Are you zombie? A drunk? Both? Well here you go then…My Two Cents Clothing bring you the Me Want Beer zombie t-shirt. Available in sizes Youth Medium to Adult XL, with your choice of ink colors “bleached bone white”, “schizo gray” or “pin-up pink”. And it’s only $11.99. Send more…kegs?
Here’s the trailer for the upcoming claymation zombie film Zombies Eat Brains & Clay, due out sometime in 2008. Check out their MySpace page for songs from the soundtrack and more. This looks so ridiculous, I can’t wait to see it.
What’s an Undead Ringer?
I review zombie movies for the ZRC. Sometimes people, for whatever reason, don’t want to come right out and peg their movie as a zombie flick. Maybe it’s artistic integrity or they just don’t want to be dismissed by being lumped in with such a stigmatized genre, so sometimes you have to read between the lines. Every now and again, I come across one that looks like it’s totally a zombie movie, but they don’t want to use the ‘Z’ word, so they call them ‘the dead’ or talk about an ‘outbreak’ or ‘cannibalistic creatures’. Sometimes they use these terms to try to sucker YOU, the zombie fan, into picking up their flick, knowing full well it’s about ghosts or lame-ass monsters. By and large, these movies aren’t very good, so to add insult to injury, you’ve just rented a really bad movie that’s not even the zombie movie you hoped for. Well, I’ve been suckered on occasion and I’ll admit it so you don’t have to. We’ll call them Undead Ringers. I’ll review them, discuss them and, yes, spoil the hell out of them, all out of spite for being fished-in. This is the only SPOILER ALERT you get. Now on to:
Here’s what the back of the box had to say:
“Trophy husband Jack Wade kidnaps his comatose wife, an ex-Hollywood studio executive, in an attempt to kill her so that he can collect on her life insurance after she screwed him out of access to her finances. When she comes back from the dead to haunt him, Jack can’t distinguish reality from delirium. His secrets come to the foreground and he ends up destroying himself, both figuratively and literally.”
Below this are four pictures, three of which are of zombified cast members. This coupled with the front cover depicting a ghoulish lady crawling out of a grave with “Dead and Gone” emblazoned across the headstone served well to convince me this was a zombie movie that I should review. I also have to mention that the front of the box (slightly different from the above picture in this respect) has three actors’ names across the top: Quentin Jones (the lead Jack Wade),Zack Ward (a cameo as a weatherman) and Kyle Gass (cameo as a televangelist). Why do companies insist on giving top-billing to actors that have cameos? Because they have an inferior product which they wish to sucker you into paying for. And this is the case here.
Dead and Gone is a boring, cliché, sophomoric attempt at horror/suspense. A guy goes to a cabin that has bad spirits in it from being built on an Indian burial ground, where a man once killed his family and himself. Does this sound like a low-rent version of The Shining to anyone else? Every now and again the camera either goes all haywire for a second or everything speeds up for a second. This is a stylistic trick that people have been using to death and I’m quite sick of it. Save it for the music videos.
The lead, Jack Wade, ends up killing a bunch of people that all haunt him and taunt him afterward. They all look like zombies, hence the pictures on the back of the box. The zombie make-up is actually pretty good, but all the other special effects are of fair to bad quality. The character played by Ben Moody (ex-guitarist for Evanesense), Booger, gets his hand chopped off by an axe, at least this is what you’re supposed to think when he holds up a rubber stub and wails in pain as it squirts blood for about a minute. It looks like they spent a lot of time on the gag, but it also looked painfully rubbery. Not to mention that it is chopped off while on his knees, raising his hand in a defensive gesture. I can’t see an axe doing this the way a sword would, but evidently the makers of this movie could.
Basically, I rented this so I could review for ZRC, watched it in 3 parts because it just couldn’t hold my interest in one shot, figured out that it wasn’t even a zombie flick and was pissed that I wasted my time and money on it. Avoid this crap.
It’s that time again to remind our readers, old and new, that you can expand your ZRC experience by visiting these horribly wonderful destinations all over the undead net.
And don’t forget, you can also sign up to receive the ZRC via your e-mail (or Skype, or Microsoft , Yahoo! and AOL Instant Messenger), and also via our nifty RSS feed. Thanks for reading!
If you are a musician, band, composer, or noisemaker…have your music played on our show! ZRC Radio is now taking submissions for upcoming episodes. Send mp3′s of your music to: nate@zombiereportingcenter.com
If you missed it, check out Episode 1 on our ZRC Radio Archive page.
In this remake of the 1968 Night of the Living Dead, Tom Savini directs a cast of actors that, by and large, favor the original actors quite heavily. Beyond delivering fantastic performances in respects to pure acting ability, the cast worked well in the roles that were cut out for them over 20 years before and brought fresh originality and believability to each character. The tension between Tony Todd’s ‘Ben’ and Tom Towles’ ‘Harry Cooper’ can be felt every moment they are on the screen.
The screenplay, beyond where it intersects with the original George Romero/John Russo collaboration, was helmed by George Romero himself. The story starts out the same with a few twists on the original to add a bit more suspense, but takes a marked turn for the better when the main character, Barbara, pulls herself together to become a gunslingin’, corpse-droppin’ bad-ass rather than a whimpering, glassy-eyed head case like the 1968 story. This new Barbara is a character that more people would like to identify with, rather than being completely frustrated with in the original.
The special effects in Night of the Living Dead are outstanding, aside from the initial kill scene where Bill Moseley’s character ‘Johnny’ is represented by an obvious dummy when he falls head first on a head stone. Regardless of the obvious dummy, the scene works as it proves to be a real wince-inducer every time. The zombie make-up in this movie is, in my opinion, the best zombie make-up in any movie made to date. The cloudy-eyed, sunken-featured, pale-faced ghouls of Night of the Living Dead are my personal favorite. The special effects team of Everett Burrell and John Vulich worked fantastically here.
Even die-hard, purist fans of the original Night of the Living Dead should thoroughly enjoy this remade classic. It’s personally my favorite zombie movie and easily one of my top favorite movies of all time. If for some reason you’ve never bothered to check this one out, there’s no better time than now especially with all the bonus features on the DVD available now. Extra gory scenes that were cut to receive an R rating rather than NC-17 are featured as well as a full look back and ‘making of’ documentary. I highly recommend you check this out.
Is this amazing or what? We found this on the internet last week and finally managed to track down the creator so we could give them proper credit. The artist is “Mez” from the Total Ecplise Body Art Studio in Fort Collins, CO. You can check out the rest of her portfolio here – including this sweet Kyra Schon one.
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