Not just any old scientists playing with beakers in the lab or whatever.
No.
Brilliant boffins who work at the world’s greatest superconducting super-collider made this zombie movie, using the creepy tunnel parts of their fancy machine as movie sets.
I would actually watch this thing.
Not too shabby, scientist peoples of CERN — keep on making these things.
There’s a big trend on the Glowing Tube of not just (a) reality shows, but (b) reality shows involving extreme people. And it doesn’t get more extreme than people devoting all their time and monies to preparing for the apocalypse.
This is fun stuff that actually poses interesting questions. It also lets us watch people prepare for doomsday by shooting their thumb off.
Some questions:
1) Are you ready for doomsday?
2) What version of the apocalypse is your favorite?
3) Are the doomsday preppers (a) admirable, self-reliant people with useful doomsday skills or (b) whackadoodles spending insane amounts of money on bomb shelters that will never get used?
Not the people watching movies, unless that movie happens to be TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN PART 5 or whatever, in which case yes, your LSAT scores will never be the same.
No, I’m talking about characters in movies.
Characters in books sometimes do stupid things, but not usually. Put that same character in a movie and they turn into absolute idiots.
This is true for romantic comedies (bumbling fools in love!), action movies (no henchman can shoot, and no heroine or sidekick can avoid getting kidnapped by the villain) and especially horror movies, which deserve a post all their own.
If a person with a functioning brain cell rattling around their skull wouldn’t go into the spooky abandoned house where people keep disappearing, you can bet the movie character will march right in. Does the hot young teenager know that a serial killer is chasing down and killing hot young teenagers? Well, she should definitely wear high heels and fall down six times while the psycho chases her.
There are websites dedicated to listing the stupid things that movie characters do.
However: I want to pick on THE WALKING DEAD, a zombie shebang that’s on the Glowing Tube.
As a fan of zombies, I am aware of this show, and though I haven’t watched every flipping episode, I kinda keep track of things by recaps and reviews and such. It’s a good show and not at all stupid.
So why did a smart show have their characters get so idiotic in the big series finale?
Here’s the setup: the non-zombie hero peoples are holed up at some farm, and the big finale is a battle that happens when the zombies show up, en masse.
What made me want to throw things at the YouTube clip is how the zombies happily marched across the fields and surrounded the farmhouse.
No, no, no.
If you or I are hanging around a farmhouse during the zombie apocalypse, the zombies won’t ever march up on us from every direction. Why? Because we’ll get busy, real quick, using all the tools and equipment that any decent farm has the second we arrive there and take inventory of the place.
First thing we do is fire up the tractor or backhoe and dig a long ditch around the farm.
Second thing we do shove the dirt we dug up into a berm, a rough wall. So they fall in the ditch, and if by some zombie magic one of the undead gets out of the ditch, he’s gotta climb a wall.
Third thing we do is put a barbed wire fence on top of that berm.
If there’s a working tractor, this sort of thing takes a day or two.
And it’s worth it, because now a single Farmer Joe type with a flipping .22 rifle can stand on top of that berm and pick off zombies all day while he sips moonshine. Because there’s no way a horde of zombies is magically getting past the ditch, the wall and the barbed wire. It’s not happening.
Zombies can’t climb.
Instead, the heroes of THE WALKING DEAD go on foot (to get nom-nom-nommed) and drive around in cars trying to blow away zombies. Which isn’t smart, either. Shooting from a moving vehicle may look cool, but you have a much better chance of hitting a moving target when you’re not bouncing around, too.
Bottom line: If you really want to survive a horror movie / zombie apocalypse, please use your noggin first and your trigger finger second.
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Guy – Photo by Suhyoon Cho
Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that was a finalist for some award.
Fast forward mid-way through this sucker, to the point where the scientist applies flame to the white powder, which is when you should be screaming at the screen, “Don’t do it, you fool!”
Because once this thing springs to life, we are all doomed.
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Guy – Photo by Suhyoon Cho
Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that was a finalist for some award.
But a robot uprising is a real possibility. Maybe they get smarter than us and don’t like being slaves to inferior beings.
Maybe an evil genius creates an unstoppable army of robots.
Or maybe some programmer screws up the C++ whatever and turns happy little lawn-mowing robots into roving blades of robotic death.
Either way, this Daniel H. Wilson man (do NOT forget the H., peoples) is not only a robot expert with a PhD and such, but an author who’s written about surviving the coming robopocalypse. Also: the animation to the video is awesomesauce.
Bonus: A glorious poster thing about robot and the future. It has numbers and such.
Robots will take over the world. Resistance is futile.
If there is a zombie apocalypse / alien invasion / nuclear war, you’ll be running around all Mad Max-style, right?
That means the Bad Guys will also be cruising the interstates, unless you really believe they’ll be walking around or riding bicycles.
So real survivalist prepper types need to think about (a) the best way to armor up their Subaru, (b) where they can possibly fill up after the apocalypse and (c) the best ways to blow up enemy Subaru’s who may be in after your stash of petro / teriyaki beef jerky / bullets / DVD collection of all 4.92 bazillion episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
How can you blow up a car, especially an armored car?
In the movies, cars just go boom when you shoot them in the gas tank. This is nonsense, as anybody who’s watched Mythbusters or shot up a car would know.
The good British people at Top Gear took this all the way and experimented in the most awesome way possible: automobile skeet shooting.
That’s right. We’re talking about yelling “pull” and blowing away a car that’s flying through the air.
This is seven separate kinds of awesome.
Top Gear should receive tax subsidies from the U.S., paid for by levying a tax on 90 percent of the stupid reality shows being created by Hollywood, and that way, we’d get less Snooki and more of this sort of thing.
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Guy – Photo by Suhyoon Cho
Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that was a finalist for some award.
Any fan of zombie movies — or action movies, horror movies and war movies — should be interested in WORLD WAR Z.
It has zombies. It has action, horror and a world war. If this novel isn’t epic, then I don’t know what epic is.
WORLD WAR Z, as in Zombies, by Max Brooks. Best zombie book ever? Maaaybe. Soon to be a movie? Yes, with Brad Pitt. Epic? Definitely.
The book is laid out as a series of interviews by a United Nations researcher, documenting the global war against zombies.
It bounces around from character to character, country to country, though the book is basically organized into sections: the first hints of zombies among us, the Great Panic, then humans getting their act together — after false starts and setbacks — to finally win the war.
Concept art from WORLD WAR Z pre-production. The end isn’t near — it’s already here.
As a reader and a zombie fan, I enjoyed it. This wasn’t a book that sat beside the bed for a month. I read it straight through over a couple nights.
As a writer, there were things to fix. Having so many characters was a big risk. Max Brooks obviously researched every location and culture in the story, and clearly he wanted to put all that research to use on the page. It’s a little much in spots, and he doesn’t pull off every character. It’s hard enough to be the authentic voice of one character for an entire novel. He tries to do it for 5.8 bazillion characters.
More concept art from the planned WORLD WAR Z movie.
HOWEVER: That is nitpicking. This is a great story and a ton of fun.
Some scenes will stick with you. The full might of the U.S. military being crushed by the sheer numbers of millions of zombies at the Battle of Yonkers. The desperation and courage of a Japanese man trapped in his apartment tower, full of zombies. A soldier’s tale of how the humans finally learned to beat the zombies not with amazing technology, but with hard work and old-fashioned military strategies, as two lines of soldiers — one firing, one reloading or resting — form a square box and shoot for days until the piles of dead zombies became a wall of corpses twenty or thirty feet high.
WORLD WAR Z is now a movie, with Brad Pitt starring and Marc Forster directing, though movies are notoriously squishy. They get announced and switched around and delayed. It’ll be fun to see this story on the big screen.
Here is Max Brooks talking about the history of zombies. He is interesting.
Shots of bourbon: Four and a half out of five.
Sidenote: If you haven’t read Max Brook’s ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE, it is not only hilarious and entertaining, but shockingly practical. No matter what style of apocalypse you favor, that book would probably get you prepared.
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Guy – Photo by Suhyoon Cho
Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that was a finalist for some award.
Anyone who watches zombie movies knows the scene I’m talking about: the chainsaw massacre.
A hero grabs a chainsaw and starts wading through the zombie hordes. Sure, a Husqvarna 450 is loud and impressive, but it’s not a serious zombie killer. The sucker is heavy, requires gas and makes a lot of noise, which only attracts more zombies. Also, you’ve got to get all up close and personal, with black zombie blood spraying everywhere and infecting anybody with an open wound or an open mouth. I mean, the more you think about it, the more you say, “Hey, you take the manly chainsaw, and I’ll stick with the wussy little Glock.”
By the same token, a machine gun is bad, because it’s super loud and wastes all kinds of ammo, since zombies have to be hit squarely in the head.
HOWEVER: an automatic shotgun, like this, would actually be amazing useful. Every man secretly wants two of this mounted his in car, 007-style.
Sidenote: every man also wants a working lightsaber, a red one (blue ones are nancypants) because Darth Vaderwill always be epic, except when George Lucas turns him into a whiny little kid named Annie, which I believe was some kind of comic and a movie about a red-headed orphan girl who went to live with Lex Luthor. Also, (1) I’d rather watch Vader grab a cart and go shopping at Safeway than see the latest movie Sylvester Stallone puts out, because I saw THE EXPENDABLES on an airplane and it was quite expendable and (2) we men of the world would happily pool our beer money to raise the $59.3 million in CGI that George Lucas would require to make a five-minute short where Darth Vader takes apart Jar-Jar Binks in the Thunderdome, with Mel Gibson on deck after. Also, Carrot Top, who for some reason has turned into a Oompa-Loompah steroid monster. And Snooki fourth. Then all of the Kardashians and Kanye West, with special guest star Taylor Swift getting a front row seat to watch it all. OK, I believe that’s it.
Back to the automatic shotgun, which is amazing: With one of these and a lightsaber, an action hero would be ready for any form of apocalypse, be it (a) zombies, (b) insect-like aliens, (c) zombie aliens or (d) hordes of blood-thirsty and shirtless werewolves who are all upset that some random, whiny high school girl — who is not remotely pretty enough to fight over — picked some boring sparkly vampire instead of their leader, the Blue Power Ranger.
Yes, werewolf lover boy was a Power Ranger first.
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Guy – Photo by Suhyoon Cho
Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that was a finalist for some award.
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