me laugh. and laugh. and laugh), and turns into a maniacal, flesh-eating zombie.

Once Lionel realizes his mom is of the undead, he tries to hide her in their house, subsequently stuffing all the other zombies she creates in the basement—which eventually results in buckets and buckets and buckets of blood, and insane puppet-y zombie creatures that try to consume the entire town.

It’s totally low budget and slapstick-y, and the acting is almost ridiculously bad, but I still love it to death. The amount of blood and entrails alone is enough to warrant multiple viewings.

I highly recommend this when you’re in the mood for something that will make you laugh, but is also gory enough to satisfy your love for bloody special F/X.

31 Horror Movies I Own #14: 28 Days Later

In 2002, Danny Boyle shook up the zombie genre by introducing us to a virus that turned almost everyone into undead brain-cravers possessing super strength and scariest of all: INCREDIBLE SPEED. No more outrunning hoards of zombies—28 Days Later suggests that if you find yourself in this situation, you’re pretty much fucked, because escaping a few might be possible, but 100, no way.

Our hero, Jim (blue-eyed, dreamy Cillian Murphy), awakens in an abandoned hospital 28 days after the “rage” virus is released. Curse those damn scientists, monkeys, and misguided animal rights activists! Thanks to them, almost everyone is raving, cannibalistic lunatic.

After running into a few creatures, Jim finds some humans left alive, but without resources to sustain them, they have to move out of the city in hopes of finding other people.  One of the best things about this film, outside of the awesome blood-splattered kills, is that those “people” turn out to be more dangerous than the zombies.

This film is a tight, roller-coastery action-packed thriller, with fantastic Special F/X and buckets of carnage. i.e. – right up my alley. It appeals to my zombie apocalypse fears in a whole new way, and I’d recommend it for anyone’s collection. So it’s just too bad that the sequel didn’t live up to the excellence of this one.

Short of some great scenes like someone using helicopter blades to mass-murder zombies, and a tense night-vision sequence in the subway, 28 Weeks Later failed due to giant plot holes, unbelievable characters, and most importantly: not following the rules set forth in the original film. I’d skip it unless you’re purely interested in the gore.

31 Horror Movies I Own #11: The Return of the Living Dead
“Send. More. Cops.”

If any movie cemented my love for Zombie apocalypses, it has to be 1985’s The Return of the Living Dead. Like any good horror-obsessed-alternative teenager in the 80s, I saw this (it has The Cramps and The Damned on the soundtrack, for chrissakes!) before the original Romero Night of the Living Dead—a fine ground-breaking film in its own right, but without the glamour and glitz of this blood-soaked, special F/X-laden, naked punk-rock dancing girl extravaganza.

Opening at Uneeda Medical Supply Warehouse, foreman Frank tries to impress new teenage employee Freddy by showing him a long-abandoned US Army container holding one of the Zombies from the original film. Of course, Freddy fucks things up by “accidentally” releasing the seal on the thing, causing toxic gas to shoot up into the atmosphere and rain down on the cemetery conveniently located next to Uneeda.

A fantastic sequence involving re-animated cut-in-half dogs, pinned-down butterflies and corpses on meat hooks follows, cementing the bent humor of this film and illustrating exactly WHY I love it so much.

Throw in Freddy’s girlfriend Tina, the only good girl amongst her hardcore partying punk friends (???), and you’ve got a recipe for some tasty Zombie dinner.  Of course, Freddy and Frank are headed for bad news themselves, as the virus slowly kills them and turns them into the same things they’re running from.

There are tons of great lines in RotLD to match the awesome scenes—so many that I can’t possibly mention them ALL here, but a few favorites are (of course) the iconic “Send more cops” uttered by a hungry Zombie who gets a hold of the radio in a police car after chowing down on the poor officers’ brains, and Freddy’s starve-tinged voice screaming at Tina “If you really loved me, you’d let me eat your brains!” Way to charm a girl, Fred.

All the actors in this thing are fantastic and hilarious, including the breakout performance of Scream Queen Linnea Quigley as flame-haired Trash, the aforementioned naked punk-rock girl whose worst fear is realized when the inhabits of the graveyard emerge.

This is a hilarious classic with lots of inventive gore that cannot be missed. If you haven’t seen it, you NEED to.

A note on the sequels: each one has their own charm, but none offer the complete packages of the first. Part 2 was mostly “meh”, a bland copy of this one. Part 3 gets a bit more interesting, offering up a newly zombie-ized chick who takes her love of S&M a bit too far, and Part 4 (Necropolis) was back to “meh” again, because it just tried too hard. I actually haven’t gotten around to Part 5 because, enough is enough, people.