The hype has been around for a while but I have finally caught up with the dvd of Colin - the zombie movie allegedly made for £45.
Colin has two major claims to fame. The first, as I stated is that it was made for only £45. I think this may have been a bit of a stretch. Even if everybody involved game their time for free and you dont count the cost of the camera, editing equipment or any other factors which would cost money if you had to buy from scratch, £45 is still a little hard to believe. I dont mean that to be a criticism of the film - its very good - I just doubt the figure they claim as total costs. The fact is that if they spent £4,500 making this film that would still be a massive achievement as it really does hold its own as a feature film and the makers should be proud of it whatever the costs.
The second claim to fame for Colin is probably more interesting. It has been proclaimed as the first film told from the zombie perspective. On a technicality, "I, Zombie" was a film which did this some years before but that had a very different premise as it featured an articulate man who had been infected slowly deterioration into zombie-ness. Colin by Comparison takes a man who rapidly descends into Romero style zombie-ness, and then continues his story. As far as I know it is the first film to do this and it does it very well.
The fact is this home-made film is really very good. It has a tight story and characters you empathise with and there is a good proportion of Hollywood output that cant boast that.


This week I have been mostly reading: The Samurai Film by Alain Silver

I'm on the hunt for new books to read and having read through Max Brooks, David Wellington, the Permuted Press collection and some of Coscom Entertainment's selections I'm trying out other publishers.

Has anyone read The Changed by B.J. Burrow? It is published by Apex.

This week I have been mostly reading: Dying To Live (a novel of life among the undead) by Kim Paffenroth

This is one of the best zombie novels Ive read in a long time. It starts off in a fairly standard post-outbreak world where Romero model zombies are doing their apocalyptic thang but it very quickly develops the main characters and sends them to some of the darkest places Ive seen explored in zombie (or any) fiction. I had only moderate expectations for this book but I was pleased and surprised to find that its a real page turner.

Hello all! I have never posted here before but have been watching for a year or so. Currently I am writing my final paper for school on the likelihood of a zombie apocalypse and general zombie survival. I need to get opinions from real, preferably not undead, people on the subject and I thought: Who better to ask than zombie_survival ? I realize here we all believe in the imminent threat of Zed, but when will he come for us?

I saw this posted on the Permuted Press and other forums.

Z. A. Recht, author of Plauge of the Dead and the sequel Thunders and Ashes passed away this week.

Links:

http://permutedpress.com/smf/index.php?topic=7125.0
http://www.djmoody.co.uk/2009/12/12/author-z-a-recht-has-died
http://morningstarsaga.websitetoolbox.com/post?id=4025085

Rest in peace Zach.

This isnt strictly speaking about zombies (or about zombies at all, in fact) but I think it may be of interest to some in this community. Ive just finished reading Daniel Defoe's "A Journal Of The Plague Year" which is more or less an eye-witness account of the outbreak of Black Death in London and surrounding area. The accounts of a serious outbreak, of governments attempts to halt contagion and of peoples attempts to cope and survive while infection spread throughout the land will be familiar to fans of zombie fiction. The difference is, this has happened and despite the age of the book it doesnt take much imagination to transfer to modern times.

Just putting it out there...

Man survives mob assassins who blow his face off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYDRiSgx4T4



Obviously they missed his brain, mostly.

I am curious if it is beginning? Will we hear that the situation is "under control" next?

(http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20091202a6.html)


"The health ministry has reported that 151 flu patients up to age 17 demonstrated abnormal behavior between late September and mid-November, including acting violently or uttering gibberish." - The Japan Times