Zombie, Part 2, Kill Everybody

In preparation for the zombie movie, I didn’t eat any lunch so I could get popcorn and a Pepsi.  They got me on the upgrade things.  I ordered a medium Pepsi; but for 5 cents more I could get the monster size so I did that.  I don’t know why but when I buy pop corn, I want to eat it during the movie.  So I just sat there while they plowed through a bunch of features of coming attractions before I would allow myself to touch the popcorn.  Which I did as soon as the movie started.

 

zombies

 

 

I must have drunk all that Pepsi.  Anyway, with about 20 minutes to go in the movie, I feel as if I have to pee real bad.  I sort of shift myself around in the seat thinking somehow that will help but of course it doesn’t.  So right when the climax is coming up, I just have to go pee, so I race out of the theatre and run in exactly the wrong direction.  When I bump into a wall I figure out to turn around and head back the other way, and relieve myself and get back just when the climax is over.

Which didn’t matter much, since I knew what it is going to be.  I could fill in the blank pretty easily; just one person whacking one of the zombies….

On my horror-meter, I would give this baby about a six on scale of one to ten, ten being best.  Good production values throughout—this has to be said about horror movies since many of them have awful production values.  Pretty tasteful gore, nothing outright sadistic.  Hitchcock jump cutting during the violence sequences added an effective note of chaos while blunting a bit gory details.

But overall it just wasn’t as good as the first one, 24 Days.  The plot line didn’t set up the characters in a way they might develop.  The reviewer for the LA Times said the movie was sort about the way government screws things up, a kind of post-Katrina commentary on bureaucratic indifference and generally bungling.  Actually, the government had a good plan for the particular situation; in case things get out of hand, kill everybody—which they did with guns, bombs, and poison gas.  I guess you could call this bureaucratic indifference.  But kill everybody is always a pretty good plan.

Oddly, the problem wasn’t with the plan, but with the way the people down on the ground screwed up the works.  The devil is in the details; and down at street level, details screw the plan.  For instance, the government has under lock and key a carrier of the disease; she is like a typhoid Jane and they have her locked away pretty good, except that one of the people who works for the government, who survived the first round of the virus, is the Husband of the Typhoid Jane.  So he manages to use this key he has to get in to visit his wife—whom he had previously abandoned when they had been under attack by the zombies—and of course all hell breaks lose.

So what’s screwed up here?  The government plan.  Or the idiotic things human beings do when motivated by such things as love or hate or guilt or anger—The movie has a bleak out ending—the kind I prefer actually, but not because the government screws up but because a sister loves and wants to save her brother….

So what’s the message: people are either bungling cold bureaucratic monsters or horribly bungling human beings?

Or Zombies.

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As the above shows, Zombies usually have really bad skin and bad oral hygiene. 

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