another good one is LIVING DEAD AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE. it’s got a different title in the US though - something like LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE…
Resident Evil was not without charm. I wouldn’t classify it as a classic zombie movie though…more like modern sci-fi or something.
Those lasers were fun.
I liked Resident Evil, but… two words; WILD ZERO.
You MUST see this film. I’m not sure what kind of zombie film you’re going for, but this is a Japanese film that stars the band Guitar Wolf and features exploding zombie heads, UFOs, magical guitar picks, a psychotic arms-dealing woman that runs around in a race queen outfit, and zombie love. Yes, zombie love. Go get this film right now.
Shock Waves
How can you go wrong with Peter Cushing, John Carradine and underwater zombie nazis!
Is that linked somehow to The Illuminatus! Trilogy novels?
The Last Man On Earth with Vincent Price. A classic.
**Dawn Of The Dead ** is still No. 1 in my book.
**Day Of The Dead ** has a lot going for it as well, a bit too talky in the first half but I can tolerate a little longwindedness in a serious horror film.
**Zombie ** (aka **Zombi 2 ** or Zombie Flesh Eaters) is a personal fave from way back.
Dellamorte Dellamore…technically not a zombie film since the plot doesn’t always revolve around them, but still a good imaginative movie.
And a few zombie films that aren’t very good but are still faves of mine:
Hell Of The Living Dead…badly made Italian rip-off with stock footage, horrible dubbing, and a complete theft of Dawn Of The Dead’s musical score (along with Goblin tracks from other films) makes for top-notch entertainment. I watched this movie at least once a month for YEARS…first the old cruddy Vestron VHS, then a dub of the Japanese VHS, and then finally the Anchor Bay DVD which is actually bright enough to let the viewer see what is happening.
**Shatter Dead **…very cheap and chinzy made-for-video film with atrocious acting and questionable production values, but it does have a fairly original conceit as regards the zombies and some interesting moments (like a XXX-shot of a girl penetrating herself with the barrel of a .45)
**Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things **…again, very cheap and cheesy, and the first hour of the movie is total boring bullshit, but once the zombies do arrive the film has a strange atmosphere that’s hard to ignore.
**Redneck Zombies **…right up there with **Citizen Kane. **
I have heard great things about a little film called “Breakfast At Manchester Morgue”, which apparently is also known under the title “Don’t Open The Window”. Never seen it, though… although I think this is the one K61 is talking about.
“Shock Waves” was a neat little cheapie… although for the life of me, I can’t see why you’d get Peter Cushing and John Carradine to be in your movie, and then not put them in any scenes together…
Anyone remember Night of the Comet? It had sorta-zombies in it. And it had the girlfriend from The Last Starfighter. I had such a crush on her!
It’s titled **Let Sleeping Corpses Lie ** on U.S. DVD and is definately worth checking out. Some very good creepy moments and nice explicit gore for its time.
It all begins and ends with the NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD trilogy minus one. DAY OF THE DEAD really, really sucks ass.
WILD ZERO could possibly turn drunken frat boys onto subtitles. Hooray Shemales!
I also hasten to mention THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, with Vincent Price. Sure, technically, it’s about vampires…but it’s zombie movie through and through. It came out before NOTLD. One should notice the similarities.
Just for the record, Return Of The Living Dead isn’t a parody - it’s a genuine sequel to Night Of The Living Dead - just following a different continuity.
Rudy Ricci: played a zombie in NOTLD and was a writer for ROTLD
John A. Russo: Played a zombie and was the co-writer and editor of NOTLD, and co-writer of ROTLD.
Russell Streiner: producer and played “Johnny” (“they’re coming to get you, Barbra!”) in NOTLD, and co-writer for ROTLD.
It’s true that George Romero wasn’t involved, but that doesn’t make it less of a sequel. 
But I’d have to say that my favorite is the Romero trilogy. I can’t decide between the three, because I see them all as one continuing story, and there are things I like about all three. At the moment, I think I’m in my Day of the Dead phase. Joe Pilato was just the most kick-ass bad guy ever, and to be able to make us feel sorry for the zombies…well, that’s a masterpiece.
Russo, Ricci, and Streiner contributed exactly zilch to the shooting script of ROTLD.
Russo had written a hack novel and a screenplay based upon it, and slick con-man producer Tom Fox purchased the rights merely to get his hands on the title. He tossed out their storyline and screenplay and hired Dan O’Bannon to write and eventually direct the film. I imagine the original trio stayed in the credits just for contractual/legal reasons, just like Quentin Tarantino still got a storyline credit for **Natural Born Killers ** even though only a portion of his screenplay was used.
(I read Russo’s original novel of ROTLD and it’s a piece of shit. Just a rehash of the original NOTLD, basically, with some people boarded up in a house and some escaped convicts thrown in for the hell of it…everything good about the film of ROTLD is strictly due to Dan O’ Bannon and not this talentless hack Russo)
ROTLD is technically still a sequel though. Romero and Russo cut a legal agreement that Romero could use the title “Dawn Of The Dead” while Russo could use any variation of “Living Dead”. Since Romero never really considered “Dawn” to be a strict sequel to “Night” (and it really couldn’t be, since it picks up 10 years after the setting of Night with the zombie problem at almost the exact same point) this worked out for everyone.
If you want a REAL example of Russo and Steiner’s talents, pick up **Night Of The Living Dead: 30th Anniversery Edition **, their atrocious re-edit and re-score of the original. Russo claimed that the original filmmakers had ALWAYS wanted to include these new characters and scenes…
One imagines the conversation back in 1968:
**JOHN RUSSO: ** “Hey George, wouldn’t it be cool if we included a female television reporter character, and a geeky bald preacher? And how about a couple of retarded gravediggers opening the film instead of the brother and sister?”
**George Romero: **“No, John. That’s stupid.”
Okay, I’m a huge zombie fan, and I’ve seen pretty much every film mentioned here, and a good number of others (such as, My Boyfriend’s Back), but I’ve got to ask you guys who like Fulcci’s stuff…
Why?
Is it simply the gore factor that entices you? I admit, the special effects are amazingly realistic (the bleeding eyes in The Gates of Hell really impressed me), but it seems like all of his zombie movies seem to be focused around one singular graphic scene, and the rest just kinda craps along with no real substance (they eyeball scene in Zombie 2, the COMPLETELY grituitous drill bit scene in The Gates of Hell, and the crucifiction/acid bath in The Beyond).
The big thing I hate about them is he seems to have no real motivation for his zombies (sounds stupid, I know, but hear me out). Zombies live to feed, right? They don’t really care about survival or shit like that, just the act of finding food and eating. Therefore, if three people were sitting in a room, and a zombie came in, the zombie would munch on the first person there and pretty much ignore the other two until one of them started attacking it. But Fulcci’s zombies walk up to person A, bite them in the neck, then as they bleed to death, walk over to person B.
Second, I did mention earlier his tendency for teleporting zombies!!! Both The Gates of Hell and The Beyond have them, and they’re incredibly lame.
Third, people seem to figure out that you need to shoot zombies in the head, but then refuse to do so. That just fucking annoys me.
And finally, I just find him to be a horrible story teller. I’ve said before, I know he’s a student of the Theatre of the Grotesque, so I understand his use of slow pacing, horribly grating music (which apparently he only has one score he uses over and over again), and his use of horribly graphic visuals, and I can appreciate him for that, because he definitely succeeds…but overall, his movies just suck! Someone, please explain to me his appeal, because I just don’t get it.
On a quick sidenote, what would you guys say about The Crow? There are a lot of movies out there that seem like zombie movies, but could really be more ghost stories (Versus is one I’m also kinda on the fence about). He is a corpse brought back to life, so does that count as a “zombie movie”?
I like Fulci because his movies are beautiful to look at. Sure the plots are mind-numbing nonsense (which I always have a soft-spot in my heart for anyway…some of my favourite films are done by Hershell Gordon Lewis), but the visuals are unlike those of any other movie I’ve seen. Sometimes the zombie effects falter a little, but the climatic gore scenes you mentioned are incredibly sophisticated for the time period, and stand up to this day. I love the atmosphere and the mood of his movies…how he won’t rush through good gore but will take ten minutes or so to slowly build up to it, and then thrust it in your face with loving detail. When I am in the mood for beautiful gore in all it’s splattery glory, I watch Fulci, or Dario Argento, who is another brilliant director with an even darker, flashier style than Fulci.
Now, for the person who said Dellamorte Dellamore was not technically a zombie film because the plot did not revolve around zombies, how do you figure that?
SPOILERS!!!
The plot is that of a man who is the caretaker of a cemetary where the dead come back to life as “Returners”; I always felt that the love story and the murderous rampages came in second to that idea (the love story fell into that first plot because she dies and comes back as a Returner, and the murderous rampages also fall under that plot because he starts shooting people in the head to avoid them ever returning in the first place).
Morgan…Morgan…
Huh? Dawn Of The Dead didn’t pick up ten years after the events of NOTLD. It picked up the MORNING AFTER the events of NOTLD!
It was MADE ten years after NOTLD, that’s all.
I did feel that Dawn Of The Dead was something of a disappointment, though.
And no, I don’t feel that the Crow movies were proper “zombie movies”. In my mind, the “zombie genre” has to do with mindless or near-mindless living corpses who rise to feed on the flesh of the living, generally in large numbers.
The first ROTLD film was funny, and worked both as comedy and horror. The second and third were, frankly, crap. Much the same can be said for the flood of Italian zombie films… the first one wasn’t bad at all, but most of the rest frankly stink, if you’ll pardon the pun. It takes more than gore to make a decent horror movie. Zombie films aren’t about the gore. They are about horror both internal and external.
Take the original NOTLD, for example – not ONLY do we have the horror factor of zombies trying to eat our heroes… but we have the growing realization that our heroes cannot and will not work together to survive… that this microcosmic society of survivors, trapped in a house and under siege… is going to FALL, because they can’t get their shit together long enough to cooperate!
Now THAT’S horror!
The second film worked the same way. After our heroes seal the shopping mall and clean out the living dead and basically conquer this bastion of American consumerism… what then? They have fun shopping for furniture, cooking fancy meals in the restaurants, playing in the arcade… ice skating… looting the bank… um… and … um… now what? We’re bored. What’s there to do? What about civilization? What… do … we do with the rest of our lives?
Interestingly enough, ROTLD worked the same way AGAIN. We have a band of teens and adults trapped in a mortuary and a medical supply warehouse, surrounded by a rapidly growing legion of the living dead. Meanwhile, two of our heroes are in fact DEAD, and they DON’T KNOW IT YET! And the solution imposed by the government at the end of the movie works both as internal horror, external horror… and wonderful black comedy.
The Crow movies were sort of existential action films… something new on the Death Wish theme, where the murdered man rises, lethal and unkillable, to seek revenge on his murderers. Provocative stuff, sure, but the Crow’s more of a classic revenant than a zombie.
I think that zombie movies do not have to work on as many levels as Night of the Living Dead to be successful as “zombie movies”. If that were the case, that series of movies would be just about the only real “zombie movies” out there. You would be hard pressed to not call Redneck Zombies a zombie movie, yet I would challenge you to find as deep of a political statement within that movie as you will find in Romero’s “Dead” series.
That being said, no, The Crow is most certainly not a zombie flick. It is more a vengeful ghost movie, if anything.
Durnit.
Now I’m gonna have to go out and rent Redneck Zombies.
And I’d been kind of put off by the title … I figured anything with THAT kind of name COULDN’T be any good…
Here’s a question:
What kind of zombies are your favorites? I mean, there’s a wide variety of zombies out there. You’ve got your unexplained walking dead (Romero’s movies), the genetically engineered dead (Resident Evil, Bio-Zombie), your intergelactic zombies (Night of the Creeps), and your comical “I still have something to live for” zombies (My Boyfriend’s Back).
Personally, Romero’s style dead are my favorite for horror films. Simply surviving on instinc, need to feed, everywhere you look. I honestly feel Resident Evil did a great job as far as the zombies were concened, the scenes with the swarms were fucking great (the rest of the movie, on the other hand…).
But there is something to be said about zombies with a little bit more motivation when it comes to comedies. If the need to feed were all that kept them going, I believe Dead Alive wouldn’t have been nearly as entertaining.