I have been a fan of zombie films since I saw Night of the Living Dead on late night TV. Since that fateful night all those years ago I must have seen thousands of rotting flesh piles shamble (and now more often than not run) across my TV screen, and on rarer occasion the cinema screen.
As for best and worst zombie scene there are so many to choose from. In the former category notable mentions must go to: the crazy biker in mall scene in Dawn of the Dead, Captain Rhodes death in Day of the Dead, the zombies rising from their graves in Lucio Fulcis Zombi 2 and the ‘I kick ass for the lord’ sequence in Braindead. Over all though I am going to have to go for another sequence in Braindead: the lawnmower scene.
Never before (or after for that matter) have I seen so much carnage in one place at one time. With Lionel turning zombies to gloopy mush with the blades of his lawn mower and Paquita feeding zombie parts into a blender, I think this scene must qualify as one of the goriest and most bizarre pieces of film making ever put to celluloid.
And here it is:
As for the worst scene, I usually find it hard to find any film that contains zombies particularly bad. There are a couple of notable exceptions though. The first one is Tokyo Zombie. I love asian zombies films (especially BIOZOMBIE), and when I spotted TZ in a second hand shop I was excited to see it. The problem is that Tokyo Zombie is extremely boring, and for a comedy extremely unfunny. However, it does not contain the worst zombie scene that I have ever encountered. That award goes to the Ewe Boll crap-fest House of the Dead. I have chosen an extended zombie gun battle that shows off the films annoying traits to the maximum. Let’s list the problems: annoying music, overuse of bullet time, over use of slow-motion, kids who came to the island to party are suddenly gun experts , the action keeps cutting video game clips which is reall f**king annoying, somehow one zombie manages to be able to do a back-flip, and finally no-one ever runs out of ammo!!!
Enjoy:
After watching this clip again I was even more annoyed, because I think with a less overly stylised approach (and some kind of vague justification as to why the kids are so good at fighting) it may have been possible to get a pretty good zombie action scene out of the footage on display here.
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