Without the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, Calgon detergent and Fred Rogers’ tonsils, Night of the Living Dead would not exist. And without Night of the Living Dead, there would be no The Walking Dead, no World War Z, no entire cottage industry centered around those “all messed-up” ghouls who crave and dine […]
zombie
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Day of the Dead
By the time 1985 rolled around, Romero had made one other Dead film: the brilliant Dawn of the Dead. Other countries, especially Italy and Spain, turned zombie movies into virtual cash machines and zombies, for the first time, were everywhere. So there was great anticipation for Day of the Dead, Romero’s third film in what […]
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The Lords of Salem
The story is pretty slight. One third of a popular radio team in Salem, Mass., Heidi Hawthorne (Sheri Moon Zombie) becomes affected by strange visions and mysterious ailments after listening to a song that is delivered anonymously to her radio station by a group called the Lords. As these things turn out, the song is […]
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The Frozen Dead
Said scientist is Dr. Norberg (Dana Andrews, Airport 1975), who lives in London, even if his heart belongs to Germany — Nazi Germany, in fact: “I’m as good a Nazi as I was 25 years ago.” So dedicated to his party is he that Norberg thirsts to bring deceased members of the Third Reich back […]
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Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal
Boris Rodriguez’s low-key Canadian comedy concerns Lars (Thure Lindhardt, TV’s The Borgias), who moves to a small town to become an art teacher at a tiny, underfunded school. Once was a gifted painter himself, Lars has been stuck in a 10-year creative rut. One of his students is Eddie (Dylan Scott Smith, 2012’s Total Recall), […]
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Detention of the Dead / The Demented
Imagine if zombies invaded The Breakfast Club. That’s literally the setup experienced by your stock-character students of the nerd, the jock, the misfit, the bully, the cheerleader and, so it’s not a total copy of the 1985 John Hughes classic, a wisecracking Asian kid (Justin Chon, 21 & Over) to spout things like, “I gotta […]
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The reading dead
The actor, best-known for playing the now-deceased T-Dog in TV’s smash-hit series The Walking Dead and Alton in the Oscar-winning drama The Blind Side, was all smiles as he walked into the Barnes & Noble at 13800 N. May this afternoon to promote his book, Blindsided by the Walking Dead. A line of waiting fans […]
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Bath Salt Zombies
Set in New York City, the film imagines such a huge crackdown on “bath salts” — a real-life drug currently making headlines for its zombie-like effects on users — that one enterprising chemist has synthesized it in cigarette form. Smoking it, however, proves even more addictive than usual, causing withdrawal symptoms so bad “it will […]
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Resident Evil: Retribution
After an exposition-filled prologue in which our heroine, Alice (Milla Jovovich, Dirty Girl), faces the audience to relay the events of the first four flicks, Retribution goes straight into a shameless rip-off of the much-lauded beginning of 2004’s Dawn of the Dead. This is far from the film’s only act of cribbing; look for direct […]
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Osombie
So there’s that. Utah doubles for Afghanistan as the flick follows an American Special Forces unit picking off “Class D hostiles” — that’s code for undead Middle Easterns — as it searches for the enemy camp. They pick up a extra help when they run across a Colorado woman (Eva Mauro, Miss March) searching for […]