Posts Tagged ‘fast zombies’
Tuesday, January 19th, 2021
TRAIN TO BUSAN PRESENTS PENINSULA is, of course, director Yeon Sang-ho’s sequel to his excellent zombie hit TRAIN TO BUSAN (itself a live action sequel to his less-widely-known animated movie SEOUL STATION). Although PENINSULA is officially a TRAIN TO BUSAN presentation according to the American title, these are sequels in sort of the George Romero tradition: same world, different sets of characters. Different things that happen to people in South Korea trying to survive a fast-zombie outbreak. So, although I recommend all of them, you could watch them in any order.
This one starts maybe a little bit after the other two movies. Jung-Seok (Gang Dong-won, ILLANG: THE WOLF BRIGADE) uses his station as a captain in the Marines to get his sister and her family a spot on an evacuation ship. But of course a guy on the boat starts twitching weird and next thing you know there’s running and screaming and biting. This is just a pre-credits sequence but, like TRAIN TO BUSAN, it captures a deep sense of loss as Jung-Seok and his brother-in-law Chul-min (Kim Do-yoon, THE WAILING) see their loved ones turn into monsters. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: fast zombies, Gang Dong-won, Kim Do-yoon, Korean cinema, Yeon Sang-ho, zombies
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Monday, August 24th, 2020
August 16, 1985
THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD is a movie that I already reviewed thoroughly for Halloween 2015, but it’s such a classic I felt it would be wrong to exclude from this retrospective. So feel free to click on that link for a straightforward piece about some of the reasons I love the movie, but this one will zero in on a few aspects I feel are interesting in context with other movies we’ve discussed from the Summer of 1985 movie season.
As a horror-comedy that’s more of a real horror movie than a parody, RETURN arguably has a kinship with FRIGHT NIGHT. But obviously its closest comparison is its brother from another producer, George Romero’s DAY OF THE DEAD. Earlier in the summer I wrote about some of the ways DAY fit the specific moment of 1985. RETURN does it in a totally different way. Romero’s takes a grey, grim approach to railing against the Reagan era, while RETURN writer-director Dan O’Bannon does the EC Comics and punk rock version. Like so many of the movies we’ve been looking at, it’s a very soundtrack-oriented movie, embracing music of the time. But it’s not Huey Lewis, Cyndi Lauper or even Oingo Boingo – it’s punk rock bands like T.S.O.L., The Cramps, The Damned and The Flesh Eaters. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Clu Gulager, Dan O'Bannon, fast zombies, James Karen, Jewel Shepard, John Philbin, John Russo, Linnea Quigley, Mark Venturini, Miguel A. Nunez Jr., punk, Summer of 1985, Tony Gardner, zombies
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews | 27 Comments »
Thursday, April 2nd, 2020
By now most horror fans have experienced or heard about the greatness of TRAIN TO BUSAN, the 2016 South Korean fast-zombie-plague movie. If you’re in the latter category, I know it’s easy to believe the hype but still feel no urgency to see it, because yeah, I get it. Zombies on a train. So I’ll just say again that while it’s impressive that it made me think “Okay, it turns out I do want another fucking zombie movie,” the real achievement is making me so attached to the characters and attuned to the tragedy of their horror movie circumstances that I produced actual tears near the end. Have I ever cried from a horror movie before? Not that I remember.
When I went to write the review I was surprised to learn that writer/director Yeon Sang-ho’s previous movies were all animated. He’d been doing animated shorts since the ‘90s, before the features KING OF PIGS (2011), THE FAKE (2013). Even more interesting, TRAIN TO BUSAN is sort of a sequel or tie-in to an animated feature called SEOUL STATION that Yeon did immediately before it. I didn’t realize it had come out in the U.S. until I noticed it streaming on Shudder. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: fast zombies, homeless, Korean cinema, Lee Joon, Ryu Seung-ryong, Shim Eun-kyung, Yeon Sang-ho, zombies
Posted in Cartoons and Shit, Horror, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Thursday, October 29th, 2015
There are a bunch of movies that I consider among my very favorites, that I refer to all the time, and then when I try to make a link to them in another review I realize what in God’s name, how have I not officially reviewed the greatest zombie movie ever made by somebody who is not named George Romero? And what does this say about me as a person?
Not being made by Romero was actually kind of the whole point of this one. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD co-writer (and infamous 30th Anniversary Edition maker) John Russo disagreed with Romero about how to do a sequel. Romero thought it should be one of the best movies of all time and Russo wanted to go a different direction. So Romero made DAWN OF THE DEAD and Russo wrote a book called THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD which apparently starts with a bus crash in a small town where the locals aren’t able to impale the brains of the dead like they usually do. (The book is very rare and pricey so I haven’t read it for myself).
The film rights ended up with Tobe Hooper with DARK STAR star/Jodorowsky’s DUNE would-be effects guy/ALIEN writer Dan O’Bannon working on the script. When Hooper left to do LIFEFORCE instead O’Bannon took over as director and rewrote the whole thing to be more humorous and have nothing to do with the book. (Russo got a story credit along with Rudy Ricci, another Romero buddy who wrote THERE’S ALWAYS VANILLA and was one of the bikers in DAWN OF THE DEAD. In the end Russo wrote the novelization of the movie that came out of the book that he wrote in order to make into a movie.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Clu Gulager, Dan O'Bannon, Don Calfa, fast zombies, James Karen, Jewel Shepard, John Philbin, John Russo, Linnea Quigley, Mark Venturini, Miguel Nunez, punk, Rudy Ricci, Thom Mathews, zombies
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews | 30 Comments »
Thursday, March 18th, 2004
SPOILER ALERT !!
Hi, everyone. “Moriarty” here with some Rumblings From The Lab…
Next up, we’ve got our friend from Seattle, the one and only Vern…
Boys,
A few months ago I would not think I would be saying this. But I just saw the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, and I did not want to perpetrate violent acts against anybody afterwards. Not the Scooby Doo guy, not the commercial director guy, not anybody. If the Scooby Doo dude would’ve been standing right there when I came out, and there was a clear opening to punch the guy hard in the balls, or toss him through a windshield like Steven Seagal did to that pimp in the opening scene of OUT FOR JUSTICE, I still wouldn’t have done it. I would’ve been like, “It’s cool man, it’s cool.”
That’s high praise. I would not punch the writer of this movie in the balls. Put that on the poster, fuckers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: fast zombies, remakes, Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Zack Snyder, zombies
Posted in AICN, Horror, Reviews | 5 Comments »
