Culture Archive

I didn’t grow up with zombies on my brain (pun totally intended) or a massive collection of George Romero films situated below my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trade paperbacks. For as long as I can remember, vampires have been my choice of undead entity. In fact, I’ve only ever watched one classic zombie movie, and this was back when my Dad brought home a VHS copy of the original Night of the Living Dead from our local PathMark since it only cost $2. I’ve never seen Evil Dead in its entirety. I only watched Zombieland and Resident Evil (gulp!) because they seemed entertaining and had neat special effects. I saw Shaun of the Dead in theaters and found it humorous, but in retrospect I think that was due mainly to the British accents (life is just funnier in cockney!) However, I have since gained a much deeper appreciation of zombie fiction in many of its forms, from the grotesquely horrific to the absurdly ridiculous, and this is all because of a little independently produced feature-length film which goes by the name of Blaming George Romero, written and produced by, and starring friend and fellow filmmaker Sam Platizky and directed by Robert Lise, who stars in the film as well. This tremendously funny zombie comedy about a group of college kids convinced that the “zombacalypse” has finally arrived thoroughly disemboweled me the first time I watched it - That’s how dang hard I laughed.

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