Even though I love the movie, I blame “Shaun of the Dead” for the new influx of zombie films popping up, especially the comedy based ones. The zombie film has always been a student and fan boy filmmaker’s favorite genre to use. Mostly because, in my opinion, it allows them to get a chance to play around with special effects and is cheap to do. You can always spot one of these cheap “fan” zombie films by the overuse of gore and the always-obvious Romero zombie trilogy influence. So the zombie genre is already bogged down with too many rip-offs and badly made films as it is.
Now, after “Shaun of the Dead” and the return of Romero with “Land of the Dead,” we are seeing it all over again, and it looks like we may be in for trouble. There is the NEW zombie-comedy Fido (See Clip Here) making the film festival rounds, and now the mocumentary American Zombie has popped up, and it looks kind of bad.
The Hollywood remake machine is also not left out, after the successful remake of “Dawn of the Dead,” a really awful looking remake of “Day of the Dead” (Watch Trailer) has already been filmed. Not to mention Romero is also filming his experimental Diary of the Dead that I predicted a while back would suck. The funny thing is the lamest sounding one, “Plane Dead,” looks like it may actually be good. Watch the trailer here.
The most interesting of the zombie films coming out is World War Z based on the great book by Max Brooks. Leonardo Dicaprio and Brad Pitt’s production companies were in a bidding war over the film rights and I think Brad Pitt’s won, but like I said before, they should adopt the “Alien VS. Predator” tagline:
“Whoever wins… We lose.”
And we can assume if “World War Z” does well we will be seeing a movie based on his other book “The Zombie Survival Guide.”
I never wish ill will towards any horror film because honestly I want them all to be good, well maybe some remakes I would like to see fail so that whole trend will stop, but all these new zombie films popping up just have a stink about them. Especially the zombie-comedies or mocumentaries for which “Shaun of the Dead” has seemed to open the door. We all know with so many zombie films coming out they can’t all be good, and all we can really hope for is maybe one really great one, or a couple of decent ones. It’s just a trend I started to notice and I wouldn’t mind if it went away.
Like I said, “Shaun of the Dead” was great, but a movie like that only comes along every so often. So I beg everybody to please stop trying to make the next one, because I’m going to get stuck sitting through all the failed attempts. I know there is nothing we can do, and we just have to sit back and let this pass like all the other genre fads we have had to sit through before. The thing that scares me is that the remake has not gone away, and doesn’t seem to be with all the planned remakes in the works. As Hollywood continues to rape us fans and our genre we can only hope this new zombie film dies out quickly. That way we won’t see any more of our beloved classic films destroyed, and we can wait patiently for the new great zombie film to come along. Although, who knows, a lot of these films could turn out great, and this is the first time in my life I would be happy if I were wrong. But I just can’t shake the feeling that I’m not, and we’re going to be up to our ears in a lot of zombie crap in 2007.
See What The Fans Are Saying About These Films.
- WIL Keiper
