Devouring the flesh of the living

Man alive, I don’t half watch a shed load of these movies.  I honestly don’t think i’ll ever get around to disecting each and every one that I have seen since starting this blog, and with so many, many (many) more to be watching I think I shall just draw a line and start afresh after this post.  It is supposed to be a Blog after all, not a review site.
Yes, I have watched some classics that really deserve a full mention, but I just don’t have the time.  I am sure I shall probably watch them all again sometime next year (with the possible exception of Kung Fu Zombie, which was mostly notable for the subtitles that half ran off the screen so I mostly had no idea what was going on.  It was ace though). I shall just give each one a quick summary now and move on.

City of the Living Dead - Classic Fulci, nonsense plot, awesome gore and great music.  4\5
Nightmare City – Radioactive Zombies, with plenty of gratuiotous nork shots, and a dumb\great ending 4\5
Kung Fu Zombie – Terribly subtitled, mostly kung fu film, but worth sticking on after the pub. 2\5
The Last Man On Earth – A classic Vincent Price film.  Apparently they are Vampires not Zombies, but who do they think they’re kidding?  4\5
Living Dead at Manchester Morgue – Fantastic.  As far as Zombies go these are actually bordering of genuinely scary.  Plus all the dubbing of OTT english dialects is amazing 5\5
Plague of the Zombies – Another classic, and a decent Hammer film! (Yes I know, they did good here).  Dream sequence is rightfully a highlight in zombie film history 4\5
Night of the Living Dead 3D – Stupid ‘remake’, with shoe-horned in 3D glasses effect.  Pretty funny though and well made.  3\5
Dead Heat – Buddy cop Zombie move.  Spectacularly 80’s, and pretty funny. Kinda like an 80’s version of Dead and Deader. 3\5
The Beyond – Stone cold classic.  I find myself watching this every few months, so a post on this soon is very likely 5\5
Dead and Buried – more supernatural than Zombies, and I was pretty drunk while watching it so don’t remember much.  Think it was good in a traditional rather than trashy way though.
Shatter Dead – Shot On Video film.  Has a great plot and would be good to see a remake or an update of some sort.  3\5
Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires – A Hammer Vampire film, with some zombies that don’t really do much apart from loiter around.  2\5
Buttcrack – Stupid Troma film.  The main character is hilarious, but when hes not on screen it’s dull beyone belief. 2\5
Zombie Diaries – Interesting idea, but done much better in Diary of the Dead.  3\5
Planet Terror – Spectacularly OTT zombie farce.  Gory, stupid and awesome.  Just how I like it. 4\5

I’m sure i’ve forgotten loads too, but this is a pretty substantial list here. 

Right, from now on I’ll have my Laptop next to me while watching them, so I can brain-dump into it after watching the films.  I just hope I don’t spill wine or something into it, as i’ll probably have polished off a few glasses by the time the film ends.  Hopefully I won’t build up such a back catalogue this time.

On another note, I just received a nice Christmas email from eBay, telling me that my copy of the uncut I Spit on Your Grave has been dispatched.  It’s not a zombie film I know, but I thought I should mention that I do watch other types of films.  (Yes, it is a horror I suppose, but I don’t like to stray to far into regular film territory.  I had enough Jane Austin crap-fests to endure when I had a live in Girlfriend, so now I can watch decent stuff.)

 So, that’s probably the last post of the year.  I’ll start off the New Year in style I think.  I have a week to pick what to watch.  Hmm, this could take some time…

Astro Zombies
I recently took a week off work, purely because I’ve just accrued loads and have to use it up, so what better way to spend a week off than to watch some of my back catalogue of films that even my Hammer Horror loving flatmate wouldn’t want to watch. Yes, that means the proper trashy Zombie flicks were wheeled out for my amusement, starting with the Astro Zombies.

Amazingly, this 60s trash came out in the same year as Night of the Living Dead (1968 ) but the two couldn’t possibly be further apart in every other respect. Huge long 10 minute scenes of nothing but people driving, or silently pressing buttons in a laboratory, a CIA ‘investigation’, the sole place in the film is for 2 CIA agents to be killed and nothing more, a mad scientist and his hunchbacked mute assistant (very original). And the Zombies. Oh yes, solar powered robot zombies. Bodged together from artificial organs and recently dead murderers, and powered by light. Well, Zombies is pushing it a bit. There is only one ‘zombie’ (until the 2nd comes to life at the very end) with a head that is clearly a cheap 50’s alien mask who runs around and kills people. Quite brilliantly in one scene the Zombie battery pack comes loose during a fight, so he has to hold a flashlight up to his forehead solar panel and run away, holding the torch against his face the whole time!

Although starting out slow, (very slow) as the film continued, and my wine bottle emptied I started loving this flick. All the poses that Tura Satana makes, every scene with the Astro Zombie, and even the stupid gore at the end (which actually includes a decapitation) were pure trashy awesome-ness. If Night of the Living Dead hadn’t come along at exactly the same time this film is what all Zombie films may have turned out like.
Actually probably not, but hey.

Gore Score – 2\5
Nork Score – 2\5 (oh yes, even Astro Zombies shows Norks.)
Overall Score – 3.5\5

So, been a bit lax with the old blog updates of late. Christmas and all that malarkey, as well as good old fashioned laziness! However, I can use this free opportunity to give a brief summary of the Zombie antics that have taken up the last month or so.

I’ve been hitting eBay pretty hard now for any outstanding Zombie films missing from the collection, and have finally got around to picking up a copy of Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, which is a true classic.  (Dunno why it’s taken me so long to get that.  It’s not exactly rare or anything.)   I am still hunting for a (well priced) box set of the Blind Dead films, (the US version comes in a cool coffin box and is the edition with the full versions of the films, unlike the UK edition).  After these it is just the new and obscure flicks I’ll be hunting down, as my collection contains most of the so-called classics already.

However, I have still been watching a load of my current films, but have not got around to commenting on them as yet, so expect my amazingly witty responses on the following films in the next month or so…

Diary of the Dead (oh yes, the new Romero film. I’ve seen it and it was gooood – Killing zombies with defibrillators should be the new decapitation!), Night of the Living Dead 3D, Dead Heat, The Beyond, Dead and Buried, Shatter Dead, Buttcrack, Zombie Diaries, and Planet Terror.

I realise I could give quick summaries of these here and now, but much of the reason I started this blog was to play around with Vector images, which is the part that takes the time. The ‘review’ I just knock up in a few minutes, as you can probably tell with the past articles!

So, i’m off to enjoy Christmas shopping on eBay. Might not just shop for stuff for me this year!

(Also, I have just noticed that the WordPress spell-check does not recognise the word ‘Blog’.  Hmm, bizarre.)