Andre, Luda and their little, bitey baby bump. Photo from IMDB.com.

The 2004 remake of George Romero’s 1978 classic “Dawn of the Dead” is a damn decent zombie movie in its own right.  The movies transition from the adrenaline-fueled “first shock” horror of the first hours of an outbreak into the suspenseful, constant tension of living in a zombie world.  Our survivors, a much larger and varied group than in the original, are able to fortify a large shopping mall which is soon surrounded by thousands of walking corpses.

Two of the survivors, Andre and Luda, are expecting a baby.  We all know from the start that this isn’t going to end well, but the movie teases and distracts us from the inevitable with a commendable subtlety.  When the reveal is finally made the mood is perfect and the tension thick and heavy.

Poor Luda, we barely knew you!  Poor Andre, you sad, broken bastard!  Poor baby bitey, you freakish little slab of nightmare with insanity sauce.  Here’s to you all!

It took Mystery Science Theater 3000 to make “Zombie Nightmare” watchable.  Even then you may have your problems (as, for example, fully half the movie seems to have been filmed at night with no lights) but at least you’ll laugh.

Jon Mikl Thor, Canadian body builder and heavy metal musician who bills himself humbly as “The Legendary Rock Warrior” plays good natured mama’s boy Tony Washington.  Tony is killed by a group of teenage 80’s hair-dos in a fast car.  As Tom Servo so musically puts it (to the tune of “Amore”): “When your car hits a guy and his body goes fly, that’s a dead guy.”

His mother, thankfully, is owed a favor by the local voodoo priestess.  She drags him back from death to allow his rampaging corpse to get his revenge.  She does this, by the way, through the cunning over-use of candles and make-up.

The movie is beyond terrible, even for Canada (I kid!) and Thor’s attempt at “zombie” looks pretty much like his attempt at “not zombie”.  He wanders around with a baseball bat, grunts, eventually runs accidentally into somebody that might deserve to die and then things happen.  Mostly off camera.  Still, the movie’s failure is MST3K’s success and for that we celebrate Tony Washington!

[I just realized that I screwed up the publish date on this and, horrors!, there was no zombie for over half the week!  I’m not sure you were all able to survive, but if you didn’t send me a pic and maybe you’ll be the next zombie of the week!]

Apparently artistic poodle grooming is a thing people do.  I’m not sure why that’s a surprise to me at all; I already knew there were professional potato carvers.  There are also people who make a living pretending to be celebrities on twitter.  So who am I judge?

Anyway, this is Xerxes the Zombie Poodle.  I believe that his means his name is “Xerxes”, that’s he a poodle and that he’s a zombie.  Really, pretty self-explanatory.  Yes his beloved owner,  Amy “Bullet” Brown, turned him into a zombie but let’s not hold that against her.  He seems happy enough.

I fear that he seems “happy enough” because of the surprising number of hollowed-out, licked clean noggins around the dog-house but, well, he seems happy enough.

Gwen Price is a complicated chick.  Well worth getting to know if you have the chance but “baggage” is definitely a word that comes to mind.  She’s unsure about her career, has some trouble connecting with her friends and has a really hard time with relationships.  She also has to eat a human brain once a month or so or else she’ll devolve into a senseless, rampaging zombie.

iZombie unfortunately ended after 28 amazing issues but is still available at the better comic shops and digitally.  Written by the always interesting Chris Roberson and drawn in an amazing pop-art style by Mike Allred it was a story that crossed genre and generational gaps.

It began with the insanely interesting concept that a zombie needs to eat brains to retain their humanity but suffered the memories and desires of those from whom they partake.  After eating a brain (readily available in her position as a grave digger at a eco-friendly graveyard) Gwen would be nagged by the inherited memories until she took action.  The series could have rested on this impressive, but admittedly minor, stroke of genius and become a simple anthology.  Instead it proceeded to expand its scope into nearly every supernatural genre in the most wonderfully bizarre ways.

Gwen’s best friends were an amiable, air-headed ghost and a neurotic were-terrier.  Later she becomes involved with a group of entrepreneurial vampires and the ancient order of monster hunters investigating them.  There’s a group of government-sponsored monsters named for (and led by) dead presidents.   There’s a 2,000 year-old mummy, a possessed chimpanzee and yes, there are Nazis.  There are also quite a few zombies.  At one point, at least, way too many zombies for the good citizens of Eugene, Oregon.

iZombie is a sharply written, deftly drawn orgy of genres and ideas.  It’s a must-read for anybody looking for an original, clean take on zombie mythos and concepts.  Until we do the right thing and complete a full review of the book just trust us on this one: spend some time with Gwen and her friends.  You won’t be disappointed.

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.