Loading ...
Here we see what happens when the artist, already smack in the midst of her final exams, catches the horrible head cold I suffered from last week. It’s a nasty bug that severely impairs your ability to do much more than lie around and groan, so I’m surprised she even got the little “sick day” comic done that she did. For those not in the know, Clamp is the Manga group responsible for bringing such things as Chobits and Magic Knight Rayearth into the world. I apologize profusely to our readership for my negligence in allowing her fevered brain to bring you “Manga Suzie”.
I suppose we can count our blessings it wasn’t Chibi Suzie. I’m locking her away from the art supplies until the fever passes… but we should be back on track next week, and one step closer to resolving the enigma that is Uncle Chuck.
Anyhow, this week I finally got around to a first-time viewing of the zombie genre oldster, Lucio Fulci’s “Zombie“. Or “Zombi 2”, depending what country you’re in, or what mood you’re in; because honestly, I couldn’t find any indication on IMDB that Fulci ever made a “Zombi 1”. This mystery persisted until I discovered that George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead was released the previous year (1978) with the Italian title of Zombi, so Fulci’s movie was renamed “Zombi 2” in a naked attempt to cash in on DotD’s success.
An alternate title could just as well have been, “That movie where a zombie fights a shark“, since that’s what everyone remembers most. Yes, that’s a real tiger shark, and the zombie is the shark’s trainer. Personally, I’ve never heard of a shark trainer, and believe that whatever they were paying that man, it wasn’t enough. Zombie was not a high budget flick, as evidenced by end credit scenes of a zombie apocalypse in New York where you can clearly see bridge traffic below proceeding in an orderly everyday fashion. Also, it’s one of those zombie movies (and there’s a lot of them) where the human cast has to be made artificially stupid in order for the living dead to get their rotting hands on them. Like a research scientist who has been dealing with the rising dead for weeks freezing in place and screaming uselessly as they get up and close in slowly… ever… so… slowly… on her. And no, she’s not surrounded. Two steps to the left and she’s out the door.
The thing is, slow zombies can be scary. Night of the Living Dead is proof of that, and while Barbara spends most of the film in traumatized uselessness, it never made me bust out laughing the way some of the manufactured demises in Zombie/Zombi 2 did. This is the sort of thing I was getting at in the podcast about there not being many “classics” of the zombie genre. Some people do consider Zombie/Zombi 2 a classic, but I’ll just call it an “oldie” and leave it at that. Maybe a comedy classic.
To be fair, I will say that immediately after watching Z/Z2 I checked out Troma productions’ Redneck Zombies, and regretted having done so without alcohol in my system. Yes, I know Troma is intentionally low-budget, trashy and campy, but wow did it make Z/Z2 look fantastic in comparison.
So that’ll be that for this week. I need to go feed Dawn and check that her chains are secured until the evil Clamp virus is purged from her system. Then she will be made to draw again. See y’all in seven!