After posting about James Joyce the other day, I guess it’s only natural that I sink immediately back into the dregs of pop culture. I’ve stumbled across four more zombie artifacts during the past several months …
First, while shopping at the insanely cool Atomic Zombie in Albuquerque earlier this month, I found a Shaun of the Dead action figure, complete with his own cricket bat for bonking zombies. Needless to say, Shaun is now perched proudly on my office desk, ready to fend off attacks of the undead.
Then, on Christmas morning, I found a Captain Spaulding action figure under the tree (he’s from House of 1,000 Corpses, Rob Zombie’s brilliant bloodbath.) Sadly, the good captain probably isn’t work friendly. The back of his shirt says “If I wanted to listen to an asshole, I’d fart.” Nice. And he’s motion activated, spitting out creepy wisdom every time you walk past. Also, kudos to Graveyard Records for working with Lara to get the Captain under the tree in time for Xmas.
Third, I found a pretty cool zombie book, Monster Island by David Wellington. I’ve generally steered clear of zombie fiction, figuring cinema is more than enough for my obsession. But a review of this book intrigued me. It features a talking zombie, a med student who, in the midst of the zombie plague, figures out that zombies are so freakin’ stupid because their brain dies in the time between the person dies and reanimation occurs. So he hooks himself up to a dialysis machine, immerses himself in a tub of ice and voila. When he reanimates, he can think and speak. It reminds me, strangely, of John Gardner’s Grendel, which is Beowulf written from the monster’s perspective. The monster, Grendel, approaches humans looking for a friend and is met with hostility. So he responds in kind. Gary the zombie has a similar experience and goes on to lead an army of the undead. A few things about the book irked me. For instance, the Scottish bog zombie says things like “lad” and “wee bairns,” even though I’m guessing those words weren’t common in 1600 B.C. when he was sacrificed and tossed into the bogs. But that’s nitpicking. There are plenty of plot twists. There’s a small army of Somali teen girls with guns. And of course, numerous brains are eaten.
And finally, Tivo fetched a zombie movie that I’d never seen, Undead, a 2004 Australian film. It starts off great with a strange meteor shower and lots of slow-moving zombies (the best kind … I’m a purist in that sense.) But it drifts into a strange alien thing that didn’t quite do it for me. I kept waiting for the flesh-eating to recommence and it never really did. Still, it has plenty of gore, lots of amusing one-liners and more than a few zombie moments.