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?

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Shaun of the Dead. IMDB it.

[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...

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.