The Big Picture - ‘Army of the Dead’ and Top Five Zombie Movies

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

Zack Snyder returns to the undead with his new Netflix blockbuster 'Army of the Dead.' Sean is joined by Chris Ryan and Adam Nayman to discuss Snyder's latest, what makes a great zombie movie, and share their five favorites from the genre. Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Chris Ryan and Adam Nayman Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Ringer's music critic Rob Harvilla curates and explores 60 iconic songs from the 90s that define the decade. Rob is joined by a variety of guests to break it all down as they turn back the clock. Check out 60 songs that explain the 90s exclusively on Spotify. savory egg pastry, or our roasted red pepper and Swiss pinwheel starting at only $2.99 plus tax. Try one or try our full Tim's Selects lineup. Terms apply. Prices may vary at participating restaurants in Canada. It's time for Tim's. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about the undead. Today is the release day for Army of the Dead, the new Zack Snyder picture.

And to discuss that movie and our favorite zombie movies, I've got two of my favorite undead, Chris Ryan and Adam Naiman. How are you, fellows? Undead and loving it. I'm just a walking allegory, Sean. Before we start, I wanted to talk about somebody who unfortunately did actually pass away very quickly with you guys because I don't have anybody else to talk to about it. I know. Well, Charles Grodin is no longer with us, but his spirit lives in us forever. And

truly one of my favorite actors of all time, somebody who I was absolutely obsessed with as a teenager and somebody in my 20s who I think is like a fascinating imprint in a very specific moment in movie comedy history. Adam, what's your impression of Charles Grodin? You mean you want me to do an impression of Charles Grodin? If you could. No, I can't. I've been doing one for the last 20 years.

Last 20 years. You know, often when people pass, it seems very convenient when people pull out the superlatives, right? And they sort of say, this this guy this person was the greatest but i mean you make a case for groden with a relatively small sample size as one of the greatest comedic actors in american cinema didn't even have that many leads and i think the lead that he's most famous for at least in terms of box office which is beethoven which is a great performance by the way is not exactly indicative of his his skill set or his lineage or his kind of comic context but actually the other night and it may have been sean because you tweeted it

someone tweeted it i had never seen the really famous clip of him on carson where he's ostensibly promoting his autobiography and he turns it into this discussion about the soullessness of what Carson does. Maybe right. Because it's the two of them are clearly having fun going at each other. If people haven't watched you look up Groton Carson on YouTube, it's like sell you the whole seat, but you only need the edge stuff. And it's a,

it's like an extension of the, the ambiguity he had in some of his comic performances, his wheelhouse. If you were to put like, what does Groton do? It's like disgust, contempt, suspicion, dissatisfaction, kind of superiority,

but self-loathing is kind of mixed in there. So, you know, really fun range of things. But you get him in the right part with those things, and he's peerless. And that's not just hyperbole. Like, he's peerless in that niche not just hyperbole like he's peerless in that i think in that niche i think he's also somebody who is even though he you're right he doesn't have a ton of lead performances he's kind of someone who's stitched through the history of

american movies in the last 50 years in a lot of ways he's worked with um auteurs like elaine may and and and like um he's worked with warren baity quite a bit and he's worked with albert brooks and he's also appeared in muppet movies and he was a frankly a big comedy star in the 1990s appearing in movies like beethoven and clifford and and you know uh dave and he was he's just kind of somebody who was part of the fabric of american movies in a lot of ways, but also was this incredibly idiosyncratic, kind of sarcastic, acidic, deadpan intellectual who was at a kind of remove and couldn't believe kind of the bullshit surrounding him. Chris, what are your favorite things about Grodin? Yeah, you know, I think I just admire him

because if you were to just turn on any talk show like this week, you know, and if people were in studio, and I watched Chris Rock on Fallon the other night. And you just realize the extent to which everybody plays the game now. There really aren't any subversive public performances going on. And if there are,

they're kind of more along the lines of Joaquin Phoenix, like what is happening right now? Is this guy in the process of a breakdown? What am I watching? But Grodin actually did this thing with his public persona right now like is this guy in the process of a breakdown like what am i watching but groden actually did this thing with his public persona that was just like i mean you wrote about honestly i'm just stealing from your grantland piece from years ago sean it's just like the idea of being a public grump a crank a person who was annoyed and dissatisfied and and sort of always putting other

people on edge and i think he brought that to a lot of his scene work in his movies. And my favorite performance by him is probably, you know, very me to say this, but his Midnight Run, because he goes toe to toe with absolutely like prime De Niro in that mid 80s zone. And I honestly feel like he kind of bullies De Niro throughout the movie because De Niro is the one who's kind of losing it throughout the movie. His character Jack Walsh is dragging Grodin's character across the country to stand trial. And in these scenes

it's just like Grodin just slowly driving De Niro absolutely comically insane. And if you haven't seen Midnight Run, I highly recommend it. But it's kind of amazing to watch him at times blow De Niro off the screen in the most subtle of ways. He used the idea that he's being dragged along. And I would say that no actor has ever seemed better at being dragged along. And even in The

Heartbreak Kid, where technically he has the autonomy, when he's breaking up with Jeannie Berlin, it's like he's dragging himself along on something. Not just leaving her behind and not just chasing Sybil shepherd but it's like something he wants to do and doesn't want to do and isn't capable of doing equally all at the same time and it's just like across concrete those 11 minutes they're just painful proto cringe comedy or or or crypto cringe comedy and that's what maybe one of the best american movies never released formally on a DVD or streaming platform. If people want to watch

The Heartbreak Kid, you can watch it on YouTube, and you should. But we need a disc of that. I completely agree. Just you saying crypto makes me think that the three of us should start Grodcoin, which is a Charles Grodin crypto. Come on. Why not?

I'm not in, let me just say. As with all Why not? I'm not in, let me just say. As with all things crypto, I am not in. All things Chris. I'm doing the Grodin laugh on the inside smile at that. One other quick Grodin thing. In addition, obviously,

I think you should check out all the movies that Adam and Chris just mentioned. If you can find some clips of him hosting his erstwhile talk show, just an unbelievable artifact of 90s and early 2000s live entertainment grumpitude. You know, he truly was an amazing crank. He was a fascinating person who it almost felt like he was, it feels like the Nicholasolas fane fred armisen character from snl kind of originates with groden's talk show with this sort of like

you could feel groden flipping through the newspaper and reading stories and reacting with a sense of like exasperation confusion frustration and a tinge of existential despair and um just really love you, Charles Grodin. Thanks for everything you did for us, man. Let's make an incredibly awkward transition back to a different kind of death. I'm speaking, of course, about the viewing of a new Zack Snyder movie.

So Army of the Dead is here. Adam, I'm just going to ask you point blank. What'd you think of Army of the Dead? You know, it's fine. Film criticism. I, I, yeah, I was distracted by your question.

Cause right before this, I'd read the quote from Snyder that's circulating as of today, where he says, Martin Scorsese is well within his rights to say superhero movies are bad. And he's teaching people. Shouldn't say that he shouldn't, but he doesn't mean mine. I hope I'm sure he doesn't mean mine.

And I, you know, I think that that's pretty funny. I think that, uh, Zack Snyder has punched above his weight in pr in the last little bit i mean a lot of the interviews he gave around justice league were very charming and funny even though he is the opposite of self-deprecating as a filmmaker and so i'd say about army of the dead and i'm sure we'll get to this is like his other zombie movie from from 15 years ago uh daughter of the dead it peaks early you know the first three or four minutes more or less where you're doing a kind of pop song montage

of zombie depravity in las vegas super obvious could not be more obvious to use leave in las vegas this is not a deep cut crate digging soundtrack cue but it's. And the slow-mo is effective and self-parodic. And the setup is kind of irresistible. And then as it went along, I just thought it kind of went along. I was not super hype on this. Chris, what'd you think? Yeah. I got a chance to watch this as a Netflix screener, and I watched it on my flight back to Philadelphia. and it took up a lot of time on my flight, which was just like my version of one and a half thumbs up. Like, Adam, I thought it was fine. It was totally enjoyable.

I'm like, at a basic level, I'm a guy who enjoys headshots, and there's about seven dozen of them in the first hour of this movie. I thought, you know, like, Tim, I'm sure we're going to get into his Dawn of the Dead remake that sort of jumpstarted his career in a lot of ways. I thought it was an interesting parallel to look at the juxtaposition to look at Army of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead and think about how Snyder has changed over that time period because Dawn of the Dead practically feels like a Noah Baumbach movie in comparison to Army of the Dead. And I do miss or miss is maybe the

wrong word. I wonder what it would be like if he had normal people in his movie, like regular, recognizable human beings rather than, even though Dave Bautista gives like a really like interesting and like kind of physically engaged and fun performance in this film. I just kind of like, man, this guy used to make a movie where Sarah Polley was the star of it. And now we've come all the way around and it's like seven muscle-bound dudes chainsawing hordes of zombies to pieces.

Yeah, so I think it's interesting that Adam raised the interviews that Snyder has been giving of late and this sort of the sense of humor, frankly, that he seems to have developed around himself and his persona and the online fandom that surrounds him. Because he certainly did not seem like a filmmaker who had a sense of humor whatsoever through his first eight or nine movies. And over time, I think that worked against him. But in that first Dawn of the Dead movie, the fact that it was not winking in any meaningful way, that it actually was quite brutal and quite, it didn't necessarily have any of the Dead movie, the fact that it was not winking in any meaningful way,

that it actually was quite brutal and quite, it didn't necessarily have any of the satirical insight that say George Romero had, but it was a, it was a, a rollicking and kind of mean and relentless movie that I thought was very effective. And I was kind of hoping he was going to get back to that with this. And in fits and starts, he does an army of the dead, but for the most part, it kind of feels like one big joke. Like it kind of feels like one big bit. And there are some, you know,

emotional and sentimental ideas behind it. And there is some stuff that is played straight. But while I think I agree with you, Adam, that the first three to four minutes of the movie is the best part of the movie. And that title sequence is entertaining, well done.

And, you know, it's's it's essentially like the origin story for how these characters arrive at this las vegas las vegas heist slash siege movie um i it didn't seem like it was able to actually figure out what kind of a tone it wanted to have you know was it meant to be winking was it meant to be this incredibly like brawny bare-knuckled you know dc extended universe kind of a movie? I couldn't really figure out where he wanted to go with it, which didn't take away discourse kind of to an obscene degree, actually, given the movie itself. But it felt like there was a huge amount of stuff at stake in that coming out. Like, will this be what he wanted to make? And can this live up to what

people want it to be? And it's not a box office consideration because we're all stuck at home, but feels like an event. And I feel like if this had come out a year or two from now, hypothetically, there'd be both more buildup and more disappointment for it. But I feel like Snyder is still doing the Justice League rounds in a way because the impact of that was so much. And I feel like in a strange way for such a big budget, you know, zombie with Zack Snyder's name on it,

this is going to probably slip a bit under the radar. I wouldn't use my friends or my little corner of the universe as a barometer of anything, but for me personally, no one cares. That's not an insult to anyone who does, by the way. I just mean, with Justice League, people who would not normally watch were like, I got to set the time aside to watch this

because this is a thing. I am not getting that feeling about this. You know, this is a B movie. You know,movie. And I hope we talk about this a lot because zombie movies are essentially, in their roots, B-movies that have pretensions towards being something that's more important or more metaphorical or allegorical about society. And I think Army of the Dead is essentially a B a B movie. I mean, everything about it is kind of kitschy from its setting to the way in which

zombies are disposed of. But it has some pretensions to commentary about the way governments respond to crises and stuff like that. And I think that obviously you can draw some comparisons to our contemporary moment.

But like Adam's saying, where Justice League came out and it was sort of like, is this going to be the Citizen Kane of superhero movies? I don't know if anybody actually said that, but it was sort of almost pitched as a true visionary gets to finally execute his vision. This movie should be like the movie you go see after two beers on a Sunday afternoon or something like that, or that you as a for a laugh go to on a Wednesday night or you see it somewhere kind of grimy where the floor is sticky and instead I think you know we're just conditioned to just be like a film is coming out it needs our

serious discussion you know yeah I and maybe that's a good reason to not talk about this movie too much because maybe it's not worthy of too much over analysis i think part of what i was banging my head against was the obviousness of the general metaphor the idea of like places like las vegas being populated by these you know undead creatures that people this like flesh ripping paradise prison where people live you just watch showgirls. It said it all. It's not dissimilar. Um, Chris, let me just ask you though,

as the creator of the heist streaming service, which features only heist films, what'd you make of the heist aspect of army of the dead? Um, I, I thought it was like, uh, you know what? I,

I hope I was, I was appreciated the fact that it was more about brute force than like a lot of like pink, you know, uh, sort of what's, what was the guy's name in oceans? 12. What was, uh, what was Casal's name? appreciated the fact that it was more about brute force than like a lot of like pink you know uh sort of what was the guy's name in oceans 12 what was uh what was casal's name the the the night fox the night fox there wasn't a lot of night foxing going on it was more of like a power running scheme uh any anything from you adam on the on the the oceans 11ing of zombie movies? No, but I'll say that to some extent, Dave Bautista remains pretty undefeated as a screen presence.

You know, this isn't quite as good as him with the little glasses in Blade Runner, which is one of the more... Oh, yeah. One of the more oddly touching, like, small performances I can think of. Something with the size of him versus the smallness of the glasses

gets me all verklempt. But he's good in in in this and i mean this i don't know if i'd say he carries the movie because anytime snyder makes a movie his direction is the star but as the credible center to as chris is saying a kind of brawny running game heist movie you know i think he's got i think he's got the chops and the mobility and he casts a great figure on the screen. He's fun to watch. So something actually occurred to me about Batista when I was watching this, and I call him Batista and not Bautista because he was named Batista in the WWE. I don't know if you guys ever watched him perform in the WWE, but I will say during his time there, he was one of the most net zero, uncharismatic figures that I can recall. I really did not enjoy him

as a professional wrestling personality. So it's been fascinating. I love how seriously you're saying this. I've thought about this. And he's kind of the opposite as an actor. As an actor, he's oddly nuanced and captivating. And even though he's not necessarily appearing in the work of Orson

Wells, he brings a lot to these movies in small ways. And it feels like the inversion of most professional wrestlers turned actors where I still feel like The Rock has not been able to translate what made him such a special performer when he was a wrestler into his movies. He still has not made that movie that you're like, oh, there he is. There's that like smarmy, over-the-top, ridiculous, but also oddly endearing person. Obviously his public persona represents that. Hulk Hogan was an actor.

No disrespect to Roddy Piper and his great work in They Live. But Batista is one of the true like formal converts in a way. And so, you know, it's nice to see him in movies. I also like the fact that he is obviously part of Denis Villeneuve's rogues gallery. So he's in Dune and he was in Blade Runner. But I also like the fact that

he's been popping off about the MCU hasn't served Drax's backstory well enough so I will no longer be appearing in future Guardians movies. I mean, he takes his work seriously. Who can hold that against him? Yeah.

I hope he's somewhere wearing little glasses listening to this right now. Yeah. Let's talk about zombie movies. Now, we've got about 60 years of zombie movies under our belt at this point. I guess maybe more if you want to go back to the 1930s, and maybe we will through this conversation. But Adam, from your point of view, what makes a good zombie movie?

I mean, I've made this joke so many times, but one day someone's going to hear it and give me a million dollars for it or something. But I'm waiting for the day where a filmmaker says my movie is an allegory for zombies, right? Because the reverse has just happened so many times. Like whatever you can say about the early, because I mean, there's a zombie and zombie type characters in movies in the 30s and 40s. When we do my lists, very in character for me, I've picked an old movie.

But that modern conception that zombies are these kind of ambulatory metaphors that you just project a social problem or a social construct onto, that's very, you know, mid-60s Romero. And I think that that's why the repetitiveness of the basic idea of zombies has managed to hold up and endure because you can shapeshift a little bit around that basic premise. And also Return from the Dead is just a great horror premise that predates the use of the word zombie. You know, I was thinking, I'm like, what's a curveball I can throw for this podcast? Like, is Frankenstein's monster not, to some extent, a zombie? Is the appeal of Dracula having to do with that idea of undead? I mean,

I'm not trying to be cute, and I'm not trying to mis-taxonomize famous monsters. But that idea of something dead that is living is, you know, a classic horror conceit. But the zombie movie doesn't imbue it with any optimism or rarely does it imbue it with optimism. This is not like life after death in a way that you're saved. It's like life after death, but it would be better to stay in the ground because you become de-individuated and mindless and predatory and you can't enjoy it for the most part. Chris, what about for you? What are you looking for when you sit down in a zombie movie? Well, I hate to sound silly. I'm saying the real zombies were the friends we made along the way. But as is usually the case with horror movies, I think a zombie movie is as successful as the living in the movies. So zombie movies are an excellent opportunity to just bring together disparate groups of people and put them in this extremely extraordinary situation.

So all the movies that I have, but also I think most successful zombie movies are, oh shit, what's happened? And I just happened to be in this convenience store or a mall or at this apartment building or in London. And now I have to try and put together not only my life, but some semblance of society and survive. And so zombies are kind of free of a lot of the mythological baggage of, say, a vampire movie or a werewolf movie or anything like that. They're pretty one directional. There's not a lot of dialogue coming from there and there's not an ideology behind them. There's nothing like,

Ooh, maybe the zombie should live. Or maybe if the zombies just had their true love, I guess probably like there, there are some, you know, exceptions to that rule. But for me,

like the zombie movies are as good as the premise and as good as the origin situation that you put the characters in. The zombie is somebody that finds you. You don't go searching for the zombie. You go looking for the mummy and you take an appointment with Dracula, you know? And the zombie, there isn't usually like a brain zombie or a head zombie. It's sort of more like a volume kind of monster where there's just sort of a, where there's a lot of them. And that's one of the things that Romero really helped to kind of inaugurate is that idea of like the teeming mass of zombies because that kind of representation wasn't super wasn't super prevalent before

night night of living dead but the other thing maybe to say is because they're so associated with gore they're a great excuse for gore because you can shoot and kill and maim and destroy dead people and in a way it raises interesting questions or diffuses questions of morality you know i mean both virgins of dawn of the dead have characters using zombies for target practice and as a spectator you're putting an interesting position there about your relationship to gore and what you want to see happen to people you can kill people in gory ways in zombie movies then you like re-kill zombies and it's kind of a calorie-free murder in that case you know yeah although one of the interesting things about almost all of the movies that we'll talk about and that you see in this sub-genre is they're all incredibly despairing

you know there's not they don't necessarily fit some of the formats of the, say, universal horror movies where there is an effort to kind of defeat the big monster at the end and get to safety and eliminate the mummy, for example. In zombie movies, they almost always end on a downer note because there's no stopping the heedless pursuit of death after life. And so it's an interesting thing that they kind of proliferate over time because they are kind of the ultimate bummer cinema in a lot of ways. Nobody wins in a zombie movie, really. And they're typically not romantic or obsessive or erotic, which is what you would get from vampire movies or other sorts of monsters. And there's very, very little room, sorts of monsters and there's very very little room or at least there used to be very little room for comedy until zomcom became its own kind of

genre as well i mean you watch night of the living dead and it's not just despairing and bleak it's like there's no gallows humor in it either dawn of the dead kind of changed that but we'll get there yeah there's a lot to talk about the intersection between comedy and zombie that's um that's something that has been is noisier than ever in a lot of ways for for good and for ill i think um chris where does this rank in the hierarchy of horror subgenre movies for you do you like these best do you like vampires werewolves what was your what's your thing i i mean zombies are really high up there i think i'm more of a settings person than I am a sort of manifestation of evil person. So it's not necessarily what's chasing me. It's where I'm being chased.

I really like the woods. I love a snowy mountain. I love an urban one. But it's got more to do with setting and the group of people than it is what I'm being pursued by. I don't know why I'm putting myself into my shoes here, but that's what horror movies do. You're supposed

to put yourself into the shoes of the characters. Adam, what about for you? Would you say you're a zombie movie allegiant? Relatively a zombie movie allegiant. Certainly a George Romero allegiant because, you know, even if that idea of zombie as metaphor has

gotten tired, and I would say it's actually gotten to the point of just being pretty craven because any idiot can say that idea of zombies metaphor has gotten tired and i would say it's actually gone to the point of just being pretty craven because any idiot can say that about their movie you know romero pioneered something i think really useful which was that idea that you can sort of not it's not sneaking social commentary in the back door but that idea that you can channel something because there's a huge gap in intentionality between night of living dead and dawn of the dead. I think night of living dead is everything that people say about it, but it was sort of in the flow of making it in a really bare bones way. And then he spent 10 years reading his press clippings and making other

really interesting sociologically inflected movies. And then we get the more modern Romero idea that it's not just a zombie movie. Zombies are the ultimate. It's not just a zombie movie zombies are the ultimate it's not just a horror genre you know there's always baggage there's always meaning there's always allegory kind of somewhere in there and that's because it deals with something so elemental which is with which is death it's such a um a fungible canvas too right because you can make something incredibly spare and minimal like romero or you can make something, a movie that I'm actually quite a fan of is World War Z, partially because of the source material, but you can

actually use the zombies and have it basically be contagion. You can have government responses, and what would this be like? How would this work? And what would traffic look like? Or what would a city look like? And you can do anything you want with it so romero in many ways is is the the godfather the granddaddy of of this subgenre one something that's happening actually in a few weeks is that this film that has been more or less lost to time the the amusement park or romero movie um that was originally i think uh assigned to him as essentially like a an educational film about elder abuse that he transformed into a kind of horror nightmare zombie-esque movie set in an amusement park is actually coming to shutter later this summer so people will get a chance to check that out obviously um night of the living dead and dawn of the dead a number of his other films are well

known who are like some of the other masters of this genre? Adam, who do you think, think of as on the Mount Rushmore? Who are your guys is basically, who are your guys? Your guys. I mean, I'm a, I'm a big fan of Stuart Gordon, you know,

but I love reanimator, which is sort of just great in, in and of itself. I mean, there's, you know, a lot of depraved Italians who would, who would,

who would enter into this conversation. You've got, you've got fullci for sure. But then the fungibility, as Chris was saying, and the maleability of the zombie genre means you start wondering what the inclusion of certain people, even if they're not strictly speaking zombie movies. I mean, you think of a Sam Raimi,

or you think of David Cronenberg with Rabbit, and you think of the way that those filmmakers have integrated aspects of zombie movie staging or zombie movie prosthesis or zombie movie themes. And, you know, not to get too far into the dread vulgar auteur territory that is, you know, commanded by Zack Snyder. But depending on what you think of the Resident Evil series, which I rate pretty high and like certain of those movies a lot, maybe not as dread inflected zombie movies, but as kick-ass action movies that have zombie elements. I think Paul, Paul WS Anderson is,

uh, is right up there for me because he handles the space and the geometrics and the geography of the zombie movie. Wonderfully. Well, the resident evil movies are actually worth noting because I think one of my favorite zombie things is the resident evil movies are actually worth noting because i think one of my favorite zombie things is the resident evil video games and it gets at a real kind of like trick that zombie

movies have which is that there is no guilt in zombie movies like once you decide to fight back there's never any like ah god but like are we sure that zombies deserve this level of uh retaliation like you go for the head like the zombie movies are sort of like uh completely unhinged when it comes to their violence but also like kind of uncomplicated and and that that sort of makes them a pretty carefree uh watch in a lot of ways his longevity is not just about him you know hanging in there and and finding financing he kept shifting the the surface texture of his zombies to the point where he was kind of making them about himself by the end.

I mean, Diary of the Dead has characters making a distinctly Night of the Living Dead-ish movie right down to the girl running through the woods and losing her shoe. I mean, that's like self-tribute. But you look at Dawn of the Dead as a late 70s movie, and then what Day of the Dead is dealing with in the Reagan 80s, and then Land of the Dead as a kind of 9-11-ish, you know, divided America movie.

I mean, he, that's what I mean. The syntactical deep structure stays the same, but he keeps bringing the surface variations. And I think other zombie movies play with him. They see what he's doing. And then, I mean, with some, some people are out on their own. I mean, like, you know,

Danny Boyle making 28 Days Later the way he did is very much a reaction to and against. And, you know, in, in the context of certain of Romero's decisions, like making the zombies fast for the first time ever, you know, they're all these, it's all just responses to, or answers to, or counter moves to Romero. I think I'm not trying to give him too much credit, but I don't know if you can give him too much credit in this area. So let me ask you this. It does seem like zombie movies are maybe not as popular as ever,

but they're certainly very present in the last five or 10 years. We've gotten a lot of them. They are ever replenishing in a way, but it also feels like they're very iterative at this point. There's very few new ones that I get excited about.

There's a couple of them. I'll mention one when them when we share our lists. But is there anywhere left to go with this kind of a story? I know that seems kind of dumb because where is there left to go in westerns or broad comedies? But this is such a specific, fortified subgenre. Chris, what do you think? Well, let's answer your question with a question and also point at the elephant in the room, which is what are zombie movies after COVID? Because most zombie movies at least allude to some sort of epidemic happening. There has been some sort of viral outbreak, and that's why this is happening. So what do you do when that has happened? We just didn't get the zombies part, right?

How do people react? We've seen quiet streets. You know what I mean? We've seen shuttered stores. We've seen, you know, pieces of paper blowing across Main Street. Like what now, right?

And I think we've also like experienced in varying degrees that fear of contact, that fear of like, who's this person? Where have they been? What was that? Did they cough?

Are they wearing a mask? All these kinds of paranoias are now incredibly present in our lives. So I'm not so sure. It's not that I don't want to see that in film or that I don't want to see that in a zombie movie. I'm just kind of curious what you guys think about like, what can a zombie movie tell us that we don't already know now? Well, the book World War Z was much more like a procedural. Yeah. It was like a Ken Burns doc or something. Yeah.

You know, how, what is the global response to and followed from catastrophe? And especially in a moment of sort of like YouTube documentaries and online counter mythologies and, you know, this idea of there being secret information,

conspiracy, that idea of a zombie movie, like almost a zombie movie. That's just different points of view on the story and the consequences of all that. I mean, a zombie movie that really picked up on a kind of partisan division or a movie that found a way to yoke zombies in a way to just the thriving subcultural kind of craziness of the United States might be a thing. But I think the two Paradigm movies happened in the 2000s, and they were both very millennial in their way, because 28 Days Later was the turbocharged return to realism, and the zombies were fast, which was new.

And then you have Shaun of the Dead, which is sort of, you know, we've all seen zombie movies, and now we're in one. It did the scream thing 10 years later. And I'm not saying that that closed off all the other doors, but when Sean says that zombie movies are iterative, which I think is a really smart way to put it, those are now what I think they're iterative with Romero kind of behind both of those in a way.

And with very few exceptions, it's about grading on a curve instead of like, this is truly new. A couple of you, you guys each have some movies on your list that aren't on mine that I think are closer to feeling new, maybe. But yeah, for the most part, it's, you know, just similar content, similar container.

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Okay, so let's talk about our lists um it's this is a very interesting top five scenario because they're obviously going to be a handful of idiosyncratic choices on our parts and i can always count on chris to drop a couple that i've either never seen or i sometimes think are bad honestly but um i there are also a handful of certified classics in this genre so i guess i'll just couch this conversation by saying,

certainly there are some movies that won't be identified here that can fall firmly into the classics category. And also, we're trying to have fun on a podcast. Yeah, you know what? I would just say, if we were doing Italian neorealism, I would be really open to being like, how could you not put this? It's just like, they're zombie movies, man.

Most of these movies I've watched late at night, 1 a.m., after three beers. They're supposed to serve a purpose. They're not supposed to necessarily change the way you think of art in the world. I've continued my strict no fun policy on my list. Sorry. Chris, why don't you start us off?

What is your number five favorite zombie movie? Yeah. So let's start dumb and let's go with the kind of movie that the algorithm gives you late at night when you're just looking for something mildly scary. I also think that fast, cheap, and out of control are important tenets to remember in zombie movies. So I'm going to go with Dead Snow, which is a 2009 Norwegian movie about some hikers up in the mountains and the snowy mountains. And they basically come across reanimated Nazis. The reason why I love this movie is because most of the time, you almost feel that it's not uncommon in zombie movies for the characters to somewhat be like,

oh no, not my grandmother or my dog being reanimated. But like, what if Nazis were being reanimated? Like what if you actually hated the people being reanimated or were like, had a reason to already fear the people being reanimated. So this is just like, it's honestly, it sometimes feels like it was shot with like a super eight camcorder.

And it definitely is like, not, not on the level of some of the other films we're going to be talking about effects wise but is a absolute blast and I think it's important to celebrate like

cheap B movies when doing a zombie list. Is this movie a comedy? I've wondered about what the sort of like total intent was. It has comic parts. I think the trailer

if you've watched the trailer it's cut a little bit more comic than the movie plays. Interesting. Okay, that's a good one. Dead Snow. Adam, what about you? What's your number five?

I did a joint entry between Bob Clark's Death Dream and Joe Dante's Homecoming, which are both movies that imagine homecomings of enlisted men, enlisted zombies, basically. And Bob Clark is in the, the Clark film is in the aftermath of Vietnam, about a family grieving the death of their military man's son and wishing monkeys possible that he would come back. And he does, and it's not good. And Homecoming kind of broadens the canvas to be the idea that the dead are all coming back to life and voting against George Bush.

You know, and I mean, Death Dream is a B movie. Bob Clark, may he rest in peace. This is a topic for another podcast, but he made one of the best, you know, horror movies ever in Black Christmas, one of the best sort of purview movies in Porky's and a pretty good Christmas movie in Christmas Story. It's quite a record. But Death Dream is like cheap and unpleasant and grimy and 70s-ish and sad. It has a really mournful tone because it's informed by grief. And then

Homecoming was made in the period where Joe Dante couldn't get arrested in Hollywood because he dared to make the Looney Tunes movie, which is also good, and I think is his kill bill. And that's a topic for another podcast too but you know in homecoming subtlety is out the window right i mean homecoming is just it features these fake fox news anchors and fake fox news broadcasts and it's right in that period where it was like team america and fahrenheit 9-11 i mean it's just like it's it's indispensable kind of bush 2 era cinema i don't think it got a big wide release in the US. I think it mostly showed on TV

because it was for the Masters of Horror series that John Carpenter and other people made episodes for. But it's really good. And a good example, again, of how you can politicize a zombie movie like that. Somewhere Lee Donowitz is like, God damn, should have made Coming Home in a Body Bag a zombie movie.

You know, it's funny you guys both chose soldier-inflected zombie movies, because one movie I wanted to put on my list, but I don't know if it could technically qualify as a zombie movie, was another Romero movie, The Crazies, which to the point you were making earlier, Chris, about the pandemic

movie, that is a true quarantine movie, one of the truest ever made. And your guy, Breck Eisner, remade that. Yes, he did, which is not a bad remake, although kind of pointless. And that's a movie that very specifically deals not just with the quarantine, but with the sort of aftermath of Vietnam

and Vietnam veterans coming home and what's waiting for them in America when they return home. And I don't know, there's a fine line, I think, between infection and zombiedom, and that's closer to an infection movie. My number five is Train to Busan, which I have talked about a couple of times on this show, but that I do think is really one of the truly great, just movies, frankly, of the last 10 years. It's a, Young Sang-ho directed this movie. It's a Korean zombie movie that largely takes place

on a train. It's quite a double bill with Snowpiercer in terms of the absolute horrors that you can find on a train, but just an immensely propulsive, really well-staged, fun kind of action movie in a way too. It reminds me a little bit of the way that certain like Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and Bruce Willis movies from the 90s are staged and the kind of pursuit to freedom and what they need to what the sort of lead figures need to get through um it's also got a pretty good sense of humor about it so if people have not had a chance to check out train to busan i would highly recommend it i would not recommend the sequel that was released last year which was unfortunately very disappointing

but the original recipe is a great one um and if we're going to talk quickly about uh foreign language zombie movies there is a movie called One Cut of the Dead which people have asked me to talk about on this show so many times and it is really really good this is a Japanese film from Shinichiro Ueda and is very similar actually to is it Diary of the Dead

that you were talking about Adam that Romero made about essentially about the making of a movie about zombies and One Cut of the Dead is very similar. It's about a production house in Japan that films low budget films and then a zombie apocalypse strikes. And then they sort of use that as an opportunity

to capture the apocalypse in real time and make a movie out of it. It's a very clever movie. It was for a handful of years on Shudder. I'm not sure if it's still there, but I would encourage people to check out One Cut of the Dead as well. Yeah, there's also Charlie Booker.

One of his pre-Black Mirror shows was this thing called Dead Set, which has a similar kind of premise. It's about a big brother house during a zombie outbreak. Can you watch Dead Set in the United States? There are ways. There are ways.

Like where? Just try Googling extra hard. You got to spend that Grodd coin. No, I'm not actually. To be honest, for all I know, it could be on one of the British services, like BritBox or something. Chris, what's your number four? My number four is Zombieland.

So I was trying to choose basically between Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead. I'm sure we'll talk more about Shaun of the Dead. This idea that you could have an odyssey adventure during a zombie movie, where zombie movies are usually quite claustrophobic and we have to wall ourselves into something. Zombieland is pretty much a road movie. It has a bunch of people starring in it at a moment right before i think they all became sentient of their own um personas in a lot of ways so like an actually like delightful leading man performance from jesse eisenberg emma stone before she kind of goes supernova and woody harrelson before right before or right at bongo's woody harrelson yourelson, right at the moment where he's like,

hey, I'm fucking Woody Harrelson. So that drives it. It's basically these three strangers carousing across the country trying to outrun the zombie apocalypse that's hit the States. And it's really funny, pretty gory, pretty fun cameo in it. if you haven't seen it i won't spoil it but um really just an entertaining as hell movie and a way to make a zombie movie that isn't kind of letting down with like it's a metaphor or it's an allegory so let's just talk about the zombie comedy real quick because this is kind of a comedy and kind of not and you can make the case that it's working actually best when it's not trying to be as funny

with the exception of that cameo that you pointed out. I think the voiceover is very funny. Like the narration is funny and Eisenberg is funny, but for the most part, it actually does play it straight until Woody Harrelson shows up. Look, let's just spoil the cameo. Henry Kissinger's great.

You know, just evokes undead just effortlessly. You know, there's something with Zombieland. I remember seeing that in the theater. It's perfectly good time. I felt something about it. I'm not trying to fake engineer a kind of take on it 10 years later. I was like, this kind of feels like a fake movie. There's something about this weird lack of commitment that it has to anything.

And the cameo, which is not henry kissinger uh is a big part of that it's kind of a fake movie it doesn't mean that it's not enjoyable and i don't quite even know what i mean when i'm saying it's a fake movie i kind of like it though i like what you're saying it's it sort of has this quality of well why not and sometimes when that's yoked to a really small budget, that's inventive and exciting. And sometimes when it's released by a big studio, even if the stars aren't as big as they were going to get,

I just kind of get annoyed by it just won't have any logic or coherence or rules. It's expensive and tossed off at the same time, I guess. Well, okay, so you raised an interesting idea. Is it about Henry Kissinger? No, we're not talking about that. Overrated, under. So you're right. You raised an interesting idea. Um, so we're not, we're not talking about overrated, underrated or properly. Sorry.

Where, yeah. Where is Henry Kissinger on the Mount Rushmore? Sorry. I'm sorry. American secretaries of state. Um, so I'll just,

I'm going to jump ahead just to my number three picks really quickly in an effort to kind of have this conversation right now. So for my number threes, I basically copped out and picked three, what I think are basically zombie comedies in an effort to discuss this. And you guys have both opened a portal that I think is worth discussing. So I picked The Return of the Living Dead, which is a movie from Dan O'Bannon that I absolutely love. Evil Dead 2, which again, I've talked about on this show many, many times. And Shaun of the Dead, which Adam mentioned earlier. Now, these are three movies from two different eras. The Return of the Living Dead is mid-80s, Evil Dead 2 is early 80s, and Shaun of the Dead is, of course, last 15 years. Shaun of the Dead is incredibly self-aware and self-referential, and Zombieland is very

similar in that way. It's a movie that feels like it's not just aware of zombie movies, but it's aware of the internet. It's aware of the sort of like post-Mel Brooks economy of spoof parody satire movies. You know, Shaun of the Dead is incredibly loving and displaying almost like a filial piety to the movies that came before it. Zombieland feels like less indebted to that, but I think is also trying to have a lot of fun. And I agree with you, Chris. Like, it's clever. It knows it's that, but I think is also trying to have a lot of fun. And I agree with you, Chris. Like it's, it's, it's like, it's clever. It knows it's clever,

but it is clever. If any, like you have any other group of people in that movie, I don't think it's as nearly as entertaining. It's a good point. It's very well cast.

And that's part of what makes it winning. So the Return of the Living Dead and Evil Dead 2 don't feel like homages necessarily to zombie movies. They feel like homages to other kinds of movies. They feel like homages to Marx Brothers movies they feel like homages to other kinds of movies they feel

like homages to Marx Brothers movies or to Tex Avery cartoons or to you know even like if you want to be really pretentious about it like Ernst Lubitsch movies in some ways like the way that they're staged the sense of humor that they have they still have gross out moments and they're ridiculous about you know creatures from hell trying to destroy our protagonists, but they are not obsessed with themselves. They're obsessed with other stuff. And so there's like a kind of an interesting delineation between the two. I don't necessarily favor one over the other. It just, it's one of the reasons why I asked you guys the question about where is there to go? Because after Shaun of the Dead, I feel like the only place to go is like really gnarly

because we've already done this kind of like cute and very admiring and self-aware and still kind of scary and entertaining version of a movie. But that being said, I think you could make the case that most zombie movies are comedies, you know, that most of them seem to have a kind of, you know, a wrinkle in their brow about what our society is and what our life should be and what it means to be alive, frankly. But I like all three of those movies very much, especially The Return of the Living Dead, which I think is probably the least scene of the three I just mentioned. And it's so, so fun. And if you can get a chance to see it in a theater, I remember seeing it about 10 years ago in a theater with a packed house. And it was like

one of the best movie going experiences I've ever had. Daniel Bannon, for those people, those of you don't know, it was one of the co-writers of alien among many other movies. And it's just sort of like famously, um, I don't know. How would you describe? He's like,

he almost like a ne'er do well. He's somebody who kind of continued to seemingly get screwed out of the credit he deserved on many projects over the years. Um, and there's always been a little bit of confusion as to how much credit he actually deserves, but this is a movie that he directed and worked on quite a bit and deserves credit for it. You know, I don't want to get too far afield here, Sean, but I couldn't help but think of

when you were talking about this idea of comedy and zombie movies that possibly the preeminent zombie property of the last 10 years being Walking Dead, which is maybe the least funny show that's ever been on television. It's a great point. You know, it's funny that it took us this long to bring that up. Adam, did you watch The Walking Dead, the series? I have not watched one second of The Walking Dead. I haven't seen it.

So you can just sit there quietly while Chris and I talk about this for two and a half minutes. I'm ready. Can you act it out? I watched the first couple of seasons as they came on and then uh basically since then have done like check-ins where i'll watch like well you gotta watch walking dead tonight because something really serious happens with one of the main characters so i've seen some

of the major turning points of the series and then one of the things that's sort of amusing it's i find this also happens with greys where like a long running show, if you just catch yourself reading a recap or an article about it on vulture or something, you're like, Oh my God, this person is that guy's still chief of surgery. Like, I can't believe Negan is still on this show.

Like I thought he was dead like six years ago, but every time I check in thinking, I'm there, maybe they've gone through some sort of stylistic overhaul. And I'm sure walking dead fans will be like, you're missing the dark humor underneath this show. I'm just like blown away by how, not even serious, but like anti-fun it is in a lot of ways.

You know, like anti kind of, like you'd think after being on the run this long from Zombodies, there would be some like in-jokes that people would have with one another so chris before before i forget there's pre-teen girls in our neighborhood who write gray's anatomy fan fiction and chalk on the sidewalk that's a real thing in toronto they're so bored they've been just writing what if gray's anatomy and they're like 12 year 12 year olds so just just passing it on a different version of of zombie dumb is the 20 seasons of Grey's Anatomy that Chris is slowly pushing through.

So it's funny you bring up the walking dead. This is the second time this week that this show has come up on this podcast because we mentioned John Bernthal, who was in those who wish me dead, who I think was frankly one of the best parts of the walking dead. And when his character was killed fairly early in this show's run, I kind of lost interest. I felt like he was more

of a tension point and more of an interesting antagonist than the zombies themselves. And you're right, Chris, it's not a very funny show. People thought it was fun because the kills were so frequent and so gory and so well executed. But it was interesting to watch Invincible this year, the animated series, which was also based on a comic series that Robert Kirkman created. And Invincible is incredibly funny. And it does have that grimness, but it seems incredibly knowing as well about the archetypes of the genre and seems to be subverting them. And that was how the Walking Dead series was originally pitched to us as like a modernization and intellectualization in some ways of the modern zombie story. And I never really felt like it lived up to that. I felt

like everybody was taking everything way too seriously for it to be any fun. But what do I know? It was the most popular show on TV for five years. Yeah, I mean, I think we're getting in the weeds, but I do think that it started out and it had a little bit of prestige TV to it and a little bit of grindhouse to it. And it really worked in a lot of ways and then as the years went on it turned into like Norman Reedus' motorcycle club and like being really kind of like there are some core ideas that people have about

the show and our job is to service those those preconceived notions right right okay well let's go back to our lists Adam why don't you give us your number four oh it's an inescapable movie to discuss, right? Which is night of the living dead.

She is ferocious and unfair and just depressing 50 years later. You know, it's one of the true feats of how did they do that engineering in the history of American cinema, not because of trick shots or because even because it's that formally remarkable, but there was no money. There was no sense of the empire laying in wait for Romero and his collaborators.

It was a second half of a B-movie, double bill kind of movie. The first five minutes feel like lost footage or something sort of that's just been reclaimed from some archive. You know, this boy and this girl in this cemetery. I say this in a good way. It's very boring, boring enough that you might want to stop watching it. And then they suddenly start getting chased and it's horrifying. And it does not let up. And that image of the little girl kind of coming for her mom in the

basement is right around the same time as Rosemary's baby and the exorcist and the omen and you sort of just prefigure this generation gap like that idea of a monstrous kid wasn't totally new but it's so horrifying you know you you you take a symbol of youth and innocence and vulnerability and sort of you know weaponize it that way and that's also the best moment in snyder's dawn of the dead when he restages the monstrous little kid from from night of the living dead so like some movies just have images in them that that that lives past them and in the case of night of the living dead there's a good half dozen things in that movie that if you're listening to this podcast you've never seen the original

because you think it's old or whatever you've seen the images a thousand times yeah and this is where they came from. A absolutely timeless movie. I mean, I wonder if more people have seen Night of the Living Dead more times over the last 60 years, you know, or however long it's been, you know, than almost any other movie in some ways. It's also one of those Rosetta Stone movies where, you know, many people have heard about it, not as many people have watched it, especially in the last 30 years. And not dissimilar from what you were describing earlier about The Heartbreak Kid, Adam,

where when you go back and watch a movie like The Heartbreak Kid, you can see the kids in the hall and Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm and all of this, like you said, cringe comedy developing over time, this sense of discomfort and fear informing something being funny. Night of the Living Dead is the same way. I mean, the way that these stories are told are basically all sprung out from this movie. So it's definitely worth a visit or a revisit if you haven't seen it in a while. I'm going to skip my number four so that we can talk about it because Adam also shares it on our list

uh Chris why don't you give us your number three which I assume are we talking about the original here on your number three I'm cheating and doing both um because I think that uh for as much as I think Dawn of the Dead is a superior movie and obviously Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead is a remake I thought it would be useful to throw in Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead because I do remember just being like man maybe this guy's gonna be a really good filmmaker when I saw this movie uh Ving Rhames Sarah Polly Jake Webber uh Ty Burrell pre-modern family are in this movie it's a really good ensemble it's some of the set pieces are really really well staged it's genuinely like nerve wracking to watch uh it has a different pace and kinetic feel I think than Romero's Dawn of the

Dead but Romero's Dawn of the Dead kind of has this, as we've discussed over the course of the pod, a really amazing commentary on American consumerism going on with the walling themselves off in a mall. So I'm just going to do Dawn of the Dead as my third one, but for both films. So this is actually my number one, the original, the Romero version, and Adam's number two. Adam, I think you and I have actually talked about this movie before on the pod, but what do you love about Romero's version? Because it's just a stroke. When Chris is saying he likes horror movies where the setting is the character, I mean, this is the best one of those i mean maybe maybe you throw the shining in there as a corollary to the haunted house movie but the idea of like not a haunted mall but the idea of like the mall is where you go to be safe and then it becomes the least safe place in the world i mean you just have those two sentences in there for a movie made in

78 you're like good for you george romero you you crack the atom you cut the knot you had the thing that filmmakers strive for which is you had a stroke of actual genius you know suggesting that going to the mall is the hardwired survivalist impulse of american life and also that it will not save you what else do you need to say and just some of it is so funny the zombies going up going trying to go up the down escalator is like, you know, Laurel and Hardy. It's, it's silent comedy.

It's a psych gag. It's kind of cruel, but it's also kind of sad and touching. And it begins the tendency that Romero would double and triple and quadruple down on later of giving his zombies some humanity where they're not in human. They're like post-human and it's kind of sad and they bounce off how kind of unlikable some of his human characters are.

But that was the, that movie was a huge deal for me when I was a kid, because I just managed to sneak a VHS of it home. And I think the triumph of getting it home had me primed for it, like just gangbusters, but no, it's legitimately brilliant. It's a brilliant movie. I think also from a technical perspective, it arrives at like an amazing moment in effects and the gore and obviously the kind of historic work that Tom Savini does on the movie and a number of other people. But it's like hugely inspirational for what horror movies,

especially zombie movies and gore movies are going to look like. It's just a lot of fun too. It is the thing that's been interesting. And this is obviously true of a lot of movies from the 80s and 90s. It is the pacing is slower. You know, if you compare it to a modern zombie movie, even more so the night of the living dead, I find that this is a movie that takes its time the same way that zombies kind of shambolically take their time. It's pretty wild to watch this in comparison to the Snyder and to watch like even just even in a movie that is got a lot of humanity for a Zack Snyder movie, watching like how much quickly it's more quickly it's cut, how much more kinetic it feels. And then it's a fascinating juxtaposition.

Okay, Adam, why don't we talk about the movie that is number four on my list and number three on your list? You mentioned Stuart Gordon before. What's your number three? I'd be Re-Animator, which is, you know, Chris is several times, it's making me more and more jealous every time he says it because we're still in total lockdown in Toronto. He's like, this is the kind of movie you go to in the theater on a Wednesday with beers and watch with beers and watch it with beers and you're seeing it with friends and everything's back to normal. I mean, Re-Animator is one of the great

theater-going experiences because it's so disgusting and the disgust comes out the other end into basically being like, just like playing with Play-Doh or playing with actors. Like if it's possible for a film to be obscene and borderline

evil but completely good-natured about it like not a mean bone in that film's body even though it's mean because it's just so gleeful and joyful and so hopped up on shock tactics with bringing people back from the dead and parts of people's bodies are still alive and people are choked with intestines and innards i mean it's just the best time ever. And it's authentically Lovecraftian. You know, it's fairly faithful as a Lovecraft-style adaptation. And it has one of the greatest deadpan performances in any horror movie by Jeffrey Combs, who's right neck and neck with Bruce Campbell for 80s horror icon for me. Do you go reanimatorimator over From Beyond?

I like them both very much. And I think you have From Beyond on your list. Oh, you don't. I have something different. There's something different. They're both really good. I like Re-Animator a bit more and I defy anybody who hasn't seen it

to get a group of at least three people together and watch it. You'll put two years back on your life there's a very famous sequence in which um barbara crampton's character is being pursued i'll say that if you have also seen this movie in a movie theater you know that people to your left and to your right will grab your arm while you're watching the movie very fun movie um seward gordon passed away uh I guess, about a year ago now. He's probably the key interpreter of the Lovecraft stories in cinema.

This is his best one, I think. He's handed that mantle over to Nick Pizzolatto, though. Sure. Yes. I'd like to see those two guys talk to each other, see how that turns out. Chris, why don't we go to your number two? My number two is Wreck, which is one of the scariest found footage movies you'll ever see and gets to kind

of uh what we were talking about earlier about um you know i wonder i haven't watched this movie since the pandemic started but i i'm not in any real hurry to because i remember seeing it and feeling like this kind of feels like how society's fabric gets ripped apart is when you start to sort of just be suspicious of your neighbor's dog and like why is your husband in the in the hospital and it's basically about a viral zombie outbreak in a Spanish apartment building it's told from the perspective of a documentary news crew that's on uh that's doing a show about what happens when I think it's Madrid, when Madrid is asleep at night and they come across

this situation and it is really, really one of those horror movies that when it's over you feel like your nerve endings have been just run through a cheese grater it is an incredibly difficult watch, but it's absolutely thrilling. So The Beyond is my number two. This is a movie by one of the Italian masters you were talking about earlier, Adam, Lucio Fulci. And this is honestly one of the scariest things I've ever seen in my life this movie has a a tone and a pace and a a sound design that is unlike anything i have ever seen in my life fulci is

considered one of the great italian masters of zombie movies he famously directed a movie called zombie um but this movie which is essentially about a, it's basically about a hotel that is built on top of a portal to hell. And out of that portal comes pure evil. And that sounds simple enough. And you've probably seen a lot of movies that have similar premises to that. But the way that this movie is staged is truly unnerving. And it's very gory. And like many Italian horror masters, Lucio Fulci is obsessed with eyes and eye horror,

which of course is very upsetting. But there is something otherworldly and disquieting about the way that he creates atmosphere in this movie that is really, really hard to put into words. But if you want to have a fucked up night, if you want to have a night where you think that there is nowhere else to go, but hell, I would recommend any of Fulci's movies.

But The Beyond in particular is very, very painful. And, you know, earlier this year we did a... Honey, what are you in the mood for tonight? Yeah, this is not a date night movie by any stretch of the imagination. But this is another movie that tarantino many years ago turned me on to because he redistributed this movie when he was doing the rolling thunder pictures thing and you can see how some of this kind of like post giallo italian horror really courses through some of his work too maybe the greatest contact lens movie ever made

oh god right yeah like just just the the primacy of contact we mentioned eye horror or eyes as sources of horror i mean when you were describing the plot which you described totally accurately in 1981 i mean it's funny to see it as a flip side to the shining except and while i will never say anything bad about the shine and i will say the shining is to some extent embarrassed or very self-conscious about being a horror movie. And The Beyond is the opposite of embarrassed or self-conscious about being a horror movie. It's like The Shining is almost a horror movie in spite of what Kubrick claimed to think about the genre. And The Beyond is by people who are all in on that idea of a haunted space and a space as a portal to somewhere else.

And it's just so gloriously analog to watch it now. Gloriously analog effects and makeup and space. Like you had to location scout that movie and I'm not trying to be a crank about CG, whatever. But yeah, it's an amazing looking movie. Amazing.

It's an interesting pairing with a movie like Wreck, which I think was doing its best to deal with what it had to make something that felt modern to use that kind of handheld shaky camera effect to create something that felt real this is a movie that does the same but is essentially riffing on you know the concept of like witchcraft and the um you know the the the resonance of of of a of a country in a community built on slavery you know it's a movie set in louisiana and it's it's very much in conversation with those ideas but it's not done in

a way that is overtly self-conscious you know it's it's all subtextual and it's all about um basically like the post pain of a society um while also just being incredibly gnarly and gross and fun to watch. So that's the beyond. Let's go to our number ones. I've already shared mine, which was Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Chris, what's your number one?

It's 28 days later, which I guess by because of its absence on your guys's list, I wonder if I'm on a little bit of an island here, but you know, I just remember like it being absolutely enthralled this movie and this is also like coming off of a run where danny boyle was not only a really exciting filmmaker but seemed to be an incredibly youthful and energetic filmmaker and it will like a kind of relentlessly creative filmmaker and that's what i think about when i think of this

movie and in some ways it's kind of low budget. I'm sure it had a decent budget, but certainly not blockbuster by our, our conception of the, of the meaning. Now the, the depiction of what would happen to a city of something like this happened. And if London shutting down is really conveyed in a few really efficient

shots, but you know, I always think of Killian Murphy's gym kind of walking through London with like just completely empty and then you know the the sort of stages of this movie which I I think kind of you know obviously it's about like the stages of infection uh the sort of the the vertex of it is about that but the way in which basically like the zombie epidemic infects humanity is essentially what this movie

is about and you get to meet you know these characters along the way concluding with this really kind of awful and terrifying christopher christopher eccleston character at the end who's a initially appears as like a military savior of humanity and then obviously is is just this grotesque kind of colonel kurtz person uh by the end of the movie um just an awesome fascinating movie written by Alex Garland, who obviously every big picture is a big supporter of

with devs and ex machina. And it was really just absolutely like when you just when you thought like nothing new could be done with the genre. I feel like he gave us 25 new things. I like it a lot. I think it was an interesting decision

for Boyle to kind of slum it, I guess, for lack of a better phrase with a movie like this, but I think he did off the beach. Yeah. Speaking of movies that are hard to get your hands on in physical media, the beach, when are we,

when are one of the three of us doing a beach pod? You guys up for that? I love the beach. Adam's just blanked us completely. I could rewatch the beach to have something to say about it. Adam, what's your number one? My number one is a movie that has a beach in it. It's

Jacques Turner's I Walked With a Zombie. And hopefully people don't immediately tune out when I say it's from 1943, it's black and white. It's one of the most poetic movies I've ever seen. It's about a Caribbean island and it's one of the most poetic movies i've ever seen uh it's about a caribbean island and it's through the lens of a family of plantation owners uh you know the colonial

dynamic is sort of replicated into the present tense and it's not the first zombie movie i mean people say something like white zombie from 1932 is the first zombie movie but it conflates zombie zombieism uh uses the word zombie i think for one of the first times in a movie and mixes it with the idea of voodoo and supernatural practice but i mean it's a movie really about race and power and the zombie figure in it is this giant looming uh african slave figure who is conjured up uh in one the scariest, most beautiful sequences in any movie. I would put it on any list of the great reveals in horror movie history and how you use a close-up. And it's kind of a movie that suggests that, you know, the dead aren't the only people who are dead,

right? It's about characters who are carrying a lot of sadness around with them and a lot of kind of doom around with them. And I always, whenever I teach horror film courses, you know, I always include it and ask students to watch it in its entirety because it's one of those movies that kind of casts a spell without gore or without violence. Because I mean, even calling it a horror movie is a bit of a stretch, but as a primal scene for some of the mythos and some of the imagery and as a movie that other filmmakers appreciate, the French director Bertrand Bonello,

who actually made a pretty good Dawn of the Dead remake called Nocturama, which is Dawn of the Dead without zombies. Last year, he made a tribute to- Is that just guys, people at the mall? Like it's just people shopping or- French revolutionary teens at the mall being hunted by high-tech cops, terrorists being hunted by cops.

But he made a movie last year, Benillo, called Zombie Child, which is a really wonderful little kind of quasi-genre film that owes a lot to Turner as well. And I don't have the quote in front of me, but I believe that Romero was an admirer of I Walk With a Zombie as well. So the movie that maybe some listeners haven't seen but as well worth seeking

out and like a lot of b movies from the 40s it's very short it's like 75 80 minutes and it's just a a beautiful little movie given that zach snyder has had the chance to return to zombie movies 15 or 16 years later do you think now is the time for him to return to zombie movies 15 or 16 years later. Do you think now is the time for him to return to the Sucker Punch universe, guys? Yeah, definitely. No, he should return to the owl universe. The owls of Gubbool?

That's still my favorite. That's still my favorite Snyder. That's the good stuff. The CGI owls who die for honor. I love it. CR, where do you want Zack Snyder to go next? I just feel like there's more meat on the bone

with Justice League. You know, like, what did he hold back? You know? And what do we have to do to get it? I'll sign up for another streaming service, straight up. Maybe the AT&T discovery situation could just

be a Zack Snyder 24-hour livestream of, like, a continuously updating Justice League. discovery situation could just be a Zack Snyder 24 hour live stream of like a continuously updating Justice League. I did like when he said that he's not, he doesn't think the country is ready for his movie of the Fountainhead. Right? Because he's wanted to make this for 20 years. Show me the lie, right?

No, show me the lie or show me the movie. Zack, do it. Yeah. Break our brains. Sean, what about you, man? What do you want from Zach? You want him to do like Marriage Story or what?

No. No, that's not what I want. I think that he probably should do something that he actually wants to do. I get the impression that... Ayn Rand. Yeah. I mean, I think that there is something that is sort of unsaid. And as he has developed more self-awareness, he also seems to

be kind of shading some of his intent. He obviously got caught up in this world of the DC universe for the last seven or eight or nine years of his career. And while he's one of those unique people whose ideas I don't necessarily understand, and if I do understand them, I don't agree with what he's trying to say about life. But on the other hand, he does have an incredible visual talent. Like there, I think 300, for example,

is like a kind of weird xenophobic movie, but is also really thrilling at times. And he's doing his own thing. He has style. Most filmmakers these days do not have style or are not allowed to have style. So I'd like to see something that is like unvarnished and uncharacterized by like comic book characters and zombie movie. Like he seems to be striving towards something, but afraid to actually do it for some reason, or maybe he just can't get it funded. But the idea of saying like the world isn't ready for my fountainhead movie is

that's absurd. Like if you want to make it, make it, you're one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. You should make that movie. But who am I to say, you know, maybe he wants to remake Roma.

Like, I'm not really sure. That'd be sick. If somebody was like, bought the Roma IP. We'll just have to wait for that. And when he resurrects the zombie of Roma. Chris, Adam, thank you guys so much for doing today's episode.

My pleasure. You can read Adam on TheRinger.com and many other places. You can hear Chris Ryan just pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts. Chris, what shows are you doing these days? Yeah, I like the big picture though.com and many other places. You can hear Chris Ryan just pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts. Chris, what shows are you doing these days? Mostly on the big picture, though. Yeah.

I like coming on this pod. Is that true? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you'll be back next week. This is my favorite pod. Because we're doing a 2017 movie draft. So I hope everyone will stick around for that.

Thanks, as always, to our producer, Bobby Wagner, for producing this show. We'll see you guys next week.