How do you fight undead robbers?  With undead cops, of course!

Treat Williams plays L.A. police detective Roger Mortis (No, really, that’s his name) with partner Doug Bigelow (Joe Piscopo!) as they investigate why they can’t seem to kill the bad guys as effectively as they used to.  These investigations lead them to Dante Laboratories, which has developed a process for resurrecting the dead for twelve hours.  After a losing fight with the fattest zombie this side of Zombieland, Mortis is killed.  But, then brought back to life by his coroner ex-girlfriend (Clare Kirkconnell) and the most user-friendly resurrection machine ever.  Now, Mortis has twelve hours to solve the case and avenge his own death in a Hawaiian shirt.

Written by Terry Black , Shane’s brother, Dead Heat has a similar action/comedy feel to his brother’s Lethal Weapon, but with zombies.  And such zombies they are!  The opening jewelry store heist features two punk zombie robbers wearing BDSM leather masks!  (Their safe word is “Braaaaaaiiiiinnnnnssssss.”)

But this is nothing compared to the undead hijinks that occur at a Chinese restaurant.  You know all the dead ducks that are hanging in the window?  Or the pigs?  Or the sides of beef?  Yeah.  Good times.  Wait, no, I mean gross times.  Very, very gross.  How do you kill zombie animals with no heads?

Throughout, Williams grounds the whole movie with the ability to take anything that is thrown at him seriously.  The man is not phased by anything.  This is a valuable skill when Joe Piscopo (with an 80s mullet) is delivering some of the best wise-ass remarks in the history of motion pictures.  Watching this film, it’s hard to understand why Piscopo did not fare better in Hollywood.  The man is a scream.  Especially during an exchange with Williams that shows the deep, profundity of cross-dressing jokes between two partners.  Police partners, I mean.  Heterosexual police partners, I mean.  You get the idea.

Added into the mix are performances by the always entertaining Vincent Price(!), Darren McGavin, Keye Luke , and Robert Picardo.  These appearances are almost cameos but they’re all memorable.

In fairness, the movie does play more like it was made for TV, as opposed to a big budget feature but I think this adds to its charm.  Similar to Creepshow .  Dead Heat is a great little horror flick to enjoy on a Saturday afternoon.

The title alone should clue you in. This movie knows exactly what it is, and has no shame about it.

It all starts with an outbreak of the Zombie plague in Africa, and cockroach from there makes its merry way to Thailand,  finally biting a Caucasian business man. We take a break from these shenanigans to look in on some totally different shenanigans involving kidnapping, where several thugs take a page out of the Warner Bros. cartoon playbook to nab some rich guy’s daughter who, as it turns out, is quite the kicker of ass herself.

Said rich guy-in turn-hires the local warrior mercenary ninja, Master Thep (Suthep Po-ngam), to retrieve his daughter. He, being a master of management as well as the way of the ninja, delegates the task to our hero, Khun Krabii (Supakorn Kitsuwon). Khun, using the secret arts of ninja blacksmiths, hammers a wok into some armor and gets on with it.

Meanwhile, the Caucasian Zombie is spreading the plague.

Krabii goes to the local dance club…because, oh who the hell cares? Like every dance club in movies, it’s way cooler than any dance club you can ever hope go to in real life.

Meanwhile, the Caucasian Zombie continues to spread the plague.

The movie goes on like this, with the characters cracking more jokes than the audience can. Then the outbreak hits the dance club and it gets exponential, following the accepted statistical paradigms of a zombie invasion. The Thai military shows up, isolates the outbreak to the condominium/dance club, and then promptly gets eaten faster than a Krispy Kreme doughnut at a Weight Watchers convention.

Master Thep hears of this nonsense and gets into his zombie fighting gear, which includes a battery-powered laser sword (no seriously, it’s powered by D Batteries!), hauling master ninja ass to the scene.

What’s completely great about this movie is that, despite the heavy doses of gore and violence, it has a very light tone.  It pokes fun at everyone and everything: Zombie movies, the Thai government, Gangsters, Kung-fu movies, Transsexuals (Hey, it’s Thailand), and even those terrible Asian pop-songs they always seem to play at Pho restaurants.

This alone would make the movie worthy of a Cavalcade,  but the silly special effects and cartoonish characters send it right over the top into the rarified category of Wild Zero and Godzilla: Final Wars. Combine this with another Cavalcade favorite, Bio Zombie, and you recipe for a great Asian Zombie night.

The members of Wild Zero are the Ramones of Japan, however they also have the divine calling to kill zombies with a thick gooey coating of Japan’s Rock and Roll Spirit. This movie is just that goddamn awesome. As such, we’ve decided to resurrect one of our dead features, the live stream event, and rock it out-jingle style-on this Christmas evening. However, as opposed to just having one of us here tonigh, we’ve got a full cast of characters who are going to be offering input across the twitter-verse

(Oh. Yeah. Keep your eyes peeled for the Japanese Steve Buscemi)

Standard rules apply here, everything here is something shouted out during the course of the movie. By the way, it had its own drinking game, so things became kind of incoherent near the end as all the participants started slurring their words a bit. The lines in quotes are actually taken straight from the film. So don’t blame us.

Enjoy!

• Why are all Asian zombies blue?
• Hubcaps…in SPACE!
• Japanese Rockabilly hair combing!
• We should mention that Wild Zero ships with its own drinking game as a special feature
• WHY CAN’T I SHOOT LIGHTING OUT OF MY GUITAR?!?
• “There’s a wallet on my ass with a rock and roll license!”
• Did we REALLY need the POV shot of him peeing in the urinal? SQUEEEEZE it out, SON!
• Seriously, how many f***ing times do you need to comb your hair in a day?
• What’s with those shorts. . oh, that’s a woman.
• Why. Does. his. underwear. tie. up. on. the side? And did the actor REALLY have to have an erection during the ENTIRE scene?
• Because cocaine in the milk is like a protein shake?
• ZOMBIES!
• And…uh…why is that zombie holding sandals?
• Big. Giant. Hearts? on the screen? WHAT?
• Stick your penis in it, the zombies go away.
• That tiny bike says his penis is at LEAST a full pinky length in size. No overcompensating there!
• never. Ever. Faint in front of the zombies.
• The zombies are going to east Asian Moby! We won’t hear it though, because his shirt is too goddamned loud.
• Mop against zombies= WIN
• At some angles she looks like a man, at other angles she’s a very cute girl? Winona Ryder?
• Why do zombies go straight for the panties?
• Naked Marksmanship FTW!
• Who has fire shooting out of their MICROPHONE?
• They’ve wandered into some sort of building and um. . . SHE IS A MAN!
• It’s the crying game all over again!!! AGGGHHHH! *Runs away to the bathroom*
• “LOVE HAS NO BORDERS NATIONALITIES OR GENDERS!! DOOOO IT!”
• Atheism Limit Break CROWBAR ENGAGE!!!
• God, Guitar Wolf is like this sexy Terminator-alien-thing-man-beast. . .
• That gun’s not a penis. No. Not at all.
• His package has luster. Billy Mays here for the package buffer. . . Giggity.
• Every time they fucking back-fist Asian Steve Buscemi, take a drink.
• Why are they naked . . . and blue. . . and wearing. . .cod. . pieces?
• They’ve just found ALL the guns. . .
• charred barring hips. . . . . . charles brawlin’ herps. . . charlz broilin hips. . . she’s got ‘em. . .
• Ok. Higgins is apparently tweeting everything I’m failing to say during the drinking game.
• Guitar Wolf has got so much rock n’ roll he can kill zombies just with Guitar Picks. . .LIGHTNING GUITAR PICKS!
• Let’s do a bunch of drugs and kill some zombies. Yep, sure. That’s what I’d do.
• “THERE ARE NO BOUNDARIES IN ROCK N’ ROLL! BELIEVE IN ROCK N’ ROLL.”
• He still has an erection. . .
• Gosh he is cute. Wait. That’s not right. . .
• Nipple twist! Tune in Toyko!
• Oh, that’s right, because he’s a wolf. He’s a Guitar Wolf. STILL A MAN!!!
• He took off the wig and he’s EVEN GAYER, how does that work?!
• Well, If this going to be that kind of party, I’m gonna to stick my dick in the mash potatoes.
• ZOMBIE LOVE CAM!
• “I swear by my leather jacket, and by rock n’ roll, I swear, I love you.”
• “Courage and Rock n’ Roll, that’s what he taught me that night.”
• Ladies and Gentlemen, this concludes this mass of the Church of the Cavalcade, we thank for your attendance and my penis is not that big.
• The previous is what happens when you leave the twitter window open for random people to type. BAD Christmas guests! BAD!

I have to hand it to director Wilson Yip, when he goes schlock, he goes all the way.

This movie focuses on two slacker mall workers, Woody Invincible (Jordan Chan) and Crazy B (Sam Lee) who barely work at a VCD store (What’s up, Late 90’s?!) and generally spend their days trying to make easy money by selling things or stealing from a girl who works at the beauty shop (Tong Ying-Ying).

On the way back from picking up their boss’s car, the two troublemakers hit a guy who is carrying the Zombie Juice Extract in a bulletproof case (good idea), which itself is in a plastic soda bottle (bad idea). He says “soft drink” while choking on his own blood, not realizing he’s dooming himself. The pair give him the beverage o’ doom before he dies and throw him in the trunk of their car. Because, well, when you hit someone with your car and kill them with orange soda, you ought to hang onto the evidence.

Then the movie veers off into shenanigans around the mall for at least another thirty minutes before the vehicularly-man-slaughtered-dude comes back as a member of the undead and makes with the bitey-bitey/spready-spready necessary to make a zombie film.

Seriously, this movie has the feeling of a meandering Kevin Smith-style slacker comedy, even when the undead start showing up, because both Woody and Crazy just aren’t as motivated as your average zombie fighting heroes. Even when the action starts, they (and the director) don’t even pretend that everything they know about zombies wasn’t just learned from playing video games.

Speaking of that…

Each character in the film is introduced with a 360 flyby complete with an overlay of their stats as if they were in a fighting game. Later on, a character picks up a gun and “Reload” is flashed on the screen. It’s sad when you find out Uwe Boll wasn’t quite the genius you thought he was when he made House of the Dead . Wait, what?-The Management

Once it finally gets rolling, this movie’s got that whole wacky/gore balance thing down pat. An arm gets ripped off, and blood splashes out of victims like they were 100% water instead of the usual 70. Though by the time the flick gets to the final reel, it takes quite the dark turn, even with it lacking any sort of real coherence. Eventually you realize that everyone here is fair game for zombie meats. This is at once an awesome point of genre defiance and a little disheartening, because what’s the point if no body makes it out alive?

Overall, this movie is an enjoyably weird flick-and as an added bonus you can turn on the English dub, which is the very definition of half-assed voice work. If you end up Cavalcading it, which I totally recommend by the way, Wild Zero would be a fine choice to keep the whole Asian weird-horror-comedy thing going.

To say that we love zombies is akin to saying water is wet or fire is hot. It’s no accident that our very first Cavalcade event was Zombies, or that we’re returning to them again at the upcoming Event 18 happening in just under 2 weeks. Zombies are the extra chunky gore-butter on our fleshy-french toast in the morning.

That said, we’re unbelievably jacked about the 2nd Annual Silver Spring Zombie Walk coming on October 24th. What is a Zombie Walk? Well, it is, quite simply, a bunch of people dressing up like zombies and going a-monstering through a town, in this case downtown Silver Spring. It’s a whirligig-o-wacky-fun, and an altogether fantastic way to spend an evening.

The plan thus far (from their website):

• 7:30-8:00 PM Meet at Quarry House
• 8:01 PM Drink beer, eat tots (and brains)
• 8:12 PM Start playing “Thriller” on the jukebox
• 9:00 PM Rally the undead
• 9:10 PM Leave Quarry House on proposed walk path
• 9:15 PM Begin attacking people on Ellsworth Drive
• 9:30 PM Sneak into McGinty’s for Zombie Shots
• 9:40 PM Arrive at AFI Silver Theatre
• 10:00 PM “Shaun of the Dead” begins at AFI
• 12:00 AM After Party at McGinty’s Public House

We just managed to make last year’s event, and had a blast. Pics from the event below:

We’ll definitely be talking more about this event in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

It’s the middle of June during the Summer of ‘93. I’m 16 years old and instead of spending my vacation trying to pick up girls at the local pool or hanging out at the mall like any respectable teenage degenerate, I’m hunched over an easel in a studio classroom underneath the Corcoran Art Gallery. Sitting next to me is another kid of similar height and build, both of us in the 6-foot range, and neither weighing over 145 pounds.

His name is Kevin and we share a strange thing in common: We were born exactly one year apart. In the same hospital. You see, through a series of complications not important enough to mention, we were both forced to present our birth certificates to attend this particular class. It was then that we noticed we were both born on October 28th at 1:45 p.m. in George Washington Memorial Hospital. I in 1976, and he in ‘77. Using this and the fact that we were eerily similar as a springboard, we kick up a friendship, and it’s at this time he passes me a beat-up video tape with the words “Evil Dead 2” scrawled across the edge in ballpoint. Thus was my first exposure to the manic mind of Sam Raimi, and the reigning king of B Movies: Bruce Campbell.

The tale is a fairly simple one. Ash (Campbell) and his girlfriend Linda take a romantic vacation to a seemingly abandoned cabin in the woods, and before you can say “Klatu Verata Nictu”, Ash plays a found tape reciting passages from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, the Book of the Dead-unleashing an evil force which soon takes possession of Linda. Romantic getaway effectively over, Ash is forced to kill, dismember, and bury her. But it ain’t over, because something in the woods remains and continues to terrorize Ash.

In other words: It’s a haunted house/woods movie. Only one with zombies, demons, and the Three Stooges thrown in the mix. A hyper-kinetic picture that effectively scares as much as it sparks laughter. A film that became such a success that it lead to a wide release sequel, Army of Darkness-which abandoned most of the horror in favor of Action/Adventure and is a cult-classic in its own right. But we’re not here to talk about the giddy glee that Evil Dead II inspires. No, we’re here to talk about the Chainsaw.

Name: Chainsaw Arm

Size: 860 x 240 x 270mm

Special Abilities: Disembowling and Decapitating Demons, Run for weeks on a single tank.

Notes: A must for the working demon hunter on the go, this do-it-yourself bionic attachment comes in a variety of colors and styles, sure to fit every every occasion!

Roughly a third of the way through the picture, the evil pursuing Ash gets into his hand and it goes “bad”, trying repeatedly to kill him in one of the more memorable scenes of the picture. So Ash does the only sensible thing: he cuts it off with the Chainsaw. Then much later in the picture, when he decides he’s had just about enough of these Evil Dead causing trouble, he devises a mount that attaches to his wrist, enabling him to attach the chainsaw…thus creating one of the most famous monster fighting weapons in movie history, and cementing this flick’s place in our list.

Sure, you could argue that in the follow-up, Army of Darkness, we got the Chainsaw arm, Boomstick Kata, Plate Mail Fist, and the Death-moldsmobile. We certainly did. But nothing beats the first appearance of the chainsaw arm, so we’re going with the one, the only, Evil Dead II.

Groovy.