Posts Tagged ‘zombies’
Thursday, October 10th, 2024
A couple years ago, you may remember, I was kind of giving up on my Slasher Search tradition, because the pickings were getting really slim when it came to the type of undiscovered ‘80s slasher I was looking for. Some of you talked me into broadening or adjusting the criteria, so I’ve been experimenting with the mostly more modern horror obscurities that can be found scrolling through the horror sections on Tubi and similar free streaming services. That’s been going okay so far, so I’ll try dipping in a little again this year and see what happens.
For today’s special programming I tried out two movies that stretch the definition of “slasher,” but they seem at least tangentially related to supernatural slashers like Freddy and Candyman. Or at least one of them has Tony Todd in it. Okay, these are not really slashers, they’re action horror. Instead of a final girl running from a killer they have a martial artist who falls into monster troubles and has to fight.
HELLKAT (2021) stars Sarah T. Cohen (EASTER BUNNY MASSACRE) as Katrina “HellKat” Bash, a former champion fighter who, after a career ending loss, goes on a road trip, gets stranded, finds herself at a mysterious bar with an unholy secret. I was a little worried when Katrina’s “fall from grace” in the ring was depicted with voiceover only, no fighting seen. No ring. Then some pretty rough green screen driving and cg smoke. But that’s okay. That’s what we’re dealing with. Cohen at least has a good tough girl presence to go with her neck tattoos, chainsmoking, fishnets and Doc Martens. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adrian Bouchet, Andrea Langi, Becca Hirani, Bill Hinzman, Carla Greene, Derek Wan, Erin Brown, Media Blasters, Michael Gingold, Michael Quinlan, Nina Hodoruk, Richard Siegel, Ryan Davies, Sarah T. Cohen, Scott Chambers, Slasher Search, Tony Leung Siu Hung, Tony Todd, Vernon Reid, women in prison, zombies
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 31 Comments »
Wednesday, February 21st, 2024
I’m a fan of the Academy Award winning screenwriter Diablo Cody. I enjoyed JUNO and TULLY and her directorial debut PARADISE, but it was YOUNG ADULT and its more friendly cousin RICKI AND THE FLASH that made me a die hard. Two movies about women who are assholes. My life is so different from either of theirs, but somehow Mavis Gary and Ricki Rendazzo are two characters I relate to deeply.
Of course she’s also got a foot in horror world – she wrote JENNIFER’S BODY for Karyn Kusama and even did some script revisions on the EVIL DEAD remake. She’s said she didn’t have to do much on that, but I still wonder if she was the one who named the dog Grandpa. Now she’s returned to the genre, sort of, with LISA FRANKENSTEIN, a teen movie with a zombie and some murders, directed by Zelda Williams (KAPPA KAPPA DIE). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: '80s nostalgia, Bryce Romero, Carla Gugino, Cole Sprouse, Diablo Cody, Frankenstein, goth, Henry Eikenberry, horror comedies, Kathryn Newton, Liza Soberano, Zelda Williams, zombies
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 10 Comments »
Friday, May 20th, 2022
WYRMWOOD: APOCALYPSE is a very fun Australian zombie movie that just came out here on blu-ray and DVD. It’s the long-awaited sequel to the 2014 film WYRMWOOD (released here as WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD), once again directed by Kiah Roache-Turner and written by Kiah & Tristan Roache-Turner. I don’t think you’d have that much of a problem understanding it without the first one, but I recommend watching both.
When I caught on to ROAD OF THE DEAD it was one of those situations where I assume I’ve run out of reasons to watch new zombie movies and then I see it and think “Okay, never mind. That’s a good reason.” The main gimmick that differentiates this apocalypse from others is that the meteor that caused the zombie outbreak also changed the earth in such a way that combustible engines no longer work. But then some guys figure out that the green fumes exhaled by the zombies can be harnessed as fuel. So this is a world where road warriors attach tubes to zombies’ mouths, strap them onto the back of their vehicles and burn rubber (or dirt). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Australian cinema, Bianca Bradey, Jake Ryan, Jay Gallagher, Kiah Roache-Turner, Luke McKenzie, Nicholas Boshier, post-apocalypse, Shantae Barnes-Cowan, Tasia Zalar, Tristan McKinnon, Tristan Roache-Turner, zombies
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Monday, April 4th, 2022
WILD ZERO (1999) is something that I was aware of as a major cult movie twenty-some years ago, but I never got around to seeing it until now. So young people, please ignore that first sentence and pretend this is an impressive find on my part.
I remembered it because I watched that Japanese post-apocalyptic punk movie BURST CITY not too long ago. WILD ZERO is very different, but it’s another crazed genre movie starring rowdy Japanese rock ’n’ rollers who play music and get into trouble. A trio called Guitar Wolf (led by Guitar Wolf, backed up by Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf), who play a garage rock style they call “jet rock ’n’ roll,” star as themselves in a goofy zombie/sci-fi movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Guitar Wolf, Japanese punk, zombies
Posted in Music, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, October 26th, 2021
You know how it is, you love Clive Barker-based movies but you’ve seen HELLRAISER, NIGHTBREED, CANDYMAN and THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN a million times each, you’re not quite ready to try again on LORD OF ILLUSIONS, you even watched BOOKS OF BLOOD last year, but you want a little of that Barker movie kick, so it’s time for a Clive Dive. You gotta try some of the lesser ones out, see if you missed a good one, or if one you didn’t like back in the day is any better than you thought at the time.
So I tried one of each. The one I’d missed was the Masters of Horror episode Haeckel’s Tale, from 2006. It’s adapted by Mick Garris (THE FLY II) and directed by John McNaughton “in association with George A. Romero.” According to Wikipedia that just means Romero was supposed to direct it but had a scheduling problem. Around that time he was starting DIARY OF THE DEAD and announced a thing that never happened called SOLITARY ISLE, so it must’ve been one of those. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Clive Barker, Denholm Elliott, Derek Cecil, George Pavlou, George Romero, Gerard Plunkett, John McNaughton, Jon Polito, Larry Lamb, Leela Savasta, Masters of Horror, Mick Garris, Micki Maunsell, mutants, Nicola Cowper, Steve Bacic, Steven Berkoff, Tom McBeath, zombies
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, June 1st, 2021
I’ve been waiting for Zack Snyder’s ARMY OF THE DEAD since it was first announced in 2007, at which point he’d only directed DAWN OF THE DEAD and 300. Snyder would’ve produced and they had commercial director Matthijs van Heijningen (who later did the THE THING premaquel) set to direct. My understanding of the premise was that Las Vegas was walled off to contain a zombie outbreak, a team of mercenaries were hired to go in for a heist, and the hero was really trying to rescue his daughter who was stuck in there.
14 years later it exists in what could only be an entirely different form, since it’s directed by Snyder himself, rewritten by a guy who was 13 years old when it was announced, starring a guy who was a WWE wrestler and hadn’t even been in a David DeFalco movie yet, made with technology that didn’t exist, distributed on a service that didn’t exist. As always, Snyder is unpredictable. I definitely wouldn’t have guessed that I’d be happier with his 4 hour redux of JUSTICE LEAGUE than the zombie movie I’d already been waiting several years for when he did MAN OF STEEL. But here we are.
ARMY OF THE DEAD did not live up to my hopes, so I will share many complaints about it. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it – it’s an entertaining movie, especially for straight-to-Netflix. I recommend watching it if you’re into this sort of thing and won’t pull your hair out that it’s either surprisingly sloppy or prioritizes setting up anime spin-offs and fan theory speculation over telling a good story. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ana de la Reguera, Dave Bautista, Hiroyuki Sanada, Joby Harold, Matthias Schweighofer, Omari Hardwick, Raul Castilla, Richard Cetrone, Shay Hatten, Tig Notaro, Zack Snyder, zombies
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews | 118 Comments »
Tuesday, January 19th, 2021
TRAIN TO BUSAN PRESENTS PENINSULA is, of course, director Yeon Sang-ho’s sequel to his excellent zombie hit TRAIN TO BUSAN (itself a live action sequel to his less-widely-known animated movie SEOUL STATION). Although PENINSULA is officially a TRAIN TO BUSAN presentation according to the American title, these are sequels in sort of the George Romero tradition: same world, different sets of characters. Different things that happen to people in South Korea trying to survive a fast-zombie outbreak. So, although I recommend all of them, you could watch them in any order.
This one starts maybe a little bit after the other two movies. Jung-Seok (Gang Dong-won, ILLANG: THE WOLF BRIGADE) uses his station as a captain in the Marines to get his sister and her family a spot on an evacuation ship. But of course a guy on the boat starts twitching weird and next thing you know there’s running and screaming and biting. This is just a pre-credits sequence but, like TRAIN TO BUSAN, it captures a deep sense of loss as Jung-Seok and his brother-in-law Chul-min (Kim Do-yoon, THE WAILING) see their loved ones turn into monsters. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: fast zombies, Gang Dong-won, Kim Do-yoon, Korean cinema, Yeon Sang-ho, zombies
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Monday, August 24th, 2020
August 16, 1985
THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD is a movie that I already reviewed thoroughly for Halloween 2015, but it’s such a classic I felt it would be wrong to exclude from this retrospective. So feel free to click on that link for a straightforward piece about some of the reasons I love the movie, but this one will zero in on a few aspects I feel are interesting in context with other movies we’ve discussed from the Summer of 1985 movie season.
As a horror-comedy that’s more of a real horror movie than a parody, RETURN arguably has a kinship with FRIGHT NIGHT. But obviously its closest comparison is its brother from another producer, George Romero’s DAY OF THE DEAD. Earlier in the summer I wrote about some of the ways DAY fit the specific moment of 1985. RETURN does it in a totally different way. Romero’s takes a grey, grim approach to railing against the Reagan era, while RETURN writer-director Dan O’Bannon does the EC Comics and punk rock version. Like so many of the movies we’ve been looking at, it’s a very soundtrack-oriented movie, embracing music of the time. But it’s not Huey Lewis, Cyndi Lauper or even Oingo Boingo – it’s punk rock bands like T.S.O.L., The Cramps, The Damned and The Flesh Eaters. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Clu Gulager, Dan O'Bannon, fast zombies, James Karen, Jewel Shepard, John Philbin, John Russo, Linnea Quigley, Mark Venturini, Miguel A. Nunez Jr., punk, Summer of 1985, Tony Gardner, zombies
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews | 27 Comments »
Thursday, April 30th, 2020
I keep having to write this same exact preamble, so here’s the short version: yes, we all think we’re sick of zombie movies, but here’s another really good one. (See also: TRAIN TO BUSAN, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS.) The fresh spin on BLOOD QUANTUM – a Canadian one that opened the Midnight Madness portion of the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and got a surprise release on Shudder this week – starts with it taking place on a First Nations reserve (or Indian reservation as people here call it).
It has a vivid weird-day-unfolding feel, like a serious THE DEAD DON’T DIE, rolling out the odd characters in town through the point of view of Red Crow reserve chief of police Traylor (Michael Greyeyes, DANCE ME OUTSIDE, FIRESTORM, Fear the Walking Dead, True Detective). But it starts on his dad, Gisigu (Stonehorse Lone Goeman, a sturdy, bald old badass with no other acting credits) gutting a bunch of salmon he caught. The fucking things won’t stop flipping around like they’re in that Faith No More video. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brandon Oakes, Canadian, Devery Jacobs, Elle-Maija Tailfeathers, Forrest Goodluck, Gary Farmer, Jeff Barnaby, Kiowa Gordon, Michael Greyeyes, Olivia Scriven, Shudder, Stonehorse Lone Goeman, zombies
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 7 Comments »
Thursday, April 2nd, 2020
By now most horror fans have experienced or heard about the greatness of TRAIN TO BUSAN, the 2016 South Korean fast-zombie-plague movie. If you’re in the latter category, I know it’s easy to believe the hype but still feel no urgency to see it, because yeah, I get it. Zombies on a train. So I’ll just say again that while it’s impressive that it made me think “Okay, it turns out I do want another fucking zombie movie,” the real achievement is making me so attached to the characters and attuned to the tragedy of their horror movie circumstances that I produced actual tears near the end. Have I ever cried from a horror movie before? Not that I remember.
When I went to write the review I was surprised to learn that writer/director Yeon Sang-ho’s previous movies were all animated. He’d been doing animated shorts since the ‘90s, before the features KING OF PIGS (2011), THE FAKE (2013). Even more interesting, TRAIN TO BUSAN is sort of a sequel or tie-in to an animated feature called SEOUL STATION that Yeon did immediately before it. I didn’t realize it had come out in the U.S. until I noticed it streaming on Shudder. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: fast zombies, homeless, Korean cinema, Lee Joon, Ryu Seung-ryong, Shim Eun-kyung, Yeon Sang-ho, zombies
Posted in Cartoons and Shit, Horror, Reviews | 6 Comments »
