Chickenhawk Interview

You may recall we slipped you a little teaser (sounds kinda naughty, doesn't it?) for the gory zombie-massacre video for I Hate This, Do You Like It? from UK indie rockers Chickenhawk. Well, since the full-length video is out now, we thought we'd give you more than just the usual 'check out the new vid' spiel and bring you some tales of gut-munching mayhem from the chaps who were there for every blood-drenched moment... like drummer Matt Reid, who regaled us with an entertaining behind-the-scenes account of the hard-rocking undead apocalypse, in which he pounds the skins with his eyes torn out before chowing down on his band-mates.

Of course, you can also view the video at the end of the article... so what the hell are you waiting for?

FEARnet: So what convinced you to stage an undead apocalypse for your next video?

MATT: Well, it all kind of happened by accident... we never really set out to even make a video for this song. Danny [North] originally just wanted to shoot us for some press shots, but as time went on and we discussed ideas back and forth, he suddenly dropped us a message about doing a video. We had already done the video for NASA vs. ESA with Roach Productions and it all kind of slipped into place. The zombie theme was originally Danny's idea, as he's a massive zombie fan, and this being his directorial debut from his normal day job as a photographer [for NME], I suppose he wanted to do something that he would be excited about. We were all into the idea of it, though!

How did you go about recruiting the 200-plus zombie extras?

Jesus, this was a logistical nightmare... Roach had previous experience using specific websites to recruit new actors and students wanting to get themselves out there, but we all got involved trying to spread the word via websites like Facebook and MySpace, plus a lot of word of mouth was used. There are a lot of familiar faces in there, but actor or not, everyone totally submerged themselves each day in the scenes... as well as a lot of blood.

To read the rest of this interview, just click here (www.fearnet.com)!

Chickenhawk 'I hate this, do you like it?' Official Zombie Music Video

Here it is...

Enjoy!

WikiLeaks, Dugway Proving Grounds, and yes Zombies!!

UPDATE:   Alot has happened concerning Wikileaks since we first posted this article on November 28, 2010 (over a year ago).  The newest documents from Wikileaks (which is technically not a Wiki anymore) concerns software sold to dictators and democratic countries alike to pinpoint (Dec., 2011) enemies, and kill them.

Dugway Proving Ground Main Gate

In November of last year, we reported:

If you've not been hiding under a rock for the past few days/months/years, you might have missed reading a bit  about a little site called Wikileaks, and it's release of many top secret documents.
Many American officials are up in arms, as they say many of these documents contain information that could endanger their soldiers and diplomats abroad.
But some of these documents are mind-blowing, and one, in fact, makes reference to "zombies."

A couple of new Short Zombie flicks from Molly Brown

Molly's Movie # 1
May Be Side Effects (Molly wrote and directed)

Molly writes:
A weight loss product bought over the internet has unexpected side effects. This was my first attempt at directing a video, so it's full of beginner's mistakes. (Which I have hopefully learned from. Such as: even though it was not made for a 48 hour challenge, I still felt it necessary to shoot the whole thing in a mad rush in just one day. What was I thinking?)

But the cast (other than me) was great, so my heartfelt thanks to Andy Vine, David Hing and Tammy Sander for their great work both on and off the screen; and also to Brandon Butterworth for doing the photography and all things techie, to Peter Mills for providing some great zombie sound effects, and to Alia Sheikh for the loan of some lighting equipment.

Though I've decided to fore go the Hollywood red carpet premiere for now and take this one straight to youtube, maybe next time. . . ;)



Molly's Movie # 2
Last Zombie Standing (Molly wrote; directed by Joshua Westbury)

Joshua Westbury writes:
Last Zombie Standing was originally an entry in the Movieum / Johnnie Oddball Zombie Film Challenge 2009 by team Special Circumstances. This 2 1/2 minute version of the film is the definitive cut, re-edited after the competition. With thanks to everyone who took part!

We shot mini-DV on a Canon XL1 and edited in Blender. CGI effect shots were also produced in Blender.

Last Zombie Standing (C) 2009 Joshua Westbury Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 2.0

Read about the making of this film at
http://sci-fi-gene.blogspot.com

Screening of Gay Zombie Film Leads to Police Raid in Australia

Could there eventually come a day when our popular culture’s disposition toward all things zombie-related goes from fixation to saturation, from saturation to revulsion, and from revulsion to a point where people are actually persecuted for showing zombie movies? Richard Wolstencroft, the director of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival in Australia, might argue that the day is already here. But then again the zombie movie he tried to show at his festival over the summer is not exactly your ordinary horror flick.

In July, Agence France-Presse reported, the Melbourne International Film Festival pulled its planned screening of “L.A. Zombie,” a movie by Bruce LaBruce, a Canadian filmmaker.

The movie stars a French porn star as a schizophrenic homeless man who believes he is a cannibalistic ghoul, and it depicts acts of necrophilia, gay sex and male nudity. It had been rejected by the Australian Classification Board, a government-run body that reviews films and other media.

Mr. Wolstencroft nonetheless held a screening of “L.A. Zombie” at the underground festival a few weeks later, writing in a statement that it was to support a work he believed “to be artistically significant and also as a general stand against the often conservative and regressive decisions made by the Classification Board.”

That apparently led the police to raid Mr. Wolstencroft’s house on Thursday in search of his copy of the film, but he said Friday that he had already destroyed it.

“We thought that police might come for the screening,” Mr. Wolstencroft said. “But they didn’t. We don’t understand why they came after all this time.”

By DAVE ITZKOFF

Read our Review of this film here.

Die2Nite -- The Review-- Horrifying Harbour of Crime!

Die2Nite: Horrifying Harbour Of Crime
Posted by Quintin Smith on November 15th, 2010 at 4:23 pm      

You’re new around here. Let me tell you who I am. My name is Quinns. I am a scavenger, and I am a survivor, and I have had a shit day. I spent ten hours searching for salvage out in the desert, and when I finally came back to this town dragging this here piece of scrap iron, I discovered that some desperate soul had raided my tent and stolen the only belonging I left at home. They took my doggy bag of food. Do you know what a gallows is? Well, I’ll tell you. A gallows is what we

Zombie Pandemic -- Free Beta is Live - The Review!

A while back we interviewed the makers of the Massive Multi-player Online Game "Zombie Pandemic". We waited, and waited and now the waiting is over. Their Beta site is up, and free to try out and explore!

We were easily able to to start playing in minutes. After watching a short video outlining the chaos that has engulfed the world... "It started as a flu...", we were off to create our character.

We selected a character (we could be male or female) with various attributes, and then the game begins.





















"You wake up. Your sight is blurry.

You don’t remember what happened. Actually you don’t remember anything at all. You stand up slowly. Your body is tired and your head is hammering to the beat of your heart.

You check your pockets and find a wallet. It shows what apparently is your home address."

Disc Covering: "Make-Out With Violence," Or My Zombie Girlfriend

Unique plot twists and a great soundtrack distinguish this indie zombie film now available on DVD.

There's always that moment in zombie movies where one of the protagonists gets infected and his loved ones have to deal with the fact that someone they loved dearly is suddenly wants to eat their brains. But that's all it usually is, a moment. Then the heroes have to either man up and kill them or get eaten themselves. Festival circuit favorite "Make-Out With Violence," is like a 100-minute exploration of that moment. This is a zombie film turned inside out. Instead of following the typical arc of illness, epidemic, survival it uses that idea of someone coming back to life to tell a powerful story about loss and denial. You've never seen a zombie movie quite like this.

Make-Out With Violence
Directed by The Deagol Brothers

Tagline: Death Is the Present Tense

Tweetable Plot Synopsis: Twin brothers who've just graduated from high school find their friend who'd recently disappeared still alive...sort of.

Biggest Success: With conventions as deeply rooted as any horror subgenre, it's hard to make a truly original zombie movie. But The Deagol Brothers (actually longtime friends and filmmaking partners Chris Doyle and Andy Duensing) managed to do just that by using the language of zombie movies as a means to tell an unconventional love story. The only way the movie works, though, is if their untraditional horror film has an untraditional zombie, and the credit in that department belongs to actress Shellie Marie Shartzer, who plays Wendy, the girl who goes missing and is then found in the woods by brothers Carol (Cody DeVos) and Beetle (Brett Miller). Wendy looks like your standard issue undead: glazed eyes, pasty, pale skin, crusty wounds, and unhealthy appetites. And she's playing a zombie so, of course, Shartzer can't speak. But the way the actress tells a story through movement and posture and pure physical performance makes Wendy a landmark movie zombie. Her head lolls on her neck as if her spine's broken. She stands up torso first, without using her arms, so that it looks like some supernatural force is pulling her up from the ground. Horror nerds love to argue about whether zombies should shuffle or run, as if one is more "realistic" than the other. Generally, I think this distinction is stupid since zombies are not real and thus do not demand realism. But Shartzer's work makes it easy to buy into "Make-Out With Violence"'s fiction. That, you think to yourself, is exactly how a dead person would move.

Best Moment: "Make-Out With Violence" is extremely well-edited throughout by Brad Bartlett and the Deagol Brothers, but the opening sequence, which establishes the characters, the setting, the mystery of Wendy's disappearance, and the greater mystery of reappearance, is the structural highlight. Zombie movies are about what happens when two diametrically opposed states of being, i.e. life and death, are forced to co-exist. The first fifteen minutes of "Make-Out With Violence" brilliantly does the exact same thing, as Beetle's stream-of-consciousness narration blends past, where Wendy was alive, and the present, where Carol and his twin brother Patrick (Eric Lehning) are devastated by her disappearance. That jumbled chronology puts these characters somewhere between the lands of the living and the dead, in a place where a reanimated corpse suddenly feels a lot more natural.

I Question: the Deagol's decision to cast the film's co-writers, DeVos and Lehning, as their leads. I'm sure this film was a long-time passion project for all of four filmmakers, who helped fund the project by forming a band and performing the soundtrack they penned for the film. And I would not be surprised to learn that the use of DeVos and Lehning as Carol and Patrick was a decision borne as much out of frugality as anything else. But the fact remains that "Make-Out With Violence," is a story about teenagers, and the men playing those teenagers look about ten years too old for their roles. At times that choice creates an interesting tension between innocence and experience, and between the story onscreen and the reality off it. But the rest of the time -- most of the time -- it's just an unwanted distraction.

Worthy of a Theatrical Release? "Make-Out With Violence" did get an extremely limited theatrical release earlier this year but despite its flaws, it is definitely a film worthy of a wider audience, particularly amongst horror connoisseurs looking for movies that redefine what the genre can be instead of simply rehashing what it already is. Let's hope it finds it on DVD.

For Further Viewing: watch an excerpt from another of my favorite reinventions of the zombie movie, "Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D," the legendary cult film that "What's Up Tiger Lily?"s "Night of the Living Dead." And, yes, that is the real title.

From ifc.com

Ten Things You Might Not Know About the Evil Dead

Once upon a time, a kid who loved comic books, horror movies, and the Three Stooges and really wanted to be a filmmaker started with a low-budget horror movie. Unlike most first timers, Sam Raimi's scrappy little horror movie -- The Evil Dead -- spawned two sequels, video games, a comic-book series, and a gory tongue-in-cheek musical. Any horror fan worth his or her weight in blood has seen The Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, and Army of Darkness, but even the most devoted fans can always be surprised. Deepen your appreciation with ten little-known facts about the Evil Dead trilogy.

1. Rocky Horror Fans Helped The Evil Dead Get Made
Without The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its fanatical devotees, The Evil Dead may never have been. Raimi's movie started as a short that was shown theatrically with Rocky Horror. The reaction helped persuade potential investors to put up money for a feature-length version.

2. Stephen King Brought The Evil Dead to America
Displaying prescient judgment and business savvy, no U.S. distributor was interested in The Evil Dead -- that is, until Stephen King saw the movie and wrote a rave review, dubbing it the "most ferociously original horror film of the year."

3. The Evil Dead Set Off a Chain of Horror-Movie Jokes
The Hills Have Eyes poster that appears briefly in The Evil Dead is Raimi's homage to Wes Craven's use of a ripped poster from Jaws in The Hills Have Eyes itself. Craven responded by having Nancy Thompson watch The Evil Dead on TV in A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Raimi countered by hanging a Freddy Krueger glove above the toolshed door in Evil Dead II.

4. Steve Guttenberg Is to Blame for Linda Being Played by Three Actresses
Ash's girlfriend, Linda, appears in all three movies played by different actresses. Betsy Baker plays Linda in The Evil Dead but declined the role in Evil Dead II because she was pregnant. Thus in Evil Dead II Denise Bixler made her movie debut as Linda, but she married Steve Guttenberg in 1988 and stopped acting, leading to Bridget Fonda taking the role.

5. The Evil Dead Helped the Coen Brothers Get Started
Years before the Oscar-winning Coen brothers made their first feature, Joel edited The Evil Dead. Even though Raimi's first impression was of a "weird....long-, greasy-haired guy that I thought was going to rip [me] off or something," he and the Coens went on to collaborate in several projects.

6. Evil Dead II Almost Took Place During the Middle Ages
Army of Darkness moves the action to the year 1300, but it was the original story for Evil Dead II that was set during the Middle Ages. Producers weren't willing to back the period piece, so Raimi saved the medieval idea for Army of Darkness.

7. There's an Alternate Ending to Army of Darkness
Think Army of Darkness is messed up? Raimi's alternate ending is even crazier: Ash miscounts the number of drops of time-travel potion to drink and returns 100 years later than he wanted to find humanity totally wiped out by a nuclear holocaust. Bummer.

8. Ash's Double Head Is an Homage
In Army of Darkness, Ash splits into Good Ash and Bad Ash and eventually grows a second head. The double head, while amazing, was not Raimi's original idea but an homage by the director to the bizarre U.S.-Japanese horror movie The Manster.

9. Necronomicon Was Invented by H.P. Lovecraft

The spell that first raises the Deadites comes from a book called Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, first mentioned by name in the prologue to Evil Dead II. Necronomicon was borrowed from horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.

10. Ash's Car Belongs to Sam Raimi

In all three movies, the put-upon hero, Ash, drives a yellow 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88. The car is Raimi's, and Campbell -- who met Raimi when they were teenagers -- swears that it's been in "every one of his movies since high school."

From AMCTV's Fear Fest Movie Blog