And of course “Kill the Queen!”
As someone mentioned earlier, it’s just too easy to make a zombie movie, hence all the crap. But if you’re creative, you can go further with the concept or give it a unique twist, and with some competent movie-making produce a classic. For instance, while they’re not truly zombies, “28 Days Later” gave us a creepy evolution of the concept - normal people that act like zombies, and it’s highly contagious!
And, as shown in that movie, the basic premise can always be tweaked to surpass what has come before:
- “Shaun of the Dead” made it touching and funny
- “Dawn of the Dead” made zombies fast (now that introduced a new and scary concept)
- and I can’t believe no one has mentioned Will Smith in “I Am Legend”. Ok, they were diseased, not zombies, a la “28 Days Later”, and there were some weak points in the story (but, hey, it’s a zombie movie:)), but now, in a new twist, these zombies are really strong, really mean, and smart! Smart enough to copy your defensive tactics and use them against you. Highly recommended, even for those with a Will Smith aversion. This is not a comedy…
Zombies are really a very boring enemy. They aren’t very smart, and so they never really do anything surprising. Which makes it difficult to write the plot twists that traditional movie narratives rely on. For a zombie movie to be good, something else has to be the real enemy- time, the environment, other people, etc. Doing this skillfully is tough.
Furthermore, zombie films have a kind of odd scope- you need the area to be depopulated and remote enough that the protagonists can’t just go somewhere else. But you need to also leave some room for hope. Any situation that you come up with like that is going to feel forced. I think this is one of the things that 28 Days Later did exceptionally well- it dealt a bit better with the mechanics of a zombie-apocalypse.
I recently read World War Z, and despite the love for it here, I came away fairly unimpressed. Brooks’ basic idea was an excellent place to start, but he bungled things up in execution.
- He’s a poor writer. All his characters speak in the same voice.
- He knows fuck-all about military tactics and hardware. His explanation of why artillery doesn’t “kill” zombies betrayed total ignorance of how artillery causes casualties. He then piles additional ignorance atop that. If he wanted, for the sake of his plot, to have the military defeated by zombies early on he should have done some very basic homework on what they do, how they do it, and what they use to do it.
- The whole blind martial artist segment set in Japan was just retarded and didn’t belong in a story that is supposed to be a “realistic” description of the world overrun by undead.
I haven’t read the leaked script, but any competent script writer should be able to take Brooks’ novel and turn out a script better than the source material.
I actually like the current trend we’re seeing with zombie films. That is, rather than starting off the film with a zombie outbreak and showing the protagonists surprised to see them, we’re seeing the zombies already living among the protagonists.
Recent films that come to mind that illustrate this trend fairly well, albeit in different ways, are Land of the Dead, Resident Evil: Extinction, 28 Weeks Later, and even to some extent, I Am Legend.
What you have are protagonists who already know the zombies’ strengths and weaknesses, know how to avoid them, and know how to kill them.
What’s more, instead of running away from them with no concrete goal or destination in mind, you actually have some research being done to eradicate or reverse engineer “the virus.”
Anyway, I just think it’s an interesting take on the genre, and hopefully we see more of it.
I disagree. I found all of the characters in WWZ to have very distinct voices.
I thought he made it very clear. The army wasn’t going for headshots (as is required to stop the zed menace). Then they got overrun.
While it was a bit over the top, I thought it worked.
Brooks claimed artillery didn’t kill zombies because they don’t have functioning circulatory and respiratory systems to be damaged by the shock wave of the explosion. Apparently Brooks is completely unaware of shell fragments aka shrapnel, which are actually the chief wounding mechanism. He’s also apparently unaware of the clever things modern artillery can do, like airbursts, to get the most out of those fragments. It’s a given that he’s never heard of cool things like beehive rounds that would be just super for use against a zombie hoard.
His knowledge of military tactics and hardware make the average GI Joe episode look like a training film.
(Bolding mine.)
Zombies don’t get wounded. A ten inch piece of metal in a zombie’s belly isn’t going to cause him to fall to the ground in pain and be out of the fight. How much of the shrapnel causes massive head trauma? Cause that’s the only way it will stop a zombie.
Actually this was all covered in the book, the shrapnel was only effective when hitting the zombies in the head. How common would that be? specially in tightly packed groups? Ripping a zombie to shreads just leaves you with a crawler, not a dead zombie.
You aren’t alone. I extra dislike Brooks.
No! No! No! Despite everyone using the “brains!” line from this movie it seems most forget that Running Zombies date back as early as the 1980s with Return of the Living Dead! In fact, they were even worse because in ROLD you couldn’t kill the zombies. Period! Now that is a scary idea that needs to be revisited.
Think about it. The idea that many American’s are armed but in the end it is of no help against the dead. Now you have heroes with even less of a chance.
Why do soldiers wear helmets?
Why is there such a thing as airbursting artillery?
When a shell explodes above a tightly packed mass of zombies, what surface of the individual zombies is most exposed to the fragments?
The fact that they are undead aside, zombies still have to move by muscles supplying force to move the levers that are the skeleton. Severing a muscle or shattering a bone that would make it impossible for a live person to move a limb or limbs (or mandible) makes it equally impossible for a zombie to do so.
Instead of the Will Smith version,I’d recommend “The Last Man On Earth” with Vincent Price
It seems to me that to eliminate a city that’s gone over to the zombies 100%, a fuel-air explosive or a nuke would kill a zombie as effectively as anything else in the primary blast radius. There’s no kill like overkill. 
But that’s only useful in extreme cases, when the heroes are all dead or undead.
Apparently, you’ve never noticed that zombies have pretty capable regeneration abilities. I don’t know if it’s ever explained. But knocking out a body part doesn’t do much.
The whole idea of zombies is that they no longer work like humans do. Assuming that zombies are anatomically analogous to humans is what causes the military to fail. I know it’s a natural assumption to make, as they are regenerated human corpses. But I’ve never seen or heard of a zombie movie/work of fiction that followed that assumption. Zombies are more analogous to an alien species, with a different functional anatomy.
In other words, they can’t heal a chopped off body part, but they can heal a tendon or two. And their heads are harder than usual.
ETA: I need to add that I consume works of fiction differently than a lot of people. If I spot a mistake, I fix it in my head, rather than complain about it. I usually try to keep the text literally true, but sometimes even that fails. Like, in the Matrix, I’ve rewritten that whole “human battery” thing to be about “human processors/memory storage.”
Clearly nobody has, save you:)
I read somewhere that some Dutch guys wrote to a Zombie Football Hooligans versus Zombie (Neo?)Nazi’s movie, I think they even sold the rights to a kinda legit movie outfit, this was a few years ago haven’t heard anything recently
The idea of zombies attacking someone is no more or less boring than anything else attacking you. The “holed up in a farmhouse, waiting to see if we die” bit could be used whether it’s zombies after you, a pack of hyena’s, your ex-boyfriends motorcycle gang or some eager young republicans. It has been over-used in zombie movies, not sure why, but it’s not a crucial component of a good zombie movie. Just the opposite.
If you have a “supernatural” (voodoo, gypsy curse) zombie, as opposed to a more “scientific” one (space radiation, disease) than you just make up the rules about how or if they can die and how mobile they are.
I don’t see why a zombie story has to be boring or predictable. They are, though, all that I have seen. Terrifying, but that’s only because the idea of zombies itself is terrifying.
Maybe someone should try making a movie with regular people attacking, and once it’s good and done, THEN go back and change them to zombies. Get out of the “zombie-movie” rut.
Example, re-make with “value-added”;
The Shining, now Jacks a zombie, too.
The Village, now the “challenged” kid is a zombie.
Notting Hill, now she’s just a zombie standing in front of a boy asking for his brains.
Zombies require a suspension disbelief with that whole undead thing; if we completely abandon the way the world works, then the story collapses. It’s up to the author to construct a fictional reality cohesive enough for me to find it believable and entertaining. It’s not my job to fix his errors for him. Fan fiction often does that, but I’m certainly not enough of a fan of Brooks to start down that road.
Anyone up for a Daffy Duck cartoon?