I’ve mentioned it on more than one occasion that I’m starting to suffer slightly from a little bit of zombie overkill (is that even a pun that I need to acknowledge and apologise for?). I mean I still find zombies entertaining for the most part, Zombieland is pretty much the greatest zombie film ever but the idea of re-writing Jane Austin books to feature zombies seems like a little too much of a stretch for me.
And so the other night when the remake of Dawn of the Dead was on TV I sat down to watch a couple of minutes as I had never actually seen the start even though I’ve seen the end a bunch of times.
Something struck me again, I say again because I’ve noted it in the past and am only now getting around to writing about it.
Whatever happened to the slow zombie?
I mean these dudes have died, reanimated and are now running faster than your average Olympian? They’re climbing over stuff and chasing people down, smashing windows and hunting people.
I don’t like this at all.
I mean with the original zombies in the 1968 Night of the Living Dead it was the idea of the oppressive mass of zombies that was terrifying. Had those zombies been the ones from Resident Evil or 28 Days Later or even the new(ish) Dawn of the Dead then Barbara and Ben would have died a lot earlier.
The other thing that I think I dislike about the current breed of fast zombies is that I would have no chance of surviving in that world. You get caught in a room with one of those bastards and you want to have some mad combat skills and I don’t work well under pressure, I freak out in video games!!!
Seriously, the old Super Nintendo Jurassic Park game which had you walking through Wolfenstein like corridors hoping that a pixelated Velociraptor wasn’t right around the corner had me sweating. Imagine what the graphics of today’s gaming consoles does to me (I bought Bioshock the other day in the hopes of overcoming this).
So when faced with a mutant zombie that can out run me and doesn’t care unless I put a pool cue through his head I’m not going to do so well in an enclosed space. I don’t even think it’s a fair fight.
Dracula can’t come out in the daylight, Gillman sticks to the Black Lagoon, the Mummy… oh god don’t get me started on the Mummy remakes, he shouldn’t be running around either but traditionally he just ambles along and Frankenstein’s monster hates fire and old mills.
What do these new zombies hate? What’s their disadvantage? It’s like being in a room with Cugo (that’s a giant rabid dog for those young ones) there’s nothing you can do apart from take its head off and that’s not so easy with the olympic brain eaters!
I call on Hollywood to do the right thing and return my slow moving clumping zombies so at least at night when I’m contemplating zombie apocalypse I feel like I got a chance!
PS: If they are faithful to the novel World War Z I should get my slow moving zombies back, same with The Walking Dead TV series!
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