Platoon of the Dead isn't a comedy

Despite what's going to appear below:

That's the crawl which opens the film. Seeing that, one might well expect the content of the film to be relatively serious; to, for lack of a better term, 'mean' what happens.

And then the actual film starts. We're presented with a soldier wandering through the woods, having survived an ambush. He comes across an injured man, and immediately checks the man's pulse:

Despite the fact that the man's injuries consist of having been impaled on a branch:

The soldier then attempts to call for help, while his body language suggests that he's, you know, just hangin'-

And his radio proves to be a slightly outdated cell phone, held upside down.

That's nothing compared to his gun, however-

Which proves to have incredibly visible holes where the screws connect the two pieces of plastic.

It's strange, because were the rest of the film to be a broad comedy, all of this would work as a perfect setup. It's not, however.

More's the pity.

The Walking Dead Persists in Disappointing

So anyway, I watched the rest of this week's The Walking Dead and... well, yikes.

On last week's Avod the DiveMistress and myself got into a discussion about how terrible The Walking Dead's second episode was - most notably because of the character of Merle, the racist sexist violent redneck stereotype who everyone left to die on the top of the building. This week opens well, with a glance at Michael Rooker's desperate struggle for survival, in which he proves more intelligent than either character in the film Saw:

By using his clothes to grab the item of his salvation. Which would lead me to give the character (and by extension, the writers) a lot of credit. If the next scene featuring Merle's predicament wasn't so ungodly stupid. Here, in three images, is the crux of that stupidity:

This is, of course, a reference to Saw/Watchmen/Mad Max. So let's see just what The Walking Dead got wrong by taking a look at those scenes, shall we?

The Walking Dead is Also Poorly-Written

Here's a question I'd like to pose: if bad writing from the source material has been preserved in the finished product, is that better or worse than something just being badly written? Does faithfulness to the source material excuse the stupidity, or does the fact that years have passed without anyone noticing the problem, or bothering to fix it if they did, make the mistake even more contemptible?

I'm referring, of course, to the big reunion scene from episode 3 of The Walking Dead (it appeared in issue 2 of the comic).

That's TVRick, gleeful to discover that his family has survived.

This, of course, is comic Rick at the same moment.

What's wrong with both of these scenes? Simply that, while Rick's surprise at discovering that his family is alive is heartwarming (and needlessly profane, in one redacted case) it could not have happened this way in the context of either story.

The Walking Dead is Weird, Huh?

So I'm watching The Walking Dead, and being mildly diverted when I'm not getting angry, then suddenly I hear the oddest thing. Take a look at this brief sequence, where Rick shoots a zombie outside the police station, ensuring that Lennie James and his son will no longer be able to use it as a hideout:

Did you hear it? Buried under the sound of the chain-link fence is something that should be familiar to everyone who owns an Xbox 360.

Yup - it's definitely the 'achievement unlocked' sound effect.

Easter egg by the producers? Playful sound technician just dropping it in and hoping that no one would notice? You be the judge, because I've been too judge-y lately!

Happy Canada Day, Everyone!

While you're relaxing by the lake, drinking your beers and watching the fireworks, why not flip on the stereo and join us (by which I mean the Divemistress and myself) in taking a journey through every Canadian Horror film ever made!

Just right-click here to download it. Or click there to listen to it with a browser applet, or head over to the Avod's blog and stream it, the way a few of the cool kids are doing it!

And here, because we should all watch this at least once a year just to test our threshold for terror, is the video for Thriller. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtyJbIOZjS8

Yeah. They won't let me embed it. Jerks.

FYI, I got to the part with the yellow eyes and reflexively yelped and shut the video off.

edit:

Here's an embedded version, which I'll take down if it goes away in the next couple of days.

HOW TO RUIN YOUR OWN MOVIE: Diary of the Dead Edition

You know what's great? When a movie takes the time to sit down and explain the message behind every event in the film, in real time, as those events are happening.

I'm not going to go into the unbelievably stupid things that every character does for the entire length of the movie, because I'd have to watch the film a second time to document them, and there's no way I'm going to be doing that, but why on earth would you make a film that flat out told you not just how it was going to end and who was going to survive, but also had the narrator pop in every five minutes to explain how heartbreaking and philosophically interesting she finds everything that's going on.

So now I have to have contempt for Garth Ennis as well.

I recently read the first issue of Garth Ennis' "Crossed", a new entry in the zombpocalypse genre, in which people desperately band together to flee from the ravening crowd. You may ask "Hey, Count, what separates this particular zombpocalypse comic from all the other ones out there in the market?" Well, in addition to being much worse written, its zombies aren't technically dead yet (like 28 Days Later - also terrible, By The Way), and unlike normal zombies, they absolutely love to rape! Yeah, they can't get enough of that rape. If you forced them to choose between raping and eating flesh, they wouldn't be able to, so instead they'd hit you with a hammer and then do both to you while you were unconscious.

I'm not shocked to see this show up in Garth Ennis' zombie comic, after all, his latest series "The Boys" deals primarily with super-powered rapists and the 'fellas' that work for the CIA and try to put them in their place. Sure, I found the rape scene objectionable, but it was just the unpleasnt cherry atop the worthless pie that is the rest of the comic.