Having seen RESIDENT EVIL 2

[james_davis_nicoll]

I am compelled to ask



Why in god's name would someone think to hide from the Walking Dead in a graveyard?

And why in god's name do people split up in this films. "Sorry, but my paycheck only covers the next seventy eight seconds."

The Living Dead genre really needs a SCREAM treatment, a film in which the characters have seen zombie films and paid a little attention.

Comments

[chance88088.livejournal.com]

The Living Dead genre really needs a SCREAM treatment, a film in which the characters have seen zombie films and paid a little attention.

didn't we have that movie already - Shaun of the Dead?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

No, it was pretty clear to me those two guys never paid close attention to anything that didn't come in pints. The only way they'd be familiar with any given zombie is if it was Peter North.

They did pick up on the rules once the news-guy explained them but then failed to apply them usefully. Hint: the best zombie refuges do not feature large glass windows.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Shaun of the Dead. IMDB it.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

That's a comedy but the people it were classic zombie fodder. No ranged weapons, no confining of bite-victims, no radios, they lost their vehicle (twice), they lost their weapons, they hid in a building that had large windows, no armour, no home-made jellied gasoline....

Actually, having just read BE MY ENEMY, what I want to see is a typical Brookmyre crew up against the Living Dead.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

My daughter's calculus project was modeling the spread of movie-style zombieism as if it were a regular diesease. It was a successful project.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes?

Does it burn out before infection hits 100%?

[j-shelbourne.livejournal.com]

I figure you have to model it with a sigmoidal growth curve, where the rate of growth of the populations slows as the number of breathers goes down. The reproductive rate of zombies is, not surprisingly, the death rate of humans.

However, I could never figure out where I should set the k and r values....

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

just in case a person was wondering, you've bought me every brookmyre book i own. so if a person wanted to avoid repetition, it could be easy.

[eyelashes]

[snowwy.livejournal.com]

See 28 Days Later.

Lots of handicaps for the people we encounter, but they do NOT act like zombie-fodder. I promise. Only thing is - it's not by any stretch of the imagination (well, my imagination at least) funny. I count myself lucky that I watched this movie the wrong way, from the last 20 minutes to the end, and then in 20 minute increments working toward the beginning.

I'd have cried like a little girl if I'd watched it the right way the first time...

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

One of the things I've never been able to buy in zombie movies is the whole Dead Rising From the Grave part of it, especially in a movie set mostly in the United States.

Consider: A body buried in the ground for more than a few months, unprotected, is basically going to be disintigrated by worms and other subsurface carrion. In a high-humidity area like New Orleans it might be measured in weeks. Now since most zombies are more-or-less intact bodies (since they can usually be dispatched by destroying their brainpan), that means only a well-preserved body isoing to start moving.

Now, an average buried body is pretty tightly sealed. The coffin is going to be fairly thick wood, or sheet metal, closed by exterior locks. Besides that, it's usually in a concrete coffer or tomb, which then has several feet of dirt piled on top of it.

Now, given that the average zombie is only marginally stronger than a human being, that's still damned difficult to overcome, even if the airborne zombie virus (or whatever) can penetrate that deep into the ground in the first place. So unless the zombie happens to be Buffy Summers, it ain't going anywhere...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Consider: A body buried in the ground for more than a few months, unprotected, is basically going to be disintigrated by worms and other subsurface carrion. In a high-humidity area like New Orleans it might be measured in weeks. Now since most zombies are more-or-less intact bodies (since they can usually be dispatched by destroying their brainpan), that means only a well-preserved body isoing to start moving.

Did you see the episode where they put some dead pigs into a sports car and let them sit for a few weeks? Very, um, educational....

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Did you see the MYTH BUSTERS episode, I mean.

Ability Inflation

[cultureulterior.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but according to first movie canon, the zombies in the graveyard are impossible.

But the ability inflation of the main character is interesting-- that last bit, was rather Strossian, and it was a superpower i'm not sure i've ever seen before.

I wonder how that power will be quantified, in later films, if any.

[j-shelbourne.livejournal.com]

There's a comic online where the the main characters know all the zombie weaknesses. http://www.livingwithzombies.com and one of the dialogue exchanges on the first page is:

"Really? Fast zombies or the slow ones?"

"Slow, thank God."

Over on the All Flesh Must Be Eaten mailing list, we used to discuss handling the Romeroverse zombies from a position of knowledge. And the Night of the Living Dead remake does make the point that if you keep your wits about you, they're easy to avoid. (Though I know of one zombiemaster who took the position that in his game, zombies had incredible strength and digging power for the first twenty minutes or so.)

I don't know what happens in the first dozen issues of The Walking Dead, since I've only read issue 13. They might be aware of the movies. (However, since the lettercol refers to finally using the z-word, I doubt it.)

If you go just by NotLD, the zombies are a relatively benign menace. Romero has said that the point of the zombies is to keep people in the house, so they can fight. (The point about graveyards is well-taken, though.) Initial sources of infection are old age homes, hospitals and traffic accidents, it spreads from there, where every person killed gets up and kills again. (If animals can be affected by the resurrection agent, then we're all mince-on-toast anyway; see The Rising, I think, by Brian Keene.) Most shooters are trained to aim at the torso, and might find making the switch to head shots difficult.

In the Romero sequels it becomes obvious that there's a great deal of variation among the dead--not only in the first movie, where the first zombie we see has the brains to use a rock, but most of them just shuffle and moan; you get some (such as in the tenement in the original Dawn) who are really quite strong, and others that are no stronger than a normal person, just more persistent. (And they all travel at the speed of plot.)

Return of the Living Dead is the worst offender for having corpses crawl up from underground; clearly Dan O'Bannon had never researched burial practices. (On the other hand, Linnea Quigley dances naked, which is always a plus for me.)

Shaun of the Dead tried very hard to be true to the basic zombie movie elements rather than lampooning them self-referentially, as Scream did.

If I were doing Scream Of The Living Dead, I'd definitely mix up the kinds of zombies--fast ones, slow ones, smart ones (as in RotLD) and stupid. Actually, Al Bruno III had a nice idea: the slow stupid ones are the ones that have been embalmed (though I think they remove the brain during embalming, don't they?), and the smart ones are, well, all the rest.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

(On the other hand, Linnea Quigley dances naked, which is always a plus for me.)

RESIDENT EVIL 2 has a certain amount of bare-breastage and nippleage,
the marks of quality in fine monster films.

[j-shelbourne.livejournal.com]

Ooookay.

I saw the first Resident Evil movie with a sort of "what the fuck?" attitude. (Having read George Romero's screenplay--it's out on the Internet somewhere--I was expecting something actually based on the video game, rather than something that involved only a few trademarked items from the video game.)

Having seen RE2:A now, I can say, "Doublemint wtf?"

A couple of cool stunts, camera tricks stolen from 28 Days Later, a chance for Canadian viewers to rejoice as Toronto City Hall is reduced to slag...but it has no idea what its story is. It's not a horror film, because--and this is crucial--it's not scary. I didn't regret the loss of a single character. Superwoman had me bored--you know I'm bored when I'm going, "Hey, she's holding that accent fairly well." It was worse than trying to make sense of the first Tomb Raider movie.

The minor appeal of Sienna Guillory looking amazingly like Jill Valentine was not really sufficient.

(Which is odd, in one way: little touches like that enhance my viewing of things such as the Justice League cartoon, but not here. Possibly because they usually make an effort to have a story, and it's only half an hour, so less of my life is gone (as when they did the Hawk & Dove episode).

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Having seen RE2:A now, I can say, "Doublemint wtf?"

A couple of cool stunts, camera tricks stolen from 28 Days Later, a chance for Canadian viewers to rejoice as Toronto City Hall is reduced to slag...but it has no idea what its story is. It's not a horror film, because--and this is crucial--it's not scary. I didn't regret the loss of a single character. Superwoman had me bored--you know I'm bored when I'm going, "Hey, she's holding that accent fairly well." It was worse than trying to make sense of the first Tomb Raider movie.

It's not a horror film. It's a video game film. You can always hit replay on a video game so there's no element of tension, no possibility of permanent loss.

I've proposed what I call "Less Virtual Than It Looks Reality" games (in which the dangers to the character in the game are translated into real danger to the player) to various companies but they all lacked my visionary nature. They call it "negligent homicide" but I call it "artistic vision."

[kestrell.livejournal.com]

RE2: I spent forty minutes wandering around and then the first zombie I met died in five seconds! Nothing should be that easy to kill. One problem with fictional zombies, as I see it, is that they have totally failed to explit most of the literature. Consider Wade Davis's The Serpent and the Rainbow. Trust me, the book is fascinating, someone needs to use it to make a real zombie movie. In actual zombie lore, the zombie is given a dose of something mysterious and then dug up within a day or so. The thing is, the zombie was never really dead, only put into a barely conscious state by the drug/magic powder.
For another interesting book on burial and the undead, check out Paul Barber's Vampires, Burial and Death.

The reason Scream worked so well was Randy did his homework. He did his homework so well, that he found a way to appear in the third movie, even though he had died in the second, because as soon as he had sex he went out and made a video on which he put the secret piece of info his friendss needed in the last movie. Zombie movies never have a Randy-type expert.
Though now I am thinking about how cool a zombie movie with an entymologist character would be.

[j-shelbourne.livejournal.com]

Trust me, the book is fascinating, someone needs to use it to make a real zombie movie.

At least, a better movie than Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

There's a comic online where the the main characters know all the zombie weaknesses. http://www.livingwithzombies.com and one of the dialogue exchanges on the first page is:

"Really? Fast zombies or the slow ones?"

"Slow, thank God."

I've never done mortal battle with the undead but even I know trying it with no pants on is probably a bad idea.

[j-shelbourne.livejournal.com]

It is apparently now a comic book. No word on whether he has pants by issue 3.