Concerning Zombies...

As much as I like the horror genre, I could never get into the zombie.  They’re not intelligent, they have no goals, and they’re not evil.  They’re just hungry, dead animals.  Or hungry, dead cannibals.  Whatever.

I’m into ghosts, vampires, witches, summoned demons, and mutants; something that’s given to more than appetite.  That’s the type of monster I want the heroes to encounter, be terrified of, and depending on the tale, overcome.

Naturally, I have roommates that love zombie flicks.  And I mean love.  The latest episode of The Walking Dead is always on the night it comes out, and most of Netflix is used to locate any and all types of zombie flicks, good, bad and even worse.  It was inevitable that I would have to watch some of these movies.

Most are so bad that I go to my bedroom to watch my anime (when I should be doing homework.)

Even in the smelliest dung heaps, though, somebody will make something that’s fantastic.  Over the past weeks, I’ve come across two zombie movies that I thought were awesome: Night of the Living Dead and Devil’s Playground.

Funny, enough, most of the drama does not come from the zombies.  In both cases, zombies are more of a plague, a force of nature, but the real enemy is the other survivors.  With Night of the Living Dead, which established the modern zombie, puts random people trying to make do with a cabin none of them lives in.  There is one admirable character, Ben, trying to save himself and the woman he took under his wing, and he knows how to defend him.  But he needs help from the group, and the cowardice and betrayal of a couple key people undoes everything he tries to do.

Same thing with Devil’s Playground, a pretty recent film and British-made, so naturally, they’re not afraid to be risky and try to be intelligent in their storytelling.  Again, the zombies never terrified me.  I could admire the cunning some characters take to evade them or take a few out, but that’s as far as it goes.  But the group of survivors sucked me in when nothing else could.  It was like watching a more action-packed version of Lord of the Flies.  There’s struggle for dominance, cowardice, betrayal, and even a spark of true heroism from the unlikeliest people.

There was still some hokey-ness in Devil’s Playground.  The flashbacks were too repetitive and never added more to the protagonist we didn’t already know.  And I hated that phony issue of how the one woman who could stop the “zombie-plague” from taking over the world should not have to be a science project.  What a selfish outlook compared to the millions in danger.

Oh, well.  I can’t say I’m antagonistic to the zombie anymore.  But they’re still not scary, just gross.  And they haven’t added anything that hasn’t already been done in any other post-apocalyptic story.  Fortunately, I like the post-apocalyptic tale.