In case you haven't enjoyed enough movies about zombies and the undead lately, Diary of the Dead supplies you with yet another opportunity. However, this low-budget film is from the guy who first introduced most of America to the horrors of the walking dead: George A. Romero, who made Night of the Living Dead back in 1968. (So the zombie genre is the same age I am. Cool!)

Diary of the Dead isn't a sequel to the other movies in Romero's Dead series, but it does tend to assume that you know Romero's standard operating rules about zombies. If a zombie bites you or if you die in any way, that's it for you -- you're undead. The undead are cannibalistic, and the only way to destroy them is to destroy their braaaaains. Unlike the other Dead movies, this one is shot as if it were a documentary -- a survivor has pieced together footage from the first night that the dead come back to life.

You know, sometimes it's like the universe wants to prove you wrong. No sooner did I make one little offhand comment that Zack Snyder had probably abandoned his follow-up to Dawn of The Dead when his wife and producing partner, Deborah Snyder, tells Shock Till You Drop that Army of the Dead is alive and well (sorry, I couldn't resist). The script was written by Snyder and Awake's Joby Harold. Deborah Snyder summed up the story to Shock as follows: "Basically, something happened in Vegas and there was this huge outbreak of these zombies that were killing people...So to contain it they basically contain Vegas. The city is this wasteland with walls around it and all of these zombies are inside" -- and it could just be me, but that sounds awfully similar to Resident Evil: Extinction.

As we all know, Zack Snyder is hard at work on his big-screen version of Watchmen, and he will only produce the 'sequel' to his 2004 remake of George Romero's zombie classic. Deborah Snyder tells Shock that they are currently on the hunt for a director for the project, but that it is "...a little hard [to do] because we're here [on set] and every day is killer. We want the right person for it. The script has been turned in to the studio and they're really happy with it, with pretty minimal notes back, so they said, 'Hey, let's get a director.'" As soon as they do find their director, we'll be here to let you know who it is. Any ideas?

[via Justpressplay.net]

Zombies appeared in movies early on, in White Zombie (1932), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Last Man on Earth (1964), and -- to some extent -- Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). But the infectious, flesh-eating, undead creatures we know today originated in George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). No other horror movie was such a cornerstone, breaking new ground for its time, establishing the hard and fast rules for an entire subgenre and remaining a much-copied source nearly 40 years later. On top of all this, it's actually a great film, and hardly dated at all. When I first saw it, all alone in a dark room late at night, it gave me the shivers. But it also gave me food for thought.

Many have studied the complex relationship between the film's human characters, all trapped in an abandoned house trying to survive the night. Barbara (Judith O'Dea), after losing her brother to a zombie, becomes nearly catatonic. She's like the child of this twisted family. Ben (Duane Jones) is the leader, and though Romero apparently hadn't written the role for a black man, he evokes echoes of the Civil Rights movement that was brewing at the time. Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman) is white, middle-class America, with a wife, Helen (Marilyn Eastman) and a daughter (Kyra Schon). And Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judith Ridley) are typical teenagers, hoping to get married and settle down. It's easy to see all kinds of social commentary within this group of characters and their behavior, but even without all that, the film works very simply as a dramatic clash of personalities.

Stop me when this sounds familiar: A group of kids lie to their parents, hit the road for a night full of partying, and stumble across a nightmare of monumental proportions. Sounds like your typical B-grade horror movie, right? Absolutely. Hell's Ground is an unwaveringly derivative and preposterously gory little genre concoction that borrows a lot from the finest films of George Romero, Sam Raimi and Tobe Hooper while forging very little new ground of its own. But you know what? It's still a fun fright flick, even with all its obvious touchstones and blatant inspirations. Once the movie gets the character introductions and the requisite wheel-spinning out of the way, it's a pretty energetically good time.

It's Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Dawn of the Dead, sorta ... oh, and it came from Pakistan. Did I not mention that part? Yep, a mega-splattery zombie-strewn slasher flick from Pakistan. Shot entirely in Islamibad by a bunch of young filmmakers who clearly grew up with the same horror flicks we did. So while you're being assaulted with ideas, characters and monsters that are clearly 'borrowed' from other sources, well, it's just quite the novelty to witness Pakistan's first gore movie.

What would it take to make a war movie extra special? How about zombified vampires? Yep, that's what you'll find in the cinematic adaptation of xxx's* graphic novel Virulents. According to Variety, director John Moore has been tapped by New Regency to turn the Virgin Comics release into a big gooey movie. By my estimation, John Moore has made two stylish and generally entertaining adventure flicks (Behind Enemy Lines and Flight of the Phoenix) and one resoundingly pointless Xerox of a genuine classic (The Omen). Still, two out of three isn't bad.

Here's a plot synopsis from the official Virgin Comics site: "A small platoon of American soldiers in search of their missing comrades comes across Indian commandoes looking for a group of terrorists suspected of hiding a most heinous weapon in the craggy breast of the Hindukush. It's a night of revelation as the Americans discove the fate of their lost brothers, and the Indiams discover the fate of their terrorists. But the terror is not in the form of flesh and blood, or bullets or gunpowder. Terror has a new name."

And that name is ... zombie vampires! Woohoo! So it's like a cross between Black Hawk Down, Dawn of the Dead and Near Dark? (Yeah, in my dreams it is.) Newcomer scribe John Cox has been given adaptation duties, and producer Gotham Chopra seems more than a little psyched about the project: The story is "set in a part of the world that has a long history of myth and mystery, and it's going to rock." So there you have it: It's set in Afghanistan. It's got soldiers and terrorists and zombo-vamps. It's going to rock. I'm officially psyched to see Virulents.

* Neither the Variety article nor the official Virgin site can tell me who wrote / drew the Virulents book. I'd dig a little deeper and find out for sure, but I think it's pretty weird so I choose to let it just hang there for now.

I know my horror movies pretty well, and I know my grade-z schlock, but even I had never heard of Zombie Bloodbath, let alone its two sequels. All three films are ultra gory shot-on-video zombie films written and directed by Todd Sheets, and the trilogy will be available on June 12 in a two DVD set from Camp Motion Pictures. Although hailing mostly from the 1990's these three films are right at home amongst Camp's Retro 80's Horror Collection, through which they've been resurrecting direct to video horror flicks from the early days of home video. Does the world really need three Zombie Bloodbaths? In a nutshell, no. While it was interesting to see Sheets' skill and style as a filmmaker evolve over the course of the three movies -- and he improves remarkably -- the films are too amateurish to be drawn into.

There has been no shortage of news coming out of the NYCC this past weekend (including from our very own Ryan Stewart). Now, IGN reports that Paramount and Brad Pitt's Plan B Productions are partnering to produce a film version of the novel World War Z: An Oral History of The Zombie War by Max Brooks (son of Mel). Brooks seems to have a flair for the subject of the "living challenged" as he also wrote the Zombie Survival Guide. Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski is adapting the book but there is no confirmation yet that Pitt will star, Straczynski kept it pretty non-committal saying the script was, "For Brad Pitt potentially -- we'll see what happens. He might be the star in it."

Adapting the book won't be easy, since the novel is an anthology of man's survival during the "great" war with the undead. The structure of the book has no main characters and jumps time and place with recollections of the survivors of the decade long fight. During a panel discussion, Straczynski described the story as "very political, very smart, very cagey". Straczynski seems confident that if all goes to plan with the script, production wouldn't be far behind. The project sounds promising, but considering Pitt's plate looks pretty full, I'm not counting on him getting in front of the cameras for this one.

This surprisingly fun romantic zombie farce from Tempe Video opens appropriately enough with quotes from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream ("The course of true love never did run smooth") and from George Romero's Night of the Living Dead ("Shoot 'em in the head"). College professor Steve (played by director Brett Kelly) and his young girlfriend Amy (Caitlin Delaney) have decided to take the plunge and move in together, despite protests from Steve's friend Carl (played by screenwriter John Muggleton). Carl's status as a thirty-something man still living with his mom pretty much illustrates how much he knows about co-habitation, so Steve is soon helping Amy move into his apartment. Being a student of parapsychology, Amy brings along several books on witchcraft and magick ("magick is spelled with a 'c' and a 'k,'" observes Steve, "so it must be legit"). After the two of them profess to hoping to spend eternity together, Steve accidentally backs over Amy with his car, apparently killing her instantly.

Distraught and desperate, Steve forgets that he was scoffing at the notion of sorcery moments before, and finds himself poring over Amy's texts in the hope of finding a way to bring her back to life. He apparently succeeds, because soon Amy is up and around again, although she's not quite her old self; there's a vacant look in her eyes, her shattered spine grinds horrifically when she moves, and the only word she can say is "hungry." Steve decides they need to get away for awhile and give Amy a chance to recuperate, so it's off to a secluded cabin in the woods (important safety note: NEVER bring a zombie to a secluded cabin in the woods). Amy has become quite ravenous, and on the way to cabin she wolfs down several fast food burgers, despite her previous status as a vegetarian.

When the zombie apocalypse comes, there will be many hardships for the survivors. The Stink of Flesh deals specifically with how a world overrun by the flesh-eating undead will effect the wife swapping community. The collapse of civilization and the resulting loss of the Internet and the local swingers scene will make alternative lifestyles even more challenging than ever.

Matool is a short but scrappy individual, wandering the wasteland and dispatching zombies with his wits and the freakishly long carpenter's nails he keeps strapped to his leg. His name, incidentally, is also the name of the zombie-infested island in Lucio Fulci's Zombie, and has obviously been swiped in homage. Ammo is too hard to come by, so Matool cleans up the world one walking corpse at a time by pounding nails into the creatures' heads like they were a shop class project. When Matool is kidnapped and taken to the remote home of Nathan and Dexie he fears the worst, but things are not as they seem. Dexie fancies a variety of sex partners, and her husband is more than happy to supply them -- as long as he can watch, and Matool quickly makes the transition from unwilling captive to enthusiastic participant. Dexie's sister Sassy has her part in all this, as does the vestigial conjoined twin Dorothy that is attached to her side.

I've posted a few times over the last month or so about the upcoming George A. Romero film Diary of the Dead (check here and here if you don't believe me), his fifth film to deal with the walking, flesh eating dead. Well, even though Romero invented modern zombie films, he's not the only one making them. I've always said that if his zombie films had been produced by a major studio, films like Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, and Lucio Fulci's gore-fest Zombie would have run into legal troubles and might possibly never have been made. Thanks to an unfortunate oversight, the copyright notice was left off Romero's Night of the Living Dead -- the film which all modern zombie flicks must acknowledge as an inspiration -- which is why NOTLD is offered for sale by every dealer of public domain films on the planet. The zombie film, in essence, belongs to the people and, legally speaking, pretty much anybody can make one.

For example, did you know there's a new zombie film coming from Greece? Soon the walking dead will be shambling through downtown Athens, sipping ouzo and noshing on intestines. OK, I made up the part about the ouzo; I suspect they'll be drinking (what else?) hot, steaming human blood. Beverage choices aside for the moment, Evil (known in its homeland as To Kako) hits the streets on DVD this January 30 thanks to TLA video. Written and directed by Yorgos Noussias, this blood-drenched horror comedy, for good or ill, has all the classic elements. As TLA's website says: "It's up to a group of random strangers -- including a wise-cracking cab driver, a teenaged girl who just lost her parents, a tough-guy soldier and a tougher young woman -- to save the day as the flesh-eating hordes sink their teeth into fresh meat. Drenched in blood-soaked action and complete with exploding heads, flying intestines and more household object impalements than one could desire. Evil delivers the goods and satisfies the inner gore-hound in all of us while delivering twisted, wry comedy in the tradition of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy."

I'm usually leery of films described as being "in the tradition" of something or other, but the zombie film family tree is one with few forks. The trick is to add something new like Undead, which added a flying saucer angle, or The Stink of Flesh which posed the question, "After the zombie apocalypse, will there still be wife-swapping?" The Pakistani film industry is getting into the zombie game (see Cinematical's news piece on Hell's Ground), so let's see what Noussias and his cast and crew have to offer.

Now, pass the ouzo.

[Via Fangoria]

I would never have believed the zombie film genre to have this kind of longevity. I mean, there have been some great ones and there have been some awful ones, but when you get right down to it, how many different stories can this limited concept support? Obviously there's room for at least one more, as Resident Evil: Extinction, the third installment of the film franchise based on the series of video games, has completed shooting and should hit theaters in less than a year. As established in the first film, a virus created by the villanous Umbrella Corporation has been released on the world, making the dead walk and attack the living.

As Cinematical's own Mark Beall reported back in May, Ali Larter will play a character from the second game in the series. Larter recently had this to say to Sci Fi Wire: "Alice [Milla Jovovich] comes back, and I play Claire Redfield, who's the head of this convoy that's traveling through the Nevada desert, pretty much after an apocalypse," Larter said. "We're just trying to survive [the latest encounter with mutant zombies]. It's survival of the fittest at this point, and it ends up being about who's actually going to be able to make it during this very difficult time on Earth. It gets pretty bloody." Larter also stated that she got a kick out of all the action, despite temperatures on location in Mexico reaching as high as 125 degrees. "It was brutally hot. But it's fun to play these kinds of characters. I was able to run away, shoot some guns and have a great time with the other actors," she said.

I can certainly see Larter pulling off this roll as a butt-kicker. She played a no-nonsense cat burglar in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and she stared down death itself in Final Destination and Final Destination 2. Currently she's starring in the hit NBC series Heroes as a single mom with a superhuman split personality.

Resident Evil: Extinction is due in September of 2007.

Zombies have never really done it for me -- it was all that groaning and brain eating I suppose. I have plenty of respect for George Romero and what he did for independent horror but like I said, I just never got it. The zombie flick might have evolved into an artistic action film with 28 Days Later, but a new Spanish film could finally make the zombie movie a class act.

Variety announced that Spanish filmmaker Elio Quiroga's The Cold Hour has been picked up by Lightning Entertainment for international sale. The plot of the film will follow a group of survivors of chemical warfare fighting off the infected masses. Apparently, the focus of the film will be on the drama between the survivors trapped inside during periods of intense cold and not on the usual violence and gore. Quiroga is already hard at work on his next project No-Do, a ghost story centered on a woman who has just lost her child.

The zombie movie had a brief resurgence with Dawn of The Dead (2004) and Land of The Dead but the genre never really managed to lose its B-movie reputation. The genre might not be done yet though; The Cold Hour could be the film that makes audiences take their zombie flicks just a little more seriously.

Remember the other day when I reported that Diary of the Dead was moving forward despite previous reports that the production would be delayed because of director George Romero's health? Sure you do; if not click here. Anyway, there's finally some casting news. Apparently Romero likes the idea of having a familiar face around; Shawn Roberts, who played Mike in Romero's long awaited and crushingly disappointing 2005 film Land of the Dead. Roberts also had the life nearly sucked out of him by Anna Paquin when he played Rogue's boyfriend in X-Men, and he's also got several other horror flicks on the verge of release including Stir of Echoes: The Dead Speak, a werewolf movie called Skinwalkers, and Left For Dead, which apparently involves frat boys and a machete wielding maniac. Fun!

But it doesn't stop there. Hot on the heels of Variety reporting Roberts' involvement comes news from Dread Central that he will be joined by Joshua Close (from The Exorcism of Emily Rose and a pretty neat Dawn of the Dead knockoff called The Plague), Michelle Morgan (Alien Fire), Jon Dinicol (from Weirdsville and The Virgin Suicides), Phillip Riccio (Rent-A-Goallie), and Scott Wentworth (Elizabeth Rex). No big names here, but certainly a better known cast than The Blair Witch Project, to which this film has often been compared. Romero is, of course, the creator of the modern zombie movie, with his zombie tetralogy sporting a 50% success rate in my book. Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are bona fide horror classics, and while Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead have their admirers, I am not one of them. Although I've seen conflicting reports, the Dread Central story indicates that this film will not take place in the universe established in the previous films, making Diary of the Dead a sort of zombie reboot. Diary of the Dead, which started shooting this week in Toronto, marks a return to independent film making for Romero, and I'm very interested to see where it takes him.

[Via Coming Soon]

Following in the tradition of such Pakistani horror films as ... umm, OK gimme a sec here ...

Well, just because I can't name a horror film from Pakistan doesn't mean there aren't any, but however many may have come before, Zibahkhana (Hell's Ground) is the latest. This project has caught my interest specifically because it is being co-produced by Mondo Macabro, a UK-based DVD company that has released such magnificently bizarre examples of world cinema as Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay, For Your Height Only and Lady Terminator. And who better to co-produce a film about a zombie plague than Mondo Macabro's partner in this venture, Bubonic Films. The film is being directed by first-timer Omar Khan, who is a film historian and owner of a chain of ice cream shops.

The hot and damp Pakistani summer made for an uncomfortable shoot for the cast which was composed of veterans of the local film industry as well as some newcomers. That was part of Khan's plan all along, though. "I wanted to use heat, sweat and flies as part of the film," Khan says. "People on the crew were not used to this level of nastiness, which was very exciting for me." The story involves a group of teens who, while on their way to a rock concert, run afoul of a group of psychos reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The film is also said to feature the world's first Muslim zombies.

The film's producers are fairly certain, that Zibahkhana will not get past their native country's censors, but they have high hopes of marketing the film elsewhere. That plan seems to be off to a good start as the film has been invited to submit to the Sundance Film Festival with fees waived.

[Via Jo Blo]

Arrow in the Head, and several other sites reported on October 5 that George Romero, the 66 year old auteur behind Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, The Crazies and several other damn fine terror flicks, had collapsed and been hospitalized for a non life threatening illness. As a result, Romero had to cancel several personal appearances and shooting of his new zombie film Diary of the Dead (mentioned previously here on Cinematical) was to be delayed by at least two months. However, a new report from Dread Central says the film is still on track with Romero at the helm and will probably have begun production by the time you read this.

This new film is said to be something of a cross between a standard Romero zombie film and The Blair Witch Project: While making a low budget horror film, several young filmmakers find themselves in the midst of a real zombie outbreak. The crew proceed to record the event for posterity, taking themselves into the thick of the zombie action. As the director told Dread Central when the project was first announced, "I want to do this from a subjective kind of view with no music. You know, something really raw. So it's kind of a stylistic experiment, a low-budget, under the radar kind of thing that's just sort of from the heart." There has been some talk that this film might go straight to DVD, and although that might carry a certain stigma, I think that might be gutsy move on the part of Romero and his distributors. This way he could make as gory a film as he wants, and it's kind of reminiscent of Romero and company's decision to circumvent the MPAA by releasing Dawn of the Dead unrated.