The Dead Don't Die (2019): Writer-director Jim Jarmusch's bleak, hilarious homage to the zombie movies of George Romero is an occasionally meta-fictional delight, though the wall-breaking is generally left up to Bill Murray and Adam Driver's small-town cops. Don't get too attached to any of the characters, and don't expect anything all that normal to transpire in the small Pennsylvania town of Centerville (the Pennsylvania setting is another nod to Romero's Dead movies).
Driver, Murray, Tom Waits as a prophetic hermit, Chloe Sevigny as another cop, Tilda Swinton as a Scottish undertaker, and what seems like a cast of thousands all gamely walk and occasionally stumble into the apocalyptic night. Perhaps a perfectly cathartic movie for these COVID-19 times. Highly recommended.
White Zombie (1932): written by Garnett Weston; directed by Victor Halperin; starring Bela Lugosi (Legendre), Madge Bellamy (Madeline), Joseph Cawthorn (Dr. Bruner), Robert Frazer (Beaumont), and John Harron (Parker):
White Zombie was shot in 11 days for about $50,000 in 1932. Bela Lugosi always regretted not getting more money for it as White Zombie was a comparatively big hit.
At a trim 68 minutes or so (about five minutes have been lost, depending on what print you see), White Zombie is an engaging, creepy movie regardless of its shoestring budget. Lugosi is used well as Haitian voodoo master Legendre, allowed to underplay rather than play to the cheap seats. The acting from the other principals is mediocre at best.
Highlights include the appearances of the zombies, who stagger around wide-eyed. They're not the resurrected dead of contemporary popular culture. No, they're living people made subject to Lugosi's will by a combination of drugs and mesmerism.
The director Victor Halperin (also the producer) manages an effective use of shadows and murk throughout, along with a lot of shots of Lugosi looking hypnotic. There's a weird bit of business in which Lugosi clasps his hands together in order to control the zombies, a bit of business that seems funnier as the movie goes along. Is this the Zombie Grip?
Other than a lame bit of recurring comic business involving missionary Dr. Bruner's repeated attempts to get a light for his pipe, the movie moves efficiently along to its curiously affecting and tense climax. Those goggle-eyed zombies may not be dead, but their appearance and their movements would recur for the next 85 years in a host of zombie and zombie-esque movies and TV shows. And of course Rob Zombie would take both last name and band name from the movie. Recommended.
The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) by Max Brooks: This oddity predated Brooks' World War Z by a full three years. It's basically a set-up for that novel, a guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse written before the zombie apocalypse described in World War Z actually occurs by someone who seems to exist in the same universe as that of World War Z.
The key thing in the volume is an explanation of the zombie virus (dubbed 'Solanum'). There have been zombie outbreaks throughout history, our nameless guide-writer tells us, all caused by that mysterious virus.
Brooks differentiates his zombies from most others with one of the effects of this virus: the living dead are rendered poisonous to virtually anything that might regard them as carrion, from almost all bacteria to bears. Zombies who truly are edible carrion would, as many zombie nitpickers have noted, be pretty much neutralized as a threat in a couple of weeks.
With Solanum comes a couple of other effects: zombies don't digest the people and animals they eat, and zombies can only be killed with a head-shot. The former has been implied from time to time in some zombie movies; the latter has been a staple of zombie movies since at least George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.
I'd guess that this book would be pretty useful if one actually lived in Brooks' fictional universe. There's one glaring problem with Brooks' world both here and in World War Z: he drastically over-rates a silencer/suppressor's ability to muffle the noise of a handgun or rifle.
This wouldn't be such a problem if the book didn't exhaustively detail all the 'noisy' things one shouldn't do (drive a car, yell, walk through tall grass) while nonetheless espousing the worth of silenced guns. Go look up silenced/suppressed decibel levels some time. They're definitely louder than walking through tall grass, cars (even cars without mufflers!) and pretty much everything else.
Brooks' unnamed writer also waxes eloquent about the efficacy of the Japanese samurai sword (or 'katana'). An entire Internet argument sprang up around this topic (and Michonne's use of the katana in The Walking Dead). The general consensus was that the katana is extremely difficult to wield and, wielded by a novice, has an alarming tendency to break. Oops.
There are long, tedious stretches throughout, the boredom and page-flipping arising from those sections which consist of check-lists for what one needs for certain zombie-apocalypse scenarios. Brooks really goes all-in on the idea that this guide is 'real.' And oh so boring in its details.
The most enjoyable parts consist of the entries on zombie attacks throughout history. Brooks apparently thought so too, as a subsequent book and graphic novel series described some of these millennia-spanning attacks in greater detail. Brooks goes back to Ancient Egypt in terms of recorded encounters and even further back with cave paintings and other prehistoric artifacts suggesting that zombies have been around as long as Homo sapiens. The Zombie Survival Guide works best in concert with World War Z. Lightly recommended.
