Such a thing is beyond imagining.
Maybe, SHOCKER, it could actually be good?
— Alan
I saw the trailer yesterday in the theater and it did look better than I thought. But there is just something about seeing zombies move that fast that seems “wrong”. Maybe in a full movie they work, but in a short trailer it doesn’t.
Maybe, sure. I’ve never denied the possibility that this could be good, just that it’s got anything to do with WWZ.
Fast zombies, in my opinion, don’t make them zombies anymore. The guy who started it all, that Romano cat, introduced the modern day shambling zombie slow, subtle-like, walking up in the background, out of frame. When it lunges to attack, it catches them and the audience by surprise. That, to me, is the essence of zombies. It’s why the Dead Rising games were the best zombie ones, to me. Zombies mean creeping death and a slow, merciless, march toward oblivion. They are supposed to be slow and insurmountable, to me. The game, Dead Rising, got this perfect, IMO. You could brush by 1 or 2 but in a group someone was going to grab you. It’s why Romano’s movies worked as that slow, inevitable creeping doom shambled forth.
When you make them all fast and jumping, you change that analogy from a slow, inevitable death, one where danger is certain but people try to resist anyway, to some kind of jumping instant death threat. When you make them so quick, they lose all of their creepiness and go from creeping background threat to active threat.
I guess what I’m saying is, I would have loved for the Army vs. zombies part (I have not seen the movie) to be the creeping death, slow realization and withdrawl scene it was in the book. I haven’t seen the movie but I’m betting they either removed that part and added some huge jet fighter bombing run scene or something or changed the way it worked. That scene worked in the book because the Army knew they had all this firepower and it looked like things were working, only to realize how tough they are to actually kill. It plays into the whole headshot to kill thing. With fast zombies that creeping death scene changes dramatically. In fact ot’s probably useless and they changed that cool scene to a “military vs zombies” montage. Am I close?
It’s Romero, not Romano. Ray Romano is an actor, and there’s also romano cheese and Romano’s Macaroni Grill, but you’re thinking of George Romero.
I don’t know, have you ever sat and watched people come out of Romano’s Macaroni Grill? That many carbs can really make for slow, zombie-like movements. I people-watched slow movers for almost an hour while I caught my breath to get the rest of the way to my car.
EDIT: Back on point, I would be very happily surprised to see this be good. The fast-moving zombies-as-force-of-nature is intriguing to me in a way that “sprinting zombies” after the Dawn remake aren’t.
I blame the all-you-can-eat bread dipped in pepper and olive oil. Damn it, now I’m hungry.
Fast zombies make a decent change imo, i fond the slow shambling stuff less scary, you always feel you should get away. A mixture of mostly slow with a few rarer fast moving zombies would work best maybe.
Who knows?
In the book the Zombie vs Army fight described is almost like the Army trying to prevent a high tide using modern weapons. It just couldn’t work. In the movie trailer instead of a tide the zombies look more like insects inevitably moving forward, the change in speed just makes them unrecognizable. My daughter watching the trailer had to ask me what “they” were.
Agreed. Slow zombies are pretty silly. You can literally walk away from them.
Shaun of the Dead worked in that it was a comedy and you just walked around them mostly.
Rather than try to reword a previous post of mine, I’ll just quote it in toto:
Slow zombies are not silly. They’re scary as fuck because no matter what you do, they’re eventually going to kill you. They give you the illusion that you have a chance to survive by being quick and smart, but that sense of superiority is a trap. You’re going to inevitably fuck up. You’re going to fall asleep at the wrong time, or you’re going to go scavenging in the wrong building, or you’re going to trust the wrong person in your group, or you’re just going to realize the futility of it all and you’ll kill yourself.
They’ll surround you, and grab you, and drag you down into the crowd and you’ll be devoured. At the end, you may even be relieved, but you’ll still feel every bite.
You are totally missing the point of zombies if you think slow moving zombies are less scary than fast moving ones. That’s right, this is me picking a fight, come get some.
You may be right, i pretty much dont like zombie movies, the slow moving groaning thinks are about as scary as a barking dog, they just dont do it for me, never have.
Some people hate vampires, werewolves, ghosts and so on, me its zombies, they are so boring.
There i said it out loud ;)
Just got back from a preview screening here in Oz… and; well it didn’t suck :)
It’s pretty much an out-and-out action movie though - don’t expect even 28 Days/Weeks Later levels of character development.
As an aside - my god someone needs to pay Peter Capaldi (aka Malcolm “Fuckety-bye!” Tucker) a wage so he doesn’t have to act as anyone but Malcolm Tucker. Seeing him on screen and NOT verbally destroying someone is very disappointing!
But that’s a totally fair point. Nobody can tell you what you’re scared of. I don’t find werewolves scary. Or vampires. Or Japanese ghost girls with their hair over their faces. But I fear zombies.
And what I’m getting at with that whole “missing the point” business is that slow zombies and fast zombies don’t represent the same thing. A fast zombie is just a predator. Might as well be a lion jumping out at you from behind a rock. But a slow zombie is inevitable encroaching doom, the death that comes for us all. Sure, you can outrun them but they won’t stop and you have to rest sometime. And the knowledge that in the end, your fate is theirs. You will walk the earth endlessly hungering with no memory of who you were or who you loved.
Slow zombies are all about walking past them because they are so easy to avoid, then you lock yourself in a building to get some sleep and wake up find that the place is surrounded by hundreds or thousands of zombies and now what are you going to do?
Yeah - good zombie fiction recognizes that a single zombie is not much threat. But there’s always more somewhere nearby, and you can’t keep your guard up all the time. Good zombie fiction recognizes that it’s silly to think of a zombie creeping up and killing a strong, mentally alert adult male. It’s not very silly for a zombie to surprise and overpower an overtired, underfed, shell shocked survivor, though.