I’d say Straczynski is more pissed because half the people that have gotten their hands on the script say it’s not very good. The reviews I’ve seen seem to be running 50/50 with “It’s brilliant” and “It’s crap”. And Max Brooks has repeatedly said he has no involvement with the movie at all. So I tend to believe him.
My expectations are pretty low at this point to be honest.
Sean of the Dead? No.
Shawn of the Dead? No.
Shaun of the Dead? Yes.
Part of it is economics. You can make a low budget Alien/Monster/Vampire etc. horror movie, and it can kick ass. In fact they often end up better than that big budget equivalent as you are forced to use suspense, and the viewers imagination, to hide the fact you don’t have the budget for 90mins of full on special effects.
On the other hand the point of Zombie movies is quantity not quality, the scariness increases directly (or exponentially even ?) related to the number of zombies in your horde, a handful doesn’t cut it, no matter what your skills of direction and cinematography are. And for a shed-load of zombies you need cash.
Case in point, Mulberry Street, its an awesome low budget horror movie (with frekkin Rat Zombies, man, what more do you want ?), and I’d highly recommend it. But as a zombie movie it can’t compare to bigger budget affairs, like the Dawn of Dead remake (edit: I meant Dawn not Day, I’ve not seen the Day of the Dead remake) . Normally I detest remakes but as a Zombie movie it takes some beating, even compared to the orginal, simply cos of the sheer number of zombies invovled 
Of course the makers of all those high budget zombie suckfests don’t have that excuse, so I can’t explain them…
I dunno about this. I always thought it was exactly the opposite: a zombie movie is the perfect low-budget movie, so perfect in fact that even negative-budget film industries like the Spanish and Italians have been able to produce them hand over fist. A low-budget alien movie, at minimum, needs an effects team skilled enough to produce a plausible space alien; anything else at all, such as futuristic props or exotic settings, puts the cost up even more. By contrast, what do you really need for a zombie movie? What did Romero use that first time? A nondescript setting and a crowd of extras wearing fake blood and torn clothing. Probably only the post-apocalyptic genre, with its beloved desert and abandoned factory settings and thrift-store costuming, is anywhere near as cheap an SF film to make.
Yes, modern incarnations of the zombie movie have upped the ante somewhat with larger crowds, juicier gore effects and more sophisticated stuntwork. But you’re still operating from the fundamental starting premise of a crowd of extras in torn clothing. If such films are getting too expensive to produce, I think it’s more to do with the modern American movie industry in general. For example, even though the aerial shots from “Land of the Dead” depicted a Pittsburgh setting, Romero actually filmed it in Canada. As I remarked at the time: what kind of world are whe living in, when George Romero can’t film a zombie movie in Pittsburgh?
The problem isn’t that it’s so hard to film a good zombie movie: it’s just that it’s so very, very easy to film a bad zombie movie.
Funny you should mention that. We did it.
In 1982 my friends and I made a half-hour film on super-8. In a future war in South America, American troops discover they’re killing the same enemy over and over. And then one of their own is killed… (That was me, actually. Since I was the cameraman I could only have a short part in the film.)
Unfortunately the film was stolen.
I have a comic called Fiends Of The Eastern Front where Nazis fight their firstly allied Romanian vampire enemies. It’s rather good, rather bleak. It would make a great movie.
There is nothing - nothing - which nobody hasn’t already read and cited here first: I came in specifically to mention that. It was an old 2000AD strip from the early 80’s, very low key, tense and atmospheric. It’s told as the diary of a private in a platoon of German soldiers in Russia, who discover that their Romanian allies are in fact vampires: which is great, if a little unsettling, until Romania switches sides and the German platoon starts getting killed off on by one, until there’s only one left. Question is, how did he survive to write the diary?
[jackass]
You mean either “harrowing” or “narrow” here.
[/jackass]
Sounds interesting, they revived it again for another one off in the last few months.
It’s not hard to make a decent zombie movie, even George Romero made two of them 
Another problem with zombie movies is trying to come up with something new. To whit:
Night of the living dead: survivors holed up in a farmhouse! Will they survive?
Dawn of the Dead: survivors holed up in a mall! Will they survive?
Day of the Dead: *survivors holed up in a military complex! Will they…
Ah screw it. Lets get drunk instead!*
And you can begin to see the problem. Shaun of the Dead was great because it was “can the survivors get the pub?”. Diary of the Dead was the same.
I think one of the reasons Fido does so well is it turns the genre on it’s head a bit. Something new and differernt to do with Zombies. Yay!
The Keep doesn’t need a remake.
The other major issue in Romero dead movies is that the zombies aren’t really much of a threat, other living people are. Unless your either drastically outnumbered or in a blind panic it’s pretty easy to get away from them. Cooper, the bikers, & Capt Rhodes were dangerous much more than the undead hordes. Granted Big Daddy and his undead army we much more threatening that ordinary zombies, but they wouldn’t have been much a problem if Cholo wasn’t attempting a coup. In Diary the characters own stupidity is a bigger threat than either the zombies or other survivors.
I think Shaun of the Dead worked so well because it took both the zombies and the romance reasonably seriously. It didn’t go down the cheap and easy route of comedy gore in which the zombies are killed in increasingly bizarre and spectacular fashion for quick laughs: they were a genuine, if low key, threat. Similarly, the romantic comedy was done fairly straight: basically decent but underachieving bloke has to get his life together and win back his girlfriend, steering a path between his idiot best mate and her snotty friends. And a plague of zombies. It was funny because it was an expertly executed juxtaposition of two completely different genres: a romantic comedy with zombies, if you will.
I think if I made a zombie film I would start with some zombies back to back. And some belly to belly. I’d film it in a New York cemetery.
But what would we call it?
Well, I don’t give a damn.
Adding to your comments (on top of my complete agreement), I thought the scenes with Shaun’s stepfather were excellent. Phillip could easily have been pure caricature, but his final speech was sincere and heart-rending and Shaun had a perfectly understandable change of heart and now a lifetime of regret.
Plus Bev’s reaction to the “Phillip touched me” bit was hilarious.
Not normally a gory/violent movie fan, but I loved Shaun of the Dead.
What really did it for me was a bunch of things;
First off, you had the beginning social commentary aspect, where people are just sleep walking through their days and may as well be zombies, combined with the movie-watcher expectations of “Is he a zombie? Oh, not yet. Ok.”
The you had the obliviousness and stupidity of the characters, which was nothing like it would be in real life (riots, panic, troops, media coverage), but was typical of horror movies.
I loved the ‘skulking down the alleys carrying golf clubs and cricket bats’ bits, which kinda made it more real. But you could only do that in a British film. In America, we’d all be armed to the teeth and it would be very much different.
Then there was the whole “going to the pub” silliness. It’s one of those mad plans that makes no damned sense, that one person makes and everyone else goes along with only because they don’t know what else to do.
But back on OP, the issue has been addressed above: There are only so many ways you can do it, and they’ve been done.