Have you every wondered about Zombie films? I have seen a few (not as many as some, I must admit) and it occurred to me that there is something fundamentally wrong here.
A long time ago, George A. Romero made a little film called “Night
of the living dead”. It set the pace
for a series of descendants, some direct, some off to the side, and some
just trying hard to be thought of in the same genre. Zombie films went a way for a while, but it would appear they are back.
Recently we had "28 days
later" (which is not really a zombie
film, but it looks like one), the remake (?) of “Dawn
of the dead”, “Shaun of
the dead” and now George A. Romero is back with “Land of the dead”,
the sequel
to tail of his original series (“Night of the living dead, “Dawn of the
dead”, “Day of the dead”). So, it would appear, Zombies are back.
Now, I quite like Zombie films in general. The idea of nasty not-living people running around (or shambling around, as the case may be) killing off the diminishing survivors is always a bit of fun, but I think it’s time we faced the facts: Zombie films are stupid.
Harsh words, you might think. Well, not quite as harsh as Decay when
spammers appear, but I digress. Why do I think they are stupid? I’ll tell you.
Firstly, the easy one. If you look at the zombies in most of these films, they are
generally 20 something dead people with hideous scars and deformations. This would indicate that most people who die do so in horrible accidents and do it before they reach 30. This would appear to not really be true. Most people die after the age of 50, with a hell of a lot going on past 70. Also, the biggest killer is heart disease, which, unless things changed recently, doesn’t usually leave you with enormous scars and missing bits. So if the dead did arise, most of them would be overweight 50-70 year olds with a whole lot of little old ladies and gents. Also, given how quickly we fall to bits, most of them would be little more than skeletons.
How does a dead person dig its way out of the ground? Firstly they have to break their way out of the coffin, which is no mean feat given you can’t exactly push your way out of something buried under a huge lump of dirt, then you have to dig, with little to no space, your way out. If they can do this, I’m buggered if
I believe doors or walls will stop them!
And the last of my petty hates: Zombies invariable eat the living. This allows the film to have wondrous scenes of people being disembowelled and Zombies chomping on people. Lots of fun for the whole family. Now, the zombies never eat other zombies. And when you die, you turn intoa zombie, so it is fair to say zombies only eat the living.
Which brings us to the problem here: you don’t stay living very long when someone starts to eat you!!! So out intrepid band of zombies would get one or two good mouthfuls before they have to stop because their victim is dead. They definitely would not sit around eating bits of people after they have killed them.
On the same topic, why do zombies eat people? You can blow holes in them and they keep “living” so where do the bits of people they eat go? It all seems a tad silly, doesn’t it?
That’s it for today. I hope we all feel better now. I know I do.
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