Men vs. Zombies!!!

Over the holiday break I painted the shotgun guys from the Zombies!!! board game. They're even smaller than 28mm scale, and these pieces are not finely detailed; I'd call them tokens rather than miniatures. The paint jobs are simplistic, but I think they look at least a little better than they did when they were just monochromatic plastic. 
 

10 Monsters I could Outrun If I Had To

1. The Mummy (Boris Karloff version) 
2. The Blob (original version) 
3. Frankenstein's Monster (Boris Karloff version) 
4. The Bride of Frankenstein
5. The Invisible Man (Claude Rains version) 
6. The Creature from the Black Lagoon (on land) 
7. Standard Dalek (no antrigravs installed) 
8. The Creeping Terror
9. Romero-style zombies
10. The Green Slime

The key in all cases is to ensure you don't get cornered. Given an open playing field, the average healthy human being who doesn't panic or take stupid chances or box themselves in should be able to escape any of these guys without too much trouble, although there's a chance you might get shot in the back by a Dalek with a death beam.

 

The Monsters Are Due on Mini Street

The Horde After Midnight

Quick Takes: Maggie

What a sad, lovely vignette Maggie (Henry Hobson, 2015) turned out to be, with a heartbreaking, vulnerable performance from Abigail Breslin as zombie-infected Maggie and a surprisingly warm, sensitive turn from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who actually sheds believable tears here. It's a meditative, slow-paced film, more character study than horror movie, though there are certainly a couple of horrifying moments, grounded by poor Maggie's experience as one of the infected. Her dad, Wade (Schwarzenegger) spends the entire film keeping a dim flicker of hope alive, but you can tell he knows his little girl is doomed, and that one day soon she will succumb to the disease and turn into a mindless, raving cannibal. His only choices are to put her in government quarantine...or put a merciful end to her suffering.

Efficiently directed with stark yet beautiful cinematography and a smart, chilling, but compassionate screenplay, Maggie is horror with a heart.

Maggie Maybe Good?

Just when it starts to feel as if the zombie genre is getting cluttered and tired comes along something that might have a glitter of promise. If the trailer is anything to go by, this seems like an atypically sensitive role for Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I certainly like the idea of a zombie movie that focuses on one particular zombie, and on a father's effort to cure her. I hope this movie lives up to the promise of this intriguing glimpse. 

Map of the Dead: Edmonton and Leaf Rapids

What will you do when the dead rise from their graves? I've always feared that I would die within the first few minutes of a zombie apocalypse, but thanks to Map of the Dead I feel a little better prepared. Simply type in your home address to discover zombie danger zones and the locations of your community's supply depots.

The map is a little thin - Edmonton certainly has more malls than indicated, and my own dental clinic is missing - but it's certainly a fun idea. Here's a closer look at my vicinity:

West Edmonton Mall would be a great place for supplies, but it's also a danger zone, and for good reason; crammed with tourists by the thousands, the mall could be a death trap.

On the other hand, Leaf Rapids, Manitoba, is nearly bereft of supplies, but with a tiny population there wouldn't be that many zombies anyway.

The Waking Dead

Members of the University of Alberta Star Trek Club celebrate Halloween 1990. Taken just outside my dorm room at 139 Kelsey Hall, U of A.

While watching AMC's The Walking Dead this Halloween night, it occurred to me that only in parodies and comedies of science fiction, fantasy or horror stories do the characters show any familiarity with the dangers they face. They possess no genre awareness.

If you or I suddenly woke up to find that vampires, werewolves, or zombies were running amok, we'd be terrified - but we wouldn't be ignorant. Decades of books, television shows, movies, comics, even stage plays have shown us how to respond. Everyone in the Western world knows that you kill werewolves with silver bullets, vampires with a stake to the heart, zombies with a bullet to the brain.

On The Walking Dead, the protagonists discover how to kill zombies only by accident. They don't even use the word "zombies;" they call the living dead "walkers." It's as if they grew up in a world without George Romero and Night of the Living Dead, or even the works of Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide.

We see this over and over again in dramatic genre fiction. An unprecedented catastrophe occurs, and none of the main characters seem to have ever read a science fiction novel or seen a horror movie. If the heroes only had a little genre awareness, they'd be far better prepared to tackle whatever outrageous genre problems facing them. There would be no need to learn by deadly experience, to lose redshirts or other cannon fodder in the early hours of the catastrophe.*

Years ago, I mused about the possibility that writers and other creative types don't actually create anything, that they are in fact merely tapping into parallel universes with some as yet undiscovered sensory organ. Some friends of mine hated this idea, with good reason - it does, after all, destroy the idea of the human imagination - but I thought it might make a pretty good hook for a story or two...stories I haven't written yet, of course.

But during The Walking Dead's opening episode tonight, I remembered my idea and thought to myself, perhaps there's even more going on here than I originally speculated. Perhaps writers and directors and painters are somehow inoculating our world against such horrors merely by bearing witness to the awful things that happen on other Earths. Think about it: if Earth is ever faced with an alien invasion or a zombie plague or body snatchers that take over our loved ones, there will be millions of people who know how to deal with the problem from the first moment, because they've seen or read all the solutions already. In the face of that vast pool of knowledge, perhaps genre threats have declared our world, the "real" world, off-limits. If you were a vampire, would you set up shop here? You wouldn't last a week before a gang of garlic-wearing teenagers were water-bombing your crypt with holy water.

So here's to the dreamers, those who see beyond our reality into other worlds more terrifying than our own. Perhaps their dark visions have protected us from the lurking terrors that stalk the many universes, beasts and madmen that move on to other, less imaginative worlds...

*Of course the real reason protagonists lack genre awareness is because professional writers know it would be tiresome to begin each and every story with their characters talking about how "they saw this exact situation on TV!"

Zombieland: A Nice Place to Visit...

Like any right-thinking individual, I have a great deal of affection for the Zombie Apocalypse sub-genre of horror. My favourite zombie film remains George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, aka "the one in the shopping mall." That film has just the right mix of tension, satire, horror and laughs to make it an undead classic.

Zombieland isn't in Dawn of the Dead's league, but it is funny, heartfelt and even romantic. It's sensitive and sincere. The four characters - known initially only by their hometowns - each have their own quirks, and while broadly drawn, they grow and change throughout the course of the film to outgrow their stereotypes: neurotic nebbish, redneck, spunky little girl, slick con woman. Each character has a growth arc, even though they're kept busy killing zombies and scavenging the wasteland throughout the film. The film plays the apocalyptic situations for laughs most of the time, then stuns the viewer by reminding us of the very human cost of the end of civilization. The redneck's obsessive quest for a popular snack food masks the pain he's really feeling, while the nebbish's obsession with his rules of survival clearly shows that his coping mechanisms need to change if he hopes to experience emotional growth. The women, too, are faced with the necessity to make themselves vulnerable, to trust in others in the worst possible circumstances. Yes, this is just a zombie film, but because the characters are more than cardboard cutouts, the audience gets invested in the story. We care about these people, because they're very much like us.

The film makes clever use of special effects to transform credit sequences and pop-up subtitles a living, breathing part of the film, a technique that reminds me of nothing so much as Will Eisner's technique in his famous comic strip, The Spirit. This sort of thing is becoming more common - I've noticed it on Fringe, for example. Some people might find the device intrusive, but it struck me as quite clever.

Horror film sequels have a mixed track record, so I won't call for more adventures in Zombieland - the ending is satisfying enough for this film to stand on its own. But if a sequel does come along, so will I - not for the zombie mayhem, but because I wonder if these characters have more room to grow.

Everything's Better with Zombies

A couple of posts ago, "anonymous" mentioned that he was developing a variant of the boardgame Settlers of Cataan featuring zombies from, well, Zombies!!!. I think that's a terrific idea, and I hope to play one day soon.

The idea made me wonder if other games could be modified to add shambling zombie action. Certainly the infamous Bruce Lee Game (BruceLeeGame!) would be simple enough to combine with Zombies; just add a few Zombie cards to the deck, add random zombie attacks on your dojos, and you're set. Really, how come no one's made a movie in which Bruce Lee fights off hordes of zombies? (They'd all line up and attack one at a time, of course.)

Zombie Monopoly might be fun. You could add random Zombie cards to Chance and Community Chest..."You have been eaten by a zombie. Do not pass go, do not collect $200 dollars." Zombies could spring up on your holdings, bringing down your property values. "Oh no! Just when I paid off my mortgage!"

I thought about zombie Scrabble, but couldn't come up with anything but bonus points for spelling out certain words, such as "brains," "zombies," "splatterpunk," "boomstick," etc.

Zombie charades would get pretty tedious after a couple of turns:

"Okay, one word..."

(Player tilts his head back, drools, extends one arm, shuffles around in random circles) "Urrrgh...ullllh...mulllghh..."

"Zombie!"

Zombie Axis and Allies might be cool. The game starts as normal, but after two turns, zombies spring up in a randomly chosen territory. They multiply very rapidly, and the focus of the game shifts from a world war between powers to a combined effort for survival, Nazis, Allies and Japanese working together to fight off the horde. Zombie Risk could work the same way.

In the world of computer games, someone should write a Zombie Outbreak mod for Civilization. I would think it would be deceptively simple...just replace roaming barbarians with zombies, but have them multiply faster. And if they win combat with your unit, the unit isn't just destroyed - it's turned into a zombie too!

Worst Zombie Fighters Ever

On Saturday night, Pete, Colin, Mike, Jeff and I gathered for a relaxing night of board games. We started off with Settlers of Catan - great game - but the real story of the night was what must have been the most inept game of Zombies!!! ever played.

For those unfamiliar with Zombies!!!, the game attempts to recreate the plot and atmosphere of a typical zombie film. A group of desperate survivors stands in the middle of a city overrun with shambling, flesh-eating zombies; they must find a way to escape the city before they're devoured by the mindless but deadly creatures.

The players start off in the town square; each turn, a new section of the city is revealed, either a street or building of some sort. The last section of the city to be revealed is the helicopter pad. The first player to reach the helicopter escapes; the rest are left behind to their fate.

As it happened, I took the first turn. I dashed into the street to fight my first zombie. The odds of winning hand-to-hand combat with one of the game's zombies really aren't that bad; you roll a 6-sided die to determine your fate. If you roll 4-6, you win and add the zombie to your collection; 1-3, and you lose one of three bullets or one of three hearts. Once you enter combat with a zombie, you must continue until one of you is vanquished; if you lose your last heart, you die.

I promptly rolled between 1-3 six times in a row. Thus, I died right before the horrified eyes of my fellow protagonists only seconds into the game. In zombie movie terms, I had become the disposable character used in the opening moments to show just how dire the zombie threat is.

There was much laughter as I placed my token back in the starting square, symbolically introducing a new character to the game/film.

But I wasn't the only one short on luck that night. Defying all probability, each of us stumbled our way through the game, consistently rolling ones, twos and threes, with the occasional four or five mixed in. We hobbled from square to square, zombies feasting on our flesh at will. I died at least five times; most of us died three times. Mike held out the longest, but eventually he too would face the horror and humiliation of being forced back to the town square. It got to the point that I was crying with laughter, and my voice took on that high-pitched squeal of complete loss of self-control.

In the end, Jeff's third or fourth avatar managed to fight his way into the chopper and leave the rest of us sad sacks behind to a well-deserved fate. Were the story of that particular game indeed transformed into a film, it would have been as if the Keystone Kops or perhaps Pauly Shore and Carrot Top were fighting off the zombie hordes. Action heroes, we were not.

Zombies in Calgary

Jeff and Susan prepare for defeat


Sylvia prepares for defeat, Earl for victory

On Saturday, Sylvia and I drove down to Calgary to visit Jeff and Susan Shyluk, who were there to visit Jeff's parents. We first enjoyed two rousing games of Nuclear War - a board game from the height of the Cold War era with a darkly mordant sense of humour. Susan "won" the first game, eliminating the populations of all other nations, while everyone lost the second - a not uncommon result in nuclear war.

We then switched to a hard-fought game of Zombies!!!, using the mall, university and army base expansion packs. It was the largest game of Zombies!!! any of us have ever played, with dozens of ghoulish fiends littering the board and blocking all escape routes.




Late in the game it looked like Susan was going to run away with it, but in a last-minute berserker charge, I hacked apart a half dozen zombies and managed to make my escape in the helicopter, leaving my hapless competitors behind to serve as zombie chow.




As Wesley Snipes quipped in the legendary Passenger 57, "Always bet on black!" (Note the colour of my game token.)

Unburied Treasures

Earl Woods, Wayne Reti, Phil Cresswell, Stephanie Gillis, Ravinder Singh, and Jason Taylor-Collett at the end of the 1988-89 school year.

Years ago, Wayne Reti loaned me a package of film negatives, pictures he'd shot during his time at Lister Hall. Much to my consternation, I quickly lost the negatives - or thought I had. I just rediscovered the envelope a few weeks ago, and so naturally I rushed over to McBain Camera to have the pictures processed. There were plenty of gems in the pile, at least if you're Earl waxing nostalgic, and the above shot is one such gem. As my second year at the U of A drew to a close, I spent much of my time taking photos of my floormates of Main Kelsey - and so did Wayne. I really like this shot - I cared very much for each person in the photo, and I hope they're all doing well today. Maybe I'll see them at the Lister reunion being held this spring.

In other news, Sylvia continues to spoil me, work continues to become more and more stressful, and I'm getting regular exercise. So it's a mix of good and bad. Isn't it always?

My wheelbarrowful of gifts now includes new shirts and underwear, handy office items such as Post-It notes, batteries and a new photo album, and far too many goodies.

Sean came over on Friday for supper and a round of Zombies - you can catch his very entertaining writeup here.

Later this week (I hope), I'll post my analysis of two movies in a very small but fascinating genre, and my brother's incredible schematic of a home dilemma I have yet to solve.

Stay tuned!

You're Not Being Paranoid When They Really Are Out to Get You

Picked up The Zombie Survival Guide a couple of days ago; halfway through it now.

1. Stay alert. Keep a close watch on your environment, and watch for danger signs: increased police activity, hoarding, looting, "random" tests of the Emergency Broadcast System.

2. Equip yourself with care. Keep a two-week supply of provisions on hand at all times, as well as an emergency kit if you have to flee the premises suddenly.

3. Your body and mind are weapons; keep them well-honed.

4. Travel in small groups. Three or four are manageable; anything more is a chaotic mob.

5. And most importantly, be as quiet as possible at all times. If you make any noise, the zombies will home in on your position and eat you alive.