Hi. I’m Lia Habel, an author of young adult fiction who is currently focusing her creative efforts on the lives of the undead. All in good fun, of course. I’m a New Victorian, hyperactive geek, and flighty horror movie fan. Thanks for visiting my site!
Title: Resident Evil: Extinction
Year: 2007
Director: Russell Mulcahy
Leads: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Oded Fehr
Favorite quote: “Desert must have taken it back. Five years. No one to keep the sand back.”
Thoughts: I don’t know why they killed Carlos, mom. 
(Those are supposed to be skulls?)
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Links: Resident Evil: Extinction at IMDB
Resident Evil: Extinction on Wikipedia
Title: Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Year: 2004
Director: Alexander Witt
Leads: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Eric Mabius
Favorite quote: “You mother****ers is crazy! Look. That big mother****er got a rocket launcher!”
Thoughts: I’m just going to let my mother’s review stand for this one. It is truly the best thing she has ever done. I pretty much die every time I see Nemesis. I want a doll that looks just like him.
(Click for larger version!)
Links: Resident Evil: Apocalypse at IMDB
Resident Evil: Apocalypse on Wikipedia
Title: Resident Evil
Year: 2002
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Leads: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, James Purefoy, Colin Salmon
Favorite quote: “I don’t want to be one of those things. Walking around without a soul.”
Thoughts: Silverback loves the RE films. So, having seen them with her countless times (and having heard her watching them in her end of the house countless times more), I figured that if I were ever going to accept outside help with my reviews, it’d be for these.
So, I kinda convinced her that if she did my blog posts for me she could get a press pass to SD Comic-Con, gave her a box of crayons (yes, like a five-year-old), and told her to go to it. After hearing about my process before, she was more than happy to “do it right” for me.
The results are…magical. Truly, I am going to treasure these my entire life. When she is dead and gone (heaven forbid), they will be blown up on a massive screen at her memorial service.
Anyway, before that, I did want to say a few things – because this movie is an excellent jumping-off point for discussing the relationship between zombies and mutants. I’ve talked before about how the future of zombies lies not with the classic dead-and-hungry model, but with various takes on living and hybridized zombies – that just seems to be the direction zombies are taking. Some might accuse people who go down that road of “sanitizing” or warping zombies, but I’m eager to see what comes of it, myself. After all, it’s my personal belief that similar tactics could prove the way of salvation for vampires in current western culture – The Passage, with its science-gone-wrong vampires, was one of the best vampire stories I’ve read in a loooong time.
I think the key thing to keep in mind when dealing with zombies of this persuasion is that violent, bombastic mutation is but another example of “exaggerated” life. It can be difficult to describe, but when watching zombies in action (especially the modern crop of fast zombies), I’m always captivated by the fact that they seem to exhibit an overabundance of regained life in order to compensate for the fact that they are, at heart, dead bodies. In fact, this is what a lot of modern visceral zombie horror (and comedy) stems from. It’s also yet another example of “life that should not be.”
Since both zombies and mutated monsters dovetail so nicely on these matters, it makes sense to combine them. I find it far from offensive.
The RE series is also fabulous for talking about issues of control. It is not only the dead who have lost their minds, but Alice and Spence, via amnesia. We could also discuss the manipulations of the Red Queen – who is, for all her charm, artificial. Yet an further example of “life that should not be.”
But…you want to see what my mother thinks. Behold.
Title: Zombiegeddon
Year: 2003
Director: Chris Watson
Leads: Mark Adams, Ari Bavel, Tom Savini, Uwe Boll
Favorite quote: “You mean there’s an alien life force created by the devil?”
Thoughts: Last Thursday I innocently opened my latest delivery from Netflix, and this is what greeted me.
See, right there is where I should’ve taken a stand. The two seconds it took me to read that text, seated on a hard plastic bench at work in front of a space heater cranked up so high I could feel my eyeballs drying out, marked the precise moment when I should’ve thrown in the towel and chosen to turn my life around. Started…I don’t know…writing romance novels about lonely, middle-aged women on holiday in Majorca, or something. Something normal.
But what did I chose to do instead?
Play the freaking thing.
And that’s when I saw this.
Now, sarcasm aside, Uwe Boll – UWE BOLL – warned me not to watch Zombiegeddon. After the textual warning, he actually came on screen and verbally told me not to watch Zombiegeddon. That it sucked. That it was the worst movie he had ever seen in his life.
And you know what? I should’ve listened! He was trying to help! Why didn’t I listen? Was I too proud? Did I seek to mock him? Defy him? Why? I still don’t understand! I still don’t understand how my life could have gotten to that point!
I can’t even begin to describe how badly this movie sucked. This was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life, too. Do you know what it’s like sharing an extreme in taste, an artistic line in the sand, with Uwe Boll?
The rest of this has to be notes. I can’t do this.
Radio lady tells of coming zombie apocalypse because ancient zombie-slaying family has come to an end – did I mention that the zombie-slaying family has a tiger? And acid-washed jeans? Because they do.
TOM SAVINI WAS ASSOCIATED WITH THIS?! TOM SAVINI IS…JESUS CHRIST. NO, HE’S REALLY JESUS CHRIST.
Jeffrey – kid – just trying to help! You’re sending him to a psychiatrist for proactive zombie identification? You suck, and I would’ve been screwed if you’d been my principal.
…now it’s a comedy about Satan killing all the women on earth?
…man becomes zombie after being refused a porno rental. This explains everything.
This might be the most homophobic zombie movie I’ve ever seen. I was used to the sexism and racism, but homophobia? What?
How did Uwe Boll even HEAR about something this bad? Uwe Boll is Oscar-worthy compared to this!
So Satan’s version of humanity is…zombies. Right. No. Aliens?
And the two dirty cops are…well, one is Jeffrey. The other’s just a total tool.
Giving up giving up screw the credits giving up RIGHT NOW.
Title: Tales from the Grave: Beyond Death / Tales from the Grave: The Rotting Dead
Year: 2006
Director: Dave Parker, David P. Barton
Leads: Danny Draven, Eric Clawson, Jamie Donahue
Favorite quote: “This is all your fault – and if I die, you better dedicate that Fangoria award to me!”
Thoughts: This short collection was billed as a single movie, and contained two zombie-related stories. I’m going to count them together as one entry.
At first I was ready to brush Beyond Death off as yet another cute, homemade homage to zombie horror created by people who are obviously my brothers and sisters in gore. I mean, the plot concerns a bunch of actors stumbling upon a corpse and deciding to use it in their film – where have I seen this before?
Then this guy showed up.
Well. Hello there, Mr. I’m An Anne Rice Zombie If Anne Rice Did Zombies. You’re looking fine as hell this evening.
Mr. IAARZIARDZ and his exaggerated, puppet-like minions (seriously, they were like refugees from Braindead) kept me awake through what was essentially a half-hour chase scene. I was willing to forgive the bite transmission that instantly mutated each new victim, the surreal ending, and the coffin-shaped machine that apparently served as a portal to another dimension, or whatever. (On second thought, that part’s pretty awesome.)
Unfortunately, The Rotting Dead was another story. Essentially a morality tale about what happens when drunk rednecks kill the son of the neighborhood witch when he’s in cat form (I know, I hate it when that happens), I can only say that it was a mildly interesting take on the ol’ zombie revenge army cliché. I did like the chosen zombie genesis (powder blown in the faces of the rednecks in question – trés voodoo) and the whole pumpkin patch thing (whee, evidence for my plant zombie hypothesis!).
Title: Tales of Terror: The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar / Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Terror: The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Year: 1962
Director: Roger Corman
Leads: Vincent Price, Debra Paget, Basil Rathbone
Favorite quote: “I know it is all honorable, and I love you both the more for it.”
Thoughts: The next two entries are going to be shorts, simply because Netflix kept shoving them in my face and I wanted to power through them and banish them from my queue.
That said: THIS SHORT HAS BOTH VINCENT PRICE AND BASIL RATHBONE.
TALKING.
TO ONE ANOTHER.
+
= EARGASM
(OhgodohgodI’llbeagoodgirlforever…)
Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes.
This short is based on the Poe story, and, while not exactly true to the original, is still entertaining. The plot concerns the hypnosis of a man at the exact moment of his death, after which his body is kept about as a sort of putrid urn for the remains of his consciousness or soul. Thus I suppose he could be viewed as a sort of voodoo zombie, with the mesmerist, Carmichael, in control.
Of course the best part comes at the end, when the trapped and victimized Valdemar manages to drag himself from his deathbed in order to protect his widow, upon whom Carmichael has long had designs. As he does so, Valdemar transfigures from an icy-white corpse into a thing worthy of Tar Man’s attention, dripping and rotted. Awesome stuff.
Title: Doctor Blood’s Coffin
Year: 1961
Director: Sidney J. Furie
Leads: Kieron Moore, Hazel Court, Ian Hunter
Favorite quote: “He has every appearance of death…”
Thoughts: Doctor Blood’s Coffin is a stodgy 60s British horror film – like a bad Hammer – but I ended up really enjoying it. Mostly because I ended up connecting it to advances in real life medicine, and wondering whether or not some of the lines in the movie were ever uttered by the contemporary mainstream media. I know such things have been said by my contemporary mainstream media.
I mean, this movie is totally sixties. The sixties – when even psychotic mad scientists wore impeccably-tailored trousers! The sixties – when promising young doctors smoked like chimneys! And yet, there are several arguments in it – mostly concerning the overreaching abilities of medicine and science – that sound like modern sound bites from FOX News.
Basically, Peter Blood is obsessed with bringing the dead back to life. (If you had to live in his stultifying little British village? You might go crazy, too.) He ends up paralyzing people whom he views as “undesirable,” convincing everyone else that they are dead (shades of voodoo!), so that he might use their organs in his experiments. Specifically, their hearts.
Ultimately this simple bad-guy-bad-no-medical-degree-for-you plot culminates in several very interesting conversations about the nature of his work. This movie was created six years before the first successful human heart transplant, which I think is important to keep in mind. As Dr. Blood and the nurse he’s shagging argue about whether or not he’s playing God, whether or not a dead body is an empty shell or potentially evil once the spark of life has passed from it (and will continue to be once that spark of life is artificially returned), whether or not the reanimated have “permission” from God to go on existing – I couldn’t help but be enthralled. I’m sure there must have been people who made the same arguments, way back when. I mean, there are people making the same arguments today, they’re just about stem cells.
In the end, Linda is proven right – her dead husband, reanimated by Dr. Blood as a giant “I told you so,” attempts to strangle her. But she did call him a creature from hell to his face, so…I find it rather hard to judge him.
Links: Doctor Blood’s Coffin at IMDB
Doctor Blood’s Coffin on Wikipedia
Title: Zombie Town
Year: 2007
Director: Damon Lemay
Leads: Adam Hose, Brynn Lucas, Dennis Lemoine
Favorite quote: “Oh my God, you shot Mrs. Mahoney!”
“Yeah, I never did care for her much.”
Thoughts: I think this one has to be straight from the notes. Sorry.
So…
The ubiquity of The Woods in zombiedom – potential talking point? Go woods!
Makeup could use some work. A few drops of blood and a mild rash do not a zombie make. These guys look like escapees from a burn ward. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
This guy is real observant for a scientist – fails to notice the corpse in the water a mere five feet away. You and Bowery-Lugosi should talk.
I think this is bite transmission…wait a minute…
…it’s…butt transmission.
It’s…leech transmission. Giant toothy leeches that…inject hormones into nervous sys…
…no.
NO.
IS THIS GUY GOING TO WALK AROUND WITH HIS PANTS DOWN FOR THE REST OF THE FILM? FOR THE REST OF HIS UNDEAD SECOND LIFE? JESUS CHRIST. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO HIM?
…okay, so the “slugs” can be killed with salt and this one dude is a professional road salter. Good to know. I’m so glad I live in the snow belt, now.
Now they’re herding the zombies with an ice cream truck full of chum…
…I’m officially messed up, that I’m starting to find this slightly charming. Slightly.
Links: Zombie Town at IMDB
Title: The Crazies
Year: 2010
Director: Breck Eisner
Leads: Radha Mitchell, Timothy Olyphant, Danielle Panabaker
Favorite quote: “One, two, three. That’s how many times I’ve saved your life. Now walk out where I can see you. Go on, move!”
Thoughts: I actually enjoyed this particular remake – and not just because I managed to see it in the theater, equipped with butter-laden popcorn.
(Theater popcorn. Ambrosia. 10% of my body by volume.)
While the original Crazies was an incredibly effective movie for its time, the remake creates a sense of zeroing-in, of getting down to basics. Instead of jumping between various characters throughout the length of the plot like the original, the remake focuses solely on David and Judy, following them tirelessly toward their doom.
Other than that, the plot remains largely the same – so I emerged from the theater far less offended than I expected to be. The movie came across as another look at the original Crazies, as a valid reframing. I wish more remakes/reboots/re-whatevers could say the same. (Also, Timothy Olyphant? Sigh.)
The murderous insanity of the infected was also very well presented. You got the sense that these were truly altered human beings that the main characters were dealing with, that the afflicting toxin (in this case) was truly an agent of change to be feared.
Something that strikes me about many living-infected-zombie films is the desire to escape to some mythical and/or promising place – to find not only safety, but a life elsewhere. The Crazies makes that journey the main idea of the plot. Yet, escape can seldom truly be effected – and not for the reasons you’d think. We are haunted by ourselves, and often become “viral carriers” of everything horrible about humanity – violence, fear, jealousies, etc. We are dogged by the detritus of our previous lives. All too often, we are more willing to do away with our fellow man than open and sift through our own baggage. However, if you keep throwing away everyone who becomes infected or just plain ticks you off, soon you won’t have anyone left.
So. I think it’s time to venture part of Lia’s Unified Theory of Living Zombies. Today I’d like to focus on the qualities that make a work (book, video game, etc.) about modern infected-living-zombies precisely that, as opposed to a work about a pandemic or a particular type of infection.
To wit, the qualities that set a work about infected-living-zombies apart from a work about infection include:
1. The portrayal of the infection as something to be feared not for the pain or death it brings, but because of its mind- or behavior-altering qualities. Additionally, the related alienation or dehumanization of the infected (“I’m not going to end up like those things outside“).
2. The presence of a subset of uninfected humans, either on the run or in hiding.
3. An overwhelming sense of loss of control – seen both in the plight of the infected (who have lost control over their bodies, minds, or senses) and in the plight of the uninfected (who now live in an abnormal, unpredictable world where they face violent physical and biological threats).
4. An overall sense (or setting) of apocalypse.
Title: Sugar Hill / The Zombies of Sugar Hill / Voodoo Girl
Year: 1974
Director: Paul Maslansky
Leads: Marki Bey, Robert Quarry, Don Pedro Colley
Favorite quote: “He is a greedy god! Do you have any money?”
Thoughts:
An Ode to Sugar Hill
by Lia Habel
There is no way to adequately convey my love for you, Sugar Hill
Though I should not love you, and the injunction
Against it, the instinctive desire to push you away
Even as I selfishly drag you closer
Makes my love all the sweeter – sound, taste, feel all the sweeter
Like your name
For you are a true blaxploitation grindhouse zombie flick
The kind of thing Tarantino knows that he could never create
For to attempt to forge a thing so pure, so true to the source
In our dissolute, jaded age
Would only serve to destroy it
There was only one time, one place, one era
An era where this magnificent suit was worn without a trace of irony
And that was both your womb
And your tomb
Oh Langston! Oh Sugar! Oh Valentine! Oh sweaty Baron Samedi who moonlights as a cab driver/construction worker/scarecrow/pig farmer!
Oh fly black car!
Oh dead slaves rising from the swamp where they were illegally buried after being hauled off the ships and letting slip their shackles
Ready for righteous, awesome revenge
Oh mink couch! Oh slutty boots!
Oh independently locomotive, murderous chicken foot
Oh bartenders who don’t even bat an eyelash when hate crimes take place right in front of them
But eventually provide weapons to the oppressed
Oh epic, racist lines that I dare not repeat, full of ethnic slurs I’ve never even heard before!
OH 1970S FORENSICS!
I love you all
I damn you all
At the end of this movie
The vile, awful, hateful wannabe slum lord
Confronts his dead cronies, animated by voodoo dolls
Grinning horribly
And I gaped in wonder, for it was beautiful
And I questioned all that had gone before – whether I had really seen it
Whether perhaps I was dead but dreaming
But you do exist
You do exist, Sugar Hill
And you are amazing
And ass-kicking
And eye-bulging
And I feel so guilty for enjoying you