If I’m watching a zombie movie and I need to refill my drink and I don’t bother to put the movie on pause, that’s a problem. If while watching it I start wondering if I’ve gotten any interesting emails, that’s a problem. If during the major ‘fight for their lives’ scenes I get distracted by 4chan, this is a problem. All of those happened. The thing is I just couldn’t get interested and everytime I tried I found myself more bored and annoyed then I had been previously.

I watched it last night, and after sleeping on it I think my biggest problem is that the zombie aspect of this movie is a widget. They could easily take the exact same script and change all the “zombie” references to “vampires” or “warewolves” or fucking “mummies” for that matter and it wouldn’t make that much of a difference. When you have a zombie walking around holding his decapitated head out so that he can lead his body in the right direction, it’s pretty clear you don’t give a crap about zombies and are just using a random default ghost movie device for your scene.

Maybe I’m being too much of a purist, which is saying a lot for someone who isn’t bothered by running zombies, but I think if this had been called High sGhoul Prom or Prom Bite and the monster of choice hadn’t been a zombie I would have at least been amused. But pulling of the Dead into your title I think at least puts some obligation on you to either try to add something to the genre or blatently ignore it and try to cash in and suffer the consequences of the fans. I don’t think this film did either, mostly I think they just didn’t get it.

Guess what? It’s not that bad. It’s different for sure, but it’s very Romero. The social commentary is front and center, and I can see how people might be quick to write it off as just following the Blair Witch or Cloverfield style [see the trailer] but I think to tell this part of the story that was the best choice. As with other Romero flicks the zombies are just the setting for a much larger discussion but for the first time someone in the film actually says “they are us” pointing out the crux of the struggle has never been how do we deal with this outside menace but rather how do we deal with ourselves. I thought the conflict of the people who were filming everything trying to decide what was more important, helping out in a single instance or documenting it for the future was very well thought out.

At the same time I can see why people who were looking for something like the remake of Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later might be disappointed, though I was amused with the jokes about dead things not moving fast. This has action, but isn’t an action movie. It has gore, but isn’t a gore fest. It’s definitely the most introspective in the Romero series which could put someone off if they weren’t in the mode for it. That said, I enjoyed it. It’s not my favorite thing he’s done, and it’s not the best zombie flick to come out in the last few years but it’s entertaining, thought provoking and worth watching for sure. That is assuming you like zombie movies, and since you are reading this I’ve gone ahead and made that assumption.

First off I just finished all three hardbound editions of The Walking Dead graphic novels and they turned out to be as awesome as I’d heard they were. I’ve actually been wanting to pick these up for a while but it wasn’t until a gift certificate I got for xmas that I just threw down and grabbed them. These are quick reads as you might expect but the storyline doesn’t suffer from that at all. Like any good zombie story the interactions between the non-zombies is the real focus and theres some top notch storytelling going on here. The one complaint I’d heard was that the artwork made some of the characters hard to tell apart, but honestly I didn’t notice that as a problem. The individual characters are extremely well developed and you understand how and why they react in some situations the way they do and while some of the story lines have been seen before (friendly survivers vs not so friendly ones) the little twists make them still completely enjoyable.

I finally picked up the final chapter in David Wellington’s triology, Monster Planet. I loved the first two books (Monster Island & Monster Nation) and while I’m only halfway through this one it’s a perfect continuation of the story. While the first two books take place almost simultaniously, this one is set 12 years after the fact and picks up right where you’d hope it would. If you haven’t been following the story it’s totally worth picking up the first book and seeing how Wellington takes a new angle to this by telling part of it through the eyes of some of the zombies that managed to maintain some bit of consciousness. With the first two books I could barely put them down and only my current hectic schedule is preventing me from doing the same with this one. I’m kinda sad this is the final piece of the story, but super glad to have this series in my library.

Horror movie fan Caryn Coleman, who owns a Los Angeles art gallery called Sixspace, recently hosted an exhibition by local artist Chad Robertson that focused on the concept of the zombie in popular culture.

“The public’s fascination with zombies has to do with the fact that zombies represent the regular person more than other typical horror monsters and … zombies reflect the monster within each of us,â€? she said.

“The zombie outbreak we see in films shows us how just one single cause can create a rippling and life-altering effect,” Coleman said. “Take, for instance, post-Katrina in New Orleans. That is a perfect example of a devastating event bringing out the intense need for survival and utter chaos.”