How do you review the movie which single-handedly spun the zombie horror archetype?
Simple - I don’t, and never will - we are talking about Night of the Living Dead here not Zombies Gone Wild.
Written by George A. Romero and John A. Russo this film is where everything started - everything this blog is about, this film invented the zombie.
Ok, ok, before I get accused of being wrong on the internet - zombies have been around for ages before Night of the Living Dead - as Haitian Voodo Zombies and in various mythology - and the writers did borrow and build on the apocalypse theme laid out in Richard Matheson’s I am Legend (Now starring Will Smith!) but for all intents and purposes these guys brought it all together in 1968, and spawned the shambling, decaying, cannibalistic creature - which still scares us today.
And, its public domain.
This means that you can watch the catalyst for the entire zombie horror genre, its all its black and white majesty, from the comfort of your own computer.
Resident Evil is my favorite zombie themed survial horror video game series and while I have been eagerly awaiting the March 2009 release date of Resident Evil 5 - hungrily devouring the elusive scraps of information released by Capcom - the team at the-minusworld have actually been doing something constructive to deal with the withdrawals.
The-minusworld have posted images of mock-ups of Capcoms new Resident Evil Activity Book For Kids. Fantastic! Now I can fill out the Resident Evil themed crossword whenever I start to get the shakes.
As of today I’ve decided to institute a new tag called Zombie Spotting. This is for all those times zombies appear in the background and don’t receive enough focus to warrant a long dedicated post of the media they appear in.
I managed to score a private screening — by virtue of being the only one in the cinema — of the documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation. While its an enjoyable and eye opening film about the history of Australian cinema and has given me a list of (non-zombie) films to hopefully find, footage from the film Undead appears in the section on the modern return of Ozsploitation.
