Zombie Apocalypse * Zombie Slave Leia * Fido * Apple Invasion * Naked Ape * 30 Days of Night * Zombie American * Zombie Emergency Defense Program

It’s Blog Like It’s the End of the World Day! Everybody Panic!

You can keep up with my ongoing entry here.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Zombies are the new Black. Marvel Zombies are great, Zombie Superman is (in good ole ObZomb’s opinion) even cooler, but now what we’ve got here is a straight up winner! Zombie Slave Leia. I’m not even worthy enough to bask in the gory glory of her shadow. What’s next, zombie Scooby Doo? I said it first, you’re my witness… so if it happens, I want cash!

Just a reminder for all y’all undead lovin’ individuals. The new ZombComâ„¢ flick FIDO is coming out on Friday. You’ll remember from the last round-up that FIDO is about a world filled with domesticated zombies. Billy Connolly plays Fido with Carrie-Anne Moss as his owner.

What some have estimated to be a crowd of nearly 150 *zombies* took to the streets and terrorized the citizenry of San Francisco, Ca. After the mob converged in a central square, the decided (how they had enough brain power left for decision-making is beyond me) to storm local businesses, including the flagship Apple store. See, my brethren have taste in tech as well as brains!

Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s masterwork of vampire fiction 30 Days of Night is nearly here people. Sony Pictures just posted a great little teaser trailer, and I command you to view it as soon as humanly (or otherwisely) possible. The movie opens this October 19.

What happens when Swedish electronica meets zombies? Well, when melody makers Naked Ape got together with indie film unit Zombie Duck, things got bloody hot and wet!

Check it out here: Fashion Freak (NSFW)

Let’s catch up on the latest in undead jollies, shall we? Continuing where we left off, here are the next two segments of Zombie American.

Zombie American, Chapter 2
Zombie American, Chapter 3

And for good measure, here’s a bit of the Brit I that found while trolling around on MySpace:

Zombie Roommate

A Comic Shop in Winter Park, Florida, had boldly declared their base of operations (read: a comic shop) a zombie-free zone. This past April 24th they officially announced Z.E.D. — the Zombie Emergency Defense Program. With rally cries of “When the Zombie Apocalypse Comes, We Will Be Prepared!” and “Better Z.E.D. then dead!.” They’ve taken it upon themselves to ready a makeshift militia and began practicing defense scenarios in advance of the ‘impending infestation’ (which according to the blogsphere is happening right now!)

In fact, on June 24th, they will be taking up arms and spending the day shooting down some of the unfortunate undead (hey, suddenly I don’t know if I’m okay with all this ZED business!).

Also coinciding with Z.E.D., they’re sponsoring a zombie themed short-film contest/festival. Good ole ObZomb will keep you updated as the finalists and winners are chosen.

–Obvious Zombie

My Monstrous Militia,

Dead, nearly dead, and undead alike rejoice, ’cause it’s that time of the month again. Time take a look the latest group o’ gangrenous guts being gouged from the gullet and strewn about for all to see.

Later is Now, Baybah!
In case you had forgotten, 28 Weeks Later opens today and ObZomb (that’s me) says ‘Yes, yehaw, and yahoo!’ I cannot wait to feast my rotting ocular nerves upon what’s sure to be an awesomely good rip ’em up. I’m hoping we’ll get to see glimmers of Robert Carlyle’s genius turn (IMHO) as Colqhoun in Ravenous show through a bit in 28 Weeks… man, that movie creeped me out!

Move Over Bicentennial Man
It’s the 1950s and the great Zombie war has been waged — and won. Apparently some asteroid passed the earth, raised the dead, and broke loose some hell. With the zombies effectively beaten, a meglo-corporation figures out how to tame them, and begins marketing them as domestic servants. This is the premise of Fido, starring Billy Connelly as the eponymous zombie, and Carrie-Ann Moss as the seemingly generic ’50s housewife. Lions Gate Pictures, after watching the trailer, I could kiss you! Like ObZomb (me again) said in the previous Zombie Round-Up, Zombie comedy, or ZombCom (a term I am coining and copyrighting RIGHT the F NOW!) is a genre that transcends the cultural divide, and this one looks hella funny!

Un-Dead at 30,000 Feet
Ok, now if you thought snakes on planes were bad enough, then check this shit out. New Line Cinema is set to distribute a movie that revolves around an in-flight zombie attack. The film from director Scott Thomas was internationally released with the title Plane Dead, but New Line has taken it upon themselves to re-title it Flight of the Living Dead. The way I see it you’re either someone who wants to see a movie about zombies on a plane or you don’t, so at this point I think the title is pretty irrelevant. I think the tagline speaks for itself: Un-Dead at 30,000 Feet.

Non-Zombie, but Relevant
The Hollywood Reporter is, um, reporting that ZombCom masters, brothers Peter and Michael Spierig, are working on a futuristic vampire flick with Weta Workshop handling the monster and effects duty, and Ethan Hawk in the star chair. As long as the brothers can keep each other from losing their unique sense of style, unlike some other brother/director team *cough* Matrix *hacks*, this should be an interesting movie. The feature is tentatively titled Daybreakers.

And lastly, some funny… or DIE!

La presenta: Zombie-American

Thanks to Dr. Geek for bringing this gem to good ol’ ObZomb’s attention!

This week in zombie comic news.

Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, Vol. 6: This Sorrowful Life hits the shelves. The TPB collects issues #31-36 of the Kirkman zombie saga, and totals out to 136 pages of gray, gory, goodness.

Black Panther #27-29 — Marvel Zombies will be making some waves in the Wakandian king’s pool. Check out the current Black Panther arc (#27-29) to see the newly juxtaposed Fantastic Four tangle with some Galactus fueled super-zombies.

Sincerely sick,
Obvious

Hordes,

While I never thought I’d have enough zombie-related news to do one of those ‘This Week In Zombie’ until the great zombie uprising began in earnest, I never let the dream die. Looks like my perseverance payed off, as I have been able to gather a few good zombifyed nuggets to share with y’all.

Let’s start with the obvious (ahem):

28 Weeks Later — Oh yes!
I look forward to making cinematic eye-love to the latest installment in Danny Boyle’s not-quite-zombies-but-I’ll-take-what-I-can-get scarefest. Yes I do! Even though they’re really not Zombies per se, but rather like Beserkers, good ole Obvious welcomes all flesh-eating, virus-spreading, genocidal maniacs into the fold. With just a few more weeks to go before 28 Weeks Later hits the theaters, the rumblings of a third installment have already begun — tentatively titled 28 Months Later. The possibility of Months will doubtless live or die on the Box Office performance of Weeks, so I got my rotted fingers crossed. Fast-moving, scary-ass zombies … come to Papa!

Primetime Zombies — it’s about fucking time!
CBS TV is shooting a pilot called Babylon Fields, which is going to be a Zombie horror series. The ghouls over at Icons of Fright snagged some exclusive pictures of a gaggle of undead doing the boiler-plate emerging from a cemetery routine. Don’t let me down CBS, or I’ll be sending some real zombies down to show you how it’s really done.

We’re here. We’re dead. Get used to it.
That’s the tagline for indie flick American Zombie. Apparently, it’s a mockumentary chronicling the rise of the ‘non-living’ community in Los Angeles. It’s fairly obvious that American Zombie is intended as a comedy, and under most circumstances, I’m totally okay with that. When done right, Zombie comedy is genre that transcends the cultural divide — Shaun of the Dead, the Spierig brother’s Undead, and the Return of the Living Dead series are great examples of how funny we undead can be — and I’m hoping that American Zombie will be making its way to an Indie theater near me soon so I can see if it makes the cut.

Brisbane 2007 — Zombies take to the streets
Here are some great pictures from the Zombie Walk in Brisbane. It’s nice to see my people getting together and going out for a stroll.

Putridly yours,
Obvious

“This is a new James Bond, a rough-and-tumble one, unlike any of the previous five incarnations of the suave playboy spy. Craig’s Bond is brutal, violent, gritty, a cold-blooded killer. Craig spends half the movie covered in blood and scars.”

read more

Controversy runs rampant at GoD H.Q.!!

read it!

Dear Lame Saint,

I have Laryngitis.

Imagine that, a zombie who can’t speak. That’s a silly thought, now isn’t it. I mean, how are people going to know I’m a zombie if I can’t say stuff like ‘Braaaiiiinnss’ and shit??

Lucky me, though. I have my trusty fembot (in a wet t-shirt) at the bottom of every entry just waiting around to speak what I write. Now if I only had something interesting to say today, we’d be all set here.

O.k. got it, we could get all updated on week one of the J23Ix2, shall we? Ja!

My eating this week was quite good. No binges, no purges, no brains (well, I am a Vegan zombie). Everything I consumed was colorful, purposeful, guilt-free, and tasty good!

In the mind-food department, I made with the reading. In fact, I read a heck of a lot… of, um… O.K., O.K.!! I read about a hundred comic books. Well, it may not be exactly what I had in mind when I promised myself I’d read more, but at least I’m all caught up on D.C.’s 52 and Marvel’s Civil War. I’m having a hard time deciding which series I’m enjoying more, but I can easily say that I am enjoying reading them both.

Marvel has a distinct advantage, with there being countless tie-in’s to nibble on while piecing together the entire picture. And I’ve particularly enjoying the X-Factor, Wolverine and Luke Cage arc’s, but I’m thinking that the Elongated Man story-line in 52 might be the most engrossing for me.

As the world of fitness turns: Starting on Monday, I alternately ran and biked four miles each day, and rested on Saturday. So far I’m feeling pretty good about it. By Friday I started to feel my runner’s breathing return, so I was able to push it to six miles. I paid for it the next morning, but it was worth knowing that I could still do it. I’ll take it down a notch this week and let myself progress naturally.

Saturday, I got together with my family and we celebrated my oldest sister’s birthday. I brought my X-box and the Karaoke Revolution Party games that are to me and Eve what Crack is to Whitney Houston, and we all had a great time singing and laughing. Eve and I sang our heads off, but since I lost my voice completely, I’m gonna put forth that I may have overdid it. We won the Diamond Duet Trophy though, so I’m gonna call it a fair trade.

My nephew’s X-box was broken, so like any good Uncle would do, I ran out to Best Buy and bought an X-box 360…. for myself, and I let him keep my hella old, creepy, X-box regular. But when I got home the next day and hooked that bad boy up, I found out that none of my old games work on it. And I ask you,

What The Fuck???

None of them???

What the hell kind of backward compatibility do you call that???

On Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance (GBA), every single freaking regular old GameBoy game works on it. Now that is what I call backward compatible. The 360, on the other hand, makes you go through this whole shit-ass routine of telling you that the game is not compatible with the new system, but if you get online with it, you may be able to download an update that will make it work. So I got through the painfully slow process of signing up for an X-box live account, it begins to download all these ‘necessary’ updates, which, even though I’m sporting a 30mbps broadband connection, took fucking forever to finish its business.

And when all is said, done, and updated, nothing worked. And I became very sad. I don’t know what I am gonna do about it, but as Evie so eloquently said yesterday,

“That thing really is a 360, cause it’s gonna be circling right back to the store.”

As it turns out, there is a backward compatibility team at Microsoft that is sloooowwwwly creating a separate emulator for each and every X-box game (what a shitty solution, b.t.w.), starting with their ‘most popular’ and working their way down the line. I don’t know where Karaoke Revolution Party stands on that list, but I’m guessing pretty fucking far down. So, I emailed the Microsoft X-box Backward Compatibility team and asked them if they could give me a time-frame for when my particular games would be updated. If they don’t answer me by the end of the week, back to the store it goes.

And Finally, we finished off the weekend by seeing Lady in the Water and Clerks 2. I’m not going to go in-depth here, but if you want my quick opinion, Lady in the Water was a slow, moody film, that I grew to enjoy, with Paul Giamatti once again proving to me that he is one hell of an actor. But unfortunately, I can never, never, ever recommend this film to anyone, ever! It was just far to inconsistent and idiosyncratic for me to lay my reputation on the line and give it the nod. Sorry, M. Night, but you’ve been on Notice ever since that crapfest with the fake monsters in the fake amish village, buddy! That’s it your gone from my life for cereal. You can go hang out with that other dude whose movies I will never watch again– Oliver Stone!

P.S. Oliver Stone, go fuck yourself!

On the other hand, Clerks 2 was Pure! Freaking! Genius! There is so much to love about this movie. It was funny, intellectual, gross, intriguing, boundary-pushing, and as Joel Siegel will never know, heart-warming. As a sequel, it completely did the right thing. The script stayed true to the realism of the two working-class New Jersey dudes we saw in the original movie. Kevin Smith added a necessary complexity to the main character’s relationship— a complexity that was only hinted at in the first movie. And this ultimately made the film very endearing and believable.

Sorry, Joel Siegal, but you are an unprofessional douche. And Kevin Smith is my new B.F.F.L.!

Shit, I guess I did go a little in-depth there.

Anyway, so far as I can tell, the only thing I failed to fit into my self-imposed J23Ix2 schedule was a bit of guitar practice.

Sorry, Guitar! You know I love you. We’ll get together a bit this week, I promise.

-Draconian Devil

Brethren,

I posted a comment to a story on one of those social bookmarking/link sharing sites, about the upcoming Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino flick, GRINDHOUSE, and in it, I referred to them as R-Rod and Q-Tar, respectively.

Just a quick little thing I didn’t even think much of as I submitted the comment, but upon reading it a few minutes later, I was struck squarely on the retarded bone.

I’ve never heard or read anyone using the ‘J-Lo’ in reference to Quentin before, and R-Rod too similar to A-Rod, which is old hat. So unless someone can supply notarized proof to the contrary, I henceforth claim invention and ownership of the title Q-Tarâ„¢ in reference to Quentin Tarantino (much in the same way that I invented the Governator in reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger), and will be copyrighting it ASAP!

-Obvious

/caution, may only be humorus to brain-damaged undead
//whatever

Food,

Thanks to slashfilm, I was made aware of two things.

One very cool, one not so much.

First the not so much.

The Hollywood rumor mill has churned out yet another stinking wad of green, glowing, throat-gunk. According to an article on the afore mentioned slashfilm website, Denzel Washington had been spoken in the same sentence as ‘rumored to play Master Chief in the upcoming HALO movie.’ Let me cap this off with a disclaimer- Zombie Love Denzel, but having hard time envisioning him as Zombie’s beloved M.C.

Please, let this remain a rumor.

And second, if you look at the bottom of each of my entries, you’ll notice the addition of a cool iPodish icon that says Listen to this podcast… well, go ahead, listen. I followed a link on Slashfilm to their audio broadcast of the Denzel rumor entry and wound-up at Talkr.com. They have a free service that translates text entries to speech for podcasting and/or the visually impaired.

I signed up and installed a WP plug-in, and seconds later all of my entries were made available as mp3 files.

Quite cool, ja?

So begins an era of my thoughts being read aloud by a computerized woman.

-Obvious, and my feminine, binary-type accompaniment