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Movie #221 watching every zombie movie ever. Junk (2000) was the hardest movie to find. Like, the title and year are very commonly used search terms. I had high hopes for this one. I should have probably just had medium hopes.

Some not-to-bright jewelry thieves stumbled into an abandoned military science place where there just were zombies. Most of them died, but they blew it up in the end and then stole a car. I like them.

The vibe felt a little old fashioned in terms of writing and technique, but they really tried which is more than I can say for most of these.

Zombies were the slowest ever. They moved about as fast as a rich guy moves towards progress. They did seem to have the ability to just be there behind people if they weren't looking. Then they'd bite, kill, and eat. Some of these zombies would even eat parts of themselves! Headshot kills. Unclear if bites turn or if the army chemical is what turned them.

Except there was a queen zombie, the smart, agile ex-girlfriend of a military scientist. It's always them dang scientists. She survived headshots, dismemberment, electrocution, and an explosion.

The action scenes weren't great. The plot was kinda meh. The acting was adequate. The gore was sub-par.

4/8

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Movie #220 watching every zombie movie ever. Army of Darkness (1992) is a classic, beloved by many a horror fan. I hated it. The tonal shift from the horror from gore of the first two, to the Tom & Jerry slapstick of this one gave me whiplash.

Ash goes back in time because Demons and they retconned the ending of Evil Dead II, but whatever (but actually why?). And he learns he needs the Necronomicon to get back to his time. So he gets it and sets the dead free to conquer the world. So he defeats the army of the dead with the help of armies of the living and does swords against the main zombie.

Does he learn how to sword fight during the movie? Does he learn or grow or change? Does anything of relevance happen other than the above summary? The answer is shut up, he fights little mini versions of himself and that's funny for some reason.

I didn't like Tom & Jerry as a kid. I might have liked Itchy & Scratchy though.

1.5 stars.

There was a point during the final sword fight when the baddie says "You're goin down!" and Ash looks at the stairs next to him and says, "I'm goin up," and that made me push breath out of my nose.

I've got 4 more rare zombie DVDs to watch, so I'm cautiously hopeful about them.

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Movie #219 watching every zombie movie ever. Evil Dead II (1987) got skipped because I really didn't think that the first one was a zombie movie. I do think this one was though and Army of Darkness surely is, so I'll watch that next.

This movie was wacky souvlaki. Kicking thing off in fifth gear, it's kinda non-stop horror nonsense for the whole movie. Our hero Ash gets like half-zombed after having to cut off his girlfriend's head because of the forest demons. Then some more demon-fodder arrive to scream and bleed for a while. Ash does attach a chainsaw to his wrist after cutting his hand off with it. Then the demons kill everyone but him and suck him through a time portal to the medieval times. The end.

This movie helped inspire the game Doom, so I have to thank the creators for my childhood.

Zombies are a little more mystical, not really following any logic per se other than to do what the demons needed them to do... or is it demons possessing the corpses again? I dunno.

Very fun and weird movie. Tons of claymation, adorable puppetry, humorous murdles. Way more blood than a body has in it.

4 stars.

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Movie #218 watching every zombie movie ever. Dawn of the Dead (2004) is a Zack Snyder reimagining of the other one. It makes zombies fast and scary. It's an action suspense movie and its message isn't anti-consumerism like the first one. It's message is more just like, that we need each other to survive. The main character arc, I think, goes from the guy's willingness to sacrifice others to survive, to recognizing that survival is easier with others, to sacrificing oneself to save the others.

Plot was zombies comin, run away, hide in mall, make plan to find island to hide on, get to boat. There were side quests, but they didn't seem to effect the above story.

Down sides: Snyder adds in his little witty quips that make the character look cool even if it's not in the character and takes me out of an otherwise deadly serious situation. Also sometimes the characters did weird things to make the action more tense, but mostly the writing and acting were good.

Up sides: Snyder knows how to push the action button and the scare button. He certainly made these zombies scarier than they usually are.

Zombies were fast runners, eaters/biters. A small bite will turn you eventually, but a big one will turn you fast. Headshots kill. Zombies were dumb, but not 100% dumb.

6.5/10

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Movie #217 watching every zombie movie ever. Meat Market 2 (2001) was another DVD that cost too much and took a while to get here. And now that I've seen it, it will never be seen by human eyes anywhere in the world ever again. This movie was the most boring gore-filled edgy garbage since Meat Market 1. Nobody in their right mind could sit through what I just sat through.

In this one, our vampire friend and two humans get captured by post-zompocalypse fascists. Then, after the slowest, least convincing torture scenes, the cannibalism reveal, and several scenes of a guy fucking various human body parts for no reason relevant to the movie, the vampire does vampire magic and breaks her friend out of there. The other one shot himself in the head which invoked exactly zero emotion from anyone.

This one, like the one before it, played as if it was a first year college assignment that nobody involved wanted to do, so everything about it felt phoned in, even the sUpEr edgy shots of boobs and dicks.

Also, the sound of zombies eating people sounded like a guy biting apples inside a plastic bucket and it got very annoying.

Two thumbs down.

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Movie #216 watching every zombie movie ever. Choking Hazard (2004) was right up my alley. It had philosophy and humor and also zombies.

A small group meets at an out-of-the-way motel to talk to some smart guy about the meaning of life. Zombies who are all woodsmen for some reason begin to swarm the motel. They are biters and eaters and pretty dumb. They run on instinct. Later a different group of zombie woodsmen appear: the hunters, zombies who can clearly think. They represent reason. Meanwhile, as people die one by one, the survivors continue talking about the meaning of life, morality, meaning itself, quite divorced from the horror going on around them. The teacher philosopher smart guy says that we must balance reason and instinct as he is inexplicably led away with the rest of the zombies (by this time he has been zombified). The filmmakers chose not to make sense of this movie and especially its ending(s?), keeping in line with the different views of the characters and leaving any meaning to be interpreted by the viewer.

I enjoyed this one and saw myself in many of the silly philosophical takes made by each of the students.

8/10

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Movie #215 watching every zombie movie ever. Blood of the Beast (2003) was so hard to find that, not only did I have to order it on DVD, but I couldn't even find a trailer or anything to get shots of the movie (normally I just take screenshots). So these pictures are actually taken from my phone camera pointed at the TV screen.

This is a a low budget experimental film and I kinda loved it. Ok, so the obvious negatives first. The acting and dialogue wasn't great. Not the worst, but below acceptable. Many of the shots were visually boring or even off-putting but in a non-horror way. Like, a brightly lit hallway with white walls and nothing in it as a setting for a conversation.

But what this film lacked was made up for by its atmosphere if nothing else. The film uses silence or quiet throughout to emphasize the particularly horrific and violent scenes. It calls back to the great wars by adopting the silent film aesthetic in those key moments. While most films are filled with screaming and squishing sound effects, this one reminds me of those war films when a shell would strike too close and all you could hear was the ringing while the terror continued around you.

My interpretation of Blood of the Beast is that it is an anti-power film standing against both religion and government, using the horrors of both war and technology to show just how much danger we are in. All of us, in our actual lives.

In the aftermath of WW3, due to chemical warfare humans lose the ability to have babies and cloning replaces reproduction. Years later the first wave of clones begin to die and wake up again as flesh-hungry animals preying on anyone nearby. One group in the film turns to religion and a preacher to keep them safe, another relies on their own reason and rationality. Both groups are entirely doomed. They stood no chance. It is implied in the film that this outcome was planned from the beginning, another weapon of war that doesn't discriminate. Where WW2 was won with unimaginable destruction, WW3 wasn't even won. It merely stopped due to indiscriminate chemical genocide across the world. But it was only paused for a few years.

Those with political power do not care about those without it. Hiroshima and Nagasaki lost hundreds of thousands of innocents in an instant and hundreds of thousands more in the aftermath. Regular people in the Congo, Palestine, Ukraine, and a dozen other nations are dying and suffering because of apathetic political powers. North America, originally known as Turtle Island is home to the largest genocide in humanity's history. All because of political power and its undying need to expand.

In the film, 3 billion died by chemical war and presumably the rest by zombie apocalypse. All for the power of a few uncaring masters. Tools for an end that had nothing to do with them. Religion didn't save them. Intelligence did nothing for them. Fighting back or giving in both had the same result. No one is safe while political authority exists.

9/10 don't care about the minor downsides when it gets me thinking this good and gives me those horror chills while it does it.

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Movie #214 watching every zombie movie ever. Zombiegeddon (2003) was bad and dumb and bad. Its humor was juvenile even for its time. Acting sucked. Dialogue didn't make sense. God was real. Bro killed the king of the zombies by gently putting his hand into the guy's stomach and ripping out his heart. The way people die in this movie felt like the 1950s when someone just casually puts their hand on a throat and that kills you almost instantly. In one scene they clearly used cans of tomatoes for the gore because you could see a couple of slices fall to the ground.

Also, ALSO, zombies weren't really zombies. Like, they can be a lot of different things, but in this movie they were a species created by the devil. You can't turn into one. They aren't dead people. They could look human, but then for whatever reason would suddenly turn into zombies complete with inability to talk, groaning, flesh-hunger, and rotting grey skin. You can kill or incapacitate them by any means effective on humans. This one zombie got put out from a sleeper hold.

Our "heroes" in this movie were two cops who are shown murdering multiple people, planting evidence, and laughing about it (I think it's supposed to be part of the humor?). And luckily we're told and not shown that they're also rapists. Like, I dunno. Someone should check on the creators of this crap to see if they're in prison yet. Again, these are the main characters and heroes of the story.

As pictured Robert Z'Dar showed up for a couple scenes literally to plug Maniac Cop twice. I just... I'm beginning to think I don't like movies anymore.

Only kinda good thing was that they had a tiger in the first scene and it wasn't stock footage, it was actually there with them. It very much looked like it didn't want to be there though and it was just gone and not mentioned for the rest of the movie, so I'm giving them no points for it.

0 stars. Two thumbs down. 0/11.

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Movie #213 watching every zombie movie ever. Zombie Night (2003) is another amateur low budget movie about the same stuff written by people who don't know how humans behave, acted by the same, no artistry or original thought. Pictured is a zombie eating its own leg after someone shot it off and I thought that was funny.

Setting was recent zombie apocalypse. Plot was every zombie apocalypse plot stuffed into one movie by having the characters explain everything instead of showing it.

Zombies were regular slow, thoughtless, eaters, bites turn ya, headshots kill em.

If I hadn't seen fifty of these already I might be more entertained by them. 1.5/10

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Movie #212 watching every zombie movie ever. Zombie King and the Legion of Doom (2003) was exactly what you'd expect from a comedy horror lucha zombie movie. Not great.

The premise of this one is that luchadors are kinda like famous superheroes and they're quite common. And also that there just are zombies. And so a lucha wrestler is making a zombie horde to take over the world and a rag tag team of super famous luchadors do fighting on him to make him stop. Along the way one of our heroines is killed by zombers and her friend (or more than friend?) is sad. At the end we get treated to a lesbian human/zombie kiss that everyone asked for (pictured).

Zombies are slow and dumb, but smart enough to know and do simple things. They bite to turn and they eat the whole body. They start out scary, but by the end of the film nobody even cares if they're walking through a bunch of zombies. They are not a threat at all unless the plot calls for it. To kill them you must remove their heads. Not just headshots, but full removal.

I think this movie was a tribute to the old lucha films by El Santo and his gang which I hate so very very much. This was better, but still not very good.

4/10

Is that Zach Braff??

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Movie #211 watching every zombie movie ever. Undead (2003) was at times so simple as to be boring and other times so complicated as to be confusing. They were either spending 20 minutes in a badly acted/choreographed zombie shoot-out or or brushing quickly passed what even the heck the aliens were really doing... which I think was saving people.

A comet struck a small town in Australia only and it did zombies, then also there was acid rain burninating all the people, grasshoppers getting abducted, a giant spiked wall around the city, and zombies sayin "brains" and "join us" while punching through people's heads. And so I think the idea was that the aliens, who seemed like the baddies at first, were really saving us from comet zombies. The abductions were to take healthy animals (including humans) up above the acid rain which was to cure zombies? or to kill the zombies? And the wall was to contain the comet zombie virus.

Bad acting, effects, writing, lighting and editing. The whole movie was this blue color except for the start and end which were sepia tone. It often just looked like they shot in black and white and added some blue in afterward. Anyway uh, I'm bored of these low budget movies trying to look like Independence Day or The Matrix.

2.5/10

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Movie #210 watching every zombie movie ever. House of the Dead (2003) makes no sense. How do you make the most formulaic action horror and still manage to make the most nonsense decisions possible? This movie was predictable from minute one except for all the nonsense dialogue and the shots of the actual game that it was based on spliced in randomly. How do you take someone out of the movie entirely like twenty times? Cut to that scene in the game that's kinda like this scene! Hey kids! Remember playing the game? That's kinda like what's this is being?

Zombies moved fast and could have been genuinely scary, but instead they were anonymous enemies for the annoying rich teenage protagonists to easily fight off even without any combat experience. They do zombify you, but some people got bit without turning, so maybe that's not how you turn and who even cares at this point?

1.5 out of 11

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Movie #209 watching every zombie movie ever. Gory Gory Hallelujah (2003) had four Jesuses fighting a horde of Elvises. Nuff said? No? The female Jesus stabs an Elvis to death in the dick with a corkscrew because he non-consensually grinded on her.

Ok so this movie wasn't perfect. It parodied everything from religion, to conservatism, to feminism, to the Black Power movement, and look, did it get everything right? Almost yeah. It was pretty good, I think. But there is that thing where the parodied version is often agreed with by those who are being parodied and I'm sure that's what was happening to me. The angry political afroed black Jesus, the man-hating feminists, the bisexual himbo who sometimes gets it right, I know they're all poking fun, but I also agree with them on pretty much everything.

The movie could have used less r*pe talk in my opinion. The dick stabbing was enough. We didn't need the feminist stereotype trying to convince our heroine that her consensual sex was actually not consensual. And humiliating Black Jesus when he was taken prisoner wasn't funny or necessary.

That all said this movie goes bonkers hard. The zombies rose because a priest found a glowing dildo rod from God and used it to cause the apocalypse. It was mildly surreal edgy South Park humor and I enjoyed it as that.

3.5 stars.

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Movie #208 watching every zombie movie ever. Beyond Re-Animator (2003) was the best of the bunch in my opinion. It was slightly less wacky than the others. It was set mostly in a prison and most of the people who bit it were either r*pists or prison guards.

Our hero went to prison after causing just so much death and 13 years later the kid whose sister died by zombie strangulation becomes a doctor at his prison. Yadda yadda, prison riot, dead people back to life do scary murders. If you've seen the others, this one didn't reinvent anything. The main difference here was that this one was more grounded, more serious, but also had better jokes. I did get kinda bored though, so IDK how good it really was. It makes prisoners seem like they're all awful people though. Each one was a criminal stereotype.

Zombies were normal Re-Animator zombies except our hero figured a way of bringing them to a kinda rationality, but it like mixed their personalities and kept the murderous impulses. One got killed by electric chair? Even though you could literally pop out an eyeball and it would keep living.

3 stars up.

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Movie #207 watching every zombie movie ever. Battlefield Baseball (2003) is a Japanese musical comedy horror kung-fu sports movie and all of those things worked perfectly. I can't remember a movie as absurd or fun as this one. This film was as close as you can get to pure joy in a horror movie. PLUS the dog didn't die! The dog didn't die! First zombie movie where the dog doesn't die!

So there's a guy who accidentally killed his father by loving baseball too hard and the local team wants him to play because they have to play against a zombie team that literally murders other players in a no-rules, no-laws game of baseball. And he finds the strength to play again and the support of friends and the love of family and the magic of just deciding not to die yet and he fucking owns his enemies and then has empathy towards them and then fucking owwwwns one of them who is extra bad and the dog survives and isn't even in any danger at all. I love dogs.

Zombies were sort of an undead baseball team who were green and kinda freaky looking, but otherwise completely human in every way including their desire to murder the opposing team (Go Canucks Go!).

9/10

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Movie #206 watching every zombie movie ever. Zombie Chronicles (2001) was shot entirely in the woods and it's 100% because doing so is free. This movie was about a woman who is lost on her way to some town and picks up a guy and he tells her two stories that include zombies and it turns out he was a ghost the whole time and then she gets eaten by zombies. This movie was bad and also not good. It did have a lot of unintentionally funny moments in it though, so might be a fun watch with the types of friends who would enjoy that. Some of the gore was pretty ok or at least hilarious. The zombie effects were just rubber masks and gloves though.

This was another one of the movies so hard to find that I had to buy it from ebay on DVD. It came with 3D glasses and they were the wrong kind, so I had to just watch it in boring 2D. The DVD case was unopened, brand new, and it had a coupon inside the box for juice that expired in 2003. I found that very charming.

Zombies were dead people who grunted and ate flesh, but otherwise seemed to be aware of things and did things with a purpose. They moved as fast as normal people. Dunno if anything kills them.

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Movie #205 watching every zombie movie ever. Ritual (2002) aka Tales from the Crypt Presents Ritual - because I guess it didn't sell that well so they slapped a (racist?) Crypt Keeper opening on it - was inspired by I Walked with a Zombie from 1943, the ninth ever zombie movie, if we count J'accuse.

Anyway, this one was bad. Watch I Walked with a Zombie instead. This one took the basic premise and undid the interesting parts to make it kinda just a medical thing even though there was definitely a magical element. Also, the way that our heroine defeated the baddie at the end was unearned and out of nowhere. Tim Curry was in it too! This did not help. Boring mystery drama with some suspenseful parts and the acting was mid.

Zombies were people brought back from the dead and barely appeared in the film at all. I think the cop fucked a zombie right at the end. Like, it's off screen, but I don't think he was a zombie, but maybe he was. I don't care enough to check.

One thumb out of three.