Thursday, June 16, 2005

Hell on Film


She may be black and white, but she'll still chew your arm off.

It should come as no surprise to those near and dear that I hate zombies. I have even posted about this hatred before, I believe under the title "I fucking hate zombies." They're just so undead, vile, and prone to gnashing their teeth in the vicinity of one's brains. It was disturbing enough to learn that some sick people have zombie sex fetishes, and the recurring zombie nightmares have never been a treat, so I was a bit...perturbed to see that George Romero has a new zombie movie coming out this summer.

There I was, sitting quietly in the movie theater, waiting for Lords of Dogtown to start so I could leer at the hot-yet-distressingly-young Emile Hirsch and Victor Rasuk for 100 minutes, and what should break my pre-film reveries but a preview for Land of the Dead! Stuffed from beginning to end with the walking dead(and Dennis Hopper), this latest installment in the "Dead" series features my WORST nightmare-AN ENTIRE PLANET OF ZOMBIES, and intelligent ones at that.

Seeing this preview once was enough for me. I must give George Romero respect for creating the single most repulsive monster ever, but it's safe to say I won't be slapping $10.75 down at the multiplex for this one. I'm a consumer, I have the ability to choose, I've chosen, so that should be it, right? WRONG. It seems that Yahoo has some sort of advertising deal with Land of the Dead's distributor, because EVERY TIME I GO TO YAHOO MAIL THE PREVIEW IS PLAYING. Over and over and over again, I try to hit "Check Mail" and instead my eyes are pulled to the top of the screen where teeming masses of the undead lumber and maim. Why me? Why now? Why, George Romero, why do your creations stalk me so?

The worst part of this all is that the movie doesn't seem like it will be that good-pretty standard Aliens type plot. Actually, the plot synopsis reads almost exactly like a zombie Aliens. And another thing-why do these newfangled, intelligent zombies look like they just got out of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer makeup trailer? I suppose once zombies develop agency and the ability to reason, etc., they are just vampires of a different type. What's that evolutionary term that describes two different species developing the same traits completely independent of each other?

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