gore

Left 4 Dead

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Left 4 Dead (2008)


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Summary
Highlights
Platforms
More Info
Summary

Left 4 Dead, released in 2008 by Valve, the same company that created the popular ‘Half-Life’  series, defined the ‘zombie horror FPS’ genre and is still being played on dedicated servers by adoring players. 

 

Ah, I think back to those summer nights of playing this game on my PC until dawn with my friends and competitively comparing headshot scores and accuracy at the end. 

 

Left 4 Dead plays like you are the survivors in a more about the zombie outbreak. You have four different characters to choose from for co-op player vs. environment on or offline multiplayer. Characters do not have special stats, but they interact with eachother in an amusing way throughout the campaigns- each set in Philadelphia. 

 

Left 4 Dead introduces some unique concepts to the game, such as interacting with the environment in a detrimental way or a beneficial way – being able to shoot barrels of gasoline to start fires or slinging missed shots at parked cars that set off alarms and attract the horde. All the while, you are moving through immersive maps toward your campaign objective and come across some ..interesting..mutations that you have to deal with in special ways, as these zombies are more deadly than the regular brain-dead horde. 

 

For example, the Hunter stalks its prey on the roof tops, can cling to sidewalls like Spiderman and will pounce on you when they think you’re weak and isolated unless one of your team mates shoots it dead out of the air. 

 

Or, the Smoker – with its hallmark cough and elongated tongue that can strangle you off the side of a building unless your team rushes over to help. Boomers that explode, covering you in bile and attracting the horde, and Witches that will shred you to pieces and attract billions of the undead if you get their attention. 

Aspects of this game can be truly terrifying and the gore is realistic- it’s not surprise that it has been banned in some countries. 

Highlights

  • Unique and immersive campaigns based around the backwoods and inner city of Philadelphia in the midst of the zombie outbreak. 
  • A variety of different weapons – from melee to guns – health packs and pills for temporary health and vitality boosts. 
  • Easter eggs throughout the game paying homage to classic zombie movies and other zombie games, such as Dead Rising 
  • Play online with your friends in CO-op, play alone with bots, or play with friends at your house if you have a couple extra controllers. Play as both zombies and survivors! 

Platforms

 

(Click links for purchase options) 

More Info

View Screenshots and Trailer Here 

 

Evil Dead Rise

Evil Dead Rise

Movie / Stroller / One-on-One

The Evil Dead "franchise" (God, how we hate that term!) has wandered all over the map in plot, tone, and mythology, from energetically terrifying (like Evil Dead 2) to wonderfully goofy (like Army of Darkness) to consistently enjoyable, if not exactly groundbreaking (like Ash vs. Evil Dead). And though Evil Dead Rise has little or no direct connection to the plot of characters of the core story or the 2013 remake, it has some of the same manic energy and gleeful gore of the core films -- a welcome return to form.

Now we've got at least three separate Evil Dead 'threads' that could continue: Ash's original and continuing adventures (Come on, Bruce! More!) ... whatever happens next to ** of the 2013 remake ... and now the 'mother and daughter team (we know, we know) of deadite-destroyers from Evil Dead Rise. And we want it all. 

Evil Dead 2 (1987)

Evil Dead 2: Reinvigorating the Genre with a Crazy-Mad Variation

Movie / Fast Zombies / Essential

Evil Dead 2 can be found on almost any list of the Top Ten Zombie Movies of All Time. And though a case can be made that Evil Dead and its sequels and spin-offs aren’t really, technically, “zombie movies” at all, one thing is certain: the entire franchise is a major milestone in the genre, a rare instance where the sequel is actually stronger than the original film, and where we can find the premiere of one of horror’s most memorable characters and most durable actors, the launching of a director who’s still making movie history forty years later, and the source of horror’s most powerful and classic tropes. Not bad for one crappy little horror flick.

Let’s start, logically enough, at the beginning: Evil Dead. Conceived and filmed in the late 1970’s and released in 1981, Evil Dead came from modest – very modest – beginnings, but displayed all the building blocks of greatness from Act 1, Scene 1. Director Sam Raimi, along with aspiring actor Bruce Campbell and producer Robert Tapert, came up with the idea of a bunch of hapless college-age kids going to a run-down cabin in the woods for a fun-filled weekend, only to discover an unholy book – the legendary Necronomicon. They’re dumb enough (of course) to read from it, and resurrect (or create) zombies, ot at least zombie-like, creatures they come to call “deadites” -- reanimated dead folk with violently evil new personae that take endless pleasure in tormenting, torturing, and ultimately killing any human in sight. They’re not straight-up Romero zombies, no,; they speak (or spit-speak), move fast, and think way too clearly about all the wrong things… but they’re not exactly demons from hell or simply living people who’ve become possessed, either. They’re deadites, damn it, unexplained and perhaps inexplicable hybrids that make perfect sense by making no sense at all from the very beginning.

Evil Dead cost something around $375,000 to make and returned a handsome 500% profit to its original investors. But things really took off, cine-cult-wise, with Evil Dead 2, released in 1983. 2 started in the same place, with more ‘cabin in the woods’ nonsense, but now Campbell’s increasingly deranged character Ash Williams would take center stage, and many of the artifacts that are best loved and remembered about the franchise come from this second movie in the series, including Ash’s hand becoming possessed and then detached, only to be replaced by a chain saw. And face it: any movie that shows your deceased girlfriend dancing naked in the moonlight until her head falls off, or a whole race of crazed warriors tearing the cabin to splinters all around you – well, that’s pretty much your basic “horror classic” right there.

(It’s worth noting here that Evil Dead basically invented the “cabin in the woods” trope. It’s hard to find anything before that first film that begins with the basic premise of ‘kids go to a cabin and get killed a lot;” it’s equally difficult to get an accurate count of just how many horror movies using this same premise came after Evil Dead, though it’s rarely credited as the First and Best.)

Evil Dead 2 became the real classic, and holds up remarkably well today. And even that was only the beginning. Army of Darkness (1993), a dizzying tour de force of action, horror, violence, and funny jokes took Ash and his boom stick to an absurd version of the Middle Ages to fight yet another invasion of deadites, only to return him rather unceremoniously to his job as a middle manager at S-Mart (“Be Smart! Shop S-Mart!” in the final reel. And though the franchise took a long pause at that point, the real damage to American pop culture was still to come.

Fully thirty years after the first films premiered, an entirely new version of Evil Dead (2013) appeared, a remake (of sorts), produced by Raimi and Campbell and Tapert (among others) but co-written and directed by relative newcomer Fede Alvarez, recruited from his native Uruguay after his pretty remarkable short on Giant Robots destroying Montevideo (you can see it on YouTube here. )This version featured Mia, a whole new central character with problems of her own, played powerfully by Jane Levy. It did well, as it deserved to, but people missed the madness and humor of Ash and his version of the deadites. And that led, not long after, to three seasons of Ash vs. Evil Dead (2015-1018). Original appearing on Starz, the series starred a happily aging Campbell as a not-so-happily-aging Ash and a wild crew of friends and enemies, including the impossibly still alive Lee Majors, now in his 80s, as his father, an early appearance of Samara Weaving as a recurring character in Season One, and the legendary Lucy Lawless, Xena Warrior Princess herself, as a formidable frenemy (and also, not so coincidenally, the wife of long-time producer Robert Tapert.)

And still Evil Dead will not die. In 2023, a new film, more of a deadite spin-off than a sequel, has arrived: Evil Dead Rise, which introduces a new set of characters in a brand-new urban setting. Raimi didn’t direct and Campbell didn’t appear, but both were highly involved and served as producers, and Rise has done so well that there’s already talk of a sequel in the near future.

And even more: Campbell made an announcement as Rise was rising that he was getting a little too old and tired to continue playing Ash, but (maybe because of the success of the new film) he’s recently re-opened the door to Ash-centric sequels. There is also talk of possible sequel to the 1983 version centering on the Mia character, as well as more films following characters and storylines from Rise. At last report, the Raimi/Campbell/Tapert team say they are thinking of a new Evil Dead movie from one or more of the storylines every two or three years rather than every two or three decades.

And as if that wasn’t enough… there’s the multimedia. Army of Darkness generated a wild-ass monthly comic for a while, both adaptations and new stories, written by none other than Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman. They’re all still widely available in comics shops, bookstores, and online. And the truly legendary artist John Bolton and comics veteran Mark Verheiden crafted an extraordinarily beautiful and disturbing graphic novel of Evil Dead 2, available in a 40th Anniversary Edition both digitally and in a fancy-pants hardcover edition.

And Good God, the merch. T-shirts, posters, action figures, throw pillows, blankets – the list is long and growing daily, like the deadite horde itself. Some of the coolest can be found at The Creepy Company, but an even wider array is only one or two Google clicks away.

When people think of Evil Dead, they often think more about the sequel, or the original movie, or maybe Army of Darkness, than they think about the rather massive franchise it’s generated for almost fifty years – fifty years. With so much good Dead stuff already available, and so much more to come, the weird and wild work of Raimi, Campbell and Co. deserve to stand right up there with the equally influential work of Danny Boyle, Robert Kirkman, and even Romero himself. And still, still, it rises ...


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