How Did I Forget About This?

I've just gotten done preparing samples that I'm going to analyze, and I don't know if I'll be done before midnight, so I thought I'd put this up now.

I'm not one who claims to be exactly linked in to popular culture at large. I don't have cable (as I'm down with either watching things online at a network's website or waiting for Netflix to bring me television and it's way cheaper that way) so I tend to miss a lot of things, but I also try to keep up with news sources, radio and the intertubes. Having said that, I've let something slip so drastically that I fear that I might have to stop claiming to be an enthusiast of the genre. I am speaking, of course, of tomorrow's release of Diary of the Dead.


IMDB.com claims one of the other taglines is "Shoot the Dead" which I like for its "Hey Guys! Zombies!" straightforwardness, but I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a reference to something which is more conventionally done with the dead

For some reason, it was stuck in my mind that this was coming out in May. Apparently, that was completely wrong, and now I'll have to fit seeing (and then reviewing) Diary of the Dead into the weekend, which sadly shouldn't be too hard. I could write for a very long time on the subject of zombies in horror fiction, of my preference for slow zombies in the eternal slow (Romero) zombies versus Fast (28 Days Later) zombies which does not hinge upon the pedantic argument that Boyle's zombies aren't true zombies because they're not dead. I grant Boyle's zombies "zombie status" but still find the slower counterparts more interesting. And while I was disappointed with Land of the Dead, I'm not holding up high expectations for Diary. It's not going to be in the same league as Night or Dawn because those were simply astonishing blends of horror and social commentary (a bit more on the latter in Dawn) that it's unfair to expect Romero to match it, though I do maintain that largely avoiding the overt social commentary is what made me not like the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead all that much. The premise sounds a bit too much like Blair Witch Project with Zombies but I think if executed well, it should be an interesting twist on the origin-bit of the whole zombie tale and could provide an interesting device to follow the survivors who are, after all, what the story's really all about (a prime example of a story which executes this very well, in my opinion are the Walking Dead series).

I'll be interested to see, because I can't find much information online (in the time I'm giving myself to look for it) whether Romero continued to set his movies in Pittsburgh. That's always added a little bit to the appeal of his movies for me, if I'm able to recognize that sometimes, cemeteries in Evans City get screen time, that if there's a zombie outbreak, George Romero envisions the residents of Johnstown having a blast with the whole affair and that I can remember going to the Monroeville Mall on days when it was, thankfully, cleared of the undead. Even when he either set Day explicitly elsewhere, it was nice to know that it was filmed in Beaver Falls of all places, and Land let me know what downtown would look like from Mt. Washington if there were suddenly a giant citadel in the middle of it.

As I said, I could go on about that for a very, very long time, but I won't. I'll save that for the review, and for when I have more free time.

So yes. Expect a post on that soonish.