zombie films

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. 

Life After Beth

Life After Beth

Life After Beth (2014)

It's All About Aubrey

Movie / Stroller / One-to-One / Zombie Romance

Aubrey Plaza’s deadpan, off-kilter, unpredictable manic energy seems perfectly suited for horror in general and the Zombie World in particular. And though Life After Beth had a whole bunch’a problems, Plaza – as usual – never fail to impress.

As one critic put it, “It's an age-old story. Boy loses girl. Boy finds girl. Boy realizes girl is undead.” And that basically sums up the premise. Conceived by writer/director Jeff Baena (Horse Girl, I Heart Huckabees), who also by pure coincidence happens to be married to Aubrey Plaza, the story doesn’t follow any classic zombie rules. Beth herself – killed by a snake bite – remains coherent for a long time, though increasingly hot-tempered and violent, until things get truly out of control in the third act.

Not a big hit, not terribly well-received, it seems to have more in common with “bedroom community” zomromcoms like Fido or Warm Bodies than it does with Night of the Living Dead. But Plaza carries it well and – for the most part – makes it work. She’s also aided and abetted by an astonishingly strong supporting cast, from Dane DeHaan to John C. Reilliy to Molly Shannon and Cheryl Hines and Paul Reiser and Matthew Gray Gubler and Anna Kendrick – Anna Kendrick! -- as the ‘final girl,’ of a sort.

Some good laughs, some memorable moments (love that refrigerator!) and a ‘must-have’ for the Aubrey Plaza completist, this one’s worth a few drinks and a lounge on some quiet Saturday night.


Click Here to Buy!

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 ...


Click Here to Buy!

Black Friday (2021)

Black Friday (2021)

Black Friday:
Zombies Attack Walmart (or something worse!)

Movie / Dark Action Comedy / SlowZombies

Horror Comedy, the mother of all oxymorons, is very tough to do well… but that doesn’t keep filmmakers from trying. Over and over. And hey, it doesn’t have to be Shaun of the Dead or Tucker and Dale vs. Evil to be worth a look.

So where would we put Black Friday, a 2021 entry in the Comedy Horror Olympics that starts with the all-too-real horror of the ruthlessness, cruelty, and utter madness of shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving, then postulates what happens when those shoppers go full-tilt zombie, thanks to some goo that looks like it came right out of The Stuff, a zombie-adjacent movie that we’ll talk about eventually.

Yeah, it’s funny. Not laugh-out-loud, roll-in-the-produce-aisle hilarious, but on the other hand it has Bruce Campbell – yeah, post-Ash, post-Burn Notice Bruce, at his 2021 doughy best, complete with a bushy mustache and a dickish attitude, teamed up/at odds with Devon Sawa, fresh out of the new Chucky series by way of Final Destination and Idle Hands, the last of which is another zombie-adjacent film we’ll have to cover.

There are some cool swipes at consumerism, corporate callousness, and the death of the American Dream throughout the surprisingly graphic all-night adventure, and though the ending gets a little too Ghostbusters (the first one, the good one) to work entirely well, but it’s a solid piece of comedy horror. It’s no Horrorstor, Grady Hendrix’s amazing book about a haunted/cursed IKEA that has no zombies, but you’ll like it anyway, and… hey! Bruce Campbell! Being a dick!


Click Here to Buy!

28dayslater, 28 days later, zombie movies, horror movies, rage virus

28 Days Later (2002)

28 Days Later:
Where Fast and Viral Zombies Began

Movie (series) / Outbreak & Aftermath / Fast Zombies

It’s hard to believe it’s been twenty years since Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (the often-overlooked screenwriter who’s gone on to write amazing movies like Never Let Me Go and Ex Machina and most recently Devs. But yeah: Prior to 2002, all zombies were slow. Relentless, evil, able to sneak up on you without making a sound, but slow. And though the idea of a virus behind the zombification had been tossed around before, it was 28 Days Later, and the creation of Rage, along with the super-swift conversion of the populace that basically changed the whole genre going forward. It was also the first time that most of us ever heard of Cillian Murphy or Christopher Eccleston, and… well, look at what they’ve done since. Awesome.

Anyone who calls themselves a zombie fan pretty much has to have seen 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Months Later, as well as cursed God for not giving us 28 Years Later, or at least not yet. But it’s also one of the Essentials that should be on the shelf, digital or analog, for any fan. And we’ve given you a link to the Amazon page that offers this classic in all its multiple variations – blue ray, original, packaged with the sequel, on and on.

Let’s not get all gummed up in the argument that these aren’t real zombies because they’re not dead people, just infected people. Hey: they’re raging humans bent on stalking, chasing, tracking down and ultimately eating other humans. That’s good enough for us, and for about 7 billion other people, so deal with it. So if you’re looking to revisit one of the best zombie movies ever made, this is the one to choose first. Or if you’re trying to convince the newbie, the uninitiated, or the just-plain stubborn that there really is some great movie-making in the genre… here you go.


Click Here to Buy!