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version seven. http://demongin.org |
The Wanking Dead
A short one on George Romero's continued, unwelcome contributions to zombie media.
Sunday, Oct. 23, 2011 | Film, Television
| Who died and made you fucking king of the zombies? |
| Shaun of the Dead (2004) |
So, in spite of the word on the street and my own better judgment, I decided to spend a couple of hours with AMC's original series "The Walking Dead" yesterday: I accidentally stumbled upon the first season's 82% Metacritic Score and had to see for myself.
Unsurprisingly, the show ended up being an amateurish recontextualization of Sociology 101 driven by an eye-roll-inducing male-female relationship plot and interspersed with stylized, if somewhat anatomically preposterous, Zombie effects--Crash with Magic Bullet head shots, basically--and I fully expected a cursory Google search to turn up at least a handful of piquant puns about how all this show does is dig-up and reanimate the worst-decayed parts of the lamest of mid-20th century zombie stories and how a .45 calibur slug between the eyes is more than it deserves.
My original intention was to select a handful of those, print some of the choicest excerpts here and toss off a few more pot shots at George Romero and the myth of that he somehow adds more value to contemporary zombie content than Tom Savini (whose legendary war photography experience inspired him to give us the zombie aesthetic as we have it today).
My original intention was to maybe finish up with something about how, given the importance of "dress up" to contemporary zombie culture, I do not think that it goes too far to argue that contemporary zombie "culture" owes almost nothing to George Romero and nearly everything to Savini and his virtuoso 1990 remake of Romero's artless 1968 original.
So you can imagine my chagrin when I found that no one else publishing on the English-speaking parts of the Internet appears to have sat with this piece-of-trash show and then felt inspired to get on their computer and complain to the aether about it.
What the hell, people?
If you want to live in a world where a dried-up never-was like Romero gets the ridicule he deserves whenever his naked-as-a-jaybird ass starts yammering on about his exquisite new garments (rather than the completely unjustifiable fan-boy adulation of some half-wit Gawker lickspittle), you've got to start speaking up.
