I Am Legend- audiobook review

I am Legend and Other Stories by Richard Matheson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is just as good the second time around. It has been a few years since I read the book the first time. This time I listened to the audio. The director of the audio book made some different interpretations of the I Am Legend story, but the reading was well done. The other stories, though, I couldn't get through due to the reading. I remember enjoying several of the stories previously, especially the Mad House one and the monster funeral, but there were funny voices and whatnot and It kind of ruined the mood. I would suggest reading instead of listening to this one.

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We're Alive: A Story of Survival

Do you long for the days of old when families would sit around the radio and listen.  Not to music, but well produced audio dramas.  Dramas with a full cast of characters, music, and amazing sound effects.  I am talking well produced with top notch writing.  Maybe you are one of these people and don't even know it yet.  Well if you are, you need to be listening to We're Alive. 

We're Alive is a available for free from the website Zombiepodcast.com or from any podcatcher/iTunes, and it follows a ragtag group of survivors of the Zombie Apocolypse as they learn to cope with their new and dangerous new world.  It isn't just the zombies that they have to protect themselves from, as they quickly find out. 

If you like zombies and/or like Walking Dead, you are going to love We're Alive.  The zombies are a bit different and the characters are trying to figure it out.  If you don't think you are a zombie fan, I say give this one a shot as it is well written and well produced.  I would rate it at 13+ due to fantasy violence, language, and non graphic sexual situations. 

I really don't understand how someone hasn't picked this up as a TV series to cash in on the success of Walking Dead.  It is certainly good enough.  Highly recommended

Zone One- A second look

Based on Steve's review of Zone One, I decided to pick it up.  This book isn't really your normal zombie novel.  It doesn't concentrate so much on the gore and is more philisophical.  This effect is magnified as the author writes in a stream of conciousness style.  The main character is suffer from PASD (post apocalypse stress disorder) so this stream of conciousness can jump around quite a bit and not seem to make much sense.  There are many instances where the timeline just shifts without any warning.  It makes the book a much slower read, but it is still a good story and quite enjoyable.  It is actually a litterary zombie story.  I think Steve's assessment of a 4 is fair.  I am not a huge fan of stream of conciousness, but this one was still engaging. 


Here are some things I clipped from this novel:
"Time slowed down in situations like this, to grant dread a bigger stage."
"He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized that the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could out run them."

Yes the book is dark.  I won't say it is for everyone, but it is good. 

Survival of the Dead

You know, I loved the original Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.  I kind of enjoyed Day of the Dead and the one with John Leguzimio (sp?), although I didn’t think smart zombies were the way to go.  Then I watched Diary of the Dead, which is a found footage movie, I generally don’t care for those that much anyway and the story was only okay.  So, I guess what I am getting at here is that I have a deterioration fondness for Romero and his films.  With the name Survival of the Dead, I thought we would get back to some good stuff.  I was wrong.

Why do Night and Dawn work so much for me?  Well they are horrifying for one.  But they are also about the people and not about the zombies.  The people are the characters and the zombies are just a situation/metaphor.  In night and dawn, you actually care when a character dies.  By the time you get to survival the characters are just caricatures. 

Survival may be the first Romero movie where zombies are a joke.  None of the characters are really afraid of them.  Ammo is abundant and everyone is a crack shot.  The zombies are slow and they come at people single file almost.  The zombies are also ninjas and can sneak up on someone that is supposedly surviving in a zombie apocalypse.  If I never see a person shoot past another person’s head again, it will be too soon. 

After reading Max Brooks zombie stuff and reading/watching the walking dead, it is clear that Romero doesn’t really do his homework on the genre that he created.  I mean he really falls short in this movie.  The movie is really about a blood feud between two families on an island and how that is intensified over treatment of zombies.  Go ahead, read that again.  The families are fighting over whether or not the zombies should be killed.  It even goes so far as they are trying to teach the zombies to eat something other than human flesh. The purpose or importance of this experiment was completely lost on me. 

If you want to see a zombie ride a horse for an hour, then you might like this movie.  Everyone else is probably going to be let down.  The DVD has a bunch of special features, but I don’t care enough to watch them.  I think Romero is the zombie now.  This movie was dumb. 

Book Review: Zone One, by Colson Whitehead

Zombies are in.

From AMC’s smash hit television series The Walking Dead, to the movie Zombieland (and the upcoming film version of Max Brooks’ World War Z), flesheaters are everywhere. In fact, they’re so much everywhere that I have started worrying that zombies were reaching that too-much-of-a-good-thing spot that vampires reached right around the second Twilight book.

So, it was with some curiosity and a fair bit of skepticism that I read Colson Whitehead’s most recent book, Zone One. The story follows three days in the life of Mark Spitz (no, not that Mark Spitz), a survivor of a zombie apocalypse, who is working to help the government re-establish an outpost of civilization in lower Manhattan.

Spitz is employed as a “sweeper”, part of a team whose job it is to clean out straggler zombies from buildings in the Zone. Over the course of the novel, Spitz reflects on how he came to be there, his relationships with his teammates, the fall of modern civilization, and its prospects for rebirth.

There are two types of zombies in Whitehead’s world: the vast majority are the mindless, ravenous hordes that we all know and love and the other are a rare type of “malfunctioning” undead. These poor creatures spend endless days repeating a single task from the fallen world: standing at a copy machine, pushing a broom around a room, holding a skillet in a long-unused kitchen. They don’t attack people and never even seem to notice them. It is these stragglers that Spitz is most interested in and curious about.

Whitehead is no hack “genre” writer either – his literary novels over the past decade have been critically well received and have even been finalists for prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. And, boy, can the man put a sentence together. (Of the sort that makes me despair as a writer, knowing that I’ll probably never write sentences that good.) Using power metaphors and allusions, Whitehead transforms the day-to-day drudgery of Spitz’s Zone One existence into something beyond a horror story. It is, in a way, horror literature.

In Zone One, Whitehead turns the view of the post-apocalyptic world back onto the trappings of our world and civilization – the technologies we take for granted, our attachment to material goods, and our societal preoccupations – and plays on our own desire to “chuck it all away and start over”. The scenes with the malfunctioning zombies, stuck in the pointless, repetitive lives are particularly well done. And through it, Spitz becomes sort of a 21^st century everyman who sheds the modern world, but doesn’t particularly mourn it.

The book is an engaging societal and human commentary, masterfully written against (and within) a now-familiar zombie apocalypse backdrop that manages something remarkable: a fresh take on a genre that I thought was getting stale.

Four stars out of five.

Marvel Zombies- NCCW

Before there were black lanterns or even red lanterns, before there was Zombie Land, there was Marvel Zombies.  It wasn't riding the coat tails of the zombie craze, it was at the forefront.  This one is old enough that I am going to throw out spoilers.

The basic premise is simple; what if zombies infected superheroes.  The answer provided by the comic is super zombies causing global devastation in their quest for ever more food.  Most companies would have went safe here and infected some lesser heroes to have the big names come in and safe the day.  Marvel infected the big names and just when you thought the next big name would save the day, he/she is infected as well.  It looks as Reed Richards' scientific mind is the only hope. While researching the virus, Reed falls in love with the beauty and simplicity of it and infects himself.  The series ends on a familiar note.  The heroes of the marvel Universe teaming up to face Galactus, to make him a zombie as well.

Naturally, I had some questions.  Wouldn't Wolverine's healing factor stave off infection?  Couldn't Colossus just stay in his steel form to prevent infection?  How can you bite something that intangible like Kitty Pryde?  The comic obviously works around these issues as it infects everyone.  If you want to know what your favorite marvel character looks like undead, this is the place to go.  

This week's quiz will be about zombies.

$200- This Romero movie changed the face of zombie movies in 1968.
$400-  Linnea Quigley made zombies hot in this movie.
$600-  Marvel had a series of comics with a zombie outbreak called this.
$800-  Max brooks wrote these two books about zombies.
$1000- Zombies originally were represented as slaves from this religion.

Zombie Run

I posted a review of Jennifer Hillier's Creep at My Alternate Reality.  Go check it out. 

No quiz this week, but I have a picture category coming up that should be fun. 

On to the Zombie Run.  On October 22, 2011 in Baltimore, zombies will attack.  You must survive the zombie apocolypse by successfully navigating this 5k obstacle course populated with zombies that would love nothing more than to sample your flesh.  Upon completion you can find other survivors and start rebuilding civilization with life music and food. 

Runners are given a flag belt, when all the flags are gone they are dead, or undead depending on how hungry the zombies were and if they were dismembered.  There will be health bonuses throughout the course that can help you to survive.  The course has twelve obstacles, I could tell you the obstacles but that wouldn't be fair.   The course is 5k-10k long and it is a race with prizes.  Yeah, 5-10k, so choose your path wisely. 

If you don't feel like running from zombie, but still want go to the after party, you can even buy a pass for that.  Looks like they are trying to get these things started around the country.  I think it is probably good training for the inevitable zombie outbreak.    So, be on the lookout for one near you.   It is a bit pricey for a race at $67 bucks but you do get a cool party afterwards and are chased by zombies in makeup during. 

Deadgirl (2008)

A lot of times when I am watching a movie or a tv show that my wife finds disturbing, she will ask me why I am watching it and ask how it will affect me or some other silly question.  Usually, I watch these shows because, at some level, I find them enjoyable.  She was asleep when I watched Deadgirl, which is funny because if she would have asked why I was watching it, I might have agreed with her and turned it off. 

It is a train wreck of a film.  Not that it is shot or acted bad, but train wreck in the sense that you can't look away.  I kept thinking to myself that I couldn't believe someone thought this movie up.  Well, actually I can, but I can't believe that they then wrote this idea down. 

Plot-  Two teens find a "corpse" in an abandoned mental hospital that isn't really dead and, it is later shown, can't be killed.  She is chained to a gourney and covered in plastic.  The bad influence teen is getting pretty excited about seeing a naked girl, even though he thinks she is dead.  The "normal" teen is getting pretty freaked out.  The evil teen then cops a feel and they realize that the body is indeed alive, and this is where the movie dives off the deepend.  Normal teen states he doesn't want to "have fun" with the chained down girl, but agrees to keep her secret. 
The next day, evil teen makes normal teen come back and witness that the girl can't be killed.  He apparently discovered this as the deadgirl started snapping her teeth and he wanted to teach her a lesson.  Of course the beating she sustained has done nothing for her looks and now she has bullet holes in her stomach from the second demostration.  Weirdo evil teen seems to be even more turned on and quits going to school to have sex with the zombie on a pretty much constant basis.  Worse he reqruits another kid at school to have sex with the zombie when he can't (maybe he thinks she will get lonely).  Not really understanding the movie at all at this point and it gets weirder from here. 
Characters-  They do a pretty good job of fleshing out the characters and the acting isn't bad, but I just am not sure that character motivations would have taken the characters where they go.  I find it hard to fathom that one person would act like that, let alone almost every character.  The film portrays men as nothing but sex addicts that will drop their pants for anything, and I mean anything, that is offered. 

Overall- I don't know that I can actually recommend this movie for anyone.  It has been a long time since a movie disturbed me and this one hit that note and hung with it from about 30 minutes in to the very end.  Not sure why I finished it.  I guess I was just hoping that the "normal" teen would redeem himself. 

Cell Spoiler Free Book Review-A to Z Challenge

I went into cell knowing nothing about the book except that it was by Stephen King.  Imaging my surprise when I saw that the book was dedicated to George Romero and Richard Matheson.  I knew exactly what kind of book it was going to be at that point. 

Plot-  This is a survivor's tale.  I am unsure why survivors feel the need to travel, I mean for one character it is obvious why he wants to walk across two states, but the others made me wonder.  The story borrows from The Stand somewhat, which is okay because The Stand was an excellent book and very well done.  The Stand was better though.  Not sure that the book has aged well.  Cell phones are so different now then they were upon the writing of this book.  The story does start off lightening fast and then slows down into a strolling past and then kind of rushes to the finish.  Of course the ending will leave you guessing. 

Characters-  There is a comic book writer/illustrator, a religion hating gay guy, and a teenage girl that knows about Neal Stephenson (I strongly doubt that this is possible).  Not completely stereotypical yet they completely are.  We don't really get to know the characters all that well.  This story is plot driven and we get reactions of the characters but no real characterization.  In other words, you won't feel connected to these characters. 

Overall-  It was entertaining.  I have read better King and I have read better survivor tales, I have read better King survivor tales.  It isn't bad.  This book was about the idea and I get that, but I wish he would have fleshed it out a bit more.  It may have added a couple of hundred more pages, but it would have been a better book.  Kingophiles will have read this arlready,  but for everyone else I say you aren't missing anything by passing it up, but it is somewhat entertaining. 

High school Of The Dead or H.O.T. Dead

Image via Wikipedia

I was looking through the free on demand selections and came across High school Of The Dead ep.1. I know, I capatilized some of the wrong words, that is because it is abreviated H.O.T. Dead. The synopsis said it was zombies so I was there.

Ummmmm..... can you say fan service. It was borderline ridiculous. If that is the demographic you are going for you should just go all the way. With the amount of language and violence that is in this, there won't be many kids watching, so upping the ante to adult only wouldn't change much in terms of sales. I didn't have much a problem with it until it started getting in the way of story.

Sure it is episode 1 of a half hour show, but all you get is how the zombies infected the school. There are some really cool gory scenes but overall it didn't really set the series up well. That might have been because they needed about 15 minutes of the half hour they had to show fan service. The writing could have been a bit stronger and less cliched but some of that could be translation.

Animation wise it was pretty. Clean lines, the zombies are done well. The attacks are gory. The character design is what you would expect. Nothing earth shattering. The voice acting was par for Anime. Not great but passable.

Overall, it was okay. Not enough to get me to buy the DVD, but enough that I might watch other episodes if I saw them available. The fact that I can't watch this with my wife or kids kind of limits its viewing potential.

Related articles

• Janai's 2010 Year in Review: Top 5 Best and Worst Anime (janaiblog.com)

The Crazies- Spoiler Free Review

I heard this movie was pretty good, so I tracked down a copy.  I remember something about when it came to the theater, but I am sure it did poorly and no one made a big deal about the DVD release.  It is a remake of a movie that I have not seen from 1973, I believe (too lazy to look, but not so lazy that I won't waste a sentence explaining why I didn't look).  It stars Timothy Olyphant (from other movies starring Timothy Olyphant) and a bunch of people I have never heard of.

Plot- Yeah, you have been here before.  Even if it wasn't a remake, this is the plot to several zombie movies with some subtle changes.  The movie keeps a pretty quick pace and does an excellent job of setting mood and building suspense.  The military is punching bag, which is over done and not fair to people that are in or have been in the military. 

Characters- As the action takes place over the course of about 3 days, you can't expect too much character development, but there wasn't any really.  Characters act in the way that you expect them to act.  The actors all did well in their one dimensional roles, but the deputy puts forth the most memorable performance.

Cinematography- A lot of the movie was too dark.  I was watching at night with the lights out and I couldn't make everything out, this may have been to help establish the mood, but it was distracting.  It is possible that this is just a problem with my equipment so let me know if you experienced anything different. 

Overall-  It was decent way to pass some time.  It will make you jump in a couple places and that usually makes a movie worth it for me.  It is a retread plot that doesn't say anything.  This movie is happy just being a horror movie.  I would keep the kiddies way from this one as it is pretty gory and intense at places.  There is also some language.  If you like zombie movies (technically they were not zombies, but they were) you should enjoy this movie.  Just don't expect any social commentary.

On a seperate note is Timothy Olyphant just a poor man's Bill Paxton?


 

All Hallows Eve

I wasn’t expecting to dress up this year but boredom got the best of me.  You see, we were going to meet up with another family and go trick or treating.  I start getting the kids ready for a 6pm departure at about 4:30pm.  It doesn’t take that long to get them ready contrary to what every Sunday morning church departure has taught me.  At 5:30pm we make the call to see if the other family is ready and they tell us 6:30.

 

I had an hour surrounded by face paint and an imagination.  The easiest thing, I think, is a zombie.  15 minutes later, I am done with make up and bored again.  In my mind, I associate Black Lantern’s with zombies.  Not a huge leap and I wonder what the black lantern symbol is.  I check it out on google and my first thought is that I could draw that pretty easily.  So 20 minutes later I am standing there with a black lantern symbol on the chest of my black leather jacket. 

Of course no one knew that I was a black lantern.  I did get compliments on my face paint though.  One person asked what the symbol on my chest was but didn’t know what a black lantern was and probably didn’t know what a green lantern was either. 

"The blackest night falls from the skies,
The darkness grows, as all light dies,
We crave your hearts and your demise,
By my black hand— the dead shall rise!" –Black Lantern Creed

The Walking Dead on AMC-Spoiler Free

Image by VJnet via Flickr

The Walking Dead on AMC pretty much rocked.  It is pretty brutal stuff and I see why they put the disclaimer at the beginning. 

The show is about people.  So far, I care about every character they have developed.  That is great because it creates immediate tension.  The characters all seem to have depth as well.

The creep out factor is pretty good.  One or two zombies are cool looking but not creepy, but the hordes are super creepy and super tense.  The FX are better than most zombie movies, I am looking at you zombie strippers.

This is going to be a show that I look forward to watching on a weekly basis. 

Horror Quiz part 3 zombie edition

All answers must be in the form of a question, answer in the comments, and no cheating. First person with the most correct answers will get a SciFi Media "no prize" button to display on their website.

1.  He is the creator of Night of the Living Dead.

2.  This Zombie franchise started in 1985 with a punk rock feel, and can be credited with causing anyone that dresses as a zombie likely saying brains, living brains. 

3.  This Zombie spoof of 2004 was masterfully created by Simon Pegg and Edger Wright. 

4.  This tv show, set to debut Halloween Night 2010 on AMC, is based on a comic book of the same name. 

5.  28 Days later has zombie like creatures that are actually infected with this virus. 

Sears zombifies their site

Sears, in the spirit of halloween (or are they a sponser of The Walking Dead?), have converted a page of the website to cater to any zombies that would like to shop.  The page has a zombie gift guige, twitter feed, and even a zombie maker.  So, it should be fun for the whole family. 

Link to your zombie buddy in the comments.

ANOKS: Zombie-time

Vampires have been the “it” undead for a while now – and why not? They’re smart. They’re really long-lived and mysterious. Needless to say, they’re dangerous – ninja-sneaky and super-strong all in one package. And in recent incarnations they ooze all sorts of sexual attraction as evidenced by so many victims going through the whole “No, no, no – yes, yes, yes!” arc while being exsanguinated.

But let’s move down the undead foodchain a bit. Actually, let’s move all the way to the bottom of it. To zombies. You’ve really lost the undead lottery if you end up as a zombie. Why? Because zombies are like the anti-vampire. They’re stupid. They’re clumsy. They’re slow. And zombies probably test the limit of Rule 34.

But I will say that zombies get an “A” for effort. I mean, the thing about zombies is that they are relentless. You can’t talk a zombie out of what it wants to do. And you’re going to tire and need to sleep, but they don’t. And unlike vampires, they don’t stop shambling when the sun rises, so no break there.

And if you’re not careful, there can end up being a lot of them – which is where zombies end up getting really dangerous. I mean anyone with an axe can take out one zombie, but 10? 100? 1000? Man, you got a problem.

Which brings us to the latest installment for A Nightmare on Kel’s Street: Night of the Living Dead and Zombieland.

Night of the Living Dead is THE seminal zombie movie. Made in the late-60s on a shoestring budget, it tells the story of a group of people that attempt to survive the initial appearance of “ghouls” – the recently dead come back to life, or unlife, such as it is. Being filmed in black-and-white with no real known actors gives it a sense of realism and the movie, which starts off seeming like a pseudo-comedy gets pretty ugly, pretty fast with some really gruesome scenes and some gut-turning “gnaw-gnaw-gnaw” sound effects. Despite all the remakes and sequels, it still works. 8 stars.

Zombieland, which came out a couple of years ago, is on the other end of the zombie-apocalypse – after the zombies have toppled civilization. In this send up, a nerd, a mercenary (wonderfully played by Woody Harrelson) and two sisters are survivors trying to make their way to some sort of safety in a zombie apocalypse. Poking fun and both people and the entire zombie-genre, these guys get it right – and with really one of the best surprise cameos in a long time. A lot of goofy fun. 8 stars.

So, maybe zombies are getting a little bit of due after all this vampire-love. In fact, AMC is producing an adaption of “The Walking Dead” – a series which will take place in a not-nearly-so-funny post zombie-apocalypse America.

Hmmm… now I’m hungry.

Where Would You Go in Time?

 Tom Gelsthorpe of the Cape Cod Times asks this question inspied by H.G. Welles Time Machine, and I thought it was a great one to ask myself.   Where would you go in time and why? 

Personally, I would go into the future.  The past has been written about and sure it would be neat to go back to biblical times and ask questions to Jesus, but I don't speak Aramaic, Hebrew, or Greek.  I suppose I could take a translator, but I would have to pay that person. 

I would go into the future and while I may still need a translator, I would be able to find one in the future.  I don't think I would go too far, just ten to twenty years.  Any farther and I would risk not being able to comprehend the technology in any true way, or maybe the lack of technology as the world is being over run by the zombie horde.  On second thought, the past isn't looking so bad. 

Where would you go?

Gimmick Books

In the recent past there have been more than a few gimmick books come out. They are perpetually coming out, really, but the ones I am refering to are the horror gimmick books.

I guess it all started with The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. This excellent book was both funny and launched a zombie craze in literature. This was soon followed by the very novel (pardon the pun) idea of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Not saying that P&P&Z is a great book, only that the idea was very clever.

Now, it seems, every book ever written is bein given the treatment. I hear they are going to rewrite I Am Legend and put more Vampires in it. Then call it I Am Legend and Vampires. It is kind of rediculous and I imagine some of these books are selling quite well, but they are just a novelty.