Your Week in Zombie News

For some reason, there appears to be a steady amount of zombie-related media being released to the unsuspecting public, and while I am all for anything and everything zombie, I feel the need to point out two of the more recent releases:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Featured on NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," and recommended by John Hodgman, one of the stars of the #1 Children's Film in America, this parody of the classic Jane Austen novel features the original text, plus "all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action!" The book's already reached #88 on the Amazon.com Best-Seller list, and it hasn't even been released yet! Also, that cover is amazing. Zombifying the covers of famous literature needs to be the new Photoshop challenge.Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is just ten bucks from Amazon.com. It's release date is listed as "unknown."

Otto; or, Up with Dead People
a film by Bruce LaBruce

This film and I crossed paths last year when I was a programmer for the Cucalorus Film Festival, and let me tell you, I hope we never see each other again. I am all for more gay/lesbian cinema. In fact, a lot of the entries I viewed were about homosexual relationships, and for the most part, they were all very entertaining and would've been perfect fits for Cucalorus. Bruce LaBruce's gay zombie porn, however, was boring, incomprehensible, and featured embarrassingly bad acting by people who clearly had no need to attempt the fake foreign accents they were trying to pull off. I mean, seriously, how do you fuck up a film taking place in a parallel universe where "gay zombie porn" has become a cottage industry? It practically writes itself! And look at the tagline on the DVD cover:That's right; it says "Bringing sexy back...from the dead." If half the film were as creative as that tagline, maybe Otto would've been shown at the festival. It's still ten times better than the offensively heterosexual Deadgirl, recent Cucalorus entry and my pick for worst film of '08. Otto; or Up with Dead People is on DVD for $24.99 on Amazon.com.