zombie

The Walking Dead

mandy — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Like any good geek, I love me some zombies. So, of course I tuned into AMC’s new zombie show, The Walking Dead. And I found myself disappointed.

The show starts with our hero, Rick, and his misogynistic partner, Shane, talking about how women and men are different. This conversations seems to function solely to tell us that Shane is a bit of a prick, Rick is a genuinely good guy (which I didn’t really buy), and Lori, Rick’s wife, is a bitch. Basically, it took about ten minutes for me to realize I was probably going to blog about this show, and not in a good way.

The dudes, who are police officers, get into a shootout. Rick is shot, and we see Shane bringing him flowers in the hospital. (He assures us that he didn’t pick them out himself, however. That’s for sissy ladies. And he’s not gay or anything gross.) Rick wakes up, the flowers are dead, and the hospital is full of corpses and ruin.

I did like the set up here; Rick has no fucking clue what it going on, and he’s still injured, so he basically cowers home, where he discovers his empty house. He runs into Morgan and his young son, Duane. Their family was heading to the refugee camp in Atlanta when Morgan’s wife became infected and got all zombified. She still hangs about, and they can’t leave with her haunting them. Morgan wants to “put her down” and even attempts to in this episode, but he can’t.

Anyway, Rick and Morgan arm themselves, keep open a line of communication, and Rick sets off for Atlanta. We find out that Lori and Carl are with Shane (and Lori is with Shane) outside of the city, because it’s been overrun with zombies. Rick runs into the city on a horse (looking straight out of a video game), gets his horse eaten by zombies, and takes an incredible amount of time to seal himself up in a tank. (Seriously, this guy must have the lowest amount of adrenaline ever present in a human being. He moves like molasses.) In case you missed it, he’s a goddamn cowboy.

So far, I liked the story okay, and it seems promising for the character development of the people the show seems to want us to care about. Unfortunately, none of those characters are ladies, who exist in this pilot for the sole purpose of helping to advance the dudes’ development. Morgan’s wife is in the refrigerator, and the only reason we even care about her is that Morgan and Duane are all traumatized by this. She gets a lot of face time in this episode because we’re supposed to see her (rather pretty for a zombie) face through Morgan’s eyes.

The only other lady with a name is Lori, who gets very little screen time, and most of that is devoted to kissing Shane (presumably so we can see how whore-y she is since she got over her husband faster than it took him to heal from a gunshot wound). Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the writers here; they may not want us to judge her so quickly. But it’s difficult to tell since we were already told in the beginning of the episode that she’s a bitch, and she doesn’t ever get a side in that conversation, because she doesn’t actually matter.

This episode failed the Bechdel test hard, despite being an hour and a half long. But I think this show could get better. According to the cast of characters, there are some women (though significantly fewer than men) playing parts in the show later. It's possible, then, that they will get some personalities and plot lines not connected to their dudes and romantic relationships. But I was really disappointed by the premiere and am not feeling particularly optimistic.

Attention The Walking Dead writers: women are not plot devices. And we don’t like watching shows that don’t think women matter as characters. Fix it.

Cross-posted at Geek Feminism

Written by: Courtney Stoker, November 8th 2010

Survival of the Dead

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Directed by George Romero

Magnolia Pictures

Pop films that take on politics tend to do so as an add-on and go all over the place. Since I have come late to zombie films and director George Romero, perhaps I am being unfair to Romero and his Survival of the Dead, the latest of his zombie films, in expecting consistent politics from a gore fest, but perhaps dystopia deserves its due.

The only zombie film I have ever seen—if “seen” can mean glimpsed out of the corner of a fearful child’s eye—was a production rerun on afternoon television sometime in the 1950s, in my case, to keep children content while they waited for a school bus. However, like Romero, I was a fan of pre-code horror comic books. A gloomy disposition predisposes me to dystopia. With this risk factor, perhaps I was slated to become zombie food.

The movie takes place in the near future in which a disease has conferred a horrid form of immortality on the dead. National Guardsman Sarge (Alan Van Sprang) is on killing duty in the morgue, where bodies spring to murderous life. A fellow Guardsman who refuses to shoot a buddy-turned-zombie is summarily executed; Sarge and a few comrades say enough already—actually, “I didn’t sign up for this”—and go AWOL into a lawless United States, where the only protection is individual armed self-protection, but nighttime comics telling zombie jokes can still be downloaded on a PC. Surviving as thieves, Sarge and his band are busy not only killing zombies coming back to life, but also dealing with the generalized violent breakdown of society.

After a confrontation with another band of renegades, a young man (Devon Bostick) who survives the encounter (and provides some additional snarky, intergenerational conflict) joins up with them to take off in an armored van with a safe full of money. The posse ends up heading for Plum Island (ostensibly off the coast of Delaware, though the film was shot in Canada) because an Internet huckster, Patrick O’Flynn, is luring social outcasts, now much of the population, there to rob them. O’Flynn has been exiled from the island as a result of a long-standing family feud with another clan. (How two Irish clans got on this island in the first place is left unexplained, but there are hints of religious fundamentalism and right-wing survivalism.) A great subplot is the hopeless courting of the lesbian tomboy by her would-be Latin lover/comrade in arms and the genuine nonsexual affection between them.

Romero is quoted as saying the movie is about war, but it could as easily be about too permissive gun laws justified by the Second Amendment. Or out-of-control conflicts over different strategies for dealing with a serious threat—the overlay of the feud. Or it could just be a corkboard for any one-off social commentary—about professional salaries or the narrow perspectives of small towns—that can be stuck in a spot in the plot.

The real Plum Island, off the coast of Long Island, is the site of the federal Animal Disease Center run by the Department of Homeland Security, and at one time a secret bio-weapons research facility. There, any wild mammal is said to be shot on sight. This is O’Flynn’s solution to the zombie problem, while his rival, Muldoon, wants to rehabilitate them.

“Zombie”—as in banks—is fast becoming an overused metaphor. In the book Imaginal Machines, cultural theorist Stevphen Shukaitis presents an analysis of the capitalist transformation of human workers into labor power, living into dead labor; cooptation/recuperation of social movements into nightmare versions of themselves; and the question of whether such altered movements could be truly revitalized or need to be put out of their misery—all strung, along with their sources, on the extended metaphor of zombification.

Personally, I like zombies better as the main attraction, when they are actors in heavy makeup “getting their brains” blown out in movies; and when social commentary, however scattershot, is the sideshow.

Written by: Frances Chapman, June 10th 2010

Zombies of Mass Destruction: A Political Zomedy

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:03:00 +0000

Directed by Kevin Hamedani

Typecast Pictures

Is there anything more delightful than a well-done zombie film? How about a well-done zombie film with an obvious 9/11 parallel and smart, witty female, minority, and gay protagonists? All this and more can be yours with Zombies of Mass Destruction, which is as much social satire and metaphor as a gory, jolly, bloody good undead time.

Zombies of Mass Destruction is set in idyllic Port Gamble, Washington, on the date of September 25th, 2003. The main characters are quickly introduced with few subtle nuances, since the film is as much about stereotypes as politics and zombies, and relies heavily on quick and dirty celluloid tropes. This isn't done to quickly get a point across in a white hat/black hat sense, but to poke gentle fun at the extremes of behavior in the age of the culture wars. The living dead take over Port Gamble as the apparent result of a terrorist attack; a swarthy, turbaned, Muslim man shown on a televised news broadcast claims credit for the zombie plague.

The town reverend hates everyone a stereotypically cinematic man of the church is expected to hate (“Unitarians, gays, and pro-choicers”) and has the town mayor on his side. There's an _au natural _quasi-hippie environmentalist who abhors violence (referred to as a “godless Jezebel” by the reverend), the jingoistic flag-waving Republican who is suspicious of and hateful to anyone perceived to be the Other, and the funny-accented, dark-skinned Iranian man who runs a restaurant in town. In between this stock character parade are the protagonists: Frida, the daughter of the Iranian restaurant owner, and Tom and Lance, a gay couple visiting Port Gamble to inform Tom's mother that he is homosexual.

Frida, Tom, and Lance are given more character shading than the other roles in the film. Frida, in particular, is smart, witty, and not the usual “last girl standing.” She shuts down her ignorant boyfriend when he, like most of the townspeople, mistakes her cultural identity as Iraqi rather than Iranian by cleverly telling him, “There's Norway you're getting into these panties.” (One particular detail that also struck me was the fact that she took off her high-heeled shoes to run once the zombies began swarming the town, hence avoiding any eye-rolling “watch the silly girl fall down and twist her ankle” moments.) Tom and Lance are also quick-witted and resourceful in fending off masses of attacking zombies (including Tom's own mother), and improvise well with available zombie-killing tools.

Meanwhile, the town reverend is ecstatic at the idea of Armageddon approaching, and is convinced the “war” will be won because “history's greatest zombie is on our side.” (As someone whose favorite exclamation of surprise is “Sweet Zombie Jesus!” this had me nearly in tears.) Taking sanctuary from the zombies in the town church, the reverend, the mayor, the hippie environmentalist, Tom, Lance, and various town churchgoers find themselves at odds politically and spiritually in a fine satire of the last eight years.

Without giving too much away, the film ends in a delightfully near-sacrilegious parody of the news footage Americans will recall seeing post-9/11: hand-drawn posters of memorials and missing loved ones and sales of tacky “I Remember” t-shirts. In a televised press conference, the remaining citizens of Port Gamble are admonished to remain “vigilant” and “report suspicious behavior.” Perhaps the over-the-top political parody combined with the stringy, graphic gore of the undead is not to everyone's taste. As a lifelong zombie fan, however, I was thrilled with the film's sympathetic, if somewhat humorous, portrayals of young minority women and gay couples.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, December 8th 2009

Grindhouse

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 13:44:00 +0000

Directed by Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez

Dimension Films

(spoiler alert) It is settled. Grindhouse is officially deemed a feminist film because, well, I say it is. Okay, truth be told, Grindhouse never goes beyond the kind of surface level, individualistic, pop feminism that's all "rah-rah for girl power," but given the history of this directorial duo, that seemed obvious going in. I mean, have you seen the advertisements? Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) kicking some undead ass with a machine gun for a leg? That's, like, sooooo feminist! Don't ya think? And when arrogant stalker Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) feels the wrath of a turning tide after he fucks with the wrong group of fierce and fearless ladies in a car chase that you must see, I was cheering for more than Rosario Dawson's hot legs as she delivers a fatal high kick. Who says feminism can't be heteronormatively sexy? Seriously.

Planet Terror: I'm a huge fan of zombie flicks, especially ones by George Romero (Night of the Living Dead et al.), though I always watch them with a grain of salt. I enjoy the campy humor and the underlying (or sometimes blatant) social criticism that one tends to get from this particular horror sub-genre. Take, for example, the cause of the mayhem in _Planet Terror: _the military kills Osama Bin Laden before the Bush administration was ready for him to die. Since his death takes a chunk of the fear factor out of the so-called War on Terror the Bushies react by using biochemical weapons on the battalion of U.S. soldiers that exterminated Bin Laden in order to prevent them from leaking the confidential and (possibly) detrimental information to the media. Given the complete incompetence of the Bush Administration, it shouldn't be a surprise then that the biochemical exposure actually causes the soldiers to get their undead on and reek bloody havoc. This is classic zombie film anti-government sentiment that I can appreciate since I’m a bit of a cynic.

Speaking of cynicism, our lead character, Cherry Darling, has a healthy dose of it at the beginning of Planet Terror. Throughout the film, she reinforces an internal doubt that her “useless talents” (like the ability to do a backbend) will some day serve a greater purpose. Before all is said and done, they do, of course, which gives Cherry a big boost of self-confidence. The absurd number of subplots pertaining to the numerous semi-major characters in Planet Terror leads me to believe that Robert Rodriguez was trying to cram every zombie cliché in the book into his allotted 105-minute time slot. Fortunately, it works flawlessly, giving undead fans a chuckle every few minutes. (My giggle at a mother’s sardonic advice to her son to shoot a gun “like you do in your video games” turned into a hearty laugh when her second line of advice — "Be careful not to shoot your own face off.” — yields just this outcome.)

Death Proof: One gender stereotype that has been played out in tired movie cliches is the one about guys being obsessed with cars. Death Proof turns this little ditty on its head when the bad-ass dude in a bad-ass car makes the mistake of attacking some bad-ass women, who simply don’t know the meaning of the word victim. Zoe Bell, an amazing stuntwoman who worked with Quentin Tarentino on a few of his past films (including being Uma Thurmond's stunt double in Kill Bill), is featured here in a car chase that has moments that might make your heart stop - literally. Half of the lightning-speed chase features the uber-talented Bell clinging to the hood of the car. Yeah, that shit is crazy! And hence the title of the Tarentino half of this double-feature: it's the girl, not the car, that is death proof.

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, April 21st 2007