AMC zombie series from Frank 'Majestic' Darabont - The Walking Dead

Yeah, I think they were.

I only saw the commercials so as far as I'm concerned, IT NEVER HAPPENED

read the Wikipedia article for "Harper's Island", it is lolworthy

oh hahaha and thank go "fear itself" did choose to tackle the Wendigo, which i am sure was done with great skill and aplomb. and with further imdb research it was directed by the last winter dude, so he seems to be a little wendigo obsessed. to prove this, he also did the 2001 film "Wendigo".

masters of horror was some bullshit too imo

for the most part

Masters of Bore-or, am i rite?

actually looking through the fear itself director list is like a whos who of directors no one should hire, its kind of amazing

xpost yeah i hated like 90% of the masters of horror stuff, was only really down w/fair-haired child

i sort of enjoyed the flagrantly cruddy badness of masters of horror. like tales from the crypt episodes. shame how little the sensibilities of the various directors come through though (miike aside, yikes).

I tried watching Haven for a while but that was kind of a snooze. And not really very horror. More boring supernatural.

The first ep of Masters of Horror, the Coscarelli joint was pretty cool I remember. I heard some okay things about Carpenter's two, "Cigarette Burns" and "Pro Life" but I honestly couldn't get my head around watching it because modern day Carpenter is just never a good thing. I love him, but I hate him, ya know? And he and women, especially now that he's old and crabby...yeesh.

Oh and the Joe Dante political satire was basically a giant facepalm.

The zombies make excellent noises in this. I found it all incredibly gripping, even though I didn't like the comic much.

What's the consensus in this shockingly long thread? Tried to skim it and got bogged down in a sexism argument.

yay @ zombies! vs
eyeroll @ "zombies"

is pretty much how it boils down

Well at the beginning of the pilot my default position was the latter, but by the end it was the former. Well done The Walking Dead.

That's what I'm sayin!

There was more pathos for the zombies than in your average thing, that could be an interesting tack to take.

nothing new here I thought. The leads seem as lifeless and wooden as the zombies themselves. will be skipping...

I'll mark you down for eyeroll @ "zombies"

Finally saw this. Wasn't bad. I was, however, struck by the graphic violence vs. the relatively chaste language. Guess AMC has different inscrutable standards than FX. And yeah, lots of weird woman hating in this ep, though there are plenty of strong women to come.

MASSIVE xxxxxposts and this is a major

MAJOR POTENTIAL SPOILER avert your eyes if needed but:

if when zombies sense people their impulse is to head over and eat them and tear them apart until there's nothing left, where do new zombies come from?
― candid gamera (s1ocki), Tuesday, November 2, 2010 12:39 PM (2 days ago)

well, this doesn't address your "tear them apart until there's nothing left" but in the comic, one of the major zombie rules that has NOT yet shown up in the show but almost certainly WILL (because some big plot points circle around it) is that if ANYBODY in this new world dies (whether it's from a zombie bite or not), they eventually come back to life as a zombie.

Which is part of what makes the title cutesy: the walking dead doesn't really refer so much to the zombies as it does to those who will ultimately BE zombies in the not-too-distant future, which is to say our protagonists do u c

That's pretty cool!

one of the major zombie rules that has NOT yet shown up in the show but almost certainly WILL (because some big plot points circle around it) is that if ANYBODY in this new world dies (whether it's from a zombie bite or not), they eventually come back to life as a zombie.

good call, imo, cuz even in romero-verse, the initial zombie plague consists of dead risen from graveyards and the like. not bite victims, but just any old sort of dead people that happen to have been exposed to moon mist. i mean, if it were bite transmitted only, it'd be fairly easy to control, at least outside the initial outbreak area.

it also makes the story much more open ended, because the potential is there (and some of the comics storylines outline and point to) a world in which people get it together enough to form communities and procreate and have multiple post-zombie generations and it just becomes part of life that there are always going to be these predators as part of the new landscape.

In other words, there's not a world war z style reclamation so much as we learn to live an uneasy existence with our own dead

^ downside of this is that zombies become boring, like the flu. o shit there is zombies in the alley. get the kids inside and call the squad.

yah, but the upside is that before long zombies are like narcotrafickers in Breaking Bad (or alcohol in Mad Men? I dunno, there are no good metaphors here) and we just get into the human relationships and people fucking each other up. That's why complaints about acting/writing are relevant because by the time this gets to season three, zombies are gonna be much less of a major immediate problem and more like a constant natural disaster that letting your guard down around will get you killed over

human drama on TV is never an upside

i mean, i mostly just want to see spock be quizzical in technicolor

or zombies eating people

i get that too. but even two years of "AH ZOMBIE AH NOM NOM NOM" is gonna get tired. They gotta produce some human interest that's soapy enough. Man that kid had better be able to act.

yeah, no, agreed. was kidding mostly. have a certain resistance to EVERYTHING being all soapy and long-form dramatic on TV these days, but overall quality of writing is way better than it's ever been, so can't complain too much. in that regard, this show needs to get its game up, maybe just a little. nobody's bad, but our leads and general tone of dialogue leave me cold. hoping for wife/gf & kid itr.

i'm totally cool with giving this a season before i levy judgment one way or another in terms of acting and plot. AH ZOMBIE AH NOM NOM NOM is gonna be fine for at least eight hours.

have a certain resistance to EVERYTHING being all soapy and long-form dramatic on TV these days

I don't know how much TV you watch, but let me assure you that this is not a catching disease.

The networks and cable channels that do take the risk (and it's still a pretty significant risk) to put on a show that takes time to build and develop an audience and hopefully later sell on DVD -- well, I have nothing bad to say about them. They're walking a tightrope, because the shows have to build episode by episode enough that you can't start watching in the middle, but the shows can't be so slow that they allow for dead spots.

his complete lack of curiosity as to how the fuck this happened.

Instead of trying to survive, he will try to find someone and just ask how this happened. Fuck survival. ;-)

xp, and sorry for the rant, but...

Also, what old-style TV network has even tried to do this? And don't say "Lost" -- you could give that show as much attention as you could afford without giving up sleeping, and it still wouldn't make any goddamn sense. That's not long-form drama, it's just increasingly complicated and interestingly shaped piles of turds. And don't say soap opera either, because that's not really long-form, it's endless-form, which is different, and requires a different kind of writing. The long-form TV drama as it is currently being made isn't just TV that leaves you hanging every week, it's a very new kind of storytelling on TV, made possible by a new kind of TV market. HBO pioneered it, and AMC really hung their stuff out over the ledge when they decided to try the same thing. More than HBO did, even, because they're not even PAY cable, they're just cable. (Though I think there's less and less difference.)

At any rate, soapy happens and always will, but the really good stuff on TV is better than any good stuff has ever been. It's a goddamn golden age. Enjoy it while it lasts, I say.

I very much agree with the golden age thing, Kenan. We're bombarded with fantastic telly.

yeh, no complaints in that dep't. most all my favorite television shows are products of the last 10 years. this isn't to say that i don't get tired of certain formulae.

xp - Co-sign you both. You make an excellent point there, Kenan.

A few of my acquaintances still trot out the tired old "I don't watch TV" line in a sniffy manner, which to my mind just betrays ignorance of how much great stuff there has been in the last decade or so.

On topic, I really dug TWD, particularly the unstinting nastiness of the gore which was surprisingly close to the knuckle for a TV show. I know nothing about the source material, so have no idea where it's going long-term, but will def. be watching to find out.

I HATE people who look down on telly. (Well, not really.)

I think I'll read the books now. My husband has been raving about the comics for the longest time.

Romero already did the practical living with the dead thing in "Land of the Dead." And wrt the bite thing, it's always been zombie lore that the "dead or recently dead" come back to life. The bite just hastens death. You get bit, the virus kills you, you come back as a zombie.

I thought this was pretty good. I'll keep watching.

i agree we're in a tv golden age

doesn't make this show any better

xp yeah, but in Walking Dead world (the comic at least) you don't need to get bit. If you die, you turn. It's something in the earth or whatever. That means when granpa dies a natural death, you don't bury him; you shoot him in the head.

you say potato

i say aaaaaaagggggggggghhh brains aaaaaaaaagh

-o

lol forks

And wrt the bite thing, it's always been zombie lore that the "dead or recently dead" come back to life. The bite just hastens death. You get bit, the virus kills you, you come back as a zombie.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, November 4, 2010 6:39 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, i spoke too hastily. those are the basic "rules." but many contemporary zombie flicks suggest that only the bitten go shambly. varies film to film though.

"only the bitten go shambly"...if this thing goes into season 2, that's our thread title right there

cosine