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I had to spend a while thinking this one over, but I think I've settled on Romero's zombies for best franchise and sequel, Evil Dead for best gore and remake. Easiest first: Best remake is no contest. On the Romero side they both feel like echoes - there are some real points of strength in both movies and they're absolutely worth watching, but they're uneven and stay so close to the source material that they end up feeling like lesser copies to me. Evil Dead 2013 actually has ideas of its own and is good to great all the way through. Best gore has solid arguments either way, but style-wise I love what Evil Dead does and I've just never cared that much for the Savini approach. There's more breadth to it - that pencil into the ankle in the original ED actually made me wince the first time I saw it, and the fountains of blood never stop being fun. All that really sticks with me for gore on the Romero side is a bunch of (admittedly excellent) zombie makeup, and a bunch of piles of intestines. Intestines just don't do much for me. Best sequel is where it starts getting hard for me. Evil Dead 2 gets tremendous credit for polishing and refining the spirit of the original, but it's also...nicer, I guess. Slapstick in horror can be a lot of fun, and it certainly is here, but it feels like something was lost. Dawn sharpened its fangs instead of filing them down, and I think I have to give it the nod for that. I still haven't seen any of the Evil Dead TV series so I guess we can call my vote on best franchise tentative, and I hope I'll be able to make some time for it, but when I make myself tune out all the cultural noise that's followed them there's just no competing with the Night-Dawn-Day sequence. Honestly, though, I'm surprised that people are spending so much time talking up Romero's influence as a factor in his favor here - it came close to costing him my vote. If we look at the stuff most obviously and directly inspired by his zombies, it's overwhelming in quantity and almost all of it sucks. Try to trace the most direct lines out of Evil Dead, and you have a lot of really great movies.
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Jun 4, 2020 20:51
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Franchescanado posted:Umberto Lenzi's film Ghosthouse was marketed as Evil Dead 3, which launched it's own trilogy. Also, hard to ignore the Zombi 2 connection to Dawn of the Dead. Of course. I'll never deny Evil Dead's place here. Evil Dead has a sizable room in the house of horror. But that is one room in the Night of the Living Dead wing. When it comes down to Dawn VS Evil Dead 2, I say without reservation Evil Dead 2. What is also undeniable is that Evil Dead is not as ground breaking as other films. There's a reason I brought up Chucky- we've had Demon movies before Evil Dead. Lots of them. Possession movies too. Evil Dead didn't invent that genre by any stretch of the imagination, it just took the ideas and did them better. Evil Dead was a very smart movie. It knew it didn't have much of a budget, it knew it didn't have the ability to do much more than throw blood and other fluids around. They could do some quick tricks and dirty makeup work and a lot of creative film shots but the film never tries to go beyond its own scope. It's probably why it's better remembered than what is undoubtedly an influence, Equinox 1970, which is an Evil Dead rear end Evil Dead style movie that aims WAY beyond its pay-grade and suffers mightily for it. But you can't really say the same about Night. Not only does it still hold up- the closest you have before it is, as I mentioned, The Last Man On Earth, which was an adaptation of I Am Legend which was a realistic vampire tale. This is why its easier for me to label Night as the more important of the two. We had Evil Deads before Evil Dead, they just weren't as good or concise. There was no Zombie genre before Night.
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Jun 4, 2020 21:02
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I'm loving this discussion by the way, no way we'd have gotten this with two slashers in the finals. Really glad these two franchises made it.
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Jun 4, 2020 21:41
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Burkion posted:There was no Zombie genre before Night. Well, you may want to clarify your point, because there were zombie movies, and they were certainly used for social commentary. Zombies from the 1930s through the 1960's were mainly based around black magic, usually voodoo (the idea of zombies largely comes from Caribbean folk-tales, most notably in Haiti), but there are outliers that had them just be the living dead. The trend started with White Zombie with Bela Legosi, 1932, is also a voodoo zombie film. Tournier's I Walked With A Zombie from 1943 uses voodoo zombies (which are still the living dead in that specific context) as a context to explore the horrors of the colonization of the Caribbean. Even Plan 9 From Outer Space has zombies, that time the re-animated dead from alien technology. Romero certainly reinvented zombies into anthropophagous re-animated dead bodies, and that's the context we know them as now, but there were three decades worth of films where they were still Zombies. Funny you mention I Am Legend, cuz Romero apparently considered that an inspiration for making his ghouls eat flesh. I clarify because it speaks volumes about the power of Night of the Living Dead. Romero re-invented a 30+ year old film genre in such an extreme way that it retroactively erased those films for many fans, and he gets the title of "creator of the Zombie genre". Franchescanado fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Jun 4, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2020 22:15
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Hammer's excellent The Plague of the Zombies is the direct link between voodoo zombies and Romero zombies. The graveyard dream sequence feels like a direct antecedent to Night of the Living Dead.
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Jun 4, 2020 22:28
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Franchescanado posted:
No film exists in a vacuum, but before Romero, zombie did not mean what it means now. Hell even with Night, Zombie didn't mean Zombie. Those were ghouls. But you know what I meant and I trust people not to be pedantic here of all places. Zombie was also the term used for the fish freaks in Horror at Party Beach, and no one is going to try to claim that as a forefather of Romero's work. My point was that there was no film in the same genre as Romero's Night of the Living Dead, and the closest you can find was a (at the time) harder sci-fi take on vampire lore. There was nothing that took the idea of the living dead and codified it the way Romero did, how he did, and as successfully as he did. Equinox isn't as good as Evil Dead, but they're extremely comparable films in many regards. That was my point.
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Jun 4, 2020 22:31
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Burkion posted:Clarification can be found in my previous post, where I specifically trace Night back to Last Man back to I Am Legend. (And did so again here) Hopefully my pedantry wasn't read as antagonizing or saying you were wrong, just adding that, like my edit said, Romero's film is so important, he recontextualized a 30 year old genre. It was in addition to, not a disqualification, of your post. And I mentioned the I Am Legend connection to yours, in that it's interesting Romero read the story and said "Oh, what if zombies/ghouls/the undead ate flesh like vampires feast on blood?" and went with it. Not the cinematic timeline your post explained.
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Jun 4, 2020 22:38
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Okay I am going to be a dick and didn't want to break up a post but I'm going to be a dick... Franchescanado posted:Peter Jackson literally said Evil Dead inspired him to make Bad Taste. He literally said that Evil Dead 2 inspired Meet the Feebles and especially Dead Alive. I googled it and found quotes where he said so before I posted. The Army of Darkness aspect I did not google, but it seems pretty evident in how it influenced his portrayal of the Orcs, plus the spookier aspects of LotR. quote:Stephen King was a novelist for a decade before The Evil Dead. I'm saying The Evil Dead, which he clearly saw and loved because they used it for marketing, inspired aspects of Pet Sematary (resurrection of the dead, burying a loved one and them coming back possessed and with bloodlust, forces in the woods) and IT (shape-shifting creature that gets power from torturing people before killing them, a group of friends terrorized by supernatural forces), two of his most popular novels of all time, one of which JUST GOT MADE INTO THE MOST POPULAR HORROR BLOCKBUSTER FILM SINCE GET OUT. quote:Coen Bros wouldn't have a career if they didn't work on Evil Dead and copy Raimi's marketing techniques to get Evil Dead made. quote:Edit: Also an actual counterargument against Evil Dead and Edgar Weight is that his break-out film is directly taken from Day of the Dead. Romero even showed up on Shaun and gave his approval. Raimi is also copping a lot from The Exorcist for the deadites, especially in terms of sound design. Timeless Appeal fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Jun 4, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2020 23:31
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Timeless Appeal posted:I've made this argument before and this part hurt my feelings. I appreciate your points and debating me. Sorry if I get heated in debating my thoughts, I don’t mean anything personal by it. We’re both lovers of horror movies and trying to each compete our opinions and thoughts, and I get competitive.
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Jun 5, 2020 03:47
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Timeless Appeal posted:
That last I'm going to quibble with. The Walking Dead was inspired by Romero, but not in a positive way. Robert Kirkman's thought on it was that no zombie movie accurately reflected the true feeling of a world changing event because the movie only lasted two hours and then resolved itself. His aim was to capture what it would be like by following the world for years and even generations, with no easy escape over the hill to a brighter future because there were zombies on that side of the hill too.
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Jun 5, 2020 12:44
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Thanks Fran! Jedit posted:That last I'm going to quibble with. The Walking Dead was inspired by Romero, but not in a positive way. Robert Kirkman's thought on it was that no zombie movie accurately reflected the true feeling of a world changing event because the movie only lasted two hours and then resolved itself. His aim was to capture what it would be like by following the world for years and even generations, with no easy escape over the hill to a brighter future because there were zombies on that side of the hill too. I think you can split Romero's influences. There is the creation of the modern zombie and how it's used in movies and then there is the broader use of horror as social satire and appropriation of tropes. i've said this before, but for its time, NIght is kind a throwback in terms of its initial tone. I think because people see it in black and white and just generally bucket it as old, we forget that there is an element of genre parody just like Evil Dead. When you look through the first lens, I think Romero is more of a continuation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and predecessor to Get Out. The literal creation of a monster type is just a much more concrete and an inarguable influence. EDIT: To elaborate, I mean that I don't for sure know that Get Out wouldn't exist without Night. But I think it's hard to imagine Return of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, or Shaun of the Dead existing. Timeless Appeal fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 13:34
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Jedit posted:That last I'm going to quibble with. The Walking Dead was inspired by Romero, but not in a positive way. Robert Kirkman's thought on it was that no zombie movie accurately reflected the true feeling of a world changing event because the movie only lasted two hours and then resolved itself. His aim was to capture what it would be like by following the world for years and even generations, with no easy escape over the hill to a brighter future because there were zombies on that side of the hill too. To be clearer, his critique is that zombie movies shouldn't end, because it gives you an escape from the setting. Which is uh... a take.
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Jun 5, 2020 16:02
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Lurdiak posted:To be clearer, his critique is that zombie movies shouldn't end, because it gives you an escape from the setting. Which is uh... a take. I don't even really see that as a critique of Romero because in Romero's films the setting does continue to develop. You get a vastly different state of affairs in each film, each one shows you a different stage of societal collapse.
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Jun 5, 2020 16:08
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Basebf555 posted:I don't even really see that as a critique of Romero because in Romero's films the setting does continue to develop. You get a vastly different state of affairs in each film, each one shows you a different stage of societal collapse. Yeah and then the later sequels explore the new societies that form within the zombie, like through the series of six movies Romero made he really did cover a lot.
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Jun 5, 2020 16:53
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Man Land of the Dead is really worth revisiting. I didn't realize that Romero was remaking the opening of 2001 with zombies.
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Jun 5, 2020 17:17
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Yeah, I don't think Kirkman's critiquing Romero. I think he's directly inspired by Dawn and Day. Society dying, people losing it, and other people and your own ability to continue on becoming the bigger threat. Night inspires all those zombies movies that deal with the chaos and drama of "HOLY poo poo THE DEAD ARE RISING!" and then the story ends. Kirkman was "critiquing" that and exploring what happens next, but its obvious Romero was all about that first and I think you can clearly see the inspirations The Walking Dead took from Dawn and Day. So like, if you want to blame Romero its that he DID inspire Kirkman because Kirkman seems like he was tired of people taking from Night and he wanted Dawn/Day/Land/Survival to never stop. Which is problematic for a couple of reasons not the least of which being the inevitable step into toxic survivalist poo poo that Romero largely rejected. STAC Goat fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 18:09
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Kirkman also just wants to be an rear end in a top hat in a soap opera for as long as he can without letting people realize it's a soap opera
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Jun 5, 2020 18:22
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I feel like the Walking Dead audience is firmly split between those who recognize and accept that Kirkman's idea was at its core "a zombie soap opera" and those who still like really want to see some bad rear end outsmart the zombie apocalypse.
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Jun 5, 2020 18:27
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Kirkman's writing is frustrating because he wanted to explore "what happens next" but his stories very quickly just became endless cycles of society reasserting itself and then SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS and the fledgling society falls apart and zombies get everywhere, leading to moving to a new place where society reasserts itself etc. That's not what happens after the movie's over, that's just rewinding to the opening. Also all the spinoffs are loving awful misery porn with fascist power fantasy protagonists.
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Jun 5, 2020 19:59
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Yeah, World War Z the novel for all its flaws does a better job at giving a wholistic view of a zombie apocalypse including the aftermath and rebuilding. I think the one interesting movies is that they're not about the end of the world till Daw at the end, and by the end of Day and definitely with Land, I think Romero questions the concept of the end of the world.
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Jun 5, 2020 20:23
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World War Z, like the Dead sequels, still has an end though. Kirkman's idea was always "no end". Which has its obvious problems that have pretty much played out like one should have expected. If life is just an endless cycle of pain and death and compromise and misery and sadism then that's gonna have a shelf life for most people and rarely give any kind of truly satisfying resolution. Which, you know... is the point. But that point is a loving bummer.
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Jun 5, 2020 20:31
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I had to tap out of TWD when it became clear that the show/comic was just having the same discussion about “making the hard choices” over and over again. Spoiler: the “hard choice” is always to kill someone before they have a chance to kill you. Of course it was America’s favorite TV show for a long time, lol. Edit: Like, it misses Romero’s point so completely it’s kind of stunning. Splint Chesthair fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 20:46
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I don't think I ever felt TWD was overly in on the "kill or be killed" idea. Its an idea that's wrestled with since the very beginning and I think that kind of makes sense, but I don't think they ever really settled on "yeah, kill people." Like even when they do there's always someone there going "No!" But like, while I can accept that people suck and a zombie apocalypse would be a terrible world of moral compromise and predators there was only so long that I could actually enjoy living through the cycle of "we gotta hold on to our morals, we gotta match this evil before it destroys us, lets get back our morals." Again, that's kind of the inherent flaw in Kirkman's idea. No satisfying resolutions. And by "flaw" I of course mean artistically, because financially the idea of "zombie movie that never happens" was apparently genius.
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Jun 5, 2020 21:02
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STAC Goat posted:I don't think I ever felt TWD was overly in on the "kill or be killed" idea. Its an idea that's wrestled with since the very beginning and I think that kind of makes sense, but I don't think they ever really settled on "yeah, kill people." Like even when they do there's always someone there going "No!" I went back and reviewed the plot summaries on Wikipedia to jog my memory about how that idea got so stuck in my head - It seems to be because they followed up the “Should we kill this guy?” on the farm in Season 2 with another “Should we kill this guy?” in the prison in Season 3. I quit not long after the prison thing was over because of that and all the reasons you said.
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Jun 5, 2020 21:27
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STAC Goat posted:World War Z, like the Dead sequels, still has an end though. The real problem with that is that it doesn't make for a good story and it doesn't make a lot of sense in universe. The population of the world is decreasing. Zombies in WD are fairly realistic and wear down over time. There are only a finite number of them. Considering they have no self preservation skills and are easily mowed down, the initial numbers advantage would be whittled down. Even though people turn into zombies after they die, the population shrinks and shrinks where that stops being an issue. After a few years the only reason the Walking Dead universe should be a living hell is through author convenience and nothing more. With Romero, these things are easy to ignore because his zombies are not and have never tried to be realistic. There is no reason for the way they are and they are shown to be able to learn and grow. And the movies are disconnected as such that the strict continuity of time doesn't really matter. There's only so long you can put up with miserable cynicism that the Walking Dead embodies.
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Jun 5, 2020 21:28
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This reminds me of how badly written the Bethesda Fallout games are, where the world is still exactly as post apocalyptic 200 years after the bombs dropped, right down to the ground still being radioactive and the rubble being everywhere. Like you'd think in 200 years someone would have moved the big rock out of the way of the main trading routes or loving swept up the skeletons in the diner. It's not that hard.
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Jun 5, 2020 21:52
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Splint Chesthair posted:I went back and reviewed the plot summaries on Wikipedia to jog my memory about how that idea got so stuck in my head - It seems to be because they followed up the “Should we kill this guy?” on the farm in Season 2 with another “Should we kill this guy?” in the prison in Season 3. I quit not long after the prison thing was over because of that and all the reasons you said. Yeah, TWD repeats the same moral dilemmas over and over with no antagonists who are basically just shades of the same problem. "Should we kill this guy?" is always on the table because there's always some psycho killing people and there's always characters saying "yes" and the main characters going back and forth. But its always a debate, or was from what I remember watching. But having that same debate over and over again is tedious and depressing and goes nowhere. Burkion posted:The real problem with that is that it doesn't make for a good story and it doesn't make a lot of sense in universe. But like the whole of the TWD is something like 2 or 3 years after the complete collapse of the world. So like they're still working out the concept of how to build sustainable farms and secure walls to protect them from assholes.
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Jun 5, 2020 22:03
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Right that would be a huge problem with this kind of story in American comics as well. Comic book time. The story's been going over or just about ten years right? Closer to fifteen? Yet so little time has passed in universe.
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Jun 5, 2020 22:13
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Yeah. I think it makes relative sense in the context of the show/comic. They've only gone through a few years and they're still adjusting, adapting, learning, and just trying to survive all the trauma and psychotic fallout from the end of the world. Its not like its been a generation and they haven't started to get their poo poo together. They're all just a few years removed from going to work and losing their families and poo poo so haven't fully progressed into new world farmers yet. But practically the fact that the show has been going for 10 years and the comic has gone for nearly 20 years means the audience is gonna have a hard time with that since they've basically lived with the apocalypse longer than the characters have. And the fact that you can't stop actors from aging doesn't help. The show could time jump but that kind of goes back to the "problem" with Kirkman's idea. His whole hypothesis was "this is a hell that you just have to live through." So skipping past that stuff might make for a better show but wouldn't be Kirkman's thing. I get it. I just got tired of it. STAC Goat fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 22:21
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Moving away from TWD, when was the last time a zombie movie actually did something new? 28 Days Later, Romero himself with Land of the Dead? Not counting One Cut of the Dead here. I'm genuinely asking since I've not kept up with with the genre at all. edit: Oh maybe World War Z, for all its worth.
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Jun 5, 2020 23:19
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WWZ movie was absolute trash that has sullied the book (the audio book is fully voice acted by Mark Hammill, Alan Alda and a bunch of other folks, I think its better than the movie)
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Jun 5, 2020 23:43
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I did it, I finally made it through all nine hours of Diary of the Dead! Just one more movie and I’ll have watched every movie in both franchises (and 2/3 of the series, but I don’t know that S3 would change my opinion of that show at all). Survival can’t possibly be worse than Diary, can it 
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Jun 6, 2020 03:26
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married but discreet posted:Moving away from TWD, when was the last time a zombie movie actually did something new? 28 Days Later, Romero himself with Land of the Dead? Not counting One Cut of the Dead here. I'm genuinely asking since I've not kept up with with the genre at all. I feel like between Zombieland and Little Monsters, there is arguable a Shaun of the Dead inspired sub-sub genre of zombie films.
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Jun 6, 2020 03:34
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married but discreet posted:Moving away from TWD, when was the last time a zombie movie actually did something new? 28 Days Later, Romero himself with Land of the Dead? Not counting One Cut of the Dead here. I'm genuinely asking since I've not kept up with with the genre at all. What do you mean by something new? Do you mean just made a sincere attempt at the genre without just recycling cliches? Do you mean had a story structure that wasn't just "first act oh no there's zombies, second and third act we're trapped in safe place with zombies outside and complications keep happening"? Or do you mean the worst possible answer "Our zombies have a twist".
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Jun 6, 2020 03:42
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david_a posted:I did it, I finally made it through all nine hours of Diary of the Dead! Just one more movie and I’ll have watched every movie in both franchises (and 2/3 of the series, but I don’t know that S3 would change my opinion of that show at all). Survival is a step up from Diary, but a disappointment.
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Jun 6, 2020 03:42
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david_a posted:I did it, I finally made it through all nine hours of Diary of the Dead! Just one more movie and I’ll have watched every movie in both franchises (and 2/3 of the series, but I don’t know that S3 would change my opinion of that show at all). Season 3 is definitely worth watching. The first episode is a bit of a stumbling block, as they introduce a couple of characters who may make your eyes roll, but it's a ton of fun and a lot less toxic than the previous seasons.
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Jun 6, 2020 03:42
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Lurdiak posted:What do you mean by something new? Do you mean just made a sincere attempt at the genre without just recycling cliches? Do you mean had a story structure that wasn't just "first act oh no there's zombies, second and third act we're trapped in safe place with zombies outside and complications keep happening"? Or do you mean the worst possible answer "Our zombies have a twist". Just something that makes you go "I've not seen that before". Vampire movies for example have Let The Right One In, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, What We Do In The Shadows, Only Lovers Left Alive. While somehow in zombie movies (even the ones I mentioned) everything always ends up with a person slowly turning into a zombie, a safe place getting overrun etc. but this time it's on a train, reservation, whatever. Not that these can't be good movies, but I desperately want to see something fresh and new that makes me excited about the genre again. Something like Romero did from Night to (arguably) Land. married but discreet fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Jun 6, 2020 |
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Jun 6, 2020 04:29
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married but discreet posted:Just something that makes you go "I've not seen that before". Zombies in the way Romero defined them aren't as versatile as vampires can be. While you can have different types, including intelligent ones, that's still treading on ground either Romero or Return of laid out. Like, you want a zombie romance movie? Return of the Living Dead is your boy. You want zombie society? Land of the Dead. Outside of that if you start changing zombies around too much, they're going to end up just some other creature.
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Jun 6, 2020 04:34
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Burkion posted:Like, you want a zombie romance movie? 
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Jun 6, 2020 04:39
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Burkion posted:Zombies in the way Romero defined them aren't as versatile as vampires can be. I would argue that something like I, Zombie that adds tons of wrinkles to zombies like them passing for human as long as they eat brains still has a lot of thematic DNA from Romero's stuff moreso than Twlight or Underworld does with Nosferatu.
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Jun 6, 2020 04:58
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