Director: Kevin Hamedani
Year: 2009
Country: USA

Zombie comedies, heretofore known as “zombedy,” are all the rage these days. Zombieland tore up the box office and resulted in a weird cult of Woody Harrelson (I still say his best role is as Woody on Cheers), while Doghouse, though relatively unseen outside the festival circuit and the U.K., blew me away with its unique brand of humor that failed to miss a beat. Kicking off the new decade with a slot on After Dark’s 8 Films to Die For is Kevin Hamedani’s Zombies of Mass Destruction, a zombedy with a political bend it wears on its blood-soaked sleeve.

Zombies of Mass Destruction takes your standard “group of people trying to survive a zombie outbreak” trope and layers it with a heaping plate of social and political commentary. Iranian-American Frida has recently returned home from Princeton to only be met with ignorant yet neighborly racists and her devoted Muslim father. Meanwhile, couple Tom and Lance have arrived from the big city to reveal to Tom’s mother that he’s gay. To make matters worse, a zombie outbreak has inexplicably cropped up. As they struggle to survive, the zombies become the least of their worries as they face rampant racism and religious persecution that has come to typify the small town they tried to leave behind.

(Read the rest of the review at Horror Squad)

Director: Lars von Trier
Year: 2009
Country: Denmark

The influence of Lars von Trier’s latest magnum opus Antichrist reaches far and wide. The overarching theme of the film, “chaos reigns,” became the unofficial slogan of Fantastic Fest, and although recently cancelled to legal issues, CHUD.com and IFC sponsored a “make your own Antichrist poster” contest so that similarly disturbed individuals could artistically express their love for what has come to be, for me, one of the worst horror films of the year.

This sort of reaction is not what I would have expected from such a brilliant filmmaker. My experience with the film prior to viewing it was simply reading the words, “Lars von Trier to make a horror film called Antichrist,” and that was all that was needed to get the anticipation flowing through my veins. What we have here, then, is another example of the hype machine working its magic, instilling in me expectations that can in no way be met or exceeded.

(Read the rest of the review at Horror Squad)

Now in list format!

1. If you have not been to Castle Vardulon, I suggest you drop what you’re doing right now and make way to this little corner of the internet post haste! The one and only Count Vardulon is a rare treat in that not only does he cover horror movies and literature, he also writes incredibly long yet hysterical reviews of episodes of popular TV shows such as CSI: Miami and Criminal Minds. Thrown into the mix are his hilarious Saturday Night RapeWatch columns and the weekly AVOD, the internet’s only audio-only video podcast. Run in tandem with the lovely Dive Mistress, herself a shining beacon on the horror blogging community, the AVOD is a hilarious podcast no horror fan should go without. This past week they invited me as a special guest to discuss my time spent at Fantastic Fest. I won’t post it here, but you should definitely go HERE and check it out for yourself.

2. Head on over to Horror Squad, where we’re unveiling the 31 Fates Worse Than Death and other wonderful things.

3. I received a bunch of new comics in the mail, so God willing I’ll be throwin’ some reviews of them within the next week or so. Life always seems to get in the way of what I want to do.

4. Here’s a picture. Enjoy.

Director: Jake West
Year: 2009
Country: United Kingdom

A plethora of zombie films have saturated the horror film landscape for almost a decade, drawing the ire of those who simply want something more than the same ol’ same ol’ out of the walking dead. Every so often, however, we’re given a unique zombie film, be it outright horror or the increasingly popular zombie-comedy (”zom-com”), to satisfy our lust for originality. Sadly, many of these fail to get the recognition they deserve and as such, they tend to make the rounds at film festivals and gain popularity through word-of-mouth before ultimately being released to DVD without so much as a limited theatrical release. With luck, Jake West will buck the trend, as his splatter zom-com Doghouse is a triumph of horror-comedy that takes basic zombie tropes and turns them every which way. The result is one of the most inventive and gut-busting horror comedies to be released in years

(Read the rest of the review at HorrorSquad)

Director: George Romero
Year: 2009
Country: United States

The air was thick with anticipation for the North American premiere of Survival of the Dead, an event made all the more poignant by the appearance of George A. Romero himself. Given that his prior film, Diary of the Dead, was (in my opinion) a pathetic attempt at capitalizing on the cinema verite phenomenon and thus a giant middle finger to the horror fans, expectations for an improvement were low.

(Read the rest of the review at HorrorSquad)

Director: Orin Peli
Year: 2007/2009
Country: United States

When I was seventeen years old I saw a midnight screening of the The Blair Witch Project in Sarasota, Florida at a tiny indie theater downtown. After leaving the film I went home to a pitch-black, dead-silent house, terrified out of my mind. Although no doubt bolstered by my post-film living arrangements, much of the fear drawn from that film comes from the cinema verite style in which it is shot. Not only are the characters in the film, but you, the viewer are as well, acting as a part of the story by seeing the action unfold through their eyes. It is real horror, and it possesses all the elements to construct a truly terrifying story.

(Read the rest of the review at HorrorSquad)