The “Zed” word

Most people would make this list around Halloween but not me…  I figure as long as people are going to spend this Sunday all dressed up to worship a cannibalistic/vampiric-zombie-god, why not greet springtime with some good old fashioned zombi dust?  “Eat my flesh, drink my blood, I’ll rise from the grave…”  If you change his name and put him in modern garb, the Jesus story could be the greatest monster movie ever made!

Anyway, Top zombies of all time.

Back in the day, the rule was to never utter the word “zombie” in a zombie film.  Recently that rule went straight out the window along with the idea that zombies were slow and craved brains.  And sure, this list is weighted toward George A. Romero but then, he’s the MAN when it comes to Zombies.  And I’ll take Tom Savini over CGI any day!  Before you get all over me for technicalities, yeah, I know some of the zombies listed are not technically “zombies” but they count as such in my world.

Night of the Living Dead
These are the OG old-school zombies.  They were slow, they were dumb but there were thousands of them and “they’re coming to get you Barbara!”  The zombies themselves were easy to get away from.  You could shoot them in the brain, you could take a shovel to their neck.  Or if you didn’t have any implements of destruction you could simply outrun them.  These older model zombies had a top speed just above that of your average six-month-old child.  But just like that child learning to crawl, if you didn’t keep your eye on them… turn your head for just one second and  “SURPRISE!” they are into some shit.  With a toddler it often meant pulling stuff off the table, with a zombie it usually meant he was scooping your brains out with his hand.  The real fear with NotLD zombies was being overwhelmed by sheer numbers.  They were going to keep coming at you no matter how many you killed.  This is the same reason we’ll never go to war with China.

28 Days Later
These are some of the first “speedster zombies” I encountered.  Resident Evil deserves an honorable mention but I played the game, never saw the movie.  Milla Jovovitch in torn spandex just wasn’t enough of a draw for me.  I resisted the speed-zombie movies because I was a purist.  Zombie movies should feature lumbering, brain-craving zombies.  They should never be British (because how could you tell a zombie from a living Brit?)  Extra credit if it’s in black and white.  But then I saw 28 Days Later.  It breaks ALL my preconceived notions and contrived rules and is now, by far one of my favorites in the genre.  It covers the genre standards: loneliness, fear, paranoia and adds in a dash of sheer fucking terror as these things come sprinting after you faster than you could ever run.  Tame these fuckers and put them on the Olympic track team.  You may have to dangle a bit of flesh over the finish line…

The original Haitian field working zombie
Dig up a grave, blow dust on the corpse and you have an undead field hand.  Man, say what you want about the tribal witch-doctors but I think they were on the cutting edge of renewable energy sources.  Recycle the dead, free slave labor.  And they come with the added bonus of creeping people out which meant you could grow “whatever you wanted” out in the middle of those sugarcane fields.  Nobody was coming around to inspect your crops as long as you had your zombies out.  Well, nobody but Abbot and Costello…

Dawn of the Dead
This was almost a comedy.  The zombies go shopping.  But who hasn’t had that dream of being locked inside a mall and being able to run through all the stores and hang out?  Of course, our heroes have to gather supplies to survive a zombie apocalypse but they have their fun along the way.  The movie tries its best to make a point about consumerism; the zombies return to the mall because that’s all they knew in life…  But it’s a pretty funny movie.  The remake was decent.  Very much the same movie, just different enough from the original that I actually think I like it.  I have to go with think I like it because I’ve only seen it once.  It was better than I expected but every time I feel like watching it, I put in the original instead.  The new version’s mall was too nice.  The original version took place in a mall that looked like it was about ten years out of style.  Kind of what the Regency Square Mall looks like now.

Fido
This movie tries to make another statement.  I’m not sure if it’s about the status quo or if it’s about prejudice or what.  But 1950′s  “Leave it to Beaver” era America with Zombies is fun to watch.  It didn’t catch on with the masses and as much as I really like Billy Connolly, he’s hardly recognizable beneath the makeup and zombie-grunts.  Let’s hope “Pride, Prejudice and Zombies” turns out to be a bigger film.  I like inserting zombies into period-pieces.

Michael Jackson
Thriller.  Was he a werewolf or a zombie?  I don’t care.  Thriller was spectacular.  I’m not a fan of the singer but I have to give credit where it’s due.  That video was nothing less than a short film.  The dancing zombie crowd behind him as he did all his trademark moves…  I remember waiting up all night to watch it at my cousin’s house.  The only thing that disappointed me is the fact that I didn’t see ONE single Michael Jackson zombie costume the Halloween after he died.  Would have been perfect!  These kids today have no sense of humor.

Bill Murray
Zombieland itself didn’t do much for me.  Woody Harrelson was entertaining for about half the time he was on screen and the other half just dragged.  But Zombie Bill Murray was awesome.  I could have watched him play zombie for hours but the amount of time he was in the movie was perfect.  And the way he goes out…  Awesome.

Day of the Dead
Yeah, I know, too much Romero?  Well relax, Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead don’t make the cut.  But Day was good because they changed the zombie game.  We could win the war against the undead but we turn on ourselves and lose it all again.  Instead of wide-open fields or a large open mall courtyard, this takes place in the cramped confines of a secret bunker.  We’re keeping the zombies chained up and we’re experimenting on them.  As we learn, so do they.  Bub the Zombie is now capable of holding tools and may even be gaining rudimentary speech.  Zombie 2.0  Something to be afraid of because we created them and now we’ve trained them…

Jesus Christ
Yeah, I know this is a softball pitch and I even opened with him at the top but come on!  How can you not love zombie-Jesus?  He’s the pivot point behind one of the most powerful movements in history!  Think about this;  If I told you the shit he told people, would you believe me?  Of course not.  But because it comes from “long ago and far away” and an age when local fairy-tales were passed down as tradition, people believed it.  Because you were brought up to believe it and your parents believe it, you have unquestioning faith that a man rose from the fucking grave and walked the earth.  And none of this freaks you out, there’s nothing gross about this because you sang pretty songs about love all your childhood and you’ve seen all the artwork depicting this middle-eastern goat-herding zombie as a smiling white man.  This has GOT to be the craziest bullshit ever peddled to the masses.
The other day I went downstairs to the kitchen.  I had been saving the last piece of pepperoni pizza for a late night snack.  I walk over to the refrigerator and BEHOLD, the refrigerator door was open, my pizza was not there!  Of course I immediately assumed my pepperoni pizza had come to life and slipped out to some night-club rave party.  No other possible explanation right?
Pssst… A little hint for when you rewrite history again…  The story gains a little more credibility if the tomb remains closed.  An open tomb gives crazy people like me that like to use things like probability and logic so many other possible explanations.  Maybe he was taken away by friends who wanted to fulfill the prophecy, maybe his body was torn asunder by wolves, maybe aliens kidnapped him and are still holding him for ransom on a secret base behind the moon, maybe Scooby and Shaggy opened the secret trap door, maybe lots of other things…  But a closed door?  Maybe if the door was closed I have to believe he’s either a messiah or a Vegas magician.  Jesus Copperfield?  Penn & Jesus?

So Zombie-Jesus wins as the greatest zombie of all time.  Some people are willing to live for him, some people are willing to die for him, many people are eager to kill for him…  As king zombie, he has a worldwide congregation of living zombies (a large percentage of which continue to eat his zombie flesh) that await his command.  Most of his roving gang believes the next move will be a planet-wide apocalypse.  “Ladies and gentlemen, notice there is nothing up my sleeve as my lovely assistant passes around the offering plate.”  We’re done here, bring on the Zombie Apocalypse!