It’d be beating a dead horse to gripe about Hollywood’s reliance on sequels, prequels, and adaptations, but not all is right in the world with the recent release of the trailer for the World War Z adaption from star and producer Brad Pitt. I don’t have a problem with Hollywood bringing books and other previously existing media to the screen – hell, I like it most of the time. It’s cool to see a cinematic translation of something you know and enjoy. Therein lies the rub with the World War Z trailer. It doesn’t appear to be a translation of something people know and enjoy. I say “people” and not myself since I actually found World War Z to be a fairly big disappointment, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t hoping for an excellent zombie movie, based however it may be on the failed execution of a great premise. It’s not always wise to judge a movie by its trailer, but from our first look it seems Hollywood has screwed the pooch in the most Hollywood way imaginable.

October continues, and we’re moving to our next batch of favorite on-screen monsters. This week we’re talking about zombies and all the glorious ways George Romero changed that sub-genre forever. Originally an urban legend in Voodoo culture, the term “zombie” was forever married to an image of mobs of the undead searching for flesh to sink their rotting teeth into. It’s a friendly image, no doubt. We’ve already turned our eardrums over what Romero had to say on the commentary track for Dawn of the Dead, the sequel to this groundbreaking classic, but now we’re going back to the source. This time around, Romero has brought along two members of the cast and his co-writer, John Russo, so the conversation should be a bit livelier than creatures they all had a hand in creating on screen. So here we go, all 26 things we learned from the commentary track for Night of the Living Dead.

Why Watch? This is one of the reasons I love Short of the Week. Without them, I never would have found this ridiculous diamond collar in the ruff. As ashamed as I am of that last sentence, it’s with great pride that I feature this short. It plays off the well-worn zombie trope by transferring the humanity of the story to a canine set. With flashy, suggestive editing that makes the best use of a smaller budget, the moments of gore really stand out even if it’s the unseen attacks that hit the hardest. It also manages to go into dark territory, because even if zombies don’t want to bite into the dogs, the human survivors are still trying to stay fed. The story is a only slightly more than a few great bits woven together, and the minimal amount of shaky cam is still too much, but overall this is a creative and daring short with a lot of love for the genre. What will it cost you? Only 16 minutes. Skip work. Watch more short films.

Editor’s note: With FSR favorite ParaNorman opening today, we thought it was only appropriate to re-post our very special set visit from the film, originally posted on May 21, 2012. I recently visited a nondescript building outside Portland, Oregon that would feel right at home in any corporate office park in America. Nothing about the bland, uninteresting exterior even hinted at what to expect beyond the front doors. There’s no sign outside to tell you where you are. No iconic sculptures alluding to what they do inside. Nothing at all that even hints at the harmonious blend of magic and technology within. But make no mistake, what LAIKA Studios is hiding inside those four generic-looking walls is nothing short of a revolution in film production…a revolution 115 years in the making. LAIKA is the studio behind 2009′s critical and commercial hit, Coraline, a film that utilized creepy but beautiful stop-motion puppetry to tell Neil Gaiman’s dark childhood fable. Their follow-up feature is an original work called ParaNorman. It’s an Amblin-like tale of a small New England town, a very special boy who can see and talk with the dead, and a zombie uprising that threatens to destroy them all. And yes, it’s a comedy. Keep reading for a peek behind the scenes of LAIKA Studios’ upcoming production, ParaNorman, and their secret, high-tech weapon…Rapid Prototype 3D printers.

It is possible for family films, like any other film genre (or, for that matter, any other entertainment medium), to play to the cheap seats. It’s just that in the case of family films, those seats are brightly colored, made of molded plastic, and help little Jimmy see over the lady in front of him at the theater. When a filmmaker resigns himself to aiming the core of their movie low enough that only the tiniest of funny bones will be struck, story and character development take an unfortunate back seat. This issue has been raised and examined in many reviews on this particular site, and often due to the fact that the family film under review is guilty of sacrificing craft for a demographic-pandering layup. ParaNorman also calls to mind this issue, but quite fortunately, that’s only because it stands as a sterling example of a film that exists free of that compromise. ParaNorman is the tale of a boy named, unsurprisingly, Norman, who has been blessed/cursed with the ability to converse with the dead. This ability, as one would expect, leads to his being ostracized by his peers, mocked by his sister, and even resented by his father. Norman’s typically benevolent visions of the other side become increasingly sinister and foretelling of a horrible fate facing his community. Are the sins of Blithe Hollow’s past threatening to destroy its future? Is Norman the only person equipped to halt the impending Armageddon? Will saving his town finally get the

All the cool kids who are too cool for Comic-Con and all about trying to be cool by saying how not cool Comic-Con has become try to be cool by going to the cool comic area and buying cool things. Cool, right? But seriously, I always like to put the “comic” in Comic-Con and take a walk around the all the different comic vendors, big and small, and find cool stuff to buy. This year is no different and I found a few things that piqued my interest and raped my wallet. Have a peek into my barely literate world!

Why Watch? Good news. The zombie invasion is over, and mankind kicked brain-eating ass. The bad news? The damned infection is still out there, and a few…problems…arise. The zombie genre is all but played out for now, but the brilliance of this short is in turning the situation into a police drama. Instead of a terrorist with a bomb in a governmental building, it’s a zombie with an unknown strain of the virus in an apartment with a baby in the next room. It’s a study in what it means when failure is success, when losing lives is the right course of action, and the weight that bears. Plus, everything from the camera work to the design is all pro level. Excellent work in twisting a tired genre. What will it cost? Only 16 minutes. Skip Work. You’ve Got Time For More Short Films

Despite the fact that none of these movies that pit two famous movie creatures against each other and none of these B-movie tributes that present material that’s self-aware in its schlockiness have managed to become runaway hits, Hollywood has deemed them to be a trend. And like any other trend, it’s not going to go away until it’s run so far into the ground that it’s almost time to dig it back up for a revival. The next big entry into the purposefully cheesy something vs. something genre is coming from Amazon.com’s Amazon Studios, and it’s going to be called Zombies vs. Gladiators. You see, zombie movies have been a thing for a long time, and gladiator movies have been a thing for a long time…so why not mash them together? It worked so well for Cowboys vs. Aliens after all. All snarkiness and genre exploitation burnout aside, Zombies vs. Aliens does have one thing going for it that none of its predecessors did: pedigree. Amazon Studios may have a set-up where pitches and screenplays are submitted and then voted on, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t hire big Hollywood names to make the projects they decide to green light; and that’s exactly what they’ve decided to do here. Despite the fact that he hasn’t done much writing lately, and he hasn’t directed a film since 1995’s Lord of Illusions, somehow Clive Barker has been convinced to both re-write the Zombies vs. Gladiators script and serve as its director.

Doghouse, which was called Zombie Harlem in Japan (I can’t tell if that’s better or worse), is a British horror-comedy that’s been resting in my Netflix queue for the better part of two years. One of those films that sounds interesting, but has an air of uncertain quality about it. The official synopsis goes a little something like this: a group of men head to a remote village to help their friend get over a divorce, only to find it overrun with women who hunger for flesh. Sounds titillating right? And by titillating, I mean it should have a lot of boobs in it, right? And carnage? And death? Correct! That’s what it sounds like. But that’s not what it is.

AMC’s The Walking Dead and I have a strange relationship in that I watch it but don’t particularly care for it. I can’t really tell you why I tune in every week, but it has something to do with my great love for the comic books and a desire to see horror on television, mostly regardless of quality. The books by Robert Kirkman have always had a bit of melodrama about them, but the show has often taken that to obvious, soap opera levels. “The Walking Dead” comics feature a great cast of characters with complex motivations and relationships. Many of those characters made it to the television show – well, at least characters with the same names made it in. Things have changed so drastically from comic to screen that one has to ask – when does an adaptation stop being an adaptation?

Ahh, zombies. In many ways, speaking of the entertainment world, the end has already arrived and we are overrun with zombies. Zombie comics, t-shirts, movies, toys, and television shows. I used to love zombie movies. Hell, I wrote a zombie screenplay in college. The zombie craze reignited in the early 2000s with 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead. From then on, we’ve been fairly well saturated with the undead. Can you get too much of a good thing? Yes, yes of course you can. Too much of anything will eventually kill you or drive you insane. What a stupid question. Ignoring that momentary lapse of stupidity, when inundated with zombie flicks to the point of not caring, is it possible to find anything worthwhile, anything new? Enter The Dead. (That sounds pornographic!)

Zombies! Of all the movie about the walking dead, one of them continuously appears on the best of lists time after time after time. Okay, maybe more than one of them shows up all the time, but this one’s considered by many to be the best of them. I’m inclined to agree. George Romero‘s Dawn of the Dead is more than just an improved follow-up to 1968′s Night of the Living Dead. It the film that made living in a zombie apocalypse fun. It’s the film that really introduced us to what Tom Savini could do with some plaster and a machete. It’s the high watermark for epic, zombie storytelling, and, for 34 years, no film has come close to topping it. Who better to take us through Dawn of the Dead and show us how it all came to be than Romero, Savini, and George’s wife, Christine, who served as assistant director on the film. The commentary on this Anchor Bay Divimax is moderated by the DVD’s producer, not something we’ve come across before in this column. It could be a nice, organized way to handle information from the commentators. It could be such a slog it makes us wish Hell would run out of room. However the path it takes to get here, here are all the things we learned listening to George & Chris Romero and Tom Savini talk about Dawn of the Dead.

This week, in place of the usual triptych of found items and a T-Shirt of the Week, Merch Hunter is dedicated entirely to the mighty tee, the single most versatile member of the wardrobe family. Why 12? Well, science has proven that 12 is the magic number in terms of tee ownership (don’t look it up, it was published in a science journal you probably won’t know of…), allowing the owner to rotate nicely across two weeks, while taking a three day slot for whichever design is the Featured of the Week. After a few months of this rotation, throw in a few wild cards, thanks to supplemental purchase, and you’ll have a winning formula for T-shirt success. And yes, it really should be that mathematical. I seriously had to resist the urge to just make a list of the 100 Star Wars T-Shirts You Need To Own Now, but that will no doubt appear in the future, given how many incredibly impressive designs there are out there (and hardly any of them lining George Lucas’s pocket). For once, my inane wafflings are not needed at all to sell the inclusions below, just look at the pictures and see how many of them you can resist. I’d advise buying them all obviously: but try to only wear one at a time.

Why Watch? Holy shit. This short film from Benjamin Howdeshell is the kind of thing that launches careers. It’s fantastic. The first sequence sells the entire film with a stark, violent visual and a killer sound design to inflate its impact. Then, even when the story flat, it’s because a twist or cool idea is about to slap you in the face. It’s first rate work all around. Yes, zombies have been done to death, but this flick injects the action of a hostage thriller into the mix to create something that focuses on the men in dark suits responsible for the outbreak and less on brain-hungry hordes. That doesn’t mean there’s no neck biting though. There’s definitely some of that, and it’s work that breathes new life into an old corpse. This is a stellar film featuring effects done by the same team that did Wanted, and it boasts a strong new directing talent making one hell of a bloody mark in the movie world. What will it cost? Only 9 minutes. Skip Work. You’ve Got Time For More Short Films.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column desperate in its search for the insanely cool links of the day. It will also take movie related news, things about Community and Doctor Who, as well as, on occasion, updates on The Dark Knight Rises. Although after last night’s entry, it’s not sure there is any TDKR news left to report. We begin tonight with some incredibly cool animated work from an artist named Otis Frampton. On his Deviant Art page, found via Popped Culture, he envisions what a Battlestar Galactica animated series would look like. I would watch this show, and not just because I’m a die hard BSG fan, either.

Most zombie stories have their own origins for the walking dead, and their own special names for the rotting, shuffling fiends. In Cherie Priest’s novel “Boneshaker” they’re called “Rotters” and they’re created when people are exposed to a toxic gas. That’s one way in which Priest puts a new spin on the old zombie tropes, the other is that she’s set the zombie apocalypse in a steampunk world, creating a mish-mash of genres that should get nerds dressed in black clothes and nerds dressed in brown clothes drooling alike. A more descriptive introduction to the book, from its Amazon page, reads like this: “In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born. But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead. Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.” According to a press release

With massive ratings numbers, AMC has made the call to renew The Walking Dead for a third season. According to the press release, AMC President Charlie Collier was proud of the viewership records being set internationally by the show. That number includes more than 10m that watched the second season’s premiere around the world. Clearly, the zombie invasion is still going strong. This news comes as absolutely no surprise, but it does come with a challenge for showrunner Glen Mazzara to raise the stakes and improve on an already-strong formula for success. There were obvious storytelling differences between the first season and the start of the second, and Mazzara has to find a less ambling direction to drive the story. Not that walking around in the woods for two hours without development isn’t fun. With a third season in the bag, now is the time for them to start tightening up their scripts significantly in order to maintain the level of unease and drama that fans deserve. Taking a television show into a third season is always tricky, so hopefully they’ll get out of their own way, find some ripe stories, and deliver them without resorting to Sheriff Grimes waterskiing over a shark.  

In the cinematic world, protagonists face a lot of challenges. It can be Sasquatch or Yeti, German thieves or vaguely ethnic terrorists, zombies, aliens, werewolves, or vampires, and that’s just the exotic list. Our heroes might face down against a redneck hillbilly, a couple of gangbangers, or some cracked out carjacker. Simply put – it’s hard out there for a pimp. To combat these varied dangers, a hero must go armed. The proper choice of weapon depends on the threat faced, availability, and the environment. I’m not sure anyone has ever fought a hillbilly without the aide of a bow or crossbow, stopped a robbery without a pistol, or put down a zombie apocalypse without the use of a shotgun. In the face of such great dangers, you’d think that the protagonist would make sure that he and his companions were always well equipped to face adversity. But you’d be wrong.

Shuffle. Shuffle. Groan. Crawl. Shuffle. And commentary on all of it. It’s the Halloween season, so you know the zombie movies are out there in force. But we always like a few lot of laughs with our scares. What better movie to dish out both of those along with an ample helping of heart – figurative heart, as in emotion, not actual bloody hearts being tossed about, though we have that here, too – than Edgar Wright‘s Shaun of the Dead? What’s even better, Wright has brought along a familiar and jovial voice to help him recollect some of the fun and interesting times on set. Simon Pegg is helping out with the color commentary, that color being red more than likely. So it’s time to head on down to the Winchester – provided they have a DVD player – grab a pint and your best cricket bat, watch the ball go from bat to wicket – that’s a cricket reference just to show I know a thing or two. That’s two things. I’m out. – and hear what Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have to say in this week’s Commentary Commentary. Shuffle. Crawl. Shuffle. Groan. Brains.

Why Watch? Perhaps the most stunning, deeply-felt zombie short film of all time. Everything here from the cinematography to the effects to the storytelling shines like the finest brains offered up on a silver platter while a gorgeous rendition of “Mara’s Lullaby” plays in the background. What seems silly on face – following a man dressed in a penguin costume who has recently turned undead – becomes truly affecting. It’s one of the few zombie films to deliver a haunting sadness and crucial empathy for the infected. Simply put, it is mind-blowing. (And the end credits hit even harder.) It’s the best zombie short film you’ll see all year. What does it cost? Just 7 minutes of your time. Check out Zombie In a Penguin Suit for yourself: