J*A*S*M

A parody of zombie horror and also a reflection on the modern world. It’s not very deep, it pokes only superficially at the themes that are the most at hand: terrorism, homosexuality, religion, but ZMD doesn’t feel stupid, or at least I didn’t get the impression that the creators were pulling things our of their asses. It’s not what I would call a quality film, but it isn’t awfully bad, either.

David Fincher is simply incapable of making a bad film. Zodiac is not the most typical example of his work, and won’t become my favourite, but it’s still a very well made movie.

Enough already! I can’t take another bad zombie movie this year. Tiredness. Exhaustion. Despair. Futility on futility.

I’m not used to giving more than two stars to this type of low budget jokes, but I’m making an exception this time. Sod the script and the cheap visuals! The film excels in the atmosphere, especially in the first and the last act. At the beginning it looks like some sort of crude thriller about maniacs who don’t kill their victims directly, but put them into a… very passive state. The second act mostly follows the investigation of the father of one of the victims and it’s the weakest, it doesn’t deliver anything very memorable and has plenty of holes in the logic. The third act unravels things pretty interestingly, has a thick atmosphere and even some truly tense and scary scenes (and I don’t mean at a “semi amateur movie standard”). The authors probably got their inspiration in the mythology of the X-Files, which I can’t blame. It’s nice to see low budget creators aware of their limitations and who don’t try to make something they don’t have enough resources for (for comparison, we have the recent low budget catastrophe from Sweden Blood Runs Cold). This makes Dark Souls nice to watch, even though it’s clear that it didn’t cost much. Thumbs up and keep an eye on the directors, if they get some money, we can expect good things from them.

With this film Fulci has finally won my heart. The zombies look great and the story is passable for 1970s Italy standards. The only thing that bothered me a little was the music and, especially the fact that, when facing an extreme situation, the heroes, instead of running away, stand in front of the zombies exposing as much skin as possible so the monster can comfortably take a bite. Regardless, this film was a very pleasant surprise and one of the best of the Italian school of horror – though it’s true that it can’t be compared with Romero, he made social satire, Fulci made horror. Thanks for that.

I refuse to believe that someone could mean this seriously. There are several moments that almost made me burst out in laughter, because what I was seeing on screen felt like a self-parody, but an unintentional one, unfortunately. If it was like this intentionally, the screenwriter would deserve an award for genius, I doubt anyone could come up with, for example, the scene of “the reunion after many years”. I also realised that the pond where the water sprites live mysteriously changes its depth, you can see it in the scene where the zombies attack the bathing girls. From the coast, the water barely reaches the girls’ waist, but when the camera captures them from under the water in that same moment, they are swimming and the zombies reach for them from even deeper. Interesting. Zombie Lake is such a bad film that I’m sure someone will like it. I just hope that Romero’s upcoming Something of the Dead (also with water zombies) won’t be similar.

I confess that despite the excellent responses, I didn’t believe in Zombieland, at all. The trailer didn’t interest me in the slightest and given how much I (didn’t) like that other highly praised zombie comedy (Shawn of the Dead), I expected 80 minutes of boredom and suffering. Fortunately, the heroes of Zombieland are a lot more likeable than the gang around Simon Pegg. Where I fundamentally disagree with most other reviewers is in my opinion about the course of the film. I consider the beginning as the weakest part (those first fifteen minutes made me fear a new Shawn, with the corresponding two stars), the quiet moments in the middle (the interactions of the characters) as the best, and the action-packed climax as a fun end to the ride. BM’s cameo was awesome!

A very nice start and middle, but that sudden ending was like a cold shower – like, “good, but that’s it?”

Softcore porn for necrophiliacs, lol! This highly anticipated horror trash turned out to be better than I though – i.e. it was watchable. Englund has always been good playing weird perverts and that applies here, too; actually, he’s the best by far, the other actors deliver performances that are typical for bad B-movies. The make-up effects are quite good, which is something that can’t be said about the special effects, they are really terrible. The story is, it could be said, innovative – I didn’t expect to come across a new evolutionary form of the film zombie. In short, Zombie Strippers is not a big surprise. Collectors of cinema insanity will surely dig it, everyone else should ignore it. Yeah, it’s bullshit, but is not boring, so 45%.

The only good thing about this film is that it’s in colour, though it could be a bit more atmospheric in black and white. I don’t know if I can give it one star for that. Yeah, I know: I can’t.