The Best Zombie Movies You’ve Never Seen (And Probably Should)
For those who have seen Romero’s films, worn out their old tapes of Evil Dead, have enjoyed the splatter and superficial enjoyment of Fulci’s films and find they have gotten tired of the same predictable formulas and poor filmmaking skills of most of their imitators—there are a handful of films that, while not classics on the level of Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later, may be clever enough to convince you that there is life left in the genre yet
Ever since I was fourteen years old I have been a zombie nut. It helped that the first three films I saw were Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Evil Dead II for a teenage boy eager to delve into the horror genre such a viewing trilogy is impossible to resist. This whole exploration was a response to the recent success of the new Resident Evil game, which I adored and which I had learned was based off films such as the above (well, more the first two I suppose). Soon I had devoured (no pun intended) the major cornerstones of the genre - Lucio Fulcis many films and the non-related sequels to them, Romero and Raimis Dead trilogies, Peter Jacksons Braindead/Dead Alive, Return of the Living Dead and its sequels, and Re-Animator. Eventually I began to discover some horrible and some amusing lower-prestige titles such as Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town, The Dead Next Door and Redneck Zombies. And then the zombie renaissance began. It started with Resident Evil and 28 Days Later, but before long we were being barraged by titles like House of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead the remake, Shaun of the Dead, Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Land of the Dead not straight to video titles, but major, mainstream releases from studios. And unfortunately most of them were lousy. 28 Days Later remains as an utterly brilliant successor to Romeros films (whose own fourth entry in his series was surprisingly mundane), and Shaun of the Dead was hilariously clever, but most of them and the semi-zombie films that also followed, such as Doom and Silent Hill, were equally bad perhaps it has to do with the fact that they were almost all sequels, remakes or game-adaptations, which would explain why only the original 28 Days Later stands out as a brilliant film. What made films like Dawn of the Dead not just good horror films but good films wasnt that they had abundant gore and action but because they were simply well-crafted character pieces Dawn of the Dead, for all its action and spectacle, is most enjoyable in scenes where the film concentrates merely on the characters and their relations, and I find an unsurprisingly similar pattern in 28 Days Later; not surprisingly they both also have a clever social underpinning in the story. But for those who have seen Romeros films, worn out their old tapes of Evil Dead, have enjoyed the splatter and superficial enjoyment of Fulcis films and find they have gotten tired of the same predictable formulas and poor film-making skills of most of their imitatorsthere are a handful of films that, while not classics on the level of Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later, may be clever enough to convince you that there is life left in the genre yet. So, here are the four best Zombie Movies Youve Never Seen (And Probably Should)...