Summary
Snow is falling and group of much-wilier-than-usual zombies have come out to play! Disguised as pizza deliverymen and the Publisher's Clearing House prize patrol they are storming the city, preying mercilessly on gullible housewives and unwary frat boys! Fortunately for all mankind, our saviors appear in the form of a gang of socially inept movie geeks and their new alpha male, the delightfully named ... (Call me Eli.) Armed with a slapdash but surprising effective array of weaponry, our heroes march boldly into the streets to fulfill their destiny! Huzzah! I'd repopulate the Earth with them any day!
Warning! Spoilers ahead!
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Barbara's Rant
So we all know I'm a giant movie geek. As if there were any question, I proved it beyond a reasonable doubt the other night at the bar by launching into a diatribe about the relative emotional impacts of Romero zombies versus modern super zombies. Now one of the local barflies refers to me as "The Zombie Girl." Oh well; there are worse things to be called. The guy who called me "The Drama Lady" hasn't been around for a while, so maybe it's nice to have a nickname again. And by "nickname" of course I mean "name someone calls you when they can't remember your real name."
But I digress. For the duration of this rant, I'm going to assume that the rest of you are giant geeks as well. It's probably true, since I can't imagine why else any of you would be visiting this site, except for those of you who are related to me. (Hi Mom and Dad! [Actually, Mom and Dad are pretty geeky, too, just not about movies.]) So I think it's time that we all collectively admit that which the makers of this movie obviously already understand- we all secretly fantasize about the day when humanity's worst fear will be realized - the dead will awaken from slumber and all the cool people who mocked us and our movies and the baseball bats we keep next to our windows (just in case), all the cool people who made us watch Titanic and Team America will come to us in supplication, lost and helpless without our vast store of zombie knowledge. It's particularly amusing that I have this fantasy, since I freely admit that in the event of actual zombie invasion, I plan to be utterly useless. Well, maybe not as useless as, say, Barbra in Night of the Living Dead (1968), but I certainly don't expect to rise to the occasion as admirably as, say, Barbara in Night of the Living Dead (1990). For one thing, in spite of having read the Zombie Survival Handbook from cover to cover, I haven't fired a gun since the BB guns at summer camp fifteen years ago, unless playing Area 51 at the arcade counts. Actually, considering that I'm ranting about a movie in which zombies are killed with a Playstation controller (The best part was the grossed out face the guy made when he reeled his controller back in, dripping with blood.) Area 51 experience almost certainly is applicable.
But real zombie invasions are beside the point, as this movie was clearly meant to be anything but. I mean, I've seen some pretty weak explanations for zombie phenomena, but this one takes the cake in terms of sheer, unapologetic randomness. Which was delightful! Who cares where the zombies came from or why? The important thing is that this is our hour! Our dark fantasies have at last come to pass! This is the hour for the video game players and the obscure movie watchers and the all around losers of the world to rise up and take our rightful place in the pantheon of American heroes! With our umbrellas and our slabs of baloney from the craft services table (Can you tell this movie had the best anti-zombie weaponry ever!? There is nothing funnier than a zombie felled by sandwich meat!) we shall smite the undead enemies of humanity back into the foul earth from whence they came! Cower and fall back before our nerdly might, oh ye fiends from the deep! Oh yes, we know you, and your secret undead ways! Tremble, tremble in fear!
This movie is the perfect embodiment of this geek-hero fantasy because it both acknowledges the emotional validity of it (After all, who wouldn't welcome a sudden, urgent demand for his or her, previously useless, area of expertise? I wonder if philatelists fantasize about some kind of catastrophe that could only be averted by a thorough knowledge of the minutia of stamps.) and celebrates the fact that, as we all know, it's completely preposterous.
BARBARA JO
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