{"id":20278,"date":"2024-07-12T14:08:16","date_gmt":"2024-07-12T14:08:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattshorroraddiction.com\/?p=20278"},"modified":"2024-07-12T14:08:16","modified_gmt":"2024-07-12T14:08:16","slug":"the-dead-walk-a-short-guide-to-zombie-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/?p=20278","title":{"rendered":"The Dead Walk! A Short Guide to Zombie Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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For a review of Romero’s <\/em>Dawn of the Dead please click here<\/a>! <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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DAY OF THE DEAD<\/em><\/strong> (1985)<\/em> George Romero’s concluding entry in his original Living Dead trilogy (1968-85) might lack the excitement of both Night<\/em> and Dawn of the Dead, <\/em>but the unfairly maligned Day of the Dead<\/em> is actually a solid film filled with inventive storytelling and some truly knock-your-socks-off FX. The living dead now outnumber humans 40,000 to 1. A group of survivors made up of doctors and military personnel have turned an underground missile silo into a laboratory where they can experiment on the undead and figure out a way to coexist. The scientists are led by the maniacal Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty), whose knife-happy dissection of the zombies grants him the nickname “Frankenstein.” The soldiers are commanded by the hot-headed Rhodes (Joe Pilato), who believes the only good zombie is a permanently dead one. Romero was forced to scale down his script when the film’s budget was cut in half, resulting in a chapter that feels incomplete. Despite its budgetary restrictions, Day of the Dead<\/em> is an intelligent and intense movie featuring good acting\u2014Sherman Howard’s Bub is a zombie for the ages\u2014and some of Tom Savini’s most complex and realistic make-up work. Much better than Romero’s later and much-praised Land of the Dead<\/em>. B<\/strong>+ (Currently streaming on Hulu, Peacock, and Shudder.) <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES<\/em><\/strong> (1982)<\/em> (AKA: Oasis of the Living Dead<\/em>) Third Reich soldiers come back from the dead to protect their Nazi gold in this lousy French\/Spanish Romero\/Fulci clone. The movie uses the same template as previous zombie films: a group of people stranded in an exotic locate is pursued by hordes of the living dead. The difference with a production like Oasis of the Zombies<\/em> is the inclusion of nondescript characters not worth giving a damn about. The characters in question are imbecilic treasure-seekers looking for lost gold in North Africa. Their arrival revives the decomposing corpses of German soldiers who take their sweet time killing the dolts. Those hoping for a gore-soaked zombie apocalypse will be sorely disappointed in director Jes\u00fas Franco’s handling of the material\u2014too many uninteresting subplots take center stage, with the majority of the zombie action is saved for the last ten minutes. Even Francophiles will most likely give this one a wide berth. Absolute dreck\u2014this makes Zombie Lake<\/em> (1981) seem good<\/em> by comparison. F<\/strong> (Currently streaming on Tubi.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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SHOCK WAVES <\/em><\/strong>(1977) <\/em>A group of tourists on a boat cruise are rammed by a ghost freighter and seek shelter at a nearby island. Unfortunately, the place is overlorded by a former Nazi commander (Peter Cushing) who’s been living on the island since the war with a squad of undying SS super-soldiers experimentally designed to adapt to their environment\u2014in this case it’s water, which makes the perfect hiding spot for the zombies to attack their prey. The first of the short-lived “Nazi Zombies” subschool of Night of the Living Dead<\/em>-influenced films, Shock Waves<\/em> utilizes its claustrophobic atmosphere by offering a story with more suspense than violence; a rarity within a subculture of movies usually made with the sole purpose of delivering extreme bloodletting. Cushing is on hand to provide backstory but only appears in a few scenes, while the lovely Brooke Adams (The Dead Zone<\/em>) makes an appealing and smart damsel in distress. This film was later ripped off as Zombie Lake<\/em>, which according to numerous horror and zombie film scholars is one of the worst zombie movies of all time. How’s that for accolades? Director Ken Wiederhorn would go on to make another zombie movie (to lesser results) with Return of the Living Dead II<\/em>. B<\/strong> (Currently streaming on Peacock and Prime.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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RAIDERS OF THE LIVING DEAD<\/em><\/strong> (1986) <\/em>1986 might be the date with which this movie is stamped but it was obviously filmed years earlier. A terrorist sporting Converse Chucks and a Sherpa jean jacket (severely dating this film in the process) tries to sabotage a nuclear power plant but ends up electrocuting himself and dying. A would-be journalist (Robert Deveau), investigating an abandoned farm where a mass grave was discovered, stumbles upon zombies controlled by a fiendish doctor (Leonard Corman). A Christmas Story<\/em>‘s Scott Schwartz plays a suburban teen who transforms a LaserDisc player into a ray gun, which becomes a handy bully- and zombie-repellent. Boris Karloff’s costar in The Mummy<\/em>, Zita Johann, is a local historian who informs Deveau about the unsavory activities happening at the nearby prison involving Corman. This cheap hodgepodge of half-baked ideas and seemingly unrelated subplots has the feel of having been stitched together from the remains of two unfinished movies. The title is supposed to evoke the excitement of Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/em> and Night of the Living Dead<\/em>, but in reality Raiders of the Living Dead <\/em>has more in common with a dead body: it’s stiff and lifeless. A real bore, with Schwartz giving a singularly terrible performance as the kid hero. D<\/strong>– (Currently not streaming.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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ZOMBIE <\/em><\/strong>(1979)<\/em> (AKA: Zombi 2, Zombie Flesh Eaters<\/em>) A New York harbor patrolman is murdered by someone with a bad case of dermatitis. Local journalist Peter (Ian McCulloch) investigates and, along with a woman named Ann (Tisa Farrow), travels to an Antillean island called Matul, the last known whereabouts of Ann’s scientist father\u2014who might have ties to the crime. They find the place crawling with voodoo-spawned zombies, which give new meaning to the term “chowing down” as they devour anything in their path\u2014even sharks aren’t immune to the zombie mayhem. Along with a couple of vacationers, Peter and Ann search for her father’s colleague (Richard Johnson) but instead stumble upon his eviscerated wife being eaten by the living dead. In a bad move, Peter and Ann stop in a cemetery for some afternoon delight but are put out when a Spanish conquistador emerges from his musty grave and tears apart their friends\u2014despite its advanced age, the zombie still drips goo and other bodily fluids. More people are chomped and turned into zombies during the apocalyptic ending, but it’s too late as the walking dead have already invaded civilization. This Italian splatter epic is essentially ripping off Dawn of the Dead<\/em>\u2014it was promoted in Italy as a sequel to Romero’s film, there known as Zombi<\/em>\u2014but in recent years has secured respect and admiration from critics as a genuine work of atmospheric horror, and deservedly so. Lucio Fulci’s direction is slick and the pacing quick, leaving very little time for the viewer to recover from one gory extreme before the next strikes. Fulci followed the success of this with several more zombie-infused bloodbaths before making a legitimate (and ill conceived) sequel in 1988. B<\/strong>+ (Currently streaming on AMC+, Shudder via Prime.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stay tuned for Part 2 of The Dead Walk! <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a review of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead please click here! DAY OF THE DEAD (1985) George Romero’s concluding entry in his original Living Dead trilogy (1968-85) might lack the excitement of both Night and Dawn of the Dead, but the unfairly maligned Day of the Dead is actually a solid film filled with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capsule-reviews","category-zombies"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}