Game Review(s): Dead Island (Link)

I think I've written three different reviews for this game, and none of them ended up here. What a shame. But it was mostly on account of the circumstances. The owner of Obnoxi.us gave me the opportunity to rant on his website, and my Amazon review of the game is the "most helpful" over on that end (for now; people tend to slam critical reviews back into the depths). So... blaaaah. Don't think this'll happen too often, but if you'd like to read what I thought of the game, here are the two places to do so!

"Obnoxi.us" Review

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Amazon Review

Aimless ranting and zombies

Hi, it's Buch again. I know I haven't been writing much on the blog here, so thanks for reading this. Honestly I just don't seem to have much to say these days. My world views are pretty much limited to, 'This videogame is cool', 'This movie sucks', 'I need to get a membership at the swmming pool and then maybe I'll swim more' and 'I hate everyone and everything on television, particularly all newsreaders and Phillip Schofield.'

"Is there any ITV show you aren't on, Phillip?"

And while each of these arguments seem valid, fresh and fascinating to me, I realise quickly how dull they must be to other people when I yell at the TV and just get stern, English looks of disapproval in response. But these are my major concerns in life, aside from angst about tuition fees and my ex girlfriend, and these of course form the wealth of fascinating life experiences that make up the entirity of the fiction and poetry I write.

So all I have for the blog is stupid, stupid smug humour and nerd rage. I guess you get both today, because this was supposed to be about...

ZOMBIES.

Yes, zombies. I remember about five years ago reading a blog by the author of A Modest Destiny, when he was dilly-dallying with a comic about a post-zombie future: he pointed out that nowadays when you announce you're working on a creative project about zombies, every single one of your friends says 'yeah, me too'. And in those five years, it just seems to have become ridiculous.

I should point out that I love zombies. George Romero's cheap horror-turned-classic Night of the Living Dead is one of my favourite movies (Dawn of the Dead actually seemed quite dull to me) and I recently finished reading Max Brooks' novel World War Z, which has to be the greatest entry to the genre since Romero invented it.

But I also just saw Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides (Stranger tides? The water and weather are just about the only things that never behave unexpectedly or pose a threat in the entire movie! Where are these stranger tides, anyway - isn't this still the Carribean? Cuz they were sailing over a maelstrom in the Orient last time and no-one batted an eyelid.) And I remember seeing the trailer and laughing as Disney desperately read out some of the cool junk they had been loading into the movie to grab interest: "Mermaids! Blackbeard! Zombies!" It worked on me, but I remember my brother and I crying out 'Robots! Ninjas! Phillip Schofield! Pira... oh, wait.'

Sadly when I got to the movie, they were actually zombies in the traditional, Voodoo-or-something sense of the word. It was just, you know, mind control. But I was also kinda relieved, because... do I really need to see flesh-eating undead masses again? I like that now, in the post-post-zombie-craze-craze, people are trying to be a little more unique with their zombies - make them fast, make them sing, make them intelligent, make them Nazis, make it a comedy, give them rat teeth, anything - but... damn. Enough with the zombies. Also superhero origin stories. Enough already.

Oh do fuck off.

So every movie is zombies, every non-ninja videogame is zombies (Dead Rising, the Resident Evil series, Left 4 Dead, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, Plants Vs Zombies, Zombie Cow Milking, I Made A Game With Zombies In It - those last two are actually real) and now it's infecting (ho ho!) novels. Like I said, I adored Max Brooks' zombie history book, but... I like novels. I like to pretend they're big and clever. Please be careful with them, young zombie authors.

Last year I read about half of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I remember seeing the cover and laughing out loud - it seemed like a wonderful idea: re-write every young woman's favourite book, deliberately vandalising it by adding every young man's favourite guilty pleasure and watch as Zack lays waste to the English classic. Sadly the novel really, really, really ran out of steam with that one joke, just endlessly repeated and awkwardly shoe-horned into a romance. I ended up putting it down and reading the original instead. Anyway - my point is:

The... WAR... of the Worlds... plus blood. Did you even read the title, Eric?

Yep. I'd like to start my tirade by pointing out that The War of the Worlds contains quite a lot of freaking blood. You remember that bit where it turns out the Martians feed / power their machines by extracting blood from fallen humans? Maybe the author here hadn't quite gotten to that bit when he signed for his royalty fees. Point is: how can you add a silly, violent, geeky element to a (brilliant) story about space aliens lazering everyone to death? For crying out loud...

I do wonder if I'm wrong to complain about the great tide (or horde, HO HO!) of zombie fiction we have seen over the last decade or so. After all - [REC.], 28 Days Later and numerous other recent works were genuine classics, right up there with Romero's early films. Hell, I have now written three short stories about zombies myself. I really like them.

And aren't all great stories still being endlessly repeated? Romero zombies are only 34 years old, so maybe that's why this bothers me. I'm not writing a rambling essay about how every vampire story is just Dracula, or how every mad scientist and monster are clearly Frankenstein and his demon. And I'd argue that the zombie tale is every bit as good as those two gothic classics.

It's a good story:

See, you have this attractive girl, Barbara, who suddenly realises the world is being over-run by the dead, come back to life and desperate to devour human flesh (Why not each other's? Why do they need to eat at all since they never show signs of tiredness or needing any external energy source? We may never know.)
Barbara and a bunch of people get stuck in a shack, and then somehow the zombies find them. And the zombies are now millions-strong, even though one would assume that they would eat their victims' flesh, rather than leave them to... anyway.
Someone betrays the group, gets infected or makes a mistake, and Barbara (or a protector) is the only survivor. At the last moment she escapes miraculously, only to realise too late that she is still not safe! Rather she has accidentally thrown herself into the horrible, poisonous, waiting arms of an even greater threat to her safety and dwindling sanity.

Activate the Cube!

And if your version of the zombie story is good, you'll put in a subtle allegory or subtext about a modern political issue. If you're Max Brooks, then you'll write several of these and mix them together with political speculative fiction. And I will love you.

I don't know what my point was here. I like a great many of these recent zombie films, games, that TV show I haven't seen yet, and books, but... I don't know. I guess they're still new: the early 21st century is for zombies what the Universal and Hammer Horror series were to vampires and mad scientists. Shaun of the Dead would be Abbot and Costello in that analogy. I kinda look forward to the day when zombies are old hat.

Maybe one day some twisted, translated, re-wrtten version of Night of the Living Dead will even be the equivalent of a Grimms' fairy tale. I hope so.

They're eating her! Then they're gonna eat me!

I used to work in a video-shop in Bolton, whose company also owned a very cheap movie studio, and so out catalogue was flooded with a crazy amount of terrible, super-low-budget horror films. So during that time I developed a hobby of watching awful, recent monster movies and laughing at them - and I got to see films like Ice Queen (they used a toy car on a model background in the establishing shots) Haunted Boat (which came out just after 'Ghost Ship' and featured a boat... that turned out not to be haunted at all) and of course - What Ever Happenned to Alice (which I still say is the 'worst movie I've ever seen').

Oh! And they also had one my absolute favourite films, the one that became a big running-joke for us employees - Trees 2: The Root of All Evil, which was about killer Christmas trees that over-run a hillside town. Trees 2 has the best damn ending-credits song I've ever heard in my life. If you ever see that movie in a shop - buy it, at any price.

But I've gotten away from my point here, which is Song of the Dead. I saw a second-hand copy of this at Blockbuster (who normally don't bother with this kind of film, except for The Asylum's boring efforts) with a box reading 'Day of the Zombie'.


It looks boring and generic - but what's that at the bottom of the box? 'The ultimate horror opera'? Yes! It's a zombie musical! And one so bad that the title had to be guiltily changed, just so that it would stand a chance of being sold! That seems pretty stupid to me - who would rather watch a nondescript zombie flick than THE ULTIMATE (or rather, first... I think) zombie musical?! Well, I love musicals, bad films and zombies so I grabbed it.

Here's the trailer - which actually gives a very fair and honest account of the movie's content.

And it was such a pleasure to see another one of these movies - that know they're bad and kind of mock themselves but also are really lovable for trying - and I have nothing better to do, so now I'm going to review it.

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The movie is very, very low-budget, and very, very poorly-acted (by everyone except Steve Andsager, who is actually very funny). The singing is also truly awful, except by the guy you see at the beginning of the trailer there, but sadly he only appears twice.

The plot is deliberately very similar to George Romero's classic 'Night of the Living Dead' which these film-makers (like me) clearly adore. It begins with a man and a woman in graveyard, moves to a beseiged cabin in the middle of nowhere and ends on a pile of burning bodies. The Romero references are many, and usually painfully obvious.

Speaking of heavy-handedness, I think the biggest flaw here is the large amount of time and effort given over to political satire. Because of the zombie-musical concept, the movie tries to be lighthearted and throw jokes in there. Sometimes they're bad, sometimes they don't even make sense, sometimes they're actually good (the 'hobbies' song made me laugh out loud). But the zombies are referred to as 'zombie terrorists' and the chemical that caused the problem is the 'Jihad Ressurection Virus'.... yeah.
And we're not talking about a few throwaway lines here: this is the major theme of the plot. Believe me, after an hour or so it gets old. It's a nice enough idea to try to parody recent US foreign policy in your movie, make your heroes occasionally look like monsters, follow in Romero's satirical (but much much much subtler) footsteps... but this scriptwriter and this premise are just not capable of effectively satirising that. "We need to bomb any country that had anything to do with terrorism!" What, because your shack is beseiged by zombies...?

The songs themselves are actually catchy as hell! Unfortunately the singers are absolutely horrible, and the bland rock band who play them all are awfully samey. No big book numbers, sadly. All light rock.

It's a bad movie - there's no denying that. There is a tombstone at the beginning that looks like it's made of card and written in marker pen. One of the zombies is topless, and curiously she's always at the very front of the horde, next to the camera...

--

But at the same time this movie really is something special... or at the very least unique.

Every now and again the movie really impressed me with a subtle Romero reference (one character angrily calls another 'flyboy' under his breath) or a clever little spin on a zombie cliche (arms reaching through a wooden wall, waving slowly back and forth during a sad song).

And this is the thing, here. This is why I'd recommend seeing this film. Despite the fact that it's a kind-of-comedy musical, despite the huge limitations it faces, this film really tries hard to add a few things to the zombie lore.
There is a scene near the end when one of the characters who's been bitten gathers the others round him and starts to explain the zombies' motivation. Another character asks a rhetorical question, why do these reanimated corpses want to eat the flesh of the living? Why are they cannibals? And suddenly you think.... wait, that's actually a very good point! Why the hell do they? And the guy says this:

"By feeding on the living, the zombie's mind thinks that... it will live again! Their drive is to live: it's what they remember. But all they have is this unnatural state of death, mixed with awareness. Their minds tell them... that if they feed on the living, then they will live again, and the pain of being dead... will stop. / I can feel it inside me."

And that's a brilliant bit of writing, in this armchair reviewer's opinion. You have to watch two acts of cardboard tombstones to see it - but it's worth it.

Two stars out of five. But that's more than I'd give to most of the zombie films from the last ten years - including Romero's.