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.