The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The zombie film is one of the most popular sub-genres of the horror film. A zombie is a reanimated corpse that has returned from the dead, slow, shuffling and lacking will. In the modern incarnation, the zombie has become a creature ravenous for human flesh.
The idea of the zombie comes out of African religion. The first ever zombie film was White Zombie (1932) and for the next 36 years, the zombie remained in the province of Voodoo, occasionally a creature of mad science or created by alien invaders. There it was slow, shuffling reanimated corpse but never more than that.
The modern zombie film began with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), an apocalyptic film about the dead risen and laying siege to the living in a farmhouse. This made the zombie into a flesh eater and created the popular mythology about it only being able to be killed by incapacitating the head. This created a number of imitators but the true popularity of the zombie film grew in the 1980s following Romero’s sequel Dawn of the Dead (1978), which added copious gore and splatter to the mix. There were a number of enthusiastic imitators in particular from Italy. The 1990s saw the first zombie comedies.
The zombie film underwent a revival in the mid-2000s with a series of works that remade or homaged Romero’s films and others that claimed to be spurious sequels. This was followed by a vast shuffling horde of mostly low-budgeted zombie films. During this time, we have seen zombie films from almost every film-making country in the world.
These low-budget copies soon revealed that the number of original plots available to the zombie film was limited. This period also saw an upsurge in the zombie comedy and by the 2010s this evolved to a series of gonzo takes where filmmakers mixed zombies up with the most absurd title or conceptual mashups. By the end of the 2010s, the gonzo zombie film too had started to run out of ideas.
Bill Zebub is a micro-budgeted filmmaker who contends to be the most offensive filmmaker of all time. Yes, the film features a zombie Jesus who spends his time violating women who parade in a state of undress
Enjoyable zombie comedy that has been regarded as a classic by many and contains an appealing nonchalant sense of humour and some great performances, even if it owes much to Shaun of the Dead
Zombieland has been elevated to the status of a classic of the zombie genre; I found it enjoyable but probably overrated by people who haven’t seen enough other works in the genre. The question going into this sequel is whether it can strikes the same notes.
The title gives the impression this is intended as a zombie film take on the action film Olympus Has Fallen. The confusion you have in watching is that this is actually a film about a girl with psychic powers on the run. Brief zombie scenes turn up later in the show to justify the title but feel that they have strayed in from another film.
One of the original Nazi zombie films. From cult director Jean Rollin, known for his arty vampire erotica
The social metaphors of George Romero’s original zombie films has been missing from the modern equivalents. This takes them up again with great enthusiasm, making a critique of USA attitudes post 9/11, hammering its message home with all the subtlety of a 26-point headline
A zombie film back from the days before zombies wanted to eat brains and could only be despatched with a bullet in the head where they were instead figures out of voodoo – in this case undead sailors guarding a treasure. A mildly interesting if never entirely standout B movie of the era
A Bela Lugosi comedy in which two inept press agents are ordered to obtain a zombie for the opening of a club
A multi-director anthology of zombie-themed short films. As always in an anthology, the episodes vary but these are generally good with the standout being the side-splitting episode where Jesus faces a zombie horde
Zoombies, based around the idea of zombified versions of zoo animals, was a modest hit for The Asylum. While announcing itself as a sequel, this actually acts as a prequel explaining the origin of the zoombie outbreak
From The Asylum, the company that brought the world Sharknado and 2-Headed Shark Attack, a film about a zoo filled with zombie animals. Played more seriously than you might expect, this falls just between The Asylum’s usual corner cutting and the odd moment of effectiveness