Dawn of the Lead

While it has been making rounds as bootlegs of various quality shot in this year’s Comic Con, the trailer for AMC’s The Walking Dead has finally been released.

I’m probably not wrong in thinking that this is a dream come true for a lot of zombie fans out there, yours truly included. The Walking Dead is THE zombie comic on the market, and to see it turned into a tv series of one hour long episodes is just excellent.

Sorry if I sound like a brainless fanboi, but it looks absolutely perfect. There’s no other way to describe it. It even has the guy from Love Actually in it!

The series premieres on this year’s Halloween, I can’t wait.

More info on AMC’s official The Walking Dead site.

Wow, it’s been a while since I posted anything on zombies. While the zombie world is pretty much obsessed with the upcoming Walking Dead tv series, it doesn’t mean that it’s the only interesting thing on the radar. I’ve talked plenty of times about Europeans solidly dominating the zombie movie scene at the moment, and I’m happy to say that there seems to be what looks like a worthy addition, this time from Germany.

Judging from the trailer, Toxic Lullaby looks and feels very much like 28 Days Later. The story (as lifted from the official site and run through Google Translate and my mad high school German skills) is standard zombie flick fare:

Eloise wakes up after a drug binge in a broken and hostile world. Separated from her friends she learns to survive in a bizarre reality . The world around her is in chaos. She learns that the reason for this is grounded in a financial crisis and the speculation about the last food resources and their total destruction. The use of biological weapons spread among the people a virus that has turned  them into dangerous mutants.

Caught in this desperate situation, Eloise joins a group of people as they are driven by the desire to escape this nightmare.

Nothing new there, but the trailer looks very very cool.

Toxic Lullaby appears to be coming out on DVD on September 11 this year.

See www.toxiclullaby.com for more info.

NZ can stand for two things: New Zealand and Nazi Zombies, and I’m seing no kiwi birds. For a low budget flick, this one doesn’t look half bad!

Visit the official site for more details.

Update June 19th 2011

This just in from the director himself (no, really, see the comments section):

Hey guys, thanks for posting about our movie. A Chance in Hell is actually a US movie, not New Zealand. We shot in Illinois back in February of 2010. We still don’t have a release date yet and I apologize, but I am eager to see what people think about the movie when they do finally get a chance to check it out.

-Tony Wash
Director
A Chance in Hell

I stand corrected, and would be more than willing to see this one!

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.

I’ve once again been trawling the internets for coming zombie flicks. Two sites have been most useful, namely Zombie Info and The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse. Definitely check them out! What I’ve collected here is but a teeny tiny fraction of the news they put out.

Let’s start out with E’Gad, Zombies! which is an upcoming 20 minute period zombie comedy, that the crew is hoping to turn it into a full feature in the future. I sincerely hope that this happens, as this looks most delightful. Historical zombies is a theme sadly neglected. Except for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which I couldn’t finish due to the clumsily tacked on, poorly written zombie content. See the film’s official homepage for more details.

Another unexplored niche is zombies in Africa. The game Resident Evil 5 immediately comes to mind, and I’m happy to see a film following the same lines. British film The Dead features a pilot that apparently crashlands somewhere in rural Africa, and ends up in the middle of a zombie crisis. Looks nice, and was shot on location in Burkina Faso, I believe. You can read an interview with the Co-Director here and visit the movie’s official home page here.

Back in the 70s, Italy was THE zombie movie country. They churned out tons of cheap zombie flicks, many of which were simply soft porn with gore. Of course there’s Lucio Fulci with his zombie classics and all, but most of it is pretty unremarkable. After forty years or so, the Italians once more get on the European zombie bandwagon with the Spanish, French, Serbians, Brits and Norwegians with the movie Eaters. Don’t be put off by the mention of Uwe Boll, he’s producing and not directing. I like the visuals, though the look CGI heavy. The trailer suggests some rather clichéd scenes and very very visceral gore, so the Italians are staying true to their roots. Two trailers follow.

First the Norwegians with Dead Snow, now the Danish with the upcoming short Opstandelsen. And the Finnish with jack all. Makes me want to cry.

And since it seems we’re getting very very international in this post, how about the indie Blind Death from Chile? As I mentioned before with Rec, somehow the fact that characters are speaking some other language than English makes it seem more real. I don’t know whether native English speakers have this feeling or not, though. Blind Death doesn’t look half bad!

For this last one no trailer exists yet, as production begins in Spring 2010. Anyway, these four words should rock anyone’s world:

Nazi zombies in 3D.

That’s right. What I’m talking about is a British movie named the 4th Reich, that tells the story with a classic theme: nazi super soldier experiments gone wrong. Really, you can’t go wrong with nazi zombies. I don’t know why, but you just can’t.

See the 4th Reich homepage for more details.

Phew. That’s a lot of upcoming zombie goodness right there.

Zombies have occasionally been seen in movies in CGI. There’s Resident Evil: Degeneration:

Which was unfortunately very aptly named. Steer well clear, it’s one of the worst features I’ve ever seen. The zombie action is fine, but the trailer is a good example of the awful acting, dreary dialogue and clichéd, predictable zombie flick events. “He’s dead. Oh wait, he’s not! Oh, he bit me in the leg!” Man, that’s fresh and original.

There are the zombie-like infected in I Am Legend that were frankly a bit disappointing:

CGI Zombies - you're doing it wrong

And in the future, there just might be A.D.

This here is a wonderful, wonderful teaser trailer  for a future – or rather potential, provided they can get funding – full-length CGI zombie movie. You can read an interview with the crew here. I really hope they get the cash to crank this baby out, as it looks delicious. Like Pixar teaming up with Tim Burton to do Night of the Living Dead. Don’t take my word for it, enjoy the trailer!

Remember Zone of the Dead, the Serbian zombie movie starring Ken Foree of original Dawn of the Dead fame, that I mentioned way back in may?

I for one am happy to hear that it’s finally getting its DVD-release outside Serbia, under the title Apocalypse of the Dead. The release date is set at March 1st this year. Pre-ordering can be done at Play.com, for example.

And for those of you not bothering to click on the link above, here’s the trailer again: