Zombie AKA Zombie 2: The Dead are Among Us (1979)

An abandoned ship is found in a New York City port with two zombies and no answers. The boat owner was a scientist and his daughter goes to the Caribbean island where he worked to find out if he's still alive and why the dead are walking.

Zombie 2 is the Italian sequel to Dawn of the Dead, released as Zombie in Italy. I've heard about it as a cult classic and finally decided to give it a try. It's definitely memorable in a cheesy 70's way. The zombies featured are the product of a doctor in the Caribbean messing around with voodoo rites and trying to understand their effect on people. Of course his experiments go out of control, causing an outbreak. As with the Romero movies, these zombies are slow, eat people, and can transmit their infection to others. The makeup effects are oretty decent. The blue skintone of Dawn of the Dead is gone for a more realistic brown and gray rotted look. Some have maggots wriggling around on their faces and it's a disgusting, memorable look.

I barely remember any of the characters in the movie because they are incidental. None of them are particularly interesting, well written, or well acted. There's a reporter Peter West who sleeps with the missing scientist's daughter Anne Bowles and travels with her and their newfound friends Brian and Susan. The missing scientist is Dr. David Menard who shames, abuses, and ridicules his wife Paola, who wants to leave the godforsaken island. (I don't blame her.) Most of them die in horrific, gory ways that don't always make sense. The most memorable death is Paola's. After a ridiculous struggle  the zombie impales her eye with part of a smashed door practically in slow motion and in extreme closeup. While the scene is iconic and very well done, this type of attack is too precise for a zombie to accomplish. With that logic, it fits right in to this wacky movie.

The most memorable scene to me for many reasons is the shark scene. Susan is swimming nude in the ocean and freaks out over a shark that's nowhere near her and not bothering her at all. While "avoiding" the already disinterested shark, she is attacked by an underwater zombie. Susan escapes, leaving the shark and zombie to duke it out. The fight between them is so awkward and weird. The shark is rather small in comparison to other malicious sharks in film. The zombie manhandles the poor thing, but it escapes and rams the boat hard enough to disable it despite its size. This entire scene is so weird and really stretches the logic of this already ridiculous film.

Zombie 2 is a very strange film that earns its titles as a video nasty and a cult classic. It's enjoyable if all you care about is zombie carnage. The ending has it in spades with some surprising kills, zombies popping out of the ground, a full on zombie assault, and a gut punch when they return to civilization. There are ridiculous elements like the tiny but powerful shark, gratuitous nudity, the lapses in logic, and the awful dubbing over of voices. The positives outweigh these things and I found myself enjoying the ride and the impressive gore effects. Do yourself a favor and watch this crazy cult classic.

My rating: 3/5 fishmuffins

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Two days after Jane McKeene was born, the dead rose at the battle of Gettysburg and changed everything. Now that the North and South are more focused on fighting the dead rather than each other, the Native and Negro Re-education Act requires Native and African American children to enroll in combat schools in order to protect the general public from zombies as attendants. Jane takes classes in Miss Preston's School of Combat for Negro Girls, excelling in combat (except rifles) and falling short in etiquette. As she nears the end of her education, families around Baltimore County are disappearing at an alarming rate and no one seems to know why.

Dread Nation is an alternative history of the Civil War with zombies with fleshed out characters and relevant social and political commentary. Jane is a fiery teen who can fight zombies with relative ease through training and practice. Even though she knows she's good at what she does, she is still plagued with insecurities about her appearance and hopeless in the face of a society constructed to keep her down. The Re-education Act had armed officers take her away from her family to attend school while the school officials kept her from communicating with her family and actively sabotaged her efforts at the school. Jane makes some rash decisions that go against social niceties because she sensibly values survival and safety about those niceties. She deftly recognizes what people expect of her and changes her demeanor to get them to underestimate her or surprise them with her intelligence and skill, depending on the situation. Watching her navigate this world is frustrating because of how everything is stacked against her.

The Re-education Act is only one aspect of the legal enslavement of nonwhite Americans even after slavery was supposedly made illegal. The Survivalist Party has gained momentum with their message of keeping the natural order of things, specifically the racist notion that Native and African Americans should serve white people and protect them at all costs. One of the most disgusting displays of such racism is when a crackpot doctor has a black man bitten by a zombie to show his innate resistance to the disease. Of course it's all bunk, but everyone just allows him to do it (except Jane who is chastised for speaking out of turn) even when many know he is wrong. The vast majority of the crowd saw that man as inhuman and the others were kept silent by social norms. Slavery is also still legal in loopholes like enslaving criminals and considering zombie bitten people as inhuman (even if those wounds can't be proved to be zombie bites).

The zombies of this world are as unique as the alternative history. There are two strains of the disease: the Gettysburg strain that turns people after death and the Custer strain that changes the living after a bit. The first strain (named after its place of origin) evolved into the second (named after the man killed by his own infected men). Early symptoms of the disease include yellow eyes and seizures. They can turn between a few minutes and an hour after being bitten. Newly turned zombies are as fast as humans and slow with age. They don't feel pain and tend to congregate in hordes. Their hearing is better than normal but their sight is worse. They can be killed by destroying hte brain or removing the head as usual. As the book goes on, Jane suspects that zombies have some sort of intelligence in how they attack cities and their awareness of people/food.

Dread Nation had me reading for long hours. I couldn't put down this story and didn't predict what would happen. The social and political commentary definitely brings out some parallels to our own society such as institutionalized racism, legal slavery, the Alt-Right, the normalization of white supremacy on the politcal right, and their use of religion. Ireland does such a wonderful job of building her world, infusing it with relevant criticism and parallels, and creating engaging characters. I can't wait for the next book in the series to come out. Highly recommended on all fronts.

My rating: 5/5 fishmuffins

Upcoming Zombies Sneaking Up Behind You: Movies

These are the upcoming releases in zombie films just waiting to nom your brain.

* Patient Zero - September 14th



Stanley Tucci stars as a different type of zombie while Dr Gina Rose (Natalie Dormer) and Morgan (Matt Smith) try to find Patient Zero in order to create a vaccine. I'm a bit dubious right off the bad because Morgan can talk to zombies and is somehow immune to the zombie virus. The trailer makes it seem lighthearted and comedic. It also seems to have a decent budget for effects, actors, and the like. It's hard to tell if it'll be so bad it's good or just bad.

* Anna and the Apocalypse - November 30



It's finally coming out! I heard about this film last year during the festival circuit and it's finally going to be released! The new clips make me super excited. Anna and the Apocalypse is a fully choreographed Christmas zombie musical. It's all the things I love! There are so many inventive, funny moments like killing a zombie with two bowling balls to the head or a sharped decorative candy cane. I will be first in line to see this and I hope it's as fun as this trailer looks

* Overlord - November 9



The day before D-Day, American forces infiltrate a Nazi occupied village, only to find aberrent experiments and undead creatures. This movie looks fun. I'm expecting zombies, Nazis dying, and lots of gore. This looks very promising with some disgustingly cool visual effects. I was a little dubious when I heard about it, but seeing the trailer made me change my mind.

* One Cut of the Dead



Once Cut of the Dead is a 37 minute, one shot film. That in and of itself is interesting, but it's also a zombie movie being made within a one shot zombie movie. This looks like an exuberant labor of love for the genre. The effects aren't as elaborate and well funded as Patient Zero or Overlord, but it looks amazing all the same. Right now, it seems to still be on the festival circuit, so it doesn't currently have a US release date. In Japan, One Cut of the Dead has already made 250 times its $27,000 budget and I hope it sees similar success internationally. I'm keeping my eye on this one.

The Night Eats the World (2018)

Sam goes to his ex-wife's apartment in Paris to pick up some tapes. She and her new boyfriend are having a huge party with loud music, a ton of people, and no time for him when he just wants his possessions. After sitting and drinking alone for while, he's understandably fed up and she finally sends him to an empty office to find them himselve. He gets hit in the head when he ventures out of the room and gets a bloody nose. Sam sits for a while and eventually falls asleep just as some commotion occurs outside the room. He wakes up to an empty and wrecked apartment with blood splattering the walls. The entire city is overrun with zombies with no other humans in sight. Sam has to decide what he will do being the only person he is aware of still living in the world.

The Night Eats the World is a different zombie film than most. It takes the beginning scene of 28 Days Later or the first season of The Walking Dead and keeps the main character isolated. Sam is essentially alone for the entire film save for the raging party at the very beginning. It's such a stark comparison to see the party full of people, with projections on the wall and lights flashing, to what it looks like in the morning: a ruin of broken furniture, blood stains, dead bodies, and the spare zombie here and there. Sam is surprisingly clear headed and logic with his course of action. He secures the building, marks the aparment with the zombie, traps a zombie in the elevator, gathers food in all the apartments, and measures each bit for rationing. He finds an apartment to be his base after struggling to clean the one he was originally in.

Being alone takes a toll and he finds ways to get out aggression and create music by making instruments out of found objects (after the drum set he found attracts too much zombie attention). Over time, he develops his own routine for each day. He improves his aim by paintballing zombies and becomes a much better opponent to the zombies. He plays music, looks outside, runs around the apartments, looks through people's things, listens to music, and listens to the tapes his daughter made. He thinks a lot and wonders if anyone he knows is even alive, even musing that his mother is dead because of sympathetic personality. When he found dead bodies in the building, he wrapped them as much as he could and laid out their possessions and pictures around them. I thought it was a sweet and human thing to do to honor people he didn't know. The film is largely devoid of talking because Sam spends most of his time alone. Most of his time is just spent surviving and staying in the present to avoid thinking about the bleak future.

There are a few emergencies Sam has to address. The first day is full of tension when there are actual zombies free in the apartment complex and he has to secure everything. After that, he gets a little more comfortable yet still has nightmares of zombies breaking down his door. They are the ever present threat. When running water stops flowing, he sets up containers on the roof to collect rain water. During his cat excursion, he's scratched by a zombie and prepares to kill himself if he feels he's changing. When he's running low on food, he has to break into the zombie infested apartment, but it's only a temporary fix. The building only has so much food. He calmly addresses each issue until his own emotions start to overcome him. He was lonely before this ever started and that's why he adapted to this new world so well. Near the end, he starts to do reckless things that will attract zombies to get his emotions out even though it endangers him and threatens his worse fear. Sam also has to face the inevitable conclusion that he has to leave the relative safety of the apartment.

The zombies themselves are like most: dead, able to run, eat human flesh, attracted by sound or sight, and seem to live forever. They go into a twitching stasis when there's nothing around to catch their attention. Sam observes them much of the time and even uses the one captive in the elevator, named Alfred, to speak to. The zombies are really just a cipher for him to work out his own issues. He screams at and berates Alfred for being an awful father when he's actually talking about himself. Another character he talks to embodies his own conflicting ideas about staying or leaving and how his way of surviving isn't really living. It's never revealed why the world became this way or even how the disease is transmitted. Sam doesn't know and has only seen the precious few people he saw alive turned into zombies.

The Night Eats the World is a unique zombie film that focuses more on the human protagonist than the zombies. We see his mental state deteriorate as time goes on and we see his practical way to survive. The loneliness he felt before the end of the world becomes much more literal. I enjoyed the sparse dialogue and how the details of his background are interwoven into the story in subtle ways. I enjoyed this film. I highly recommend this if you are looking for something a little off the beaten path.

My rating: 4.5/5 fishmuffins

I Am a Hero Omnibus 1 by Kengo Hanazawa

Hideo Suzuki is a manga artist plagued by visions of ghosts attacking him as well as people to either lord over and humiliate or debate ideas an an intellectual equal. He is socially awkward, works long hours to complete projects before deadlines, and talks to himself a lot. As he's going though his everyday life, a fire occurs at a nursing home. People are increasingly out sick and random attacks start happening until society can no longer function with the influx of zombies.

I Am A Hero has an intriguing premise: seeing the zombie apocalypse start with an unlikely protagonist. Unfortunately, Hideo himself is awful and iinsufferable to read. He is not successful as a manga artist and finds every way to lash out and blame others for his failures. His self image oscillates from being completely confident and arrogant to being insecure and threatened by anyone successful. In addition to all this, Hideo hallucinates frequently. Sometimes his anxieties take visual form and haunt him, but he mostly sees two people to have conversations with. One is Yakima, a pathetic worm of a man that Hideo can humiliate, lecture, and feel superior to. The other is nameless and looks like a more put together and attractive version of himself who he views as an equal to debate with. I like the conceptual idea of this as it shows how Hideo really is. However, he's prone to long, masturbatory speeches about the value of his manga and disgustingly degrades Yakima.

The biggest problem I have with this manga is how women are portrayed. Tekko, Hideo's girlfriend, seems nice on the surface, but always falls short of his expectations. She's constantly talking about her ex, refusing sex, and getting belligerent and abusive when drunk. The other named woman is Mii-chan, Hideo's co-worker. She is beautiful and has illicit affairs with her boss and others of the staff. This is all that is literally known about her. In the background, a show called Boob Morning is shown on television multiple times, which features cleavage baring women reporting the news. Hideo hates beautiful reporters because he thinks they don't value the news and would save themselves in the event of a disaster. Every man in the book objectifies women and treats them like sex machines only to insult them when rejected. During this scene at a singles mixer, the men all lie about their age and actually have girlfriends. I was hoping all this would mean something more later like Hideo would see the error of his ways or something, but all of this misogyny and objectification goes without anything to counter it and gets worse.

The origin of the zombies isn't explained. The disease is transmitted through bites and the afflicted become mindless. They are able to say small words and phrases, but attack anyone. The first instance is when a car strikes a pedestrian who gets up and keeps walking with a broken neck. Very effective. The best part of this manga is the scene where Hideo peers through Tekko's mail slot and she gets closer and closer to him. These panels are two pages wide and have the same effect as Sadako coming through the TV in The Ring. The zombies are killed on odd ways. Caving in their skulls doesn't seem to work while slitting their throats does. It doesn't make sense to me. Unfortunately, the zombie plague seems to only be the opportunity for Hideo to see women reduced to what he believes they are and then to kill them. Tekko becomes the perfect, thoughtful girlfriend and only says she loves him, even though she's trying to bite him. On the other hand, Mii-chan is a bloated corpse and only says "penis" while trying to fellate any objects near her mouth. This portrayal was particularly disgusting and shocking. I almost stopped reading right there. Maybe it was meant to be funny, but it shows how women are literally viewed by people like this. In life, both women were disappointing to him.

I Am a Hero as a title is a complete joke. No one is represented well here. All of the men are portrayed as liars, cheaters, and misogynists while all of the women are greedy, manipulative, or sex objects. No characters are more than a stereotype unfortunately. The zombie aspects don't come in until the end of the omnibus and the rules didn't make much sense. This book failed on almost every level. I normally wouldn't read the next one but I bought them at the same time.

My rating: 1/5 fishmuffins

The Cured (2018)

The Maze Virus has ravaged the world for years, turning people into flesh eating, mindless zombies. Then, a cure is developed and 75% of the infected are cured and return to humanity. Unfortunately, the cured aren't accepted with open arms. The people hold them responsible for their actions under influence of the virus and refuse to let them reintegrate into society as they once did. The cured have to check in weekly with abusive military men like criminals and are allotted the most unskilled, lowest paid labor no matter what they did before. The other 25% of thei nfected are on the verged of being outright killed and relations between the cured and humans threaten to explode into violence as tensions rise.

The Cured is an emotional film that also reflects Ireland's political history. This is the first film I've seen that involves cured zombies. A cure is often an unattainable goal in zombie stories that we never get to see. Would you welcome ex-zombies who tried to eat your face or ate a loved one in front of you? Probably not. The vast majority of Irish society rejects the cured, disowning their cured family members and treating them as second class citizens. The cured no longer have the opportunities they had, little choices for housing and jobs, and the military roughing them up periodically for no other reason than being cured. They also still have every memory of being a zombie including every person they've killed with most having horrific nightmares and flashbacks as well as guilt and shame.

The characters are fleshed out and well acted. Senan is one of the only cured welcomed back his widowed sister in law Abbie and her young son. He harbors a devastating secret that threatens his relationship with his family, who has bonded with over time. Nightmares plague him from his zombie days and he feels crushing guilt while he tries to keep his head down and keep out of trouble. Abbie is trapped in Ireland because her son isn't a US citizen in addition to reeling from the world falling apart and her husband's death. Her strength in accepting Senan and staying positive iin the face of so much negativity, bigotry, and pressure to reject all zombies makes her the most symapthic and interesting character in the movie. Our zombie villain comes in Cantor, a former lawyer rejected by his family. I felt for him at the beginning when he struggled against bigotry, but he took advantage of it for his own ends and relishes in the violence he caused as a zombie.

The violence and oppression of the cured naturally makes them scared and outraged. Cantor uses it to intensify the tension between the cured and humans with terrorism. The zombies first have secret meetings and then start bombing humans (unbeknownst to some zombies like Senan). The last third of the film is much more action based than the rest, but no less impactful. The ending is a little too open ended and obviously open for a sequel. The Cured is a logical step forward in the zombie genre tht focuses less on action and more on drama and emotional repercussions.

My rating: 4/5 fishmuffins

September Zombies 2018!

It's that time of year again! All zombies! All the time! Fast, slow, brain eating, campy, serious, new, old, deep stories, shallow stories, science fiction, fantasy, and everything in between. If you have any suggestions for this month that I can squeeze in, email me. I'm including books, movies, experiences, and more! I hope you stay with me in the month of flesh-eating and stay on through the horror extravaganza in October.