Friday Night Double Feature: Zombies - The Next Generation

Zombies have long been a staple of horror movies. Why not? They’re easy to pull off. A little bloody makeup and a pale complexion and BAM: easy zombie. It’s no wonder so many independent horror films rely on the undead creation to plague their films. Unfortunately, they rarely do them well, and the true plague of a lot of these movies are the horrific scream queens and bad acting. Cheap, easy to accomplish effects don’t make up for the other important things in movies.

Recently there’s been a rebirth of the zombie genre featuring one change that tears apart the horror community: fast-moving zombies. The reason for their existence makes no sense – after all, walking corpses would move slowly due to rigor mortis, right? But they are one hell of a terror and definitely up the tension level of the stories. You can run away from a slow zombie, but bring in an undead monster that can race with your moving car and you’ve got an even bigger problem.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of the fast-moving zombie pictures, but there are a few that make them enjoyable enough for guilty pleasure. They even manage to keep in that social commentary that makes zombie pictures so enjoyable sometimes. So this week we continue our Halloween horror theme with a look at Zombies: The Next Generation – two fun fast-moving zombie flicks that are sure to entertain, if not delight.

Let the Halloween fun continue:

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

I know this is a remake of a classic Romero flick (the granddaddy of all zombie movies) but we’ll save Romero’s movie for a more appropriate time. Even the master of zombies felt the zombies moved “to goddamn fast” for his taste, but you have to admit Zach Snyder does create some interesting sequences with his speedy zombies. In particular, the first ten to fifteen minutes, establishing the scope of the zombie nightmare as Sarah Polley wakes up and fights just to escape from her suburban home is a lot of fun. While the story for Dawn of the Dead isn’t anywhere near as clever as Romero’s original (lacking the aforementioned social commentary, frankly), the movie is visually a lot of fun. I could do without the nightmare of a woman pregnant with a zombie baby (I’m convinced when my wife gets pregnant I’m going to see a little hand pushing out like that) but concepts like using celebrity look-alikes for target practice and the concern the mall refugees build for one stranger in an adjacent store is pretty well done. Plus: Ving Rhames, which alone makes this one worth wading through, even if you have to turn it into a drinking game in order to do so.

28 Days Later

While I’m not typically a fan of fast-moving zombie pictures, I would probably go so far as to say 28 Days Later is not only one of my favorite horror movies, but one of my favorite movies of all time. It gets out of some zombie trouble by making it clear the foils of the film aren’t zombies, they’re Rage-virus victims, but a rose by any other name… No, I love this movie because while the virus-laden zombies are terrifying, they aren’t the movie’s sole antagonist. Instead this picture explores the depths humanity will burrow to when chaos takes over the world. Christopher Eccleson’s Major West is so vile a character, you can’t help but hate him more than the mostly dead denizens of the world. It’s an interesting commentary on civilization and where the real monsters come from when the world becomes filled with monsters. For those who don’t care about the social message, there’s plenty of blood, guts, and gore to be enjoyed here as well, and there’s probably never been a more haunting moment captured on film than the stark, empy streets of London, 28 days after Jim awakes.

Other quick zombie delights: 28 Weeks Later, Resident Evil

Enjoy our Double Feature suggestions? and maybe we’ll use them in a future column.