Minecraft, why do you mess with our heads so?  Does our sanity offend you that much?  There I was, just minding my own business, building a wall around a quaint little village I had found.  Suddenly besieged  by zombies, as you are sometimes, I trundled over to deal with these numerous slow, meddlesome pests.  A few seconds later and I was dead, a tiny, bouncing blur of green dominating my memory.

Where the hell did that thing come from?!  It looks like a zombie, but it’s half the size, twice as fast and five times as nasty!  Well, I’m safely resurrected in my house, all I have to do is wait until morning and the little freak will burn with the rest, right?

So I busy myself with some crafting, some mining and wait for morning.  With the sun well-up I leave my house to survey the damage.  The village, bustling just minutes earlier, is eerily quiet.  A few seconds later and I was dead, the same tiny blur of green had brought friends to mock me.

Really, Minecraft, they’re immune to sunlight too?!  Why, Minecraft?  Why?!

Buckethead zombie is, as you might have guessed, a regular zombie with a bucket.  A bucket on his head.  It may be best to allow the esteemed Suburban Almanac to explain:

Buckethead Zombie always wore a bucket. Part of it was to assert his uniqueness in an uncaring world. Mostly he just forgot it was there in the first place.

The bucket makes him tough!  The bucket makes him strong!  The bucket makes him pretty much blind and it chafes something awful.

Plants vs. Zombies has a very large collection of memorable zombies (we’ll get to them eventually), but one of the first ones to really annoy you was probably this little shambler.  Sure, an extra pea-shooter or two settled things, but until then all you got was *clink* and chomp.

So we celebrate the buckethead zombie as we simultaneously lament all the time we’ve spent with him over the years.  Seriously… the books we might have read!  The work we could have done!  The love we could have made!

Evil Ash started out as a mirror homunculus who was split into many tiny duplicates then swallowed by Ash.  From inside he grew, like a boil or wart, from Ash’s shoulder and finally split off to explore a life of his own.  A short life, as it turned out, because he immediately proceeded to make the grave mistake of royally pissing off Ash who blew most of his face off with a shotgun.

Shortly after a surprisingly decent burial he had an even more surprising resurrection.  This was, of course, Ash’s fault.  When Ash fails to retrieve the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis correctly an unrelenting army of the undead rises from their graves.  Evil Ash, now Zombie Evil Ash, installs himself as general.

“Army of Darkness” is hands down one of the most original, clever and just pure fun movies ever made.  While it can be argued that it’s not really a zombie movie it’s actually quite difficult to pin down what it is.  A comedy?  Horror?  Parody?  Fantasy?  Sure: it’s all those things and more.

So this week let’s all give Evil Ash just a little sugar, eh?

Since we celebrated the first T-Virus zombie from Resident Evil last week I thought it would be nice to feature one of the more memorable zombies from the film adaptation (one of the few truly decent video-game movies ever made).

Michelle Rodriguez, playing the role of Michelle Rodriguez, features in the film as one of the last survivors of the special tactical team sent to investigate the disaster at the secret, underground research facility.  She also, hands down, gets the most shit of anybody.

She’s the first to be bitten by the emerging zombie horde.  Then she’s bitten again.  Then she’s bitten by her best friend.  Then she’s dragged around like a bleeding sack of flour.  Then she used as a token in a game of blackmail.  Then she dies right before they find the cure.  Then she gets better.  Then 20 seconds later she dies again.  Then 10 seconds after that she dies again.

Rain went through hell to entertain us.  For that we celebrate her.

The first Resident Evil game (known as “Biohazard” in Japan) was a huge release for the then young PlayStation console.  It was instrumental in proving that gaming had matured past run-and-jump and in defining the survival horror genre.

The first few minutes of the game are also famous for two very different things.  The first, at least in North America, is the hilariously bad voice acting and the even more hilarious script.   With lines like, “Jill, here’s a lockpick. It might come in handy if you, the master of unlocking, take it with you.” gamers may have been forgiven for writing the series off.

Minutes after this line was delivered the second thing came along and chased any such thoughts away.  As you wandered down a hallway toward an anonymous, hunched figure the mood built.  As you approached, the sounds of  gnawing and chewing rose.  The tension built expertly until, in a gush of blood and gore the creature turned and groaned and millions of gamers simultaneously wet themselves like toddlers terrorized by circus clowns.

This was our first exposure to the T-virus although we didn’t know it at the time.  The zombies in this first outing may have been primitive by modern standards but they sure as hell got the job done.  Even if they, and you, did move like drunken tanks until the forth game.

The Walking Dead has featured many iconic zombies but few are as memorable as the well zombie from the episode, “Cherokee Rose”.  Our survivors, still in an uneasy truce with Hershel, attempt to make themselves useful on the farm.  They discover a surprise in one of his wells: the bloated, beaten corpse of one of his neighbors.

Trying to get the unwanted corpse out involved a nerve-wracking sequence featuring poor Glen dangling like a worm on a hook over the snapping zombie, some decisive action from T-Dog and one of the most gruesome effects ever seen on TV.  It also ruined a perfectly good well.

The zombie was even made into a an action figure in the second series of “Walking Dead” figures from McFarlane Toys.  A perfect stocking-stuffer if ever there was one.