BURT MALONE LETTERS: Kids' Shows with Zombies in Them.

Burt just sent me an email out of the blue, complaining about Kids' Shows with zombies in them.  This might have to do with  the fact that I recently heard Burt Malone is gonna be a father soon.  I think he’s frustratingly trying to find something he could watch with his kid other than the standard fare.

[...]

HOLY SHIT Kev, where to start?

First, I tried watching one episode of “My Babysitter’s a Vampire” and it made me throw up all over my own face.  The first episode starts and it’s as if I’m supposed to already know who these two fucking knobs are.  Saying shit like “newbs” and “spellcaster” and “vampire killing”.

Like all shows about teenagers, the plot revolves around a guy doing what he's gotta do to try to get into girls' pants.  He may not know that’s what he’s doing, but that’s what he’s doing.  In this case that means bringing her dog back to life.  And then one character was like “Harry Potter would be ashamed” and then I’m pretty sure there was a foghorn sound, and then this theme song starts that sounds like a terrible Sugar Ray B-Side, and I stopped watching.

I did however skip forward to the actual “zombie” episode, and it was even worse than I thought it would be.  Truth be told, I probably would have liked this show if it were on when I was a kid.  That’s not saying much though, because I used to look forward to watching TGIF.

Step by step.  Day by day.  Moving right along.  

I decided to give R.L. Stine’s “The Haunting Hour” a shot, and I must say, this one was much more delightful.  It helped that the zombie episode I watched had the kid from “Modern Family” in it.  Eventually the kid reanimates a corpse (?), and honestly, the makeup job is sweet, and it’s fairly scary.  If my TGIF watching self had seen this, I’d probably have shit my pants.

The story plays out like something in between “Re-Animator”, “Frankenstein” and, well, “Lassie”?  One lame thing though, “The Haunting Hour” is only a thirty minute show, which I think might be confusing for children.

Cheeky the zombie likes the Home Shopping Network!  And in the end we even get to meet his zombie mom!  It’s all fairly cool.

This R.L. Stine show got me thinking about that “Goosebumps” show from twenty years ago.  There was a two part ‘living dead’ type episode where all the townspeople are poisoned by some kind of chemical disaster.  Part one is slow moving and boring.  It picks up a little bit in part two but I can’t help but feel that most kids, if they aren’t too afraid to watch this kind of show, will not have the required attention span to sit through it.  Nice to see the Canadian landscapes though.  Like in the newer R.L. Stine show, the zombies look pretty sweet, although the “SPECIAL EFFECTS” when the zombies steam/dissolve/die in the sunlight are PISS POOR.

Apparently there’s a movie coming out called “Goosebumps” where Jack Black plays R.L. Stine.  So that’s something to… look forward to?

After “Goosebumps” I tried watching “Frankenweenie” but fell asleep eating a sandwich.  I mean the plot is like a combination of that FUCKING “Vampire Babysitter” episode I watched and the more enjoyable “Haunting Hour” (this may not be accurate though, I feel asleep very quickly).  Why is it that in kid-friendly horror stuff they always bring dogs back to life?

I would like to say, however, that what I saw of “Frankenweenie”, was actually quite good, and the animation kicked fucking ass.  I don’t blame the movie for my falling asleep, I blame the genoa salami.  Also I ended up having nightmares.  Again, not from the movie, probably from the genoa.  Stupid nightmare sandwich.

If I follow YOUR scoring style, I'd have to give the babysitter show a 1/4, "Haunting Hour" and "Frankenweenie" a 3/4 and the old "Goosebumps" a 2/4.  But since I don't follow YOUR scoring style, I will give the babysitter show a "FUCK YOU", the haunting hour gets a solid "MEH", "Goosebumps" gets the honorary award for "90's haircuts and mom jeans" and "Frankenweenie" gets a Tim Burton.

IN CONCLUSION.  I think I’m better off waiting until the kid is older, and just introduce him to real zombie movies right off the bat.  How old is old enough to watch Fulci movies?  Six?  Definitely by seven, right?  In the meantime, I’ll just show him Looney Tunes cartoons.

That’s it, I’m actually gonna go watch some cartoons now.

[...]

He should have also watched “Paranorman”, which was actually pretty awesome too.  Good luck with the baby Burt Malone.  Try and squeeze in some time to write me, from time to time.

Shrunken Heads.

I don’t know much about the mid-nineties film “Shrunken Heads” other than the fact that Charles Band (and his Full Moon Pictures) is involved with it.  That COULD mean it’ll be good-bad, or could just as easily mean that it is straight up bad-bad.  The film starts with a bizarre fake movie review show starring two puppets.  It’s a little insane.  The puppets introduce the film, “Shunken Heads”.  Danny Elfman, of “The Simpsons Theme” did the theme for this film… and is apparently the director’s brother.  Weird.  Almost as weird as a puppet movie review show introducing the movie.

[...]

[A gang of bad boy teens led by a guy named BOOGER pushes a nerdy black kid off of his bike.]

Starkwell: Booger?

Lovelock: Is the guy on the bike Urkel?  I hope so.

Starkwell: I think that’s racist.  I’m not positive, but I think it is.

Lovelock: “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”

[...]

There’s something about Full Moon pictures releases from the mid-nineties… they have an almost magical quality to them.  And by magical, I mean truly abysmal.  The main character Tommy works at his dad’s corner grocery store, and he and his “sidekick” Bill, as well as their new friend Freddy (Urkel), head over to Mr. Sumatra’s magazine boutique to check out comics.

[...]

[Mr. Sumatra is from Haiti, and gives Bill, a self-proclaimed jelly-bean junkie, some sort of Haitian (I assume Voodoo) jelly-beans.]

Starkwell: I guess no one reminded these kids not to take candy from strangers.

Lovelock: From the looks of Bill, I think we can assume he takes a lot of candy.

[...]

While Tommy, Bill and Freddy read their comics and eat jelly beans (while sitting on what looks like a trash pile), the “gang” from earlier come back… I think they’re called the “VIPERS”.  Mr. Sumatra scares the gang off.

[...]

[Mr. Sumatra blows… pixie dust (?) on the “Vipers” car as they drive away and they crash into a tree.]

Lovelock: It’s hard to look mystical and tough when you essentially look like you just blew them a kiss.

Starkwell: Those New York City streets certainly look empty.

[...]

As Bill and Freddy walk the streets at night looking for adventure, Sally shows up at Tommy’s place and climbs up the fire escape to make out with him.  All the while, Starkwell and Lovelock are wondering where all of the people are on the streets, and why these kids’ parents don’t seem to give a rat’s ass that they are just wandering the New York streets at night alone.  Then the puppet show from earlier interrupts the scene and says “we’ll be right back” THEN COMES RIGHT BACK.  I guess this was made for TV.  This happens every twenty minutes or so for the length of the film.

[...]

Lovelock: I actually could have gone for some commercials right now.  Might have helped with the boredom.

[...]

[Tommy films the Vipers stripping a car and they get arrested, everyone except Vinnie.  Vinnie goes to see the MAFIA.]

Lovelock: Foiled by the comic book kids!

Starkwell: You’d think if they were backed by the mob they’d be doing better than stealing rims off an old lady’s car.

Lovelock: And you’d think they could get more professional looking gang t-shirts.

[The don, named Big Moe, and played by a woman (not sure why), snatches Freddy, Tommy and Bill.]

Lovelock: Alright, I don’t know who’s dying and who’s coming back through Mr. Sumatra black magic, but that shit needs to happen soon.

Starkwell: Why is he Mr. Sumatra?  Wouldn’t Mr. Haiti make more sense?

Lovelock: I think THAT is racist.

[Big Moe tells the Vipers to kill the kids.  They do.]

Starkwell: So they went from pushing a kid off a bike and stealing comic books to GUNNING DOWN CHILDREN.

Lovelock: And still, no sign of ANY of their parents.

[Later at the three-kid joint-funeral, attendance was low, with only Mr. Sumatra, Tommy’s dad and Tommy’s girlfriend Sally showing up.]

Starkwell: Harsh.  No one for Bill or Freddy.

[Then it cuts back to the puppet show for like two minutes and it sucks, even worse than the film sucks.]

[...]

Mr. Sumatran steals the kids from the mortuary, saws their heads off and starts boiling them up in a huge cauldron with a dead cat.  He shrinks their heads, puts on a bad ass cape and uses BLACK MAGIC VOODOO to re-animate their heads, tiny as they are.

[...]

[Mr. Sumatra throws the heads around the room to show them that they can fly… he trains them in… the ways of the force? Then the screen flashes “ONE YEAR LATER”.]

Lovelock: They trained for a year?

Starkwell: So they have mind powers and can shoot electricity?

[By the end of the year, they seem to be acting more like Mr. Sumatra’s slaves.  Then they fly through the city fighting crime.]

Lovelock: Is this fucking happening?

Starkwell: Why does Bill have vampire fangs now?

Lovelock: When they revived, they were themselves… but now they talk like killbots.  DA FUCK?

[...]

This movie makes no sense.  Bill no longer craves jelly beans, but rather eats people and sucks their blood?  Then Tommy goes spying on Sally while she sleeps.

[...]

[The two muggers that the HEADS killed suddenly get back up as zombies and start walking around.]

Lovelock: Now, THAT’s more like it.

[The zombies, instead of eating people, go around cleaning up litter…. And for some reason… farting a lot.]

Lovelock: I retract my previous statement.

[...]

At this point, the heads finally start going after the Vipers.

[...]

[Tommy zaps Sally’s head and shows her everything that he has been through, starting with his murder.]

Starkwell: Why would you want to show her Mr. Sumatra sawing their heads off?

[Tommy flies up her shirt, and rubs himself between her breasts and flies away.]

Lovelock: Classy, Tommy.  Classy.

Starkwell: He’s easily as much of a rapist as Vinnie.

[...]

Sally goes to see Mr. Sumatra and asks to see Tommy.  Then she opens her blouse and lets him fly in and stay there.  And the scene lasts like two minutes.  I believe it was Lovelock who wondered “WHERE ARE HER FUCKING PARENTS!?!?!”  Sometime shortly thereafter some Zombie Vipers come after Vinnie and he fights them, and they fart a lot.

[...]

Lovelock: Best line ever… “Are you ready for capital punishment… Haitian Style!”

Starkwell: Does anyone else find it creepy that Mr. Sumatra asked Sally if she was a virgin, and then asked her to go to his bedroom and dress up in a gown?

Lovelock: It is a touch creepy, yes.

[...]

Sumatra shows up with dressed-up Sally, the heads and a small army of zombies to take care of the remaining Vipers and Big Moe and his/her mob. After some complications and a terribly slow and long car chase (during which Freddy’s head gets run over, and Bill gets blown away by a shotgun) Tommy crashes through the windshield and flies directly into Vinnie’s mouth.

[...]

[Apparently the Zombies will continue to walk the Earth until they dissolve into a brown liquid.]

Starkwell: This movie is a brown liquid.

Lovelock: Nailed it.

[...]

So now, apparently, Sally is a high priestess of the voodoo and owns the flying heads, and she will use them to fight crime from now on...  I think.  The end.

BURT MALONE LETTERS: The Walking Dead.

Burt Malone sent me this letter a while ago regarding the television show.  I think it was right before season three hit the air… but I’m not sure.  Unlike some that he sends me via email, he hand wrote this one and slid it under my door.  So I don’t really have a date attached to it.  No matter when EXACTLY he wrote it, it still makes sense now, even if it is a little curmudgeonly.  Take it away, Burt.

[...]

AMC’s “The Walking Dead” is amazing.  Boom.  I said it.  Look, it does nothing to reinvent the wheel, but it takes the classic Romero-ish dead story and runs with it in an epic miniseries-that-goes-on-forever style (while maintaining a classic, much appreciated, “zombies DON’T run” philosophy, and avoiding having bullshit sympathetic “Bub”-like pet zombies).  The acting is great, the directing, the writing… characters are developed that you GENUINELY care for and root for.

Okay. 

I won’t go into any more detail about what I love about the show and why it is so great.  Does it stray from the source material?  Of course.  But seriously, who gives a shit?  It has become its own thing at this point, separate from the comic.  It’s like comparing UK “The Office” with the long running American version.  One came first, but both had Gervais’ name attached.  The US follow-up started with a rough copy of the original for a pilot, then went off in its own direction.  Guess what?  Both were awesome.

The problem I have with this ‘hit’ show has absolutely nothing to do with the show itself.  No sir.  The bone I have to pick dates back to, at this point, probably at least as far back as the release of “Zombieland”.  It started around then, and “The Walking Dead” has made it much much worse.  I’m talking, of course, about  zombie fever.  Everyone and anyone suddenly claiming to LOOOooOOOVE zombie films.

Ugh.

I mean, now there are apps to make your face be a zombie face.  And Halloween costumes.  And zombie 5Ks, and bumper stickers that say dumb shit like “I HART BRAINZ” and shit and ALL THAT SHIT.

Everyone in the universe is playing “Plants Vs. Zombies” on their phones and taking a break from watching their favorite show (likely about surgically altered housewives that aren’t even married but somehow call themselves housewives) to watch “The Walking Dead”?  What?

Sample Facebook post or Twitter post or whatever you kids use these days:

“ZOMG Teh Walking Ded 2nite! Cant wait ^_^ !!11011!!!”

Sorry.  Where was I?  Yeah.

And zombies are in COMMERCIALS now.  Honestly, advertising is the place that jokes and ideas go to DIE.

What’s worse is that now people go all faux connoisseurs and will be all “THAT’S NOT A ZOMBIE MOVIE” about movies that TOTALLY FUCKING ARE zombie movies.  They just don’t realize that zombies don’t all bite and eat flesh, they’re not all slow or fast, they’re not even always contagious, and they certainly don’t all require head shots or require brains to survive.  Shit, some don’t even die, ever.  Throw your made-up rule book out the window and get an education.  Watch something from forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, or hell, even eighty years ago.

Some of these people would watch “White Zombie” and say it’s not a zombie movie.  It’s called “White Zombie”.  Yeah, it's a fucking zombie movie.

“What’s your favorite zombie movie?”

“Definitely ‘Zombieland’ because it was like, the first zombie movie. It's like the original.”

“GAAAaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh-”

And then Burt’s brain explodes.

Ok, fine.  I know.  I’m being a snob.  I realize that the popularity of films like “Zombieland” and shows like “The Walking Dead” will only lead to more zombie films, which should make me happy right?  Like when a band you love gets huge and suddenly lots more people listen to them right?  Now they can make albums forever.

Wrong.  Sort of.  It's complicated.

When zombies are suddenly big time money makers?  That’s what leads to the past few years having about five or six different zombie films with the word ‘stripper’ in the title.  “The Asylum” has made at least five zombie mockbusters in the last year or so (SciFi originals?  Oxymoron.), and probably have countless more in production.  I mean, there was a bidding war between Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio over who could fuck up Max Brooks’ “World War Z” more.  That’s insane.

(Spoiler alert: Brad Pitt won and fans of the book lost.)

Not to mention that nowadays, any jackass with an iMac Nintendo Pac-Man video game can piece together a turd and put it up on the Youtube.  So, like every art form in this age of information, it’s easy to just put it out there, but hard for it to actually stand out from the pack.  The pack of pure shit.

Why do you think the only films Lovelock and Starkwell call unwatchable were made in the last ten years?

But, I guess that’s what Lovelock and Starkwell are here for.  Sifting through all of the garbage, all of the cookie-cutter zombie waste, all of the mockbusters big and small, to find the genuine gems, worth more than just their weight in about-to-be thrown out the window DVDs.

I do believe that there are still great zombie films waiting to be made.  And I’m sure that they’ll come around when we least expect them to, like true love or when you accidentally tag yourself in the nuts.  That’s what happened with “The Walking Dead”.  I never expected to see a zombie TV Show.  Once it was starting up, I never expected it to be any good.  And I certainly never expected it to get this kind of attention and acclaim.

So, everyone, resist the urge to be one of those assholes that hate “The Walking Dead” just BECAUSE it’s popular.  The show rules and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

That’s it.  Now I think I’ll go hibernate until next season.

[...]

Even when he likes these things, his letters have so much anger injected into them.  I can only hope he doesn’t ever write me about a movie or show he hates.  I can’t help but feel it will come with a flaming bag of dog droppings.

Zombie Apocalypse.

Lovelock and Starkwell haven’t exactly had good experiences with made for Syfy channel TV zombie movies.  This is the most recent one that I know of, and I felt it would be a whole bunch of fun to subject them to it.  Ving Rhames is in this?  Really?  Did I mention this is an Asylum movie?

[...]

[Six months after the outbreak, world is essentially all post-apocalyptic and shit.]

Lovelock: Well, at least the zombies are slow zombies.

Starkwell: Well, at last the special effects look like garbage.

Lovelock: Well, what is Ving Rhames doing in this?

Starkwell: Well, what was the last thing you saw him in?  “Zombie Apocalypse”? More like “Career Apocalypse”.

Lovelock:  Well, ouch.

[...]

Starkwell: Obviously there’s a SEXY girl that uses a samurai sword.

[...]

Lovelock: Wait… there are different levels of zombie speed?  Scratch what I said earlier.

Starkwell: I guess it’s a way of explaining why some of the extras in the movie decided to move faster than others.

[...]

At one point they mention a guy named Kirkman… an obvious shout out to the author of the recently made famous “Walking Dead”.  Unfortunately this Kirkman guy had died looking for coffee beans.  As Stakwell said “When lame movies try and reference cool stuff, they just come off even lamer.  And it ALWAYS feels forced.”  Since this is clearly The Asylum’s mockbuster to go with the now popular television show based on said work by Kirkman, this is even more offensive.

[...]

Starkwell: Obviously she stays up at night sharpening her samurai sword.

[...]

Starkwell: Obviously they sit around and eat pasta in an Italian diner.

Lovelock: This movie is one enormous cliché.  I feel like we don’t even need to watch it to know what happens, basically.

Starkwell: Don’t tempt me.

[...]

Starkwell: Obviously there’s a zombie dog.

[...]

It’s like the movie is trying SO HARD to be clever, but it feels like it was written by teenagers.  Not smart ones either.  Starkwell is looking more and more annoyed by this phenomenon.

[...]

[The zombies ‘ambush’ the group.]

Lovelock: Yeah, that makes sense… the zombies knew that they would come to this exact high school, and would end up in the gym, and planned to lock the doors and ambush them.  SURE.  I'm sure that's exactly what happened.

Starkwell: This movie should come with a warning label that reads ‘Watch out for plotholes.’

Lovelock: Either that or simply ‘DO NOT WATCH', you know like, do not watch if you generally like movies.

[...]

Starkwell: Obviously Ving Rhames finds a chainsaw.

[...]

Starkwell: Obviously they meet an archery professor and his two sexy student girls.

Lovelock: It's totally insane that you're not even making that up.

[...]

Lovelock has been quiet for a while now, and Starkwell just realized it’s because he has been asleep for the last twenty minutes.  Oh wait, he’s up.

[...]

Starkwell: Why do some of the zombies have white eyes, but then most don’t?

Lovelock: Probably for the same reason that some of them run and the others don’t.

Starkwell: What reason is that?

Lovelock: SHITTY FILMMAKING.

[...]

With very little runtime left in the movie, Starkwell decided to leave when they had Samurai girl mow down a pack of zombies with some kind of sub-machine gun that she had in a shopping cart, that they had abandoned much further back in the film and somehow just magically had once again in their possession.

[...]

Lovelock: Well, Starkwell would be happy to know that he missed BAD computer graphic ZOMBIE TIGER ATTACK!  And Ving Rhames saying “meow bitch” when he killed it.  And a happy ending.

[...]

What a piece of shit.

All Souls Day.

Another in a string of “made for Sci-Fi” channel movies, this one is supposed to be the cream of the crop.  That is, of course, if the cream is the worst part, and the crop is actually a bag of shit.  The DVD opens with a trailer for “Near Dark” which looks awesome and stars Bill Paxton.  But we’re not about to watch that.  We’re about to watch something whose claim to fame is that Danny Trejo is in it.  Starkwell and Lovelock are less than excited for this 2005 romp in Mexico penned by the guy who wrote Uwe Boll’s “House of the Dead”.  So yeah.

[...]

[Anytown Mexico.]

Starkwell: For a random Mexican village, there is an awful lot of English being spoken.

Lovelock: They did the same thing in “Hunt for Red October”, except with Russian.

Starkwell: And why are all of the villagers white?

Lovelock: What did you expect them to do, go and grab a truck full of day laborers?

Starkwell: Dude...

Lovelock: You know what? They probably would give a more convincing performance.

[...]

[White family in the 50s is murdered by village of Mexican Zombies, cuts to present day.  Lame white people run into village.]

Starkwell: Why did they need to show the flashback?  How did that girl write that whole explanation in the sand with a stick?  Why aren’t they panicking more?  Why are we watching this?

Lovelock: The answer to all of those is, because this film is a turd.

[...]

[Lame white guy invites his friends to join them, and then makes sex all over his girlfriend.]

Starkwell: Why would they invite people after finding a girl with her tongue cut out?  How could they be horny under these circumstances?  Who puts their bra back on immediately after boning like that?

Lovelock: Once again, because this film is a turd.

[...]

Altman throws in movie references, but rather than being subtle about it, the characters always find a way to explain what movie they were referencing immediately after referencing it, making it THOROUGHLY LAME.

[...]

[Zombie mayhem continues.]

Starkwell: If he wants to go get more bullets, why is she wasting them by shooting bullets in the air? Why is tongueless a zombie already?  How is she screaming? Why didn’t they kill the Sheriff? If the Sheriff is the kid from the flashback, why isn’t seventy years old?  Why is it only the Mexican girl that sees the weird apparitions?  Why are they making jokes?  Why are they making out?!?!?!  Why does the cheerleader have super powers?!?!?  Why am I still sitting here?

Lovelock: Turd! Remember? … Starkwell?  Starkwell?

[...]

Starkwell left.  Lovelock stayed.  As usual, here are some bits from Lovelock’s conversation with himself.

[...]

[Trejo shoots his son in the head, accidentally.]

Lovelock: How could he have possibly missed his mark by that much?  Why do we need to see Trejo masturbating? Why is she puking black stuff? Why would they have killed the other people in the first place if they only wanted to get the Vargas guy? Why is she magic, but not magic enough to stop this shit from happening in the first place? What the fuck?

[...]

Once Lovelock remembered the answer to all of these questions, he got quiet.  Real quiet.

House of the Dead II.

Apparently Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead was so good, that they felt the need to make a sequel, without him.  Michael Hurst directs this 2005 effort.  Our expectations for this movie are so low, that it literally can’t possibly live up to them.  Or down to them, I should say.  It was one of those Sci-Fi channel made-for-tv movies that seem to find their way into the bargain bins at most Wal-Marts and/or grocery stores.  Guess where this one came from?  Play movie.

[...]

[The movie opens with a bunch of college fraternity dudes spraying beer out of water guns onto underwear clad sorority girls.]

Starkwell: ...

Lovelock: Boobies!

[...]

[Girl gets run over by a car, mad scientist grabs her.]

Lovelock: Is that Sid Haig?  Either this movie’s stock just went up, or Sid Haig’s just went down.

Starkwell: Do you really not know which it is?

[...]

The intro credits show zombies essentially destroying the university / town.  We then get introduced to some kind of Zombie Kill Squad, some bad acting, some horrible dialogue, an abnormally large amount of shots of women standing around in their underwear and the ridiculous notion that this could happen at a university in the U.S. and that somehow no one would find about it.

[...]

[Sometime in the middle of the one bajillionth action sequence.]

Starkwell: The tagline said “All Guts, No Glory”, should have read “All Guts, No Story”.

Lovelock: Wait, rewind, what just happened?

Starkwell: They shot more zombies. 

[...]

After the seventh or eighth shot of a zombie popping out from around a corner, it actually started to make Starkwell mad.  Lovelock just laughed harder and harder with each one.

[...]

[The main characters electrocute a hallway full of zombies.]

Lovelock: Those electricity effects look like they belong in the Dolph Lundgren vehicle “Masters of the Universe”.

Starkwell: That might be your weirdest reference yet.  I was thinking the Emperor’s electricity hands in “Jedi”.

[...]

At one point, the movie tried to develop the characters with some sad sack story about female lead Nightingale’s family dying.  Starkwell rolled his eyes and Lovelock laughed so hard that he claimed several drops of pee came out.

[...]

[Then they shoot football zombies and end up in a locker room.]

Starkwell: Memo to horror directors, the whole “lights are flickering” thing is played.

Lovelock: So played.

Starkwell: Almost as played as this movie.

Lovelock: So played.

[...]

[The main character rubs dead guts on his body, figuring the smell would camouflage him from the zombies.  For some reason, he figures gun powder smell would give him away, and leaves his guns.]

Starkwell: Seriously?  Man, I give up.

Lovelock: If gun powder would give him away, then why wouldn’t his hair gel?

[...]

I don’t think they were paying much attention anymore, although they did make fun of the fact that in every movie featuring lame soldiers, some soldier instructs his subordinates to use “short controlled bursts” in order to save ammo.  The movie didn’t end there, but really, who cares?  If body count is all that matters to you, then this movie certainly offers that.  The truth is this movie wasn’t horrible.  It was by no means any good either.  If ever there was such a thing as a cookie cutter zombie film, this should be considered as one.  Cookie cutter or not, they could have tried to have at least one character that we might give a shit about.  Also they should have realized that stretching twenty minutes worth of story into an hour and a half is a tremendous waste of resources and the viewer’s time.