Zombies, Zombies, Zombies

I gotta admit that I love the whole ZOMBIE genre. Whether it is the classic Night of the Living Dead or the more modern 28 Days the stories are classic. Who knows what the magical attraction is for the whole zombie culture but in terms of total books and movies they seem to be edging out Vampires and Werewolves in the horror popularity contest. But who doesn’t love a script riddled with characters whose only lines are “Brains… need brains”.  The Zombie culture has been around for a long, long time.  While most of the original stories about how Zombies are created centered around Voodoo myths that the dead could be reanimated with black magic most of the past few decades have given the cause of Zombie outbreaks as government experiments gone bad or the occasional meteorite from space.  It seems our culture finds it more likely that the Science will be the bad guy over some spiritual cause.  I am sure you are not surprised that a top secret government screw up is still one of the top causes.  Maybe it makes the movie that much more believable.  Whether Zombies are real or not, the undead or now here in Denver, on the screen that is.

This week marked the beginning of “7 weeks of undead horror” with the Dead of Summer Zombie Film Event at the Starz theatre. The lineup includes a total of seven films. Four are classic zombie movies that have been spawned from the original Romero creation. The remaining three are going to be premiers for our Denver theater that appear to be from local creators. Go Denver

The first film in the sequence has already started playing and will continue today and tomorrow. I wouldn’t worry about this one being the scariest as it looks to be a major spoof on the Zombie idea. Titled Poultrygeist this storyline tells of the consequences of located your fast food business on an Indian Burial Ground. It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and I haven’t seen it so don’t look to me for a review.

This Friday the real scares will start with the 1979 Italian take on Zombies in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie. Here is the description from the Startz Website.

After a New York harbor patrolman is murdered at the hands of a flesh-hungry ghoul aboard what was believed to be an abandoned yacht, the daughter of the ship’s missing owner teams up with a newspaper reporter named for a private investigation. With the help of a pair of sightseers, they travel to the secluded Caribbean island of Matul, where Anne’s father was last seen conducting medical research. There, they meet his colleague who frantically attempts to find a scientific explanation for a phenomenon that has plagued the island; it seems as if the dead refuse to stay dead. The locals believe a voodoo curse is at work as scores of animated corpses rise from their graves to hungrily seek out live flesh. Fulci’s zombie classic was originally intended as a sequel to Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead and is released that way abroad.

I am not sure that I will make it to see them all unless I can rally a group to make it fun.  If you are a Zombie genre fan now might be the time to join the Denver Film Society (Anytime is a good time to join this by the way) as each film is roughly $9.00 but members get the whole Zombie film event for $20.  This will also set you up for the next Denver Film Festival November 13th through the 23rd.  It will also give you some great exposure to some wonderful, and let’s face it not so wonderful but hopefully original, films that are not in the mainstream market.  With the large influx of summer box office feature films even the common few Independent films that usually make it to the big theaters are having trouble getting a spot.

Maybe I’ll see you at the movies.  :)

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