I’m suprised noone’s mentioned any of the wonderful zombie films that have come out of Asia lately. Okay, so many of them really aren’t that good, but Versus is a pretty fun one, and BioZombie is tied for best comical zombie flick with Dead Alive (I don’t really consider the Evil Dead movies zombie flicks…they’re more ghost stories, as they deal with possession and not ressurrected mindless corpses driven by their need to feed…even though they are the greatest movies ever made).
Romero’s Dead movies are fantastic, and I’d probably say Dawn of the Dead is the greatest zombie film ever made.
Loved Dellamorte, Dellamore, and 28 Days Later made me very happy to see a zombie film come out on something other than video that was actually really, really good. Resident Evil had it’s moments, but failed to capture a true sense of terror for a good 90% of the film, and that’s really what drives a good zombie movie.
Personally, I hate, hate, HATE Lucio Fulci’s stuff. Traditionally, if a single zombie walks into a room of five people, it will attack the first person it can, and be content to much away on it until it perceives anyone else as a threat. Fulci’s zombies would teleport(?), bite one person in the jugular, and then immediately move onto victim number two. Or, they don’t do anything. A single zombie will attack multiple people, but fifty zombies will just kinda stand there and rock back and forth and not do much of anything, like they’re all too lazy and waiting for someone else to make a move. Plus, no matter how soon into the movie the hero discovers that you need to shoot a zombie in the head to kill it, they continue to shoot them in the chest and stomach. It seems his movies are created solely to present this one shocking image he had in his head, and then the rest is all an afterthought (in Zombie it was the splinter in the eye, in The Beyond it was the crucifiction and little girl head explody (which was really damn cool, by the way), and in City of the Dead it was the drill bit threw the head). As a follower of the Theatre of the Grotesque, I appreciate what he was doing, but I can never forgive him for teleporting zombies.
My Boyfriend’s Back was a pretty fun, campy, 50’s style kinda funny movie, although not very good.
I haven’t seen Return of the Living Dead 2, but the first one was really fun to watch. The third one, on the otherhand, was pretty damn lame.
And has anyone seen I Was a Zombie for the FBI? I’m curious about that one.
Also, I, Zombie is pretty interesting flick about a guy turning into a flesh eater.
(FWIW, Zombie! went over very well at the New York Underground Film Festival. That audience “got it”.)