Well, hey. The ephedrine killed my appetite. It must be something of a diuretic because I weighed in at 128.6 (I weighed 129.8 yesterday). It also behaves a little like speed, so you get a wandering dissertation from me today:

Zombies

I have made it painfully clear: my favorite monster in the movie world is the mindless, flesh-eating zombie. I make the 'flesh-eating' distinction because in the years BR (Before Romero), movie zombies were simply re-animated corpses that did their master's bidding. When Night of the Living Dead came out, it combined the mindlessness of the zombie with the appetite of a ghoul.

A quick backtrack for a minute: Ghouls traditionally don't feast on the flesh of the living; they feast on other dead bodies. Ghouls typically hang out at cemetaries. A more apt comparison would be a vampire. Vampires need warm, living humans for food but only drink blood. How discrete. Vampires are a wildly popular monster because they can have feelings, personality, and can form attachments to the very people they prey upon. They can also be the unrepentant embodiment of evil, but what it boils down to is they are intelligent.

Zombies however, just are. They are a collection of half-rotted instincts coupled with intense hunger. (Why they are hungry for living flesh is never explained in George Romero's movies; other people have tried to explain it with varying degrees of success). Zombies have no attachments. If your mom or brother or daughter or lover becomes a flesh-eating zombie, it simply doesn't care about you any more. You are food. Don't take it personally.

So George Romero started a new type of movie monster with his flesh-eating zombies. Night of the Living Dead gave a half-assed explanation for the reanimation of the recently dead: something about some space radiation from a satellite that re-entered the atmosphere. Besides the horror of cadavers reanimating and shambling slowly towards you, the only way they can be stopped is by destroying the brain. Worse, if you happen to be bit by one of these monstrosities, the resulting infection will kill you and you become one of them.

Romero's zombies are slow-moving and easily stopped; what makes them so nasty is when they show up in large numbers. NotLD was the first: a group of survivors hole up in a farm house during the night, trying to figure out what is going on and what to do about it. The little group's downfall is not really from the zombies; it's from their inability to get along and work together.

Dawn of the Dead came out in 1979. The violence in this movie is downright pornographic: memorable scenes includes someone's head blowing up from a shotgun blast, a zombie biting chunks of flesh from someone's arm and neck, a bunch of zombies eviscerating a live and concious victim with their bare hands... and I listed this movie as one of my favorites!

Heck yeah, the violence level is part of it. For me it's one impressive magic trick. The effects from this movie are remarkably realistic (not that I've ever seen someone get the top of his head chopped off with a helicopter blade for real). Between some of the most brutal splatter effects in existence, we have yet another rag-tag group of survivors who this time hole up in a shopping mall. Their downfall is trying to hold onto the material goods that they had access to when another group of survivors show up to raid the place.

Day of the Dead is considered by many to be Romero's weakest zombie movie. Personally I like this one better than NotLD but not by much. The special effects are as brutal as Dawn's, and with a slightly larger budget, the make-up team's zombie effects were far more varied and interesting. This time our group of survivors are a group of soldiers and a group of scientists holed up together in an underground military installation. The scientists are trying to find a cause and a cure; the soldiers' discipline is going to hell and they want to get the hell out.

One of the hallmarks of all 3 movies (for me) are relatively realistic people. I could identify with all of them, even the loudmouth jerk in NotLD. But Romero lost a little by making the soldiers too comic-book rude, offensive, and all-around assholes. But he recovers some in my eyes because the woman in this movie is my favorite. She's a scientist; unlike the (understandably) catatonic Barbara in NotLD and the quite pregnant Fran in DoD she has more of an interesting role to play.

Oh yeah; once again the downfall of our little group is the inability to cooperate.

Tom Savini, the man responsible for the make-up effects in Dawn and Day directed a remake of Night of the Living Dead in 1990. Most people consider it far inferior to the original, but I have a soft spot in my skull for it. I don't think the characters are as well developed, although Tony Todd's Ben is as sympathetic as Duane Jones is. And Barbara isn't catatonic for the whole damn film! That was a welcome change although she goes a little too SuperChick for the role. And despite Savini directing, it isn't that gruesome. But hey: it's a zombie movie.

Peter Jackson, beloved director of Lord or the Rings, cut his teeth on independent movies, including his hommage to Romero's zombies with Dead Alive. I say hommage and not ripoff because it is quite firmly planted in Peter Jackson Land. Young Lionel's overbearing mother gets bitten by a Sumatran Rat Monkey and dies from the bite and reanimates as a flesh-eating corpse. Hilarity ensues as Lionel tries to keep the fact that his mother is a zombie away from everyone, including his new girlfriend. There is gore aplently in this movie, including pus-eating incidents, a reanimated set of intestines, random acts of violence against a garden gnome, and quisinarted zombie hands. All with Jackson's trademark sense of humor intact.

Most recently (other than the Dawn remake which comes out today), Resident Evil was inflicted on us zombie lovers. Resident Evil was based on a successful series of video games which were loosely based on George Romero's trilogy. It just wasn't that good. Uninteresting characters and not enough gore. Still, I own a copy on DVD. Hey, it has Michelle Rodriguez in it!

The Italians got ahold of Dawn of the Dead and went to town. Most notably was Zombie, which includes a zombie attacking a shark underwater (shark wins, of course) and a nice closup of a woman's eye being gouged with a wooden splinter. Tons of Italian horror movie ripoffs exist; IMDb on the names Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci for starters. Just don't expect anything too sublime.

Return of the Living Dead is a fun riff on the Romero zombies. The zombies in this movie are only interested in brains, can speak (to a certain extent) and are much harder to kill (you don't really kill them; you just hack them up enough so they can't move any more). I never saw the 2 sequels to this movie but I do recommend the first one.

This selection of movies is by no means complete. If you dig around on the web you can find what is reportedly the original script to Day of the Dead (completely different than the movie filmed). Plus I haven't even mentioned the amount of fiction, including web-based fan fiction that is set in the Romero universe. Homepage of the Dead is one of my favorite sites for fan fiction and movie news. You know when you have created a phenomena when Stephen King writes fan fiction for your universe.