Also coming from Amazon.com - Zombie Pumpkins!
First up is Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, based on Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel. Seth Grahame-Smith is the guy who started those awful mashup books that mix public domain stories with werewolves and zombies and crap. Soon everyone rushed to make a cheap buck, and now the bookstore shelves are littered with this garbage, making it harder to find novels about space babes kicking butt. I mean, harder to find William Shakespeare books. Yeah, that’s it! So Lincoln had a secret journal where he killed vampires, and vampires caused the Civil War and are responsible for slavery! Timur Bekmambetov directs, and Benjamin Walker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rufus Sewell, Jimmi Simpson, Dominic Cooper, and Alan Tudyk star.
Not to be outdone, the Asylum has their own Lincoln killing things movie: Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies!
Just check out this poster:
And also there’s a boring true life biography of Lincoln coming out, called Lincoln. Steven Spielberg directs it and Daniel Day-Lewis is Lincoln. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jared Harris, Tommy Lee Jones, Jackie Earle Haley, James Spader, and Sally Field also star. It will probably be good and get Oscar noms. If you’re into that sort of stuff.
Few challenges, however, are as unusual as the latest foe facing Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice – a plague of the undead sent to reduce the picturesque villages of Longbourn and Meryton to smouldering ruins.
Hollywood studios are bidding to turn a radical reworking of Austen’s most popular book, now called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a parody to be published in April, into a blockbuster movie.
Desperate for new ideas, studio chiefs hope “P&P&Z” will mark the bloody birth of a feral offspring of classic British literature: “monster-lit”.
The idea of mixing different genres has spread from pop music, where old tunes are merged to make fresh hits, to the internet with fan homages such as Lizzie the Vampire Slayer, where Bennet is transported into the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The forthcoming novel is the first mainstream “mash-up” of Austen and horror, two of the most popular film genres of the past decade. It has been made possible only because Austen is out of copyright.
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From then on it was easy to imagine Bennet and her four sisters as zombie slayers, trained since childhood in the deadly arts of Chinese kung fu, and Fitzwilliam Darcy as a promoter of the socially superior ninja skills of Japan. Together they stand bonnet to epaulette against a plague of cannibalis-tic interlopers from the accursed city of London.
Grahame-Smith hopes that his talent agency, William Morris, will sign a film deal with a studio in the next few weeks.
“About 85% is the original Jane Austen text,” he said. “I hated her when I was forced to read Austen in school, but when I started rereading I realised she was a brutal, but very funny, satirist. I can only aspire to be as mean-spirited as she could be.”
Other talent agencies are pitching their own slate of monster-lit titles. They include a version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, where Catherine, the deceased heroine, returns as a Japanese-style ghost not only to haunt but also to terrorise Heathcliff.
In a reworking of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre , M r Rochester has something more terrible than an insane spouse in his attic, and a version of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss is powered by human sacrifice.
aka House of the Dead 2: Dead Aim
2006
Starring
Emmanuelle Vaugier as Alex “Nightingale”
Ed Quinn as Ellis
Sticky Fingaz as Dalton
Victoria Pratt as Henson
James Parks as Bart
Dan Southworth as Nakagawa
Nadine Velazquez as Rodriguez
Sid Haig as Professor Curien
Directed by Michael Hurst
Dr. Uwe Boll shocked the world with his adaptation of Sega Games House of the Dead. Shocked as in people were shocked at how inept and mishandled a movie could be in this day and age. Despite being a bigger box office bomb than Hiroshima, House of the Dead made money, mostly through advanced DVD sales and television rights selling, combined with a German tax loophole that Boll is an expert in exploiting. Following the rules of Hollywood, if a movie even makes 1/2 a cent of profit, a sequel is instantly approved. Thus, we now are graced with House of the Dead 2. 95% of sequels are worse than their predecessors, but this is one of the rare 5% that is actually better than the film it’s related to. Does that make HOTD2 a good movie? Far from it, but it’s much more fun, and put together better. It’s still full of plot holes so large the planet earth could glide through with zero difficulty, and acting that’s outshone by posters on the wall. Dr. Boll was busy filming BloodRayne, so he was unable to make Cinematic Abortion 2: Abortion Boogaloo, so instead we get former kickboxing champion Michael Hurst. Michael Hurst may be familiar to you as the cowriter of Mansquito and Nature Unleashed: Fire, so he is versatile in the realm of schlock and crap. The two main stars are Ed Quinn from Starship Troopers 2, and Emmanuelle Vaugier, fresh off her starring role in Cerberus. Bonus stars who are actually much more famous than the leads include Sticky Fingaz as the leader of the Special forces group, who will become Blade in the TV series based on the movies. We also get Sid Haig, from House of 1000 Corpses, who must be trying to corner the market on House of…. movies, when he’s not starring with Pam Grier. There’s also a Power Ranger running around somewhere. Sure, it’s a dangerous film, fraught with the horrors of bad cinema, but it outshines it’s predecessor in several way. Is there any video game scenes as cuts? Is there 360 degree Matrix-style shots of every character? Is the small improvements enough to prevent damage to the minds of those who see this? Read on, read on…
aka Virus
1980
Starring
Margit Evelyn Newton as Lia Rousseau
Franco Garofalo as Zantoro
Selan Karay as Max
Directed by Bruno Mattei
Low budget Italian Xerox copy of Dawn of the Dead, except this machine is out of toner and keeps giving a “PC Load Letter” error. Large portions of this film are just completely ridiculous, and I’m not talking about the fact the dead is rising to eat the living. If I were to take out the stock footage, the film would be around twenty minutes long. The long scenes are made even longer by their consistent slow motion state. Why bring attention to the stock by dragging it out and separating it from the rest of the inane film? Italy is known for making low budget rip offs of US films, especially around this time when they were pumping out hundreds of films, most of which had quick lives if they even made it to theaters before they helped found the video cassette boom of the eighties. In this case, someone figured that if they took Dawn of the Dead and added a few cannibal scenes, they’d score two genres for the price of one! Instead, they got an incomprehensible mess that succeeds only in spectacular failure on all fronts. So put on a tutu and top hat, grab your cane, and get ready to live the Hell of the Living Dead!
