ZomBlog Review: "Dead and Buried"

“Dead and Buried”
1981
U.S.
Stars: James Farentino, Melody Anderson, and Jack Albertson
Writer: Screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon
Dir: Gary A. Sherman
94 minutes

Nothing pleases me more than to stumble onto something others had discovered and hailed as a classic before it wound up in my hands. While I must say at the outset that I knew this was not exactly zombie fodder, its reputation demanded I take a look.

And I am glad I did.

“Dead and Buried” is what I would call a great episode of “The Twilight Zone.” It plays out very much like that. The film opens with a photographer on a secluded beach (passing by a sign welcoming him to “Potter’s Bluff — A New Way of Living”), and finding a more than willing and attractive subject in a young blonde. Within a few moments, he is beset upon by a horde of old men and women, even the blonde herself. He’s strung up, tied to a pole, and burned alive. Later, a tow truck driver (Freddy fricken’ Krueger himself Robert Englund, prior to his “V” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” days) and Sheriff Dan Gillis (Farentino) examine a car wreck, where, they find none other than the torched photographer — very much alive and screaming.

The sheriff suspects that things are not what they seem and begins investigating the accident involving the out-of-towner, inquiring with the local coroner, Dobbs (a splendid performance by Albertson, who won an Oscar in 1968 for “The Subject Was Roses” but was probably better known as Grandpa Joe in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” or "The Man" in "Chico and The Man" TV series; his last big screen performance was this film). Albertson’s performance is low-key but incredibly charismatic and stands out above the others (even though all are very solid).

As the film moves forward, the audience starts noticing that some people appeared to have died — but are now walking around and working in the town as other people in different occupations.

As the sheriff delves deeper into a few other mysterious out-of-towner deaths, the secret of Potter’s Bluff is revealed and the film ends with a nice twist — not one that you don’t see coming, but a very satisfying one all the same.

Romero Rules Followed: None at all

Gore factor: Moderate, despite some real attempts

Zombies or Wannabees? Wannabees

Classic, fine, or waste of time: Classic, but not in the zombie sense

Additional comments: While the film featured a lot of great performances (and included some early effects work by Stan Winston) and is a satisfying horror film, it does not belong in the zombie canon. It is closely married to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” And, it holds its own in that vein. I mean, come on, it was made by the same team that unleashed “Alien” onto the world, and later “The Return of the Living Dead.” It’s worth a look. Just don’t look for flesh-eating zombies.

— ROB

Dick Move

We here at the Zomblog will applaud and giggle through just about any form of dismemberment and disembowelment you can name, chowing down on a big plate of marinara in the process. That’s just the kinda guys we are. Sensitivity is not our strong point. But there’s one go-to gore move to which we feel compelled to object: dick biting. We understand it’s a time honored horror tradition as old as The Last House on the Left and as recent as the horrifying *shudder* Teeth. But now we have zombies turning on our sensitive nethers and this must stop, we say. Zombies are supposed to be our friends. Not cool, zombies.
He are four flicks that will have you grabbing your crotch in terror.

Deadgirl
If you’re about to get all mouth-rapey with a naked, chained up zombie sex slave, would it hurt you to make nice just a little? I’m not saying roses and poetry, but maybe a kind word or two. Compliment her red, enraged, zombified eyes. Dead chicks like that. Whatever you do, don’t tell her “C’mon, baby, it’s alright. It’s not gonna bite you.” That’s just an invitation to have your johnson gobbled. And not in a good way.

Zombie Strippers
Zombie Strippers’ central tenet seems to be that no matter how putrid and rotting the chick, there is some dude who is hard up enough to toddle off to the back room with a wad of twenties for a private dance from her. It’s not enough that the undead pole jockeys are munching on the clientele, but they start the feast with a cocktail weiner.

Yoroi: Samurai Zombie
In Yoroi, it’s not actually the zombies that commit the unthinkable. So allow me to offer all the murderous psychopaths of the world a word of advice. If the lovely hostage you just took suddenly stops quivering in terror and suddenly starts loving you up, keep it in your pants before it ends up twitching on the floor. Seriously, your creepy charisma just doesn’t work like that.

Tokyo Gore Police
In a world where genetically engineered criminals are roaming the streets in bloody rampages, maybe it’s not a great idea to hit up the S&M body modding club. But should the curiosity be irresistible, Mr. Yakuza Man, like with the Zombie Strippers, stay out of the back room. Nothing good came come from the back room. Deep down you know that already. Once the creepy lady with the crocodile jaws for legs bites off your wanger, it’s a little late to reconsider your life choices.

ZomBlog Review: "Day By Day Armageddon"

“Day By Day Armageddon”
2007
U.S.
Permuted Press/Simon and Schuster/Pocket Books
Writer: J.L. Bourne
300 pages

First-person narratives have a distinct rule: Find a voice and stick with it.

While I did enjoy J.L. Bourne’s first foray into the undead, I could not help but find myself taken in and out of the book by the lack of a distinct voice.

The book is meant to be a first-person journal written by a Texas Navy pilot (test pilot? Ensign?) who decides to stay barricaded in his home as news of a growing undead apocalypse unfolds. He goes through the steps any wise hunkered-down survivalist would go through: he steals MREs (meals ready-to-eat) from his Naval base, ensures plenty of clean water, ammo, and weaponry is in his basement, along with loads of batteries, etc. He luckily has a stone wall built around his home, allowing for a natural perimeter from the undead. He knows enough about military and CB radio communication to allow him to listen in as events unfold — the dead are coming back to life, the police are unable to dispatch the menace, and the government has now stepped in to manage the threat. As the impending military response looms, our unnamed narrator learns a neighbor across the way — who, luckily, happens to be an engineer — is still alive. After several days of communicating news back and forth (with Morse code and low-rent walkie-talkies, of course), the neighbor, John, and the narrator decide to haul arse to an airfield, abscond with a small plane, fill it with as much supplies and equipment as it will hold, and head to a less populated area, just in time to avoid a nuclear bomb drop.

The journal skips from day to day as the narrator and his new found friend (and a dog) head from location to location, in search of a place to escape the apocalypse, including an island. Along their way, they encounter a family — father, mother and daughter — and a lone young woman, all of whom the narrator decides to rescue from a horde of zombies, risking his life, and increasing his responsibility. The survivors eventually make their way to an underground bunker, where, finally, the story really begins to move. And, sadly, abruptly ends.

As mentioned above, the challenge with telling a story from a first-person perspective is the difficulty in finding a voice. A writer who decides to use this device must have a solid grasp on how his/her character conveys the story. A writer cannot go from commenting on how bad a writer they are (as the narrator admits a few entries into the journal) to describing events in very, very vivid detail — detail that could be only described as “overwriting” in some cases (if I was writing a journal describing my zombie-killing quests, I would not vividly describe killing one zombie on one page and simply say ‘I got rid of them’ on another), and an incestual connection to the source material in others (Bourne almost made me understand the start-up/pre-flight procedure of a Cessna at one point; he also gave a hell of a lot of detail in military protocol in dealing with a disaster scenario).

Romero Rules Followed: The undead here follow all the rules. No runners, but some seem to move a little faster than others, an insinuation that the nuclear fallout may have preserved the recently undead. The only way to dispatch them is to destroy the brain, or set them aflame.

Gore factor: Yeah, again, here is where the description becomes too much. Based on the journal-writer’s description, there is gore-aplenty.

Zombies or Wannabees? Zombies

Classic, fine, or waste of time: Fine

Additional comments: Bourne’s writings were recommended to me by a man I interviewed, a one Chad Dukes, a man I highly respect when it comes to modern zombie lore, so, I sought out Mr. Bourne’s works. Dukes cited Bourne’s attention to real-world military detail. Bourne’s attention to detail in this aspect is something I can’t turn a blind eye to, even though I wouldn’t have a clue if he was accurate. I have to take the man at his prose (he does work in Washington, D.C., with the Department of Homeland Security, so he has a big leg up on me). While I have been fairly critical of Bourne’s first outing, I fully acknowledge I know “Armageddon” began as a blog and became a novel, a novel with sequential follow-ups. I plan to delve into the sequels, and they may appear here.

Hopefully Bourne’s narrator will find an identity.

— ROB

Dead Head

Deadgirl
Dirs. Marcel Sarmiento, Gadi Harel
2008
For all the on-screen dismemberment and mayhem I have imbibed in my life, very few films have ever really gotten under my skin in a creeptastic kind of way: watching The Exorcist at 12, the infamous rape scene in Irreversible, and large swaths of Antichrist. I’m not yet sure how I feel about Deadgirl, but I may have to add it to the list for its relentlessly amoral portrayal of horny male teens without a conscience.
JT, Ricky and Wheeler are just good American teens whose hobbies include truancy, cadging beers from indifferent, absentee parents and brutally raping zombie sex slaves.
Wait, what?
OK, so only JT and Wheeler decide to get down with the dead while Ricky has some rudimentary moral qualms about the whole set up that lead him to abstain, but Deadgirl does not mince screen time before the teens delve balls-first into unbridled depravity. While the film boasts a couple of classic jump cuts that actually manage to startle and some unsettling sound work, the real squick factor comes from the character development. Deadgirl keeps its lens squarely on childhood friends JT and Ricky as they delve the depths of their own morality.

Zombology: Skipping school after fire drill, Ricky and JT go wandering through the local abandoned “nuthouse” (where the lights are still on, I might observe). Down in the building’s creepy bowels, the delinquent duo find a naked girl chained to a table behind a door that must have rusted shut years before. What at first seems to be corpse, turns out to be a breathing, living (?) woman. How the friends react will ultimately sunder their friendship and force them to confront their own sketchy morals. JT immediately gets all rapey (dragging in Wheeler) while Ricky’s ill-defined sense of right is more conflicted. From a zombie standpoint, this is a fairly classic fare: get bitten, become a zombie. But the zombies are really a backdrop to the horror only teen males can conjure.

Though she’s naked and worldless for the entire film, Emily Spain as the titular girl manages to evoke an astonishing amount of pathos, imbuing her zombie with a festering core of humanity amid the gut munching. A few ill-timed comedic digressions aside, this is a film that is relentless in its pessimism and nihilistic view of humanity. Even Ricky, whose conflicted loyalty to his childhood friends and his fumbling attraction to the wholesome girl next door, comes closest to wearing a white hat in this movie, makes choices that are ultimately less than honorable and ultimately very human. As is JT’s desire to carve out a space in the Deadgirl’s dungeon where he exert some control over an indifferent world where he sees no future for himself. Deadgirl is not an easy film. It’s not a slight horror romp. It’s a film that asks some uncomfortable question and leaves you with unsatisfying answers. Deadgirl sucks only 10 percent as bad as Hell of the Living Dead.

ZomBlog Review: "Grindhouse Presents Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror"

“Grindhouse Presents Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror”
2007
U.S.
Stars: Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey, Josh Brolin, Marley Shelton
Writer: Robert Rodriguez
Dir: Robert Rodriguez
105 minutes

For a better part of my developmental interest in filmmaking, I can honestly say Robert Rodriguez was a great part of it. “El Mariachi,” which was remade as “Desperado” in the U.S., was, for me, what I wanted to achieve with some of my other aspiring high-scholl-age film nerds — a low-budget masterpiece which incorporated talent and was a tribute to greater films we loved.
And “Planet Terror” is exactly what it was designed to be: a loving tribute to terrible, yet memorable, and often cult-status films.
This one has it all: A barely coherent plot, terribly developed characters, “explicit” sex, ultra-gore, fantastic-violence, absurd stunts, absurd action sequences, absurd dialogue, backstories that barely go anywhere, convenient plot points, etc., etc.
But when all of it is done on purpose, and with total self-awareness, therein you have the making of a true, working tribute, and, by way of default, a modern (near) zombie classic.
Cherry Darling (McGowan) is tired of living the life of not a stripper, but of a “go-go-go” girl. She now wants to be a “stand-up comedian,” and on her way from quitting her job, hooks up with an old flame at a barbecue shack owned by the ever lovable Jeff Fahey (I’m sorry, but seeing him in the awful yet groundbreaking “Lawnmower Man” and later in the very amusing “Body Parts” I became a fan of the Fahey). Wrey (Freddie Rodriguez) provides the purposely testosterone-filled foil to McGowan’s dumb but tough without Teflon definition of a “strong-but-vulnerable” woman — a perfect 1970s-era portrayal of women.
Oh, yeah. There is a side story featuring Bruce Willis as an inferred Army Special Forces general, whom has made a deal with an arms dealer, hoping to score a huge amount of toxin which keeps him and his men from turning into face-melting zombies.
And, another side plot: a nurse, whom may or may not be a lesbian is looking to leave her “crazy” doctor husband (Shelton and Brolin, respectively), and is seeing her and her husband’s hospital emergency room fill with increasing numbers of puss-spewing infected people.
Another side plot, still: Biehn (“The Terminator,” “Aliens,” “The Abyss,” “Rampage”) is a sheriff whom, for some reason never explained (purposely) has “stuck his neck out” over and over for Wrey, while trying to learn about his brother’s (Fahey) barbecue recipe. But, as the shit (and the goo-infected zombies) hit the fan, Sheriff Hicks (sorry) reveals Wrey’s true identity as…um… a badass? And, um, Wrey gives Cherry (REEL MISSING) the very leg to stand on to achieve the greatness he always knew she had.

Romero Rules Followed: Very liberally followed; They are feasting on the living, but seem to be killed just as if they were living (including copious bullet-wounds and knife slashes). And they melt. So, about 50/50.
Gore factor: Extreme, and it needs to be that way.
Zombies or Wannabees? I edge toward zombies, but the argument as simple “monsters” can be made…But I say zombies.
Classic, fine, or waste of time: Classic
Additional comments: “Planet Terror: is simply fun. Shut-the-brain-off fun. You can’t take it seriously. So, don’t. Just embrace it. Suck it up.

— ROB

Feed My Frankenstein

We here Zomblog International HQ made the official determination that while Frankenstein’s monster is a clear antecedent to the zombie uprising, Ol’ Frank just doesn’t make the cut himself. It’s no insult, we’re just sayin’ more brain munching would have helped. Japan, land of all things thoroughly awesome, has adopted Frankenstein as the central metaphor for a rack of films that also fall just short of true zombie g(l)ory. Here are three reanimated and bloody features that swipe from Mary Shelley’s playbook.

RoboGeisha
Dir. Noboru Iguchi
2009
Yoshie is the ugly duckling younger sister of a local geisha and constant butt of her abuse. The beatings have left her with a substantial case of barely contained rage and the ability to rip phonebooks in half with her bare hands. The corrupt local munitions company plays on the sibling rivalry to recruit Yoshie into their coterie of highly trained geisha assassins, whose bodies have been largely roboticized and sent out into the world to kill off political rivals. That is until a collection of local activists convince Yoshie her bosses aren’t who they seem. Subsequent absurdities include acidic breast milk, Gatling tits, shuriken spewing sphincters and a giant robot castle dancing the robot. That and a shitload of CGI gore.

Full Metal Yakuza
Dir. Takashi Miike
1997
Kensuke is not a very good yakuza. In fact, his pathetic incompetence sees him summarily gunned down early on in this Frankenstein by way of RoboCop mashup from Takashi Miike, the enfant terrible of 1990s Japanese cinema. Left to be harvested for his organs, Kensuke is revived by a local mad scientist who turns him into a metallicized kill-borg with a robowang that puts Tetsuo the Ironman to shame. Unfortunately, true to the Frankenstein mold, Kensuke spends most of the flick pondering his miserable, unnatural existence rather than wreaking bloody vengeance on the gangsters who left his ass for dead.

Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl
Dirs. Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu
2009
Frankenstein’s Monster and Count Dracula have squared off in many a moldy screen oldie. This 90 minute trip through the fine art of arterial spray posits the good count as a shy, sun adverse transfer student to a Japanese high school who squares off with a reanimated posse of mean girls. Yes it’s about a boy. He’s so dreamy. Yoshihiro Nishimura, who directed Tokyo Gore Police and contributed blood ‘n’ guts to RoboGeisha, co-chaired this gory, gory outing. But if you want to appreciate the Raimi-style bloody humor, you’re also gonna have to subject yourself to the Japanese attempt at racial humor. Japanese girls in blackface. With giant lips. And bones in their noses. And lip plates. Chanting songs about Obama. *sigh* This one is for the dedicated only.

ZomBlog Review: "Dawn of the Dead" (2004)

“Dawn of the Dead”
2004
U.S.
Stars: Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber and Mehki Phifer
Writer: James Gunn
Dir: Zack Snyder
110 minutes (Director’s Cut)

Filmmaking 101 is now in session. It is late in the semester and we are going to discuss the rules of remaking a classic.
First, select a classic, critically-hailed film.
Second, strip it of almost nearly every element that made it a classic.
Third, update characters and situations for the modern audience.
Fourth, focus on what some people found as the sensational factor of the former and ramp it up by 10.
Fifth, pour in more characters and completely compromise the original story.

If you attended a class in college, and these were the notes you scribbled down, not only should you fail outright, but your professor should be beaten to death with his own bag of weed.
Look, I understand this was Zack Snyder’s first film for a big studio. But, for fuck’s sake, if I ever was given a chance to make a film, it certainly would not be in my best interest to remake a highly-revered classic. So, from pre-production to finished product, Snyder had the odds against him.
I will say this about the 2004 “Dawn:” It is entertaining. If I was an ignorant member of the audience, I could see the appeal. It is fast, it gets to the point, there is very little character development, there is a lot of gore, the plot moves along as fast as the fucking undead, and, if my brain is shut down, it could be fun.

But, my fellow droogies, this is “Dawn of the FUCKING Dead.” I grew up lauding Romero’s original as the definitive zombie film, a film that kept in touch with it’s 1970s “talk back at the audience films.” The 1970s were a spectacular era in film. It brought us “Taxi Driver,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now!,” “Alien,” “The French Connection,” “The Exorcist,” “Rocky,” “Deep Throat,” etc. I could go on for hours.
With the exception of “Deep Throat,” (and an argument can be made there, easily), the 1970s produced films that punched the audience in the face with a message about the sign of the times. The original “Dawn” was far less subtle than its decade’s brethren, but the message was there: Consumerism will be the death of us all.
And, thank you, George, the 1980s proved you a prophet.
However, when you get around to making a modern version of a classic, which indeed had a message, the most irresponsible thing a filmmaker can do is to ignore that completely. There is absolutely no message in the 2004 “Dawn,” other than rednecks are dicks, black people are badass policemen or gang members, guys with long hair own gun shops and have great aim, blondes are either tough or screw a lot, and dogs are never zombie food.

So, here we go. Polley (I loved her in “I, Monster”) plays Ana, a nurse finishing up her shift. She comes home, says hello to a neighbor girl, and then has shower sex with her husband. She wakes up to a very zombiefied little girl rampaging her bedroom, killing and reanimating her husband, and barely escaping as long camera shots, POV camera shots, cameras mounted on vehicle shots, aerial shots, etc. etc., etc., show the audience that all hell is breaking loose. She meets up with Deputy Rhames, whom, really, plays the role with the same one-note he did as Marcellus Wallace in “Pulp Fiction.” He’s big. He’s black. He’s not going skiing.
They wind up finding Mehki Phifer and his pregnant girlfriend, and a Best Buy salesman (Weber) near a shopping mall, where they all decide to secure and wait for help.
The shopping mall and boredom with zombies are about the only parallels this remake has with the former.
However, the remake is not without merits. Polley and Rhames do pretty decent with what they are given, with Rhames taking over Ken Foree’s calm but confident role in the original (Foree shows up and delivers his classic line) and Polley taking over the role of Gaylen Ross. The long-distance rooftop friendship between Rhames and his gun store pal, Andy, had a good premise until a stupid plot point ruined it.
The other characters? Well, there is the kinda smart guy who reveals he was a salesman at Best Buy (again, Weber) and seems to be the smartest guy in the room most of the time. To me, he is a plot device; he moves the key points along, keeps the plot in order, and has very little to offer until the very end.
Once arriving at the mall, the crew of five meet up with three redneck security guards with attitudes and guns (?) and a struggle for power ensues.
And, yeah, later some other people who decided the mall is a good place to go show up. Whatever.

Damn it, this film is a tonal/total mess. It switches back and forth between serious zombie fare and tiny comedic pauses. Yes, pauses, like when you are at Thanksgiving dinner and a great-grandparent makes a racist joke. You feel uneasy, you chuckle just to get past the moment, and then can’t wait to get away from the table. I have argued with my blog counterpart about a key moment in the film (SPOILER ALERT, DO NOT READ FURTHER!) involving the issues of a zombie offspring. I thought it was a cheap attempt at shock; he thinks it should have been explored further. Regardless, the storyline picks elements from Romero’s original — zombies and a mall — and lavishes gore, pointless characters (although an appearance by Matt “Max Headroom” Frewer and now “Modern Family” dad doofus Phil Dunphy [Ty Burrell] were welcome for the few seconds of screen time they had).
I don’t hate this remake. I just don’t like it that much and will not be returning calls.

Romero Rules Followed: Should I even address this? The fuckers run like crackheads aiming for a fix and hardly have a moment to actually feast. *Sigh* They are undead and follow most Romero rules.
Gore factor: A lot, but mostly zombie extermination.
Zombies or Wannabees? The running undead. Again, *sigh* zombies.
Classic, fine, or waste of time: Fine. That’s all I can say.
Additional comments: Had this film been anything other than a remake of the original, I might have been kinder to it. The writer, Gunn, made his name with the Troma Team release of "Redneck Zombies," filmed a stone's throw from where I live in Charles County, Md., but I cannot excuse his lack of reverence. I can’t be kind when you take a classic film, throw it in a van, rape it, make it eat worms, beat it, and then smack it around for good measure. Note to filmmakers: We have seen so much fricken gore, it is not shocking anymore. Making a film more graphic and giving us cardboard actors will not make a better film. Give us people we can relate to/care about. We can watch a clip show of gory scenes and forget it. Give us a three-minute scene of solid dialogue and bad ass characters, and we will adore it. Do you doubt that formula works? See my last post…

— ROB

ZomBlog Review: "Shaun of the Dead"

“Shaun of the Dead”
2004
U.K.
Stars: Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton
Writers: Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright
Dir: Edgar Wright
100 minutes

I just can’t do it. I can’t. To attempt this right now would be a disservice. I’ll come back when I sort my life out…

Crap. Nothing has changed … But neither did anything for the hero of this great horror-comedy gem for which I have been badgered about since the inception of this tiny blog. For so many lovers of “Shaun of the Dead,” I have met just as many detractors.
“It’s too funny; zombie movies should not be that funny.”
“I guess it is funny. It had a moment or two where I laughed, but I thought it was too boring.”
“It was just an excuse to reference better movies.”
For a film I now feel is beloved and embraced in zombie-lore, I thought it prudent to point out not everyone loved it. The first time I watched it, I have to admit, I was laughing and shaking my head rather than embracing the not-so-subtle Romero/Tarantino/zombie film etc., references.
And, from me, to the detractors, I have a week-old litter box you can lick.
Of course, the film opens with some drinking, creative swearing, flatulent humor, and obvious horror film references (Shaun works for Foree Electronics, mentioning co-worker Ash is a bit under the weather), which, at first, took this nerd out of the movie. It later sent me giggling like a moron while at the same time embracing it as the love-letter it is to classic zombie lore.
You know the story by now. Zombies break-out. Lines are drawn. And everyone winds up going to the Winchester to have a pint and wait it all out.
Well, not quite.
Shaun is a resolute screw-up. His relationship with his girlfriend Liz is about to end, he adores his Mum (whom calls him “Pickle”) but often forgets about her, and his best friend, Ed, might be holding him back from doing anything with his life worthwhile. Liz’s friends think Shaun is a loser, and one of them might have designs on making sure Liz leaves Shaun so that he might have a chance at her.
Shaun thinks he is still in college, where playing “Timecrisis II” every night, getting drunk and listening to “electro” with flatulent Ed are the highlights of his day. Doldrums, routine, and familiarity rule his life. At the chance he might lose the cute blonde woman of his dreams amid a zombie uprising, Shaun finally kicks into action, with the aid of his leeching friend, a fat, potheaded louse who not only finds humor in the zombie invasion, but also suggests probable armaments, inopportune photo-ops, that a trophy gun over a bar is loaded, and that dogs can look up.
Some of the more hilarious moments of this film take place before the zombies show up. For me, the drunken scene in the Winchester with music from “Phantasm” pinging in the background as Ed describes the former lives of patrons is a huge highlight; the out of doors drunken mixmaster session with a zombie down the street is also great; the switching of television stations to piecemeal together reports mimicking “Dawn” and “Night” dialogue was rather amusing; but, anyone who has seen the film has to remember the record collection moment. Our heroes did not wax nostalgic, but rather spun the hits their own way. And we all laughed. Hardly 30 seconds would pass before something else had me laughing. Zombie movies should not be this much fun, but “Shaun” is.

Romero Rules Followed: Every single one from the original trilogy is followed.
Gore factor: For a comedy about zombies, the gore factor is plenty, but not excessive, just enough to get red on you.
Zombies or Wannabees? Zombies
Classic, fine, or waste of time: 10 out of 10 classic
Additional comments: “Shaun” is one of the most quotable, enjoyable, unhinge-your-jaw laughing films you will ever see while watching zombies lumber about. It is a life-long ambition made to fruition by perfect comic timing, embracing of the source material, British influence, a solid cast; and I know too many people, whom I respect, who disregarded it as, “OK.”
You are forgiven, Mum. Liz has your flowers. I will be over later to kill Phillip. We’ll have a pint and wait for this all to blow over.

— ROB