Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Z is for (what else?) Zombie - Blogging From A To Z Challenge 2014






Z is for (what else?) Zombie - Blogging From A To Z Challenge 2014



To celebrate the letter "Z" and the last day of the contest, I have chosen zombies for my final topic!

I could go on and on regarding zombies (running, walkers, able to use weapons or not, able to think, etc., etc.) so instead, I decided to share three of my favorite zombies.


The first one is from 'Tales from the Crypt' 1972. His name is 'Arthur Grimsdyke.'



My second one is from 'Creepshow.' His name is 'Nathan Grantham.'



And lastly, this one if from 'Zombie.' (AKA 'Zombi 2' and a hundred more different titles.)


As you may have noticed, I prefer my zombies a little more gruesome in appearance than a lot of the more current low budget fare. I'm not saying that "bloodied, white faced, black eyed" zombies are bad, I just like mine rotted!



Tuesday, April 29, 2014

10 Great Zombie Manga




After America, Japan is probably the world's #2 producer of zombies. (The only challenger I can think of is Italy, but most of the great Italian zombie movies were made in the early '80s, long ago.) Beginning with Battle Girl: The Living Dead in Tokyo Bay in 1992, Japanese zombie movies have ranged from straightforward Romero-zombie movies like Junk (1999), to trashy zombie comedies likeAttack Girls' Swim Team vs. Undead, Big Tits Zombie and pretty much every Yoshihiro Nishimura movie, to creepy serious horror like Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo ("Pulse")(2001), which blurs the line between zombies and Japanese ghosts a la Ju-on and The Ring. Perhaps Japan's biggest contribution to World Zombiedom is laying the foundation for the current zombie wave with games likeHouse of the Dead and Resident Evil; in 1998 CAPCOM even hired George Romero, who couldn't find work as a janitor in the US at the time, to direct a pair of TV commercials for Resident Evil 2.
I bring this up because lately I've been working on a huge poster explaining the links between all zombies, so for the past few months my mission has been to absorb as many zombie books, movies, games and comics as possible. And of course, zombie manga. (No, not Manga Zombie.) The past 10 years have witnessed an explosive outbreak of zombie manga: Cradle of Monsters, Broadway of the Dead, Tokyo Summer of the Dead, and countless more. Even Attack on Titan is essentially a mutant zombie story, with humanity cowering behind walls against cannibal humanoids, even though those humanoids are 50 feet tall. (I'd say more, but spoilers spoilers.) And that's just cannibal/killer zombies, not even counting "friendly zombie" manga like Zombie-LoanIs This a Zombie?, and any old story where the hero or heroine came back from the dead. IMHO, if they're not cannibals, or hideously rotting, it doesn't count.
But which zombie manga are good? Or at least, interesting? Here's 10 zombie manga, some translated, some unlicensed, that are all worth checking out. I haven't listed action manga that might occasionally include some zombies, like D.Gray-man and …never mind that tease Zombie Powder whose title tricked me into buying all four volumes without reading them (spoiler: NO ZOMBIES). I've avoided manga about itako, magicians and other people who can talk to the spirits of the dead and solve their dead-people problems, even ones like The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, where the dead people get up and walk around once in awhile. I also haven't listed the obvious one, Highschool of the Dead, because frankly, its just isn't one of my favorites, because of its unoriginal zombies (slow and moany, just like in Max Brooks' books) and the gun-fetishy, cynical, most-people-in-a-disaster-are-idiots-and/or-rapists attitude. (In other words, it's just like bad American zombie fiction, plus the massive fanservice.) But for truly great zombies, run, don't walk, to your nearest BookOff, comic store or Kinokuniya and get bitten by one of these ones. You'll never turn back.
10. Reiko the Zombie Shop (available from Dark Horse)
Bringing back the dead to take care of their issues from life is no big deal. Tons of manga heroes do it. But not all of them can bring back the dead as snarling, savage killer corpses, let alone do it with a short skirt and a decorated cellphone strap, and that's what makes Reiko…Reiko. Bloodsplattered action-horror-comedy (well, you have to squint hard to see the comedy) in the style of Evil Dead and all those Japanese splatter films, Reiko is the story of an antisocial necromancer-for-hire who brings back the dead for profit and revenge. Like the heroine of Eko Eko Azarak, Reiko soon gets entangled fighting a variety of rival magicians, mad scientists, undead serial killers and so on (mostly hot girls, of course). Their weapon of choice is their enslaved undead familiars, who they summon up like decomposing Pokémon or monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh!. I've written about this one before, but if you want the short pitch, it's maggot-covered undead mayhem from start to finish,
9. Tokyo Zombie (available from Last Gasp)
Yūsaku Hanakuma is not a mainstream mangaka; he's an underground gag manga artist whoseheta-uma ("good-bad") artstyle is intentionally crude and childish-looking. In keeping with the Osamu Tezuka "star system," aka "I have a limited number of character designs," his work often features two recurring characters, "Afro" and "Baldy." In Tokyo Zombie, this inept duo are schmoes who work in a fire extinguisher factory and dream of being jujitsu champions, until suddenly zombies start to rise from beneath "Black Fuji," a massive mound of garbage and toxic waste just outside of Tokyo. After the initial scenes of zombies clawing out of the toxic waste dump and doing things like ripping men's penises off, civilization quickly collapses, leaving only a heavily guarded enclave of rich people whose primary entertainment is watching humans fight zombies in gladiatorial pit-fights. Of course "Afro" and "Baldy" are there too, still practicing their jujitsu moves and making fun of one another for being lolicon. It's all good, cheesy, ultraviolent entertainment, and the simple art makes sure you can't get that offended. What's weird is that George Romero used almost the exact same plot in Land of the Dead a few years later.
8. Grand Guignol Orchestra (available from Viz)
Yes, even shojo manga has cannibal zombies! The twist in this manga by Kaori Yuki (Angel Sanctuary) is that the zombie virus turns people into living cannibal puppets, with segmented limbs like marionettes. The heroes are a troupe of musicians who travel a ruined pseudo-Europe, using their magical music to cure and destroy the zombies…a suitably elegant death for a lusciously Gothic zombie apocalypse.
7. Hellsing (available from Dark Horse)
Technically, I'm cheating here since this is not a zombie manga; vampire spawn (people who have been drained by vampires but don't quite become full vampires) probably don't count. But no zombie fan can fail to be awed at the apocalyptic scenes in the last few volumes of Hellsing, when London falls siege to an assault of Nazi vampires whose victims turn into flesh-hungry, undead ghouls. Kohta Hirano delivers amazing levels of detail in page after page of moaning undead with bloody eyesockets crawling all over one another through Trafalgar Square. Still, the climactic battle leaves no doubt whether vampires or zombies are on top of the undead food chain.
6. Life is Dead (unlicensed)
In most zombie media, zombies are irredeemable enemies and zombie-infected people turn quickly, but a few stories, like Life is Dead (and Harold's Going Stiff, and In the Flesh) treat zombie-ism as a medical condition requiring long-term care. In Tomohiro Koizumi's Life is Dead,being a zombie is basically like having AIDS, and the slowly rotting sufferers must take tons of medication and endure societal prejudice while trying to reverse their gradual descent into flesh-eating decrepitude. Oh, also, it's sexually transmitted, and the unemployed seinen hero gets the disease from sleeping with a prostitute, who's still deceptively fresh and non-rotten. Did I mention this is a romantic comedy manga? This short, 18+ (tho' not porny) manga is unlikely to ever be licensed, but it was adapted into a low-budget Japanese movie.
5. Mahō Shōjo of the End (unlicensed)
Any manga that runs in Akita Shoten's Champion series of magazines is, more likely than not, totally twisted. That glorious bad-taste tradition continues with Mahō Shōjo of the End, Kentarō Satō's apocalyptic action-horror manga about an invasion of otherworldly demonesses from whatever abyssal hell-pit Magical Girls come from. It starts suddenly and violently, as a three-foot-tall chibi girl in black taffeta enters the protagonist's high school classroom and starts bludgeoning people to death with a massive wand. The dead students rise as screeching, running zombies,their clothes magically transforming into black Loli-Goth dresses, and as the survivors flee into the streets they see that the sky has opened up and an army of Magical Girls is descending upon Tokyo to eliminate the human race. Zombies are the least of the heroes' problems here; each one of the Magical Girls is an individual precious snowflake with unique magical powers, and to quotethe musical sequence from Dead and Breakfast, "they feel so alive when they kill, kill, kill." Is there any hope for humanity??! If you hate Magical Girls and have ever wanted to see them dismembered and smashed into pieces by every means imaginable, although the Magical Girl Deaths to Human Deaths ratio runs about 1,000,000 to 1, so spoiler alert, things aren't looking great for our heroes. Guns, blood and fanservice runs three inches deep in the streets, making this a great manga for Highschool of the Dead fans who want to move on to something rawer and funnier…too bad it's not licensed.

4. Fort of Apocalypse (available from Crunchyroll Manga)
Zombie filmmakers should know: apocalypses cost money. It's one thing if your film is about an isolated zombie incident, but if your backstory is "the entire world has been taken over by the living dead," it's hard to take your dumb movie seriously if you can only afford to hire three zombies and to film in some crappy abandoned industrial park in Canada or Eastern Europe that was cheap to rent. In manga, on the other hand, the only limit is the artist's skill and imagination, and possibly an extra 100,000 yen a month to hire assistants; you don't need to spend >$100 million for World War Z-esque scene of zillions of zombies rampaging through the world's biggest urban landmarks.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present you Fort of the Apocalypse. A shonen action-horror zombie world-ender, this manga's first twist is that it takes place in a juvenile prison, where the hapless hero has been falsely accused and locked up with teenage thugs from all around the Kanto region. When the viral zombie apocalypse begins, though, imprisoned behind 20-foot stone walls seems like a great place to be, and when prison authority breaks down, our hero and his plucky band of cellmates (all of whom are exactly the kind of cool dudes you'd want at your back in this situation) are the ones who must keep order among the convicts and send an expedition into the flesh-hungry zombie-filled world outside. And there are LOTS of zombies: typical slow, shuffling zombies…doglike fast zombies…and a giant squirming blob, the ultimate (?) form of zombie evolution, a towering pile of bodies merged together into a single being…

In short, this is a super-big-budget zombie movie in manga form. It's still a shonen manga when you look at it closely—it's easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys and the mooks from the important characters—but Fort of the Apocalypse is solid, page-turning zombie pulp. What really surprises me about Fort of Apocalypse is that the same author, Yuu Kuraishi, also wrote My Wife is Wagatsuma-san, a series with a totally different style (and much stronger female characters). Meanwhile, Kazu Inabe's art brings the zombie action. Anyone got a spare $100 million to make the live-action version?

3. Biomega (available from Viz)
The greatest science-fiction virus zombie manga ever. Set a few hundred years in the future, on an Earth of giant skyscrapers and arcologies, Biomega begins with large areas of the planet already overrun by the living dead. The plague seems contained, however—until a floating corpse-satellite begins seeding Earth with zombie sporesfrom orbit, and airborne undeath sprinkles down upon the hapless remnants of humanity. While the Earth dies screaming, a handful of people struggle to survive: some folks in biohazard suits, a scientist with his brain cybernetically implanted into a bear's body (bears are immune, whodathunk) and Zoichi, a synthetic human with superhuman reflexes whose artificial body is immune to the virus. Of course, in the style of Resident Evil, there is an evil conspiracy involved, and the grandmasters of the plan have transformed themselves into tentacled, twisted undead monsters. Tsutomu Nihei (Blame!) was never big on explanations, though, so it's best to accept that not all your questions will be answered and just sit back to watch cyborgs on motorcycles duel with slimy bio-organic mutants as the planet is slowly transformed. And I did say the planet: in Biomega, the very earth and rocks are not safe from zombie infection. Things take a massive 180-degree plot turn right in the middle, but for the first few volumes, this manga is the graphic-novel embodiment of the weirdest zombie video game never made.
2. Living Corpse (available from DH Publishing (out of print))
Yosuke Shinkai wakes up to find himself wandering the streets, sluggish, his memory a blur. People scream and run at the sight of him, and when he looks at his reflection on a window, he sees why: he is gray and bloated, his eyes are glazed over, his touch is cold. He is a Living Corpse, horrified and disgusted by his own condition, with no idea how he got this way. He is soon captured by the police, studied by scientists, vivisected and maimed to find the secret of his living death. In the center of it all, Yosuke tries to remember who he was, to find some meaning to his existence, before his flesh rots away…

The idea of being a conscious mind trapped in a rotting body is a horror staple, but it's a theme one Hideshi Hino (Panorama of Hell,etc.) is especially fond of; his Hell Baby (who's also a cannibal) and the protagonist of Zoroku's Strange Disease also fester horribly. His untranslated mangaKaiki! Shinin Shojo ("Shocking! Dead Girl") is basically a shojo reskinning of this idea. Really, it's a theme that fits Hino like bread fits butter, since no one draws rotting flesh and maggots better than him; it's especially grotesque mixed with his simple, big-eyed character designs. The whole thing takes on an added dimension when you read Hino's afterword, which says he was severely depressed when he wrote it.
1. I Am a Hero (unlicensed)
Most Japanese zombie movies, and manga, are a little tongue in cheek. J-zombie films tend to be silly and self-referential rather than dramatic, and manga lends itself to exaggeration so it's hard not to for the author to wink at the reader, especially in a long story arc. Maybe it's impossible to take zombies seriously? Maybe it's just all been done before?

Wrong. Kengo Hanazawa's I Am a Hero shows that you can do it straight-up scary and it can be totally amazing. When it starts out, everything seems normal, a typical seinen story set in present-day Japan. The hero, Hideo, is a struggling, scruffy mangaka's assistant who's in his mid-30s but still waiting for his life to start. He's not a total NEET—he's got a girlfriend—but he's sort of a loser, spending his free time at the gun range (he owns a sporting shotgun), often drifting off in a fantasy world. "Fantasy world" is literally the case, since Hideo is plagued by hallucinations. He can function in society, and he knows it's not real, but sometimes he seems things…scary things. Sometimes he spends all night huddled under the blanket, hoping the faces peering from under the bed will go away.

The hallucinations make it hard to trust Hideo's senses when the zombie virus takes over Japan. At first it starts slowly: for almost the entire first volume—for nearly 200 pages—our "hero" doesn't even see a zombie. It starts with rumors of violent incidents, of a flu, of strange YouTube videos: and then, BOOM, in one crazed 24-hour period, the streets of Tokyo are swarming with babbling, running, cannibal monsters, super-strong and super-agile, neither dead nor alive. Even the tiniest drop of bodily fluids will turn you into one of them. Monstrous, relentless, the things take over Japan, while Hideo runs, runs, barely out of reach of the terrible plague that makes his worst nightmares seem like paradise…

I Am a Hero
 is probably the greatest zombie manga ever. It has the slow buildup of a psychological horror manga, but when the zombies hit, they hit hard, and the manga accelerates into volumes-long fight-or-flight sequences that seem like they'll never stop. Hanazawa's combination of grotesque facial expressions and ultra-realistic art makes the apocalypse look real, and he shows his horror-manga mastery with long, wordless cinematic sequences of as many as 10 or 12 pages, showing zombies propagating through a crowd, a corpse rising from a bed, rubbery-limbed ghouls ambushing screaming people. If there's a God of Manga, this series needs to be licensed NOW. Rise from your grave, Osamu Tezuka, and make it so.


~animenewsnetwork.com

Y is for Yoko - Blogging From A To Z Challenge 2014






Y is for Yoko - Blogging From A To Z Challenge 2014


Tokyo zombie 2005


After the initial zombie outbreak, Yoko (Erika Okuda) is rescued from a zombie attack when one of our heroes (Mitsuo) sacrifices himself to save her. As time progresses, five years later, we find that Mitsuo's friend Fujio and Yoko have gotten married and settled down is a safe section of the now destroyed Tokyo.


Real Zombie Apocalypse: Pandemic Planned to Depopulate America?




The CIA has been a tool of the Illuminati and it’s NWO agenda from it’s very beginning.

Apparently I’m not the only one who has considered the scenario of a pandemic that would create a Zombie Apocalypse, considering the CDC and various movie producers and video game manufacturers have already released their own versions of the hypothetical event. Its almost as if they are making a joke out of something they see coming. But lets start at the beginning.

Through it’s OPERATION PAPERCLIP, thousands of former Nazi war criminals were brought into America, their criminal war records expunged.  In the CIA you will find the fulfillment of the Nazi’s vows of the Wannsee conference in 1942, that IF the Illuminati’s NWO agenda failed via Nazi Germany, it would be transplanted to the United States, the FINAL SOLUTION included, to be continued right here in America. That very same year, the OSS was established in America, later to become the CIA.
The CIA has been and still is a major strategy planner of the NWO.
Throughout the alternative media there are articles and videos constantly being published exposing the coming pandemics.
None of this surprises me in the least, and I know much of it is true, since I have been investigating and researching the CIA for years.
But the CIA aren’t the only ones involved. The Cobden Club Memo that circulated in commentary to the ECO-92 EARTH CHARTER is evidence of an agenda for global democide. It unapologetically notes the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth and Global 2000 were correct in their assessment and that the necessary reduction of population calls for immediate action.  It stated “The present vast overpopulation, now far beyond the world carrying capacity, cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by the reduction of numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary.”

The World Wildlife Fund has made specific recommendations that the “carrying capacity” (read rather as the numbers needed to die to achieve the optimum population, that is how many must be culled)  for most countries is millions, even tens of millions and hundreds of millions lower than they are at present. The United States has a surplus of more than a quarter billion people. Even third world developing nations must significantly depopulate if they want to have any meaningful quality of life for its citizens.

At the University of Texas biologist Dr Pianka has suggested “Good terrorists would be taking [Ebola Reston and Ebola Zaire] so that they had microbes they could let loose on the Earth that would kill 90 percent of people.”  This terrible disease causes its victims to systemically hemorrhage and bleed from every orifice.

Dr Pianka, a University of Texas biologist, noted, “I do not bear any ill will toward humanity. However, I am convinced that the world WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us… We need to make a transition to a sustainable world. If we don’t, nature is going to do it for us in ways of her own choosing. By definition, these ways will not be ours and they won’t be much fun. Think about that.”
Fun. What could be more fun than a zombie apocalypse?

This paper proposes a way to significantly reduce the human population in a few months by introducing a viral contagion that would achieve two biomedical objectives in two stages of infection, the sterilization of the majority of humanity, and then the induction of zombie behavior in at least a third of mankind to render them incapable of personal survival and by inducing zombie dementia and rage to rapidly spread the infection and improve the kill ratio.

The Zombie Apocalypse could be created by genetically modifying several normally benign and non-lethal infectious agents from several families of viruses such as herpes, cold, and flu. All would be altered to contain protein sequences that would provoke human immune responses to effectively vaccinate females against pregnancy, and render males sterile.  Not everyone would be made infertile as some would have only mild cases of infection.  However, the mass of humanity could be rendered sterile in a few weeks of epidemic that would initially be almost entirely non-lethal, and in many cases seemingly as mild as “the sniffles”, and even sub-clinical as to presentation of symptoms.  This reduction in fertility, however, would not be able to answer, as the The Cobden Club Memo stated, the present over-population.

The secondary purpose of these engineered viruses would be to infect in-vivo the common human parasite Toxoplasmosa gondii.  The T. gondii brain parasite is selected because it is already known to modify the behavior of its hosts. In rats this is most striking as they will be attracted to cat urine and play and frolic where cats are, enabling, of course, the cats to catch and eat the infected rats, and in turn become new hosts for the parasite. In humans the modifications of behavior are subtler, but no less striking: women become more promiscuous, and men “less attractive” indicating profound changes in hormone concentrations and pheromone response. Schizophrenia may in some cases result from Toxoplasmosis.

Because Toxoplasmosa gondii is latent in the brains of a third to fully half of the human population there is a huge potential for hijacking the parasite in-vivo. This infection of T. gondii would simultaneously awaken it from its dormancy into an acute symptomatic stage of reproduction with a palette of nearly random neurological effects to induce behavioral modification of wild extremes.
The viruses would genetically modify the latent T. gondii to greatly reduce or greatly increase the endogenous production of important neurotransmitters such as serotonin, acetylcholine, dopamine, and also the direct production within the T. gondii itself of hormones such as adrenaline, testosterone, and steroids, as well as NMDA receptor antagonists. The combined effect, along with high fevers, would be to render people insensible of pain, socially incompetent if not totally incapable of communication, and extremely irritable and prone to violence and mindless rage, in other words to make them zombies. The viral modification the T gondii genome could be adjusted to harbor yet other viruses such as rabies that would emerge if the host were medically treated with anti toxoplasmosis drugs such as atovaquone and clindamycin. This would sabotage public health care efforts at clinics and quarantine centers.

The behavioral modifications of the host might further be enhanced by tweaking the pheromone mediated olfactory response so that the infected attack only the non-infected so that the zombies would not attack each other, but only healthy people. The “Us against Them” lines would be clearly drawn.

The course of infection then in this Zombie Apocalypse would be to quietly render the majority of people sterile and without causing them any great bodily distress, which is they are left living and apparently unharmed aside from the loss of their reproductive capacity, and then a secondary stage mediated byT. gondii by the same bio-weaponized viruses that causes a third of humanity to become mindlessly violent zombies that run amok.  The result would be the extermination of the surplus human population, and greatly reduced fertility in the survivors preventing a re-bound population explosion.

In the Post-Zombie-Apocalypse medical assistance would be urgently needed to identify and match partners capable of human reproduction, affording a great opportunity to practice eugenics on a wide scale to both preserve a minimally viable population and improve its quality.

Can you believe these monsters!

Even before “conspiracy theorists” were cool, I discovered information regarding a former CIA employee who previously worked for the NWO agenda in America. His name was Larry Wayne Harris. Larry was once a microbiologist working for the CIA.

When Larry became a Christian (no this is not a Christian News article, as I am an Atheist), he felt compelled to tell the American people what he knew.

Pamela Rae Schuffert interviewed Larry for her former radio broadcast, DEFENDERS OF LIBERTY with the WWCR network out of Nashville, TN, a terrifying scenario began to unfold about a planned pandemic for America.

“We were paid by the CIA to engineer and develop deadly viruses and bacteria that would someday be used AGAINST THE AMERICA PEOPLE….” Larry said.
It turns out that Larry helped design a deadly version of ANTHRAX that is incurable. He developed special devices designed to be thrown into public water reservoirs, which contained deadly diseases that were created to pollute large bodies of water.
“This one device I designed contained both the deadly toxin and a small explosive charge that could be remotely detonated. You throw it into the water, detonate it from shore, and soon the whole body of water would be filled with deadly toxins or disease of bacteria designed to make people sick or kill them,” Larry explained.

When Ms Schuffert asked him when all this was to take place through covert agents and black ops, he said it was all tied in with upcoming MARTIAL LAW.
Such deadly devices and other methods would be used to create huge pandemics that would justify declaring MARTIAL LAW regionally throughout America.

This would then lead to people being forced to evacuate their regions and homes, and to be”quarantined” in the dreaded FEMA/DHS camps. FEMA buses, prisoner boxcars (this explains the mysterious boxcars that have raised eyebrows lately) and even planes will be used to transport people to the camps.

Some of the deadly diseases they were developing for the CIA, were also designed to weaken the ability of the American people to offer resistance under martial law. It’s hard to fight back, when a person is incapacitated through severe, debilitating illness.


Though Larry began to share his insider information way back in the late 1990′s, with Ms Schuffert publishing his shocking revelations ever since, the only thing Larry wasn’t able to tell her was the timeline.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that timeline is coming to its end.  If one but follows current events, connecting the dots along the way, it becomes clearer with each passing day that something terrible is going to happen soon.

The prospect of effecting rapid depopulation by the Zombie Apocalypse offers a “solution” to ecological and economic collapse. The sale of small arms such as pistols and rifles would skyrocket, and demand would peak just as the plague came to an end. The survivors would return to the peaceful pursuits of civilization, and aside from occasional outbreaks of Toxozombiosis, enjoy carte blanche to remake the cleansed urban centers with ample parks and green space. The reduced demand on precious fossil fuels would grant an extension of time required for research and development of alternative energy sources.

Though I suggest you enjoy what you have while you still can, I strongly recommend that you prepare. Even if Larry Wayne Harris and Pamela Rae Schuffert, as well as all the others, including myself,  who predict similar horrors are wrong, its always better to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, than it is to get caught unprepared.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned!


Author: Tom Retterbush

c/o: conspiracy-watch.org



The cast of 'Frozen' does the zombie dance 'Thriller'







The Walking Dead Minimates Series 6 Coming this October


As Robert Kirkman continues to introduce new characters into The Walking Dead comic book series, Diamond Select Toys‘ full line of The Walking Dead Minimates just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The Walking Dead Minimates series 6 has now been revealed, which includes 2 inch versions of both your favorite humans and zombies.
The characters in DST’s Minimate line are directly based on the hit comic book by Robert Kirkman. In this sixth series you can sink your teeth into two-packs of Constable Rick with Douglas, Carl with Burning Zombie, Constable Michonne with Winter Zombie and a rare, one-per-case variant set of Party Dress Michonne with Winter Zombie.
Each 2-pack will be priced at an SRP of $9.99 and should be available this October. 


~actionfigurefury.com

Monday, April 28, 2014

Watch the trailer for the upcoming [REC] 4: Apocalypse







Official Press Release for SyFy's 'Z Nation'




SYFY ANNOUNCES ALL-NEW ZOMBIE SERIES Z NATION

13-Episode Series from ‘Eureka’ Creator To Premiere in Fall 2014

NEW YORK – April 7, 2014 – Syfy today announced Z Nation, a 13-episode zombie series set to debut in the fall. From production company The Asylum (Sharknado), the action-horror series depicts the epic struggle to save humanity after a zombie apocalypse. The series, which will air on Syfy, will be produced by The Asylum and sold internationally by Dynamic Television.
Karl Schaefer (Eerie Indiana, Eureka, The Dead Zone) will serve as executive producer and showrunner. “Z Nation will take viewers where no zombie has gone before,” says Schaefer. The show, he continues, adds “a sense of hope to the horror of the apocalypse – our everyday heroes take the fight to the zombies. It’ll be an epic journey unlike anything you’ve seen before.”
In making the announcement, Chris Regina, Senior Vice President, Programming, Syfy, said: “Z Nation is a unique new journey into the long established zombie genre. Instead of existential despair, the series offers hope that somehow, some way, humanity will not only survive, but triumph. In producing their first ever weekly series, our long-time partners The Asylum have created a different way of telling an iconic story.”
In Z Nation, three years have passed since the zombie virus has gutted the country, and a team of everyday heroes must transport the only known survivor of the plague from New York to California, where the last functioning viral lab waits for his blood. Although the antibodies he carries are the world’s last, best hope for a vaccine, he hides a dark secret that threatens them all. With humankind’s survival at stake, the ragtag band embarks on a journey of survival across three thousand miles of rusted-out post-apocalyptic America.
Z Nation is a dynamic ensemble drama that will plunge viewers into a fully-imagined post-zombie America and take them on an adventure with a diverse group of richly-drawn characters. As the reluctant heroes learn to work as a team and battle ever-more-menacing zombies, their flaws, idiosyncrasies, and moral dilemmas will ultimately become the heart of the show.
About Dynamic Television
Dynamic Television is a packaging, acquisition and distribution company with a disciplined and global strategy focused on fostering transparent and integrated partnerships between talent, producers and broadcasters. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles and Paris. 


Check out these Zombie Apocalypse uniforms for a California League minor baseball team




Minor league baseball teams don interesting jerseys for various reasons throughout their seasons, and often they're for a very good reason.

Pink jerseys for breast cancer awareness. Camouflage uniforms to honor military.

But sometimes a team will wear a wild uniform simply thanks to some creative mind associated with the club.

The Inland Empire 66ers, a Class A team from the California League, will wear Zombie Apocalypse jerseys for their Zombie Apocalypse Night on June 12.


ANCHOR BAY WILL BE DISTRIBUTING THE DEAD 2: INDIA




Synopsis:
The story is set in motion when a ship from Somalia docks in India and an infected worker enters the overpopulated country. An American engineer (Millson) has to travel 300 miles across the Rajasthan, known as The Land of the Kings, to save his love, who is pregnant and afraid as Mumbai descends into chaos. 

THE DEAD 2: INDIA will be released this Fall. 

Check out the trailer!








X is for Xian - Blogging From A To Z Challenge 2014





X is for Xian - Blogging From A To Z Challenge 2014


Xian (left) is one of Eiko's classmates that is slowly reaching the point of "Near Death Happiness" in which all 14 to 16 schoolgirls experience before they turn into the walking dead.




Saturday, April 26, 2014

W is for West - Blogging From A To Z Challenge 2014



W is for West - Blogging From A To Z Challenge 2014



Herbert West is the inventor of a special solution, or "reagent", that can resurrect the dead. He is portrayed as a brilliant, narcissistic and intensely driven young man of an amoral nature; traits carried over into the 1985 film. His arrogance and lack of respect for life (and death) prove to be very troublesome.



UK Zombie-flick 'Before Dawn' coming in May




Monster Pictures has acquired UK scare-flick “Before Dawn” for Australia. The pic, a terrifyingly gruesome British delight by husband and wife duo Dominic Brunt and Joanne Mitchell, will hit screens on 21st May 2014.
Nicky Evans also features in the film, set in the beautiful Yorkshire countryside amidst an apocalyptic viral outbreak.
“A weekend away. An idyllic cottage nestled within the rolling hills of the English Dales. What starts off as a gripping psychological drama between a struggling married couple, suddenly descends into a shocking gruesome nightmare. As panic and confusion sets in, Alex and Meg have to confront the fears within themselves and face a desperate fight for survival against a bloody terror that could literally tear them apart forever.”



~moviehole.net

Zombies have taken over pop culture, but has the trend been played out?




Zombies aren’t the first supernatural entity to take over our imaginations. Not that long ago it was vampires. There were vampire TV shows, vampire movies, vampire books, and vampire video games. Now no one wants to see or hear about another vampire anything. Ironically, the highly contagious virus that spreads the zombie epidemic in all the books and movies, is eerily similar to the way the zombie craze has spread through pop culture. With AMC working on a spinoff to their highly popular zombie show, The Walking Dead (based on a graphic novel series), it doesn’t seem like the zombie apocalypse genre will be going anywhere any time soon. So, will we ever get sick of watching people fight off the undead? Probably. But for now, here are the best ways zombies are still alive and well.

In Print
Richard Matheson, author of I Am Legend, wrote one of the first stories of life after a plague that destroyed all human life. At first it seems like the narrator is the only living thing left, until the creatures come out. They are part vampire-part zombie. I Am Legend was the beginning of many more zombie apocalypse books, including World War ZPatient Zero, and The Zombie Survival Guide.

Not even existing stories are immune. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a parody of Jane Austen’s classic novel became a best seller in 2009. There are pure horror and gore versions, there are light-hearted coming of age versions, and there are cultural commentary versions. Writers have explored every angle in the zombie apocalypse genre, even the possibility of falling in love with one of the half-rotted undead (Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies). But the popularThe Walking Dead graphic novel series is still going strong, and there are even zombie books for kids (My Big Fat Zombie Goldfish), so there are still stories to be told.

On The Small Screen
AMC’s The Walking Dead is obviously the most popular zombie show on TV right now, and for good reason. The show is on its fourth season, and it never fails to shock with gory violence, and unexpected twists. AMC and Robert Kirkman (creator of The Walking Dead books) have confirmed that they are working on a companion series to the original. The still unnamed show is not a spinoff, though, because it will feature all new characters and be capable of standing on its own. It will simply exist in the same world as the original Walking Dead series. We can’t help but wonder how different another show based on the exact same premise will really be.

SyFy has just ordered their own zombie show called Z Nation, that is reported to take place three years after a zombie apocalypse, with only one known survivor still around. Also, the Zombieland TV series, based on the 2009 zombie action-comedy film, Zombieland just premiered on Amazon Prime, adding a more light-hearted option to your weekly zombie genre quota.

On The Big Screen
There are so many zombie movies, it is difficult to keep them all straight. We have the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), which introduced the disturbing image of ravenous rotting corpses chasing after their next meal. Then there was 28 Days Later (2002), which depicted the horror of waking up only to find out that the human race has been wiped out by a virus and you are one of very few survivors. Shaun of the Dead (2004) found the humorous aspects of zombies taking over the world (slow, dumb creatures with no common sense? We’ll be fine). The Brad Pitt film, World War Z, based on the bestselling novel by Max Brooks, gave us the zombie apocalypse from a military standpoint. Then there is the adaptation of Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies that reminds us that zombies used to be human, and maybe the cure for their affliction is just a little bit of love.

There have been big budget zombie movies and small indie versions (Dead Snow, anyone?), but the novelty hasn’t worn off yet. The adaptation of The Zombie Survival Guide is set to be released later this year, proving that zombies are a genre all their own.

Virtual Reality
Resident Evil may be known as a film franchise now, but it started out as a video game. Released in 1996 in Japan with the original name Bio Hazard, it is a survival style game, created for PlayStation. It was so well received that it spawned numerous spinoffs and sequels as well as a few films.
The Walking Dead also has its own video game, which focuses more on plot and characterization than puzzle solving. The story can change based on the decisions you make as a player, making the game slightly different every time you play.

The Last of Us is the biggest zombie action-adventure video game right now. In this third-person game, you follow Joel and 14-year-old Ellie through a post-apocalyptic world, fighting off undead on your way to a resistance group who believe Ellie may be the key to a cure. The game is widely considered the best video game of 2013, and continues to sell millions of copies.

The popularity of zombie survival video games reveal that we aren’t satisfied with watching or reading about people fighting the undead, we actually want to be part of the action.

In Our Minds
So, maybe it was the romance and the immortality that made vampires so appealing, but zombies touch on something else entirely. The idea that a deadly virus could sweep through the world, and render the majority of us flesh-eating monsters, doesn’t seem so far fetched when we really think about it. What would happen if you looked out the window one morning to find a mob of zombies? Would you know how to survive? Cutting off your zombie neighbours’ head should be a piece of cake, at this point. Just take Zombieland’s advice: “don’t be a hero” and “limber up”, you don’t want to pull a muscle and be the first one to die.



~amongmen.com