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.
This claims to be the first zombie musical. Surprisingly enough, it isn’t. A cute idea but you have the sense the only musical the filmmakers had seen beforehand was High School Musical
Modest, low-budgeted British film about people trying to survive in the aftermath of a catastrophe. A zombie film that has borrowed a few leaves from A Quiet Place
A ridiculous American conservative satire that turns Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into a heavy-handed farce where a Michael Moore lookalike is made to see the error of his liberal ways
A French-Spanish film in which a group of troubled youths escaped from a reform centre only to discover that all the adults around them have become zombies
English-language version of the Korean zombie film #Alive about a guy stranded in an apartment during the zombie apocalypse trying to communicate with the girl across the street
The first film of directors Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson, concerning a troupe of cheerleaders who are killed and resurrected from the dead. The two later returned to conduct a better-budgeted remake
A charming and delightful South Korean zombie film about the friendship that grows across the gap separating them between a nerd trapped in an apartment and a girl in the building opposite during a zombie outbreak
The second film from Fred Olen Ray who has become a prolific B-budget director since. This is a zombie film, a copy of the original Dawn of the Dead, slapped with a SF title to popularise on the then recent success of Alien
Steven Seagal tries to extend his career by taking on the zombie film. However, this is routine on all levels, although to its advantage Seagal is not on screen much
A halfway decent Asylum film that emerges better than the film it is ripping off, the overblown Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The film does the historical crossover aspect with some ingenuity
Sequel to the hit multi-director anthology has a less high-profile line-up of directors, nor hits the astonishingly perverse heights of its predecessor. As always some entries never do much but the film finds its stride in the last few episodes