The Undead Symphony

Woah. Where to start with this one? Unpick this at your leisure; Matool is surviving the zombie apocalypse in Southern Colorado by killing the slow moving, blue faced undead with a hammer and long nails. Okay so far? I was. 

Then after a zombie attack on the hut he is hiding in with others he runs out into the street and is knocked over by Nathan in his pickup truck. Matool is knocked unconscious, gaffer taped at the wrists and ankles and then driven back to cuckhold Nathan's home for his nymphomaniac trailer trash wife Dexy. And from there we learn Nathan and Dexy have an open relationship, an alternative lifestyle they have difficulty maintaining in the zombie apocalypse, hence Nathan kidnapping Matool and others.

Add Dexy's psychotic sister Sassy with a third sibling's face growing out of her side like an arsehole with teeth, and that Nathan is into screwing hot female zombies he keeps chained up in the shed, and this isn't going to give anyone sweet dreams.

I scored it 3/10 for uniqueness of story and the zombie gore was ok too. However, I would avoid this like you would Johnny Z.

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The Spanish team behind REC would have us hate the Americanized version of their movie, but that dog won't hunt, Monsignor. Much like #Alive and Final Days and Let the Right one In and Let me In, I feel the 2008 US remake of the Spanish game changing REC of the year before deserves a chance.

I am a glass half full reviewer and know that his has a decent cast, with Jay Hernandez, Jennifer Carpenter, a young Joey King, Johnathon Schaech and Gregory Germann, Bernard White, Rade Šerbedžija and Doug Jones sliding into the ill-fitting soiled painties of the monster at the end. It will have FX and tension on par with the original. It just isn't the original.

The ending does change, and it actually makes more sense, if you are no a fan of possession stories, but the rest is pretty much the same. I think some of the scenes they added add to the story, the brain drill for example, Randy the asshole and the dog, but I can's score it as high as REC as it just isn't original.

Still worth a watch at 6/10. REC (7/10), REC2, REC: GENESIS, REC:APOCALYPSE, QUARANTINE and QUARANTINE 2:TERMINAL (6/10)

and now this frees me up to watch this weekends diabolical DVD offering The STINK OF FLESH.

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And we are back with the sequel, taking place 2 hours after the end of the first as a SWAT team of four including an idiot cameraman played by the same actor as the idiot cameraman in the first movie go in with a doctor to assess the situation in the apartment building. It is obvious though that the doctor knows more than he is letting on, and it is true! The whole thing is demonic possession, with the virus allowing sufferers to be controlled by a demon. 

It means we do get some cool voice changing from the kids and cops as they are taken over. And we do have some cool kills. However, this does suffer from the Jurassic Park issue. We had our mind blown by the T-rex in the first, in the second it was ok, and by the third it was meh. Here the hectic style of the first movie is persisted, we do have some good kills and a story loop. We also get a great ending that should have set up another movie between this one and the fourth, however, the third (GENESIS) doesn't continue the story of Angela Vidal.

I have scored the others higher now, the series being REC (7/10), and all the others REC2, REC:GENESIS and REC:APOCALYPSE 6/10 making it a consistently entertaining series and well worth the watch.

I'd love to hear from my dear listeners. Recommend a zombie movie or show I haven't covered, or some on and chat all things zeke. Or just like and share.

I am going to say something controversial. The gamechangers that have shaped the zombie genre are well known to us all (White Zombie the first, Night of the Living Dead making it about survival, Dawn of the Dead making it large, 28 Days Later making it scary and giving us running infected, Shaun of the Dead making it funny, The Walking Dead making it mainstream TV and World War Z making it an A lister movie) but I am going to put forward this, the 2007 Spanish REC as a potential addition to that list. Why? Well sure, there were found footage movies before it, most will say Blair Witch Project of 1999 was the first but I would say Cannibal Holocaust was a pioneer in horror. But REC, in 2007, has been copied so many times, with the final shot of the lead being dragged back into darkness, that I would say this should take it's place in that list. If Shaun can be there with a simple zombie movie story, but is there as it was the first genuinely funny zombie comedy that others try to emulate, then REC was the first found footage zombie movie and now we have them coming out of the woodwork.

It follows Angela Vidal as young reporter for a lesser known show and her cameraman (I still have issues with just how useless cameramen are in horror movies, just filming rather than helping) as they head with a fire crew to a claustrophobic apartment building where an elderly woman is trapped in her flat. Angela is in the second and concluding movies, so her arc is pretty awesome, and much better than Alice in the Paul WS Anderson Resident Evil franchise movies. 

And of course it all goes terribly wrong. Lots of face biting, blood, infection, screaming fast moving infected, lots of Spaniards shouting over the top of each other, as the authorities lock them in for 76 hectic minutes. There are some great bits, not least the final shot, and the mother being handcuffed and them not being able to do anything about it.

I do love the REC movies, I would say they are the most consistently good series of movies, and we have plenty in the genre. All four are good and definitely worth watching. Copied by the Americans with Quarantine, with its own spin-off sequel in Terminal. I would recommend them all. And am more than happy to be watching REC2 next. 

7/10

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What in the Uwe Boll have I just seen? As I wade through the cesspool of TUBI trying to find something decent I, for my sins and completeness, need to tick this one off.

Not to be confused with Narnia Dark Island, 1962 BBC series or the Dark Island in the Thousand Islands, or the  prominent feature of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, is located in the lower (eastern) Thousand Islands region, near Chippewa Bay in St Lawrence County NY. It is another shitty movie on TUBI from 2010.

When a defense contractor loses contact with its lab on a remote island, a team of soldiers and scientists is sent to learn what happened.

Rotten Tomateos say Terror awaits a team of soldiers and scientists who have arrived at a bioweapons facility to determine why contact was lost with the researchers there. 8%

IMDB says Soldiers and scientists visit a remote island, the site of bio-weapons research, after losing contact with the staff there. 3.3/10

Leterboxd says After losing contact with its researchers on a remote island, a military corporation hires a group of scientists and soldiers to find out what went wrong.  2.7/10

And none of those descriptions are technically right as a former soldier turned sulky boat owner, a scientist pretending to be a soldier, and blurring the lines, an actual soldier, a toxicologist pretending to be a medic, and a nerd head by boat to an island not dissimilar to the island in Boll's monstrous House of the Dead. Why? Well, a nasty company has been performing experiments that somehow turn people into zombies and then smoke monsters like the one in Lost. Also monster sounds like Lost. 

So basically a Canadian TV version of House of the Dead meets Lost. Wanna see it? I wouldn't. If anything the highlight of the movie was realising I hadn't covered REC or REC2 yet for the pod, and both are free on Amazon.

3/10 don't bother

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I am sewer surfing on the stinky crest of a TUBI wave this weekend, with Dark Island tomorrow and this the 2010 Defiled.

OK, let me give you the premise and we shall take it from there. It is a 100 minute long silent movie inasmuch as the characters do not speak. The humans do not speak at all and the zombies each have a single noise, be it a yar, a grunt, or a high pitched eee.

Yar, his name is the sound he makes, much like Gnar from Delamorte Delamore, (1994) has gotten one of this 3 zombie friends pregnant. But, after an ill-advised feast of a dead camper that poisons the other zombies to death, including the mother, Yar must first, and I never thought I would ever write this, perform a C-section with a butcher's hook, before looking after his zombie baby.

He saves a non verbal human female from two other zombies and now has a nanny for his zombie baby. And then there is a lot of walking. Walking to the woods. Walking to a farmhouse. Walking along train tracks. Walking through fields. Walking to a factory complex. Walking... walking... zzzzzz.

But then, realising they are all poisoned, and wanting to save his baby, they head to find the human scientists and soldiers for help.

So, a black and white silent movie told from the zombie perspective? Sounds interesting or shit? Well, to be fair it is both. Conceptually it is a good idea, but it is painfully repetitive and slow. 

Artsy for the sake of it? Or artsy because of budget and talent? Who can say. It was unique. I have seen hundreds of zombie movies and this was pretty unique. Good? Hm. Recommendable? Only for the uniqueness of it. A 2010 silent zombie movie.

4/10 an oddity.

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I was dubious, and rightly so. I have been burned of late by movies that were not zombie movies, like The Bay. And that has a lot more in common with Itch! (2026) than any of the movies we have covered. However, there is an actual zombie element to this too. A proper, back from the dead and attacking the living element. So, as a  lay person, I can say this is indeed a zombie movie.

Written by, direct by and starring Bari Kang this tells the story of a NYC hardware store and a group holding up as a regenerative parasite causes people to first, scratch their own skin off, and then, after dying, return from the dead to scratch other people's skin off too.

A low budget effort we have a decent enough location reminiscent of The Mist (if you like depressing endings) and Bait (if you like shark movies), a hardware store in one of the boroughs on a hot ass day as Jay, his non verbal biter of a daughter, rude customer Henry and shop girl Lisa are joined by wannabe robbers Miguel and pregnant Gabriella. Outside, along with some overly used and overly loud external civil unrest sound effects, including a incredibly close plane crash, the "itch" is spreading. People are scratching themselves to death, or being shot by the police if they can't control their itching in 10 seconds. Only to come back from the dead a little later.

Time to batten down the hatches and survive, which seems easier said than done.

It is a low budget movie but a decent enough effort. They could have made a few simple changes to make it more uncomfortable viewing for the audience but it isn't gross, other than the miscarriage. If anything it could have been more uncomfortable if it was an intolerably hot NYC day, sans AC, and I was a little disappointed that most kills are off camera too.

5/10 

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With the upcoming gender swap Vivica Fox version of Night of the Living Dead coming up in November, I thought I would have the NOTLD league table in place before then, but with the title and story now in the public domain it means any twonk with a camcorder can make a version.

This version from 2015 is the CGI animated version aka Night of the Living Dead:Origins and Night of the Living Dead:Origins 3D and stars Tony Todd reprising his role of Ben from the Tom Savini 1990 version, Captain Rhodes himself Joe Pilato as Harry Cooper, Bill Moseley as Johnny, and scream queen Danielle Harris as Barbara, and is set in a modern NYC over the winter.

A few really odd nods to the original, with the old truck, TV and radio, and the building, all look out of place for NY compared to the other locations, but some excellent additions, with the flashbacks to Ben and his wife and son dying in the diner, and Tommy and Judy, as well as Johnny's demise by getting a plane in th face.

The one thing that you will notice is the poor quality of the CGI characters, who don't blink, and look like the actors but with a stocking pulled over their head, squishing their face, ears and nose. Given this is 2015, that is only real negative.

5/10 for me. The action scenes were decent, the tension, but the animated characters were just poorly created. 

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Based on Courtney Summer's award winning YA novel of the same name from 2012 we are in a small Canadian town as the zombie apocalypse starts. Annoying teen Sloane is considering committing suicide because of her drunkard violent father, absent mother and now vacant sister.  But then after a bang on the door, we get the noises of the apocalypse and well, darn, it is the zombie apocalypse.

After losing her dad after ignoring his advice on staying alive not once, not twice, but thrice, Sloane joins up with the only other survivors from town, who all are from the same class at high school. What are the odds?

We get some decent effects and tension, I thought. Sloane is, if anything, the pain in the ass, and being the central character we see too much of her walking off by herself before she causes numerous deaths.

Plenty of naysayers moaning about this one, but I actually liked it. Anna and the Apocalypse without the singing, Breakfast Club without the John Hughes factor. You do feel like you've seen this before and that it is all derivative, until you realise the book was written 14 years ago.

What can I say? I enjoyed it. It felt like an elongated episode of Black Summer.

6/10 

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I should have known better. When a fellow movie reviewer lists their worst zombie movie of all time, I should have thought, well, if I listed our worst zombie movies (Attack of the Flatulating Dead, Oasis of the Zombies and Hsien of the Dead) I wouldn't then expect them to go out and buy them on DVD before watching them. But guess what I did?

Yes, this was bottom 3, on par with the aforementioned bags of steaming horse dung. Zombinator! A documentary style movie where the camera crew are mute at times and just film people being eaten, stabbed, shot, you name it, and don't give their opinions despite them being the only adults in the room of 15 fuckwit wannabe fashionistas.

And this was before the zombie apocalypse, created by the "company" and a mad colonel, and before the idiot fashionistas are saved by the Zombinator, a man so tough he wears sunglasses at night, a man who's shotgun doesn't need reloading and a man who's dialect coach should be shot.

If I could liken this movie to a liquid it would be the liquid at the bottom of a garbage can, bin juice, in taste and smell.

Avoid this one like the syphilitic sore on your pervy uncle's lip as he comes in for a kissy hello.

1.5/10 absolute badger shit. 

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