The Zombies Win

I'm at home. Nina's studying for midterms.

I Netflix'd Zombie (aka "Zombi 2"), because it seemed like it's at the head of this pantheon of European horror movies I haven't seen. You know that YouTube video of the zombie fighting the shark? This is the movie it's from! In terms of the hipster vote, that scene is actually even cooler than the clip lets on, since it starts with a topless scuba diving woman fleeing from the shark into the arms of the zombie, who goes for the shark after his attempts to fuck / eat the woman are thwarted by her fins and a handful of coral.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn't quite... I don't know. It's always hard to peg what's wrong with films like this. Zombie movie fans strike me as a rather predictable bunch -- from what I can tell by the IMDb comments, we require that the mechanics of the movie world be laid out just so, and the movie is a success to the extent that it presents a series of novel scenarios in which the zombies triumph over the humans and ultimately win. For my money there's gotta be a better way to make a movie, especially with what seems like such a compelling premise: zombies. This one was kind of head-and-shoulders above the rest in some ways -- it makes pretty thorough use of a tropical setting for the predetermined zombie apocalypse and it's about as lovingly shot, lighting- and angles-wise, as a zombie movie could be. But the acting's terrible, the cultural details of the shooting location and the voodoo aesthetic that necessitates it are kind of... overlooked -- and it just ain't scary.

I often wonder what it would take to make a zombie movie that was scary, and I think it's gonna come down to directors actually thinking about what's scary about zombies: it's not their potential to chomp and bite and eat your brains; it's the prospect of an entirely zombified world, a silent world absent of the texture of human intelligence.

There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that culminates in a convergence of a whole bunch of starships Enterprise from parallel universes. Captain Picard (or someone) devises a way to send them all back to their respective M-branes, but some of them aren't eager to go -- an alternate-universe Riker helming a smoldering NCC-1701 protests "We won't go back! You don't know what it's like in our universe - the Federation's gone, the Borg are everywhere!" That line's consistently given me chills.

No zombie movie I've ever seen -- and I've seen a few -- has ever really explored the implications of that line satisfactorily. My friend Pete directed me in his senior thesis film, "The Zombies Win," at Wesleyan, in which the main character courts a lone, aloof human female lost in a world of the undead. Pete said it was based on a summer he spent in Paris; I feel like he was making a glib joke about the French, but I've never been to France so I can't really say that makes any sense to me. We had to put in these one-size-fits-all white contacts; my friends Paul and Dave had to hold me down and stuff them in my eyes.

I've lost track of what I saying.

Speaking of zombies, The Pogues are playing Roseland on St. Patrick's day, and this guy's got tickets! Tom anticipates another "stomach complaint," but I'm optimistic. Hell, even my dad's on board -- are you?