Dawn of the Lead

This isn’t quite zombies, but I figured it might be of interest for a few reasons:

1. If you’re a zombie geek like yours truly, you just might be interested in the other themes connected to the zombie phenomenon: films about the apocalypse, catastrophes, the supernatural and infectious disease. Man, I liked Titanic. And the end of the world scenes in the otherwise awful 2012. Not to mention the views of abandoned New York in I Am Legend.
2. George A. Romero is the father of modern zombie cinema. While his latest work isn’t much to write home about, he can still claim credit for a lot of the staples of the genre.
3. I’m interested in remakes. While a lot of people consider them more or less sacrilegious, I think that even some movie classics can benefit from it. Many great horror films are hampered by hammy acting and ultra small production values. Say what you will, but a cheap movie often looks cheap, even if it’s a classic. Not to mention the fact, that the remakes often draw people to the originals.

With that out of the way, here’s the trailer for the remake of Romero’s often forgotten 1973 (this is between Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead) movie The Crazies. I must admit that I never finished watching the original (see 3, above), which frankly suprised me (see 1 and 2, above). Let’s see if this can bring me to like the original as well.

And for comparison purposes, here’s the trailer for the original. There just seems to be an itty bitty anti-government sentiment there,  don’t you think? It appears that Romero wasn’t a big fan of the Vietnam War, ongoing at the time.

To tie in with the coming movie remake, a motion comic book is coming out through iTunes. Looks pretty nice, too!

The scheduled release date for the remake is February 26, 2010 and February 23 for the motion comic.