It’s the day before Halloween.
Are you still struggling to get into the mood?
Well, have no fear! The latest edition is Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse Trailers is here to help you out!
Presented without comment, here are 6 classic trailers for the day before Halloween….
2. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
3. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
4. Halloween (1978)
5. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
6. Zombie (1979) (a.k.a. Zombi 2)
Apparently, the world’s ending but, fortunately, your boyfriend’s built an underground bunker!
Unfortunately, you now have to live down there with them and I don’t care how much you love someone, you still occasionally need some alone time. Perhaps if he had built a bigger bunker, you wouldn’t be going as stir-crazy but, as usual, no one asked you how big the bunker should be. Instead, they just said, “Get down there in case the world ends!”
And so, you flee. You break out. You confront the brave new world that is rising from the ashes of the old one.
Of course, a few weeks later, you lose all your hair and you die a slow and agonizing death from radiation poisoning. Fortunately, your boyfriend will probably die too. That’ll teach him to try to put you in a corner.
Anyway, this is an absolutely great video, both wonderfully directed and acted. That’s Cori Benesh and Hill Hudson as the couple in the bunker and they’re so empathetic and believable that you really do cringe when you realize how radioactive the sand between their toes probably is.
Enjoy!
What if you turned into a zombie and nobody noticed?
Now, in defense of the pup patrons in this video, when was the last time you ever really paid attention to the band playing at your favorite bar? I mean, I always do but that’s just because I don’t drink so I always have to find something to do while everyone else is getting drunk. So, I probably would have noticed Jamie T. transforming into the undead but I doubt I would have said something just because it’s 2019 and who wants to be a snitch?
My favorite person in this video is the drummer, mostly because she’s not going to let anything — even a discarded arm — keep her from keeping the beat.
Enjoy!
“Fire up the wood chipper! It’s feeding time!”
So announces Hunter Shaw (Ian Ziering) towards the end of Zombie Tidal Wave, proving once again that any film, regardless of genre or tone, is automatically made a hundred times better by stuffing someone in a wood chipper. Or, in this case, several zombies. Needless to say, there’s soon blood and chunks of blue skin flying everywhere. It’s messy but, when you’re being attacked by zombies, you do what you have to do.
SyFy advertised Zombie Tidal Wave as being from “some of the people behind Sharknado” and this film definitely shares the same sensibility as the first Sharknado film. What’s often forgotten is that the first Sharknado film was not quite the all-out parody that the later films in the series eventually became. It was definitely a comedy but, at the same time, there weren’t any celebrity cameos and David Hasselhoff didn’t end up in space. Instead, it took a ludicrous idea — sharks in a tornado — and then presented it with just a hint of self-awareness.
Zombie Tidal Wave does the same thing. As a result, you do get Ian Ziering delivering one-liners, like the one at the start of this review. And the entire film is full of references to other zombie films. For instance, there’s a band called The Fulcis and the first zombie to appears bears a distinct resemblance to the boat zombie from Zombi 2. The many scenes of zombies rising from the ocean will remind veteran zombie fans of Shock Waves. When the zombies invade a hospital, I was reminded of the infamous Hell of the Living Dead. But, at the same time, Zombie Tidal Wave plays things relatively straight. Zombies invade. People get bitten. Some people sacrifice themselves for the good of the other survivors. Zombie Tidal Wave has its moments of humor but it never becomes an out-and-out parody.
Why are zombies washing up on the shores of an island community? Well, it’s because of an earthquake, one that’s unleashed a horde of the undead. Hunter Shaw is a fisherman and perhaps the most respected citizen of the besieged community. Naturally, it falls upon him to not only bring everyone together but also to figure out how to defeat the zombies. To be honest, it really is a typical SyFy movie, which a handful of characters spending most of the film looking for each other while trying to stay alive and then eventually banding together to battle the threat. Some people, like Hunter and his wife (Cheree Cassidy) rise to the challenge. Others, like the rich white guy in the pink shirt, don’t. Personally, my favorite character was Taani (Angie Teodora Dick) because she grabbed a pointed stick as soon as the invasion began and spent the entire movie kicking zombie ass. GO TAANI!
Anyway, as a lifelong fan of zombie movies, I enjoyed Zombie Tidal Wave. It didn’t waste any time getting to the zombie action and really, that’s the important thing isn’t it? The pace was quick and, as he did in Sharknado, Ian Ziering played the grim hero with the right mix of sincerity and horror. I don’t know if Zombie Tidal Wave is going to launch a Sharknado-style franchise or not but it was still an entertaining SyFy film.
Today’s horror scene comes from 2004’s Shaun of the Dead.
What if the world ended and you didn’t notice?
Today’s horror scene that I love comes from 1968’s Night of Living Dead. (Read Arleigh’s review here and Gary’s review here.)
“They’re coming to get you, Barbara…”
“Stop it! You’re ignorant!”
Okay, this may not be a popular opinion but I’m just going to say it: Johnny was a jerk and he kinda got what he deserved. Nice gloves, though.
Run, Barbara, run!
I’ll admit, I’m a latecomer to the Lucio Fulci bandwagon. I viewed my first film by The Maestro, THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY , earlier this year, and absolutely loved it! I’ve been looking for more Fulci films to discover ever since, and recently recorded his most famous, ZOMBIE, off the El Rey Network (which I highly recommend to Grindhouse fans out there). ZOMBIE goes by many names, but this is the title I watched it under, so we’ll stick with that.
From that opening shot of a gun pointed at the camera, then blasting the head of a rising corpse, I knew I was in for a good time! After the credits roll, we see a derelict ship floating in New York harbor. The harbor patrol boards it, and find it deserted, with rotting food and supplies strewn everywhere. One of the cops investigates further, and is killed by a zombie…
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I had high hopes for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the just-released film which, like the novel upon which it is based, attempts to combine Jane Austen and The Walking Dead. The source material was good. The cast — with Lilly James as Elizabeth Bennet, Jack Huston as Wickham, and Matt Smith as Parson Collins — was impressive. The trailers looked great, promising a combination of zombies, ornate costumes, and a very British sense of humor. Sadly, however, the ultimate film is a bit of disappointment.
Actually, it’s more than just a bit of a disappointment. It is a HUGE disappointment. To have so much promise and then to turn out so bland — well, it’s enough to make you wonder if maybe zombies have become so common place in popular culture that they’re no longer as interesting as they once were. Don’t get me wrong, as a symbol of the impossibility of escaping death, zombies are great nightmare fuel. But, when you see them in a relatively bloodless PG-13 film like this, you realize that it takes more than just a few random zombies to make an effective horror film.
Plotwise, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is exactly what it says it is. It tells the same basic story as Pride and Prejudice, with the exception being that England is now under siege from zombies, the Bennet sisters have now been trained in how to kill zombies, Mr. Darcy (played by Sam Riley) is now Col. Darcy and he’s an expert at tracking down zombies and killing them, and Wickham is now more than just a cad, he’s a cad who wants to help the undead overthrow the living. As I typed all that out, I realized I was probably making the film sound a lot more fun than it actually is. And really, the movie should be fun but it’s not.
Director Burr Steers never manages to capture the proper tone for telling this story. The satire is never as sharp as it needs to be. The scenes that are meant to pay homage to Austen try a bit too hard to capture Austen’s style without contributing any of her insight and the romance between Elizabeth and Darcy is sabotaged by the fact that Sam Riley and Lilly James had absolutely no chemistry together. The scenes with the zombies are bland, largely because this is a PG-13 rated film and bloodless zombies aren’t particularly scary. A typical episode of The Walking Dead is more graphic than anything you’ll see in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Which is not to say that there aren’t a few moments when Pride and Prejudice and Zombies kind of works. It has moments but they’re isolated and they never really come together to build any sort of narrative momentum for the film as a whole. Sam Riley is a bit of a dud as Darcy but Lilly James, Jack Huston, and especially Matt Smith all give good performance. (Smith, in particular, is so good as Collins that I would like to see him play the role in an actual adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.) Early on in the film, there’s a fun scene where the Bennet sisters destroy a horde of zombies and it actually strikes the right balance between comedy and horror. Before that, we get the traditional scene that we get in all Austen adaptations, of the Bennet sisters preparing for a ball and, in between lacing up corsets and discussing whether they will all be able find husbands, they also carefully conceal the daggers and knives that they will be carrying just in case they happen to run into any of the undead. It’s one of the few scenes that suggests what Pride and Prejudice and Zombies could have been if it had only found a consistent tone.
For that matter, I also liked the animated opening credits, which wittily explained how the zombies first appeared in England and, not surprisingly, suggested that it was all the fault of the French. And the film also had a fairly effective scene that shows up in the middle of the end credits and suggested what would might happen if Pride and Prejudice and Zombies 2 is ever put into production.
But ultimately, even those moments that worked only left me frustrated that the rest of the film did not. For all of its potential, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies disappoints.
Here are the latest teasers for AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead! As you can see, the walkers have arrived! (The show itself will arrive in August.)
Okay, probably not.
But still, the former governor of California has been getting some unexpectedly good buzz for his performance in the upcoming film zombie film Maggie. In a role that reportedly emphasizes honest emotion over crowd-pleasing action, Schwarzenegger plays a small-town farmer whose daughter (Abigail Breslin) has been infected with a zombie virus. The trailer, which was released today, seems to hint that Maggie is going to be a bit more thoughtful than your average Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie film.
Maggie is scheduled to be released on May 8th and, hopefully, it won’t be too overshadowed by the 2nd weekend of Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Through the Shattered Lens 