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The Five Most Essential Zombie Films |
5. The Beyond (Lucio Fulci) The Beyond is so well-crafted, its three acts
so perfectly unfolding to a punctuation mark of cosmic horror, that it's
hard to believe the zombies are an afterthought. That's right, folks,
this time Fulci wanted to go to bat without the Living Dead on his team,
but the distributors knew zoms were ranking in cash at the international
box office, and in the end the producers always get their way. So once
again we get the Living Dead, and I never thought I'd say this, but
thank God for the bean counters. In this film more than any other, Fulci proves
to Italian-prejudice critics that he is not a hack. Though never
mentioned in any reviews, the Book of Einoch referenced throughout The
Beyond is a fictional grimoire created by fantasy author Arthur Machen
and used by the great Lovecraft himself in the short story The Thing on
the Doorstep. By connecting his work to a larger body of horror fiction,
Fulci raises his film head and shoulders above those of his Italian
contemporaries. The Mark of Eibon displayed on the tome is also painted
on the hero's forehead in Fulci's sword-and-sorcery epic Conquest,
supplying a unity to his work that is missing in the films of every
other Italian filmmaker except Argento. One only wishes that the Book of
Eibon was also the unholy tome featured in The Gates of Hell instead of
the unfortunately titled Book of Enoch, which in reality is a so Fulci's trademark gore is also here in
abundance--but here, as in Zombi, the splatter actually adds to the
film's building sense of dread. Over and over we are reminded just how
fragile the human body really is, how precarious our hold on life. In
the movie's most over-the-top gore set piece, acid pours over and
literally melts a woman's face while her daughter desperately tries to
step around the ensuing pink sludge--all this while her father's corpse
reanimates. |
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If only all those post Lord of the Rings, obsessive Peter Jackson fans could see this movie. What would they think of the man if they knew that he had also directed one of the goriest movies in the history of cinema? Well Dead Alive (AKA Braindead) is just that. It is the bastard brain child of the now Oscar winning director Peter Jackson. This movie is so off the wall that it is pure genius. It has crossed all lines of onscreen violence and even has a silly side filled with slapstick and black comedy that will have you in tears. It is a strange thing to be able to laugh your ass off by a zombie film and still be able to enjoy it at the same time. The movie starts of with two safari men
transporting a certain cursed animal known as the Sumatran rat monkey of
an island that is inhabited with natives. The monkey is transported to a
zoo in a small and quiet New Zeeland village. While at the zoo spying on
her son Lionel who is on a date, Lionel’s mother is bitten by the rat
monkey. This is when all hell breaks loose, the bit ends up k Never has such gore been witnessed, and in the
unrated cut of this film we see it all. Including; faces ripped
right off, rib cages torn out, dozens of impaling, the flesh and meat
ripped right of of the lower half of a body, a fist punched trough the
back of the head and out through the mouth, a hand that is gut off with
a pair of me So when it is all said and done, the deep black comedy, slapstick humor, obscene gore, and just all out plain and simple zombie carnage, gives Dead Alive a secured spot at number four on this count down of the five most essential zombie films. |
3. Zombie (Lucio Fulci) Once and a while a filmmaker just gets it
right, that perfect combination of material and talent that comes
together like...well, a splinter and an eyeball. Zombi is so perfect, so
dead on, that it's hard to believe it wasn't a pet project. Is the
movie without its flaws? Of course not. No low-budget movie filmed on
the run is. Explosions and bullet wounds to the head are repeated over
and over in the final reel, and some of the acting and dubbed dialogue
comes across as laughable. All the dialogue was dubbed after filming,
even the English. All films in Italy are filmed without sound (that's
why Eastwood's words never quite match his lips in the Dollars Trilogy). |
2. The Return of the Living Dead
(Dan O’Bannon)
It is not very often that blending horror and comedy actually works, and other than Dead Alive, this is the only other zombie movie that comes to mind, that is able to pull it off. Return of the Living Dead blends loads of outrageous humor with tons of shear terror, and it pulls it off brilliantly.
The Return of the Living Dead was made as a
homage to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living
Dead. The premises for Return is that Night of the Living Dead was based
on a true story, and that the body’s from the incident that inspired
Night were shipped to a medical supply warehouse by mistake. The
character of Freddy was on his first day on the job at the warehouse,
when his supervisor Frank thought that he would show him the body’s,
which were in individual canisters located in the basement. While
inspecting the canisters Frank taps the side of one and it causes a leak
in the tank, which allows the fumes in side to escape. Needless to say,
I think we know what happens next. The dead start to rise from their
graves, and terrorize a group of Freddy’s friends, who were goofing
around in the cemetery across the street from the warehouse where the
canisters were located. Not only was Return of the Living Dead a good
tribute to Romero’s classic, but it was a stand out movie on its own
which contributed much to the zombie film genre. Including, one of the
most innovative rising from the grave sequences on this side of Fulci’s
Zombie sequence, as soon as you see it, you know that this movie means
business. Another primitive contribution to the world of zombie films w |
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1. Trilogy of
the Dead
(George A. Romero)
In 1968 a movie came out that single
handedly changed the horror genre for ever. Night of the Living Dead
came out of nowhere and literally turned the horror world upside down.
The low budget independent black and white film was made by George
Romero, a commercial director from Pittsburgh. He and his buddies
bought a case of left over film stock and began to film NotLD on the
weekends for literally no money what so ever.
What he ended up making was a movie that was
so important to the progression of American horror, that nothing would
ever be the same after it. The story is simple, a radiation leak causes
the dead to rise from their grave and attack the living. If you are bit,
you turn in to one, and that’s about it. A group of people are stranded
in a house together while the world is literally being taken over
outside the door. Romero’s onscreen depiction of graphic violence and
gore, was shocking to mainstream movie goers in the late sixties, even
though Night’s antics in the gore department are nothing compared to the What is even more impressive about Romero’s film is that it manages to maintain a solid social commentary that can still be related to, even in the new millennium. The fact that the world is ending and a small group of people inside a little house can’t even look past their differences and work together to survive is troubling and is sad but true in a sense. The movie is a not to be missed masterpiece, and is followed by 1978’s….
Even though George Romero filmed this sequel to Night of the Living Dead ten years after the release of Night, it literally picks up right where it leaves off. With the zombies increasing in numbers by the minute, a group of people find themselves barricaded inside of a shopping mall with the dead trying to get in and eat them alive. Dawn has earned the title of one of the most successful independent films of all time.
Romero has improved his story development
and directing over the ten year gap between Night and Dawn. His vision
of a zombie apocalypse is brought across the screen in a comic book
fashion, and it works on every level. His characters are so well
developed, you will find yourself actually feeling the pain that they
are going through in this epic m Having shocked so many back in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead’s depiction of graphic zombie carnage, he wanted to out do himself for his epic sequel. He teamed up with special effects artist Tom Savini, and mowed down the boundaries of what could be shown. Dawn earned itself an X rating, and ended up having to be released unrated. And with good reason, gore is everywhere in the film. Including; nasty bites taken out of human flesh, the now famous head explosion, disemboweling, decapitations, dismemberment, and much more. But George Romero would once again outdo himself in 1985 with….
Day of the Dead
If you thought you have seen everything by
seeing Night of the Living Dead and its epic sequel Dawn of the Dead.
You are wrong, dead wrong. In 1985 George A. Romero concluded his
symphony of decaying flesh with Day of the Dead. This final installment
in the Dead Trilogy is everything you would expect and more. Picking up
about a month after the events that were going on at the end of Dawn we
find ourselves in the company of a group of scientists and soldiers who
have taken refuge in an underground military bunker. And sadly it looks
like the human race is doomed. Not only because of the war with zombies,
but because man kinds only hope can’t pull together, look past their
differences, and do what needs to be done. I find it amazing how
shockingly true it is that the way the human race is portrayed in Day of
the Dead is pretty much dead on accurate to how the situation would be
if the movies events were to hap Following in the footsteps of Dawn, Romero once again teamed up with Tom Savini, and gave gore hounds a heaping of gore like none had ever seen before. The gore is so realistic that some find themselves turning their heads at the horror that is going on onscreen. Graphic dismemberments, astonishing disemboweling, and depictions of zombies feasting on the flesh of humans who are screaming in agony is abundant in Day of the Dead. With three separate films from three separate decades, and with each film out doing its predecessor in one way or another. George Romero’s Trilogy of the Dead is the definitive zombie experience of all time. |
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This has been a special article brought to you by Oxygen Waster's Horror Reviews. The order of the films in this article were not selected by me, they were chosen by horror movie fans by polls. I would like to thank a few people for their help in making this happen. Dr. Kelvinstein for helping
me out by writing the articles for The Beyond and Zombie August 3, 2004 |
mewhat
mystical Hebrew text that is considered by most theologians to be a
"lost book" of the Bible. 
illing his
mother, but she comes back as a vicious zombie. When his mother attacks
some locals and turns them into zombies as well, Lionel is forced to
keep them locked in the basement until he can figure out what to do with
them. Well his Uncle Les comes out of nowhere and decides that he is
going to throw a huge party at Lionel’s place. When the Lionel’s little
friends from the basement escape and attack the party goers, one of the
goriest sequences in the history of cinema is played out right in front
of our very eyes.
dical
scissors, garden sheer decapitations, numerous fully shown
disemboweling, a face ripped in half from the inside, a head put in a
blender, and an end massacre with a lawn mower that has to be seen to be
believed. All this and I am just getting started. If you
haven't seen this film you are probably thinking that the shots of t the
gore are quick, well you couldn't be more wrong. Peter graciously
lets the camera linger on each of the grotesque harms that happen to the
characters. But you should note that this is all severely butchered in
the edited cut of the film, so get the unrated to view it in all
of its gory glory.
the grave, but they were Lovecraftian harbingers of cosmic horror. Fabi
Frizzi's great score adds to the effect, and the small groups of zombies
trudging relentlessly forward in their billowing burial shrouds to the
low pounding of synthesizer music is truly one of the most eerie and
memorable images of the entire genre. And Fulci had his zombies crawl
from their graves, putting on film a human fear as old as primitive man.
It had already been done in Plague of the Zombies, but the grave-letting
scene in Zombi would ensure that almost all future cinematic living dead
would start out in the grave. 
to
the ocean floor; luckily she was pulled to the surface by a
quick-thinking Ian McColloch. The zom vs shark scene itself was filmed
in a tank with the shark's trainer playing the part of the zombie.
ome
as more of a surprise.
as
the concept of zombies needing brains to stop the pain of being dead. On
another interesting note, Return of the Living Dead can actually be
blamed in a way for the box office flop that George Romero’s Day of the
Dead experienced. Return was such a popular movie that more people went
and saw it, instead of Day. This is ironic if you think about it,
because it was a movie made to pay tribute to Romero’s films. Also on
another minor side note, it has been rumored that Tobe Hooper was
originally lined up to direct Return, and Romero was scheduled to
produce it. Either way The Return of the Living Dead, changed the
way that mainstream America looked at zombie horror films and has earned
its spot at number two, on this list of the top five essential zombie
films ever.
Night
of the Living Dead
early Herschell Gordon Lewis films like Blood Feast and Two Thousand
Maniacs, which were around five years younger than night and were even
in color. The difference that Night had over cult director Lewis’ gore
and graphic violence is that Romero shows his in a much darker and
grimmer manner than the campy context of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ films.
Dawn
of the Dead
ovie.
Romero continues with the social commentary that he started in Night,
only in Dawn he takes it a step further. The problems that the
characters run into with self destruction of the human race are obvious
and it makes you actually want to try to be a better person.
pen
for real.