Attack Of The Canuck Zombies!  First Trailer For Romero’s ... OF THE DEAD Arrives!

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1. GeekOfEvil 01/06/2009 @ 7:35am

   For God’s sake.
   I don’t want to be overly cynical (there’s plenty of those guys at AICN), but his movies are dying a slow, repetitive death (excuse the pun). He’s just doing the same thing over and over, except it’s getting worse each time.
   I’m not criticizing the footage purely because it stated above it hadn’t been tweaked yet, but even the stories he’s coming out with are dreck.
   I know that sounds really pompous of me to say all that, but look at how he started out in the movie industry and how he’s making a living now.
   It speaks volumes to me.

2. indiemaker0583 01/06/2009 @ 7:35am

   HOLY SHIT! THAT. LOOKS. TERRIBLE!!! I enjoyed Land of the Dead, it’s a shame that bombed financially, I would have liked to see another big budget follow up to that. Now Romero is going back to the indie route. I get it. But Diary fucking blew although it has its share of sympathisizers who believe Romero can do no wrong.

   Seriously, horror fanboys are so stubborn. (Argento has only made 3 or 4 good films in his entire career!)

   But this? This looks awful, this is on par with any other number of bad zombie Direct to video flicks. And seriously, the genre’s dead. Fucking dead. I’m sick of zombie films, There’s no where else to go with them. Blah. Romero has done great things outsid of zombie films. I love the Crazies, Martin, even Bruiser had some decent qualities.

   Romero is obviously milking his cashcow reputation as one of the founding fathers of this genre until it’s completely dead. Boring. He should move on to something new. Guess Romero is out of decent ideas.

3. Wotan 01/06/2009 @ 9:45am

   this does not look good at all…i’ll probably watch it though lol

4. SHot70 01/06/2009 @ 10:30am

   It doesn’t look to bad.  I’m a little tired of zombie movies though.

5. Mike 01/06/2009 @ 10:48am

   At least it probably can’t be any worse then Diary of the Dead was.

6. Illogic 01/06/2009 @ 11:01am

   I haven’t liked Land of the Dead, and didn’t even see Diary, but I like the bleak western feel this seems to have to it. Maybe that’s just because it’s in production though. We’ll have to wait and see I suppose.

7. Gunde 01/06/2009 @ 12:15pm

   Bah that does indeed look bad. But I disagree that the genre is dead.

8. ChevalierAguila 01/06/2009 @ 1:09pm

   The genre is not dead, but Romero’s talent seems to be.

9. GeekOfEvil 01/06/2009 @ 1:46pm

   There really is no credibility in horror today. It’s either a remake, spoof, shakey-cam, or deliberately bad movie. Where are all the films like Hellraiser or Alien gone? It’s ironic that there’s all this emphasis on cgi and crystal clear picture and they can’t make a good f’~#%*g movie to go along with it. Thirty years ago, it was prostethics, obvious rubber and fake blood, but the movies were actually watchable.
   But that’s only slightly annoying when I think of how we all just swallow this stuff, one after the other.
   Am I alone? Please, somebody tell me I’m not alone.

10. thecrimsoncurse 01/06/2009 @ 1:54pm

    the genre isn’t dead. just look at what the comic series “walking dead” has done. the problem is they think just coming up with new locals or set pieces is making a new movie. what they need to do is just tell a real human story. look at “let the right one in”. why is that film so great? not because it breaks new ground in vampire mythology but because it feels like a real film, telling a really human story.

    we don’t need islands or shopping malls or talking zombies, we need real human characters and a script that isn’t just total dreck.

11. indiemaker0583 01/06/2009 @ 2:14pm

    I agree and disagree. I understand nostalgia, but I’m not sure if times have changed that much, if things are really any worse now than before.

    I can’t help but think of Gogol Bordello. “There never were any good old days, they are today, they are tomorrow. It’s a stupid thing we say, cursing against the winds with sorrow.”

    I amid that I wish I were alive and working during the exploitation period, the 60’s and 70’s which also saw a major boom in Indie films after the collapse of the studio system in the 50’s.

    Through Drive Ins and roadshows, films like Night of the Living Dead & Texas Chainsaw Massacre became mainstream phenomenoms.  Films were made cheap, therefore, a little success could amount to a large success.

    As far as I can tell, with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls being my bible, the explosive popularity of block busters such Star Wars & Jaws was the real death of American cinema, Thank you George and Steve.

    But there’s always been a lot shitty movies made with a few gems in between. There’s still decent horror flicks coming out, but they’re few and far in between. Was it any different during the time of Hellraiser or Alien? For every one of those there were a dozen crappy knockoffs.

    For all of The Things, there were tons of crappy rubber monster horror movies.

    It’s easy to name a dozen or two amazing horror films from the late 70’s through late 80’s.  But it’s also easy to condense two decades into one paragraph. It’s still a 10- 20 year span we’re talking about. 2008 was pretty weak with one or two exceptions, same of 2007, and 2006. But if we were to add up the one or 2 great horror films of the last ten years, it’d be on par with the past.

    It’s all a matter of trends. The 90’s was all about campy, post modernist mockery with the success of Scream. Thankfully, that’s dead. The J-horror trend is dead, I think the PG-13 trend is dying off as well as Torture Porn. I’m not sure what’s next, maybe we SHOULD hope that the Let the Right One In remake will be good, faithful, and financially successful so that we’ll see a new trend of mature, adult horror films with an emphasis on intelligent and scary content. 

    I for one like the propsects that the shaky cam, reality films will give way to. I think Cloverfiled, Home Movie, Rec, Paranormal Activity etc are all structured around a cheap gimmick, but it’s one with some merit. While I don’t think of these worked as “films”, there were moments in all that had my hairs on edge. They all gave an “experience” and I think that’s a key word. Watching a horror film should be an “experience.”

    I think Horror is a lot better when it feels real, when the audience is stuck in the situation with the protaganist. I for one, hate it when horror movies have music that cue you in on when the scare’s coming. I hate it when they’re heavily edited with quick cuts that call attention to themselves. Again, both Them and The Strangers are completely forgettable films that have garnered a lot of attention because they do jus that. They stick the audience in terrible situations and let it play out organically sans music, stylistic camera angles, noticeable editing giving an uneasy feeling of danger, there’s an actual sense of physical threat for the viewer in those pictures.

    Think of Let the Right One In, The Descent, Wolf Creek. They are excellent horror films. The Ruins was halfway decent.

12. GeekOfEvil 01/06/2009 @ 3:21pm

    indiemaker0583

    Thank you for a well made and valid point.
    You’re right in what you say and it’s made me re-consider what I said above. But I present another angle. One I think none of us consider.
    Upon reflection, I believe if there is any blame to be placed on modern horror not matching up to what I would consider the classics, I believe it lies not only with the filmmakers, but also with us, the audience. What with the advent of the internet, we are exposed to a whole new channel of information. What once was a mysterious process to us meager public, is now broken down in blogs and “behind the scenes” clips on dvd’s and the web.
    I agree wholeheartedly that for every Hellraiser and Alien, there was probably twenty or thirty stinkers. I guess me being a nineties kid, I don’t know as much as I think. But I’d like to think there was a lot more passion and art in what came before as opposed to now. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to sit a bunch of renderers down at computers and pump something out, than for special effects crews to get together and make molds and animatronics. I don’t argue with them wanting to save money. I just think what they give is what we get.

    To drag up a bad example, I’ll suggest I Am Legend. I love Will Smith. I loved the scenery. I loved the simple enough story. I loved the length and pace of the film. But for a film that has some of the worst cgi I’ve seen this millennium, it lost all effect on me. I would’ve settled for cheap rubber easily.

    I agree also what you say about trends, but I also cast a cautious eye on the somewhat conservative attitude filmmakers are adopting more and more of. Bear in mind, we’re living in a time when everybody gets offended by every little thing that’s put out there. So it’s no wonder that horror as a genre is a knife whose sharpness has been dulled by the times.

    I dunno. It’s all in the eye of the beholder. I just appreciate the conversation.

13. gambitnightwing 01/06/2009 @ 3:44pm

    Wow! I really hope the movie is better than what the trailer seems to make it. It looks like a scifi channel original movie.

14. ChevalierAguila 01/07/2009 @ 2:37am

    “As far as I can tell, with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls being my bible, the explosive popularity of block busters such Star Wars & Jaws was the real death of American cinema, Thank you George and Steve.

    But there’s always been a lot shitty movies made with a few gems in between. There’s still decent horror flicks coming out, but they’re few and far in between. Was it any different during the time of Hellraiser or Alien? For every one of those there were a dozen crappy knockoffs.

    For all of The Things, there were tons of crappy rubber monster horror movies.”

    Agreed on all that, but not on the shaky-cam thing. I think that’s by far the worst possible gimmick in movies today.

15. Jahsoldier 01/07/2009 @ 3:36am

    @thecrimsoncurse Funny you mention “The Right One” because the author John Ajvide Lindqvis has also done a zombie book called Handling the Undead (english translation) which was a totally different kind of film. The zombies did not eat people and the book centered on how the human population reacted to the waking of dead loved ones. I personally found the book dull but at least he was trying a different angle.

    I think there are great zombie stories out there just waiting to be turned into decent films such as The Walking Dead, World War Z (already in production), and even some of books by Brian Keene, David Wellington and David Moody. Instead we get trash like this. It may only be a promo but as a promo it should elicit excitement. This does nothing. Without Romeo’s name, this would go straight to the garbage bin. Land and Diary were also trash (although Land was slightly better). Romero should have been made to watch The Zombie Diaries and see how it should be done. One must ponder over the first Resident Evil movie had Romero done it as originally promised. It couldn’t have been any worse than the Resident Evil series is today and it might have actually improved his standing within Hollywood and propelled him onto better things than the trash he churns out now.

    Even with this shitty promo, I still hope he has some talent left to produce a half decent zombie film.

    Let’s hope Dead Snow, WWZ, and Worst Case Scenario (if ever finished) will be successful.

    *sigh*

16. indiemaker0583 01/07/2009 @ 9:16am

    “To drag up a bad example, I’ll suggest I Am Legend. I love Will Smith. I loved the scenery. I loved the simple enough story. I loved the length and pace of the film. But for a film that has some of the worst cgi I’ve seen this millennium, it lost all effect on me. I would’ve settled for cheap rubber easily.”

    I just watched I am Legend on HBO a few days, the first time I’ve seen it since its theaterical release, and I wonder if the terrible CGI isn’t intentional. Was it ILM that did the effects? Ironically, Lucas’ powerhouse effects studio always seems to do really sloppy CGI work, even on the Star Wars prequels.

    But still, I am Legend has some incredibly intense scenes. For a PG-13, 150-200 million spectacle, it creates a pretty bleak sense of dread. Watching it a second time, I wondered if those awful, animated creatures were so poorly rendered as an intentional means to make the film more accessible for casual/younger audiences.

    If they had actually been phsyically threatening in appearence, maybe the studio feared the film would garner an R rating, something they didn’t want to risk on such an outrageously expensive flick. With all that money on the film, and so many other positive aspects, I just can’t believe those awful, awful, cheap looking effects weren’t done on purpose.

    Going completely off topic now, but I am Legend got me thinking… What the fuck is going on with The Road? I have friends who work at Shooters in Philadelphias were the film is now in Post. (yeah Philly!!!) People working on color correction are telling me that the footage is amazing!!!! Just, absolutely fucking amazing. I’ve heard rumors that the director hasn’t perfected the tone just yet… But I don’t buy it.

    From everything I’ve read on set and heard from people actually working in post for it, it’s a damn near flawless adaptation of the novel with a terrific score by Nick Cave. I can only assume that those shit head Weinsteins heard how popular the book was, bought the film rights without reading it, and now have a film that’s too dark for their taste.

    Hell, I’m hearing rumors of a straight to DVD dump job with it. Why Weinsteins? Why? I think we can blame the Weinsteins for some of Horror’s problems today as well. They buy the rights up for everything, and they either don’t release it, or they dump it on dvd with little to no marketing, and what marketing they do is always sleazy and misleading.

    God, the covers for Nightmare Detective and Inside are embarassing. Or what about Infernal Affairs with the hot mini skirt clad asian girl. Those Weinsteins like insulting us fanboys by pushing the orienatlist, yellow fever angle huh?

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