Another season of “The Walking Dead” has come and gone. Massive headlines, massive ratings, and the phenomenon keeps chugging along. With season four split in to three very brutal and effective story arcs, we break down the fourth year of the series, and explore ten of our most shocking moments of “The Walking Dead,” season four.
Is there such a thing as civility in the land of the dead? Will there ever be such a thing as civility and kindness and consideration? Do you really have to become a savage and evade all sense of morality to survive? Was Shane right? Was Shane prophetic? Would Shane have become Rick’s mentor in the apocalypse, eventually? One thing I loved about “A” beyond answering all questions, while still keeping us in the dark is that Rick finally comes to fruition as his comic book counterpart. One thing about Rick that’s always rung true in the comics is that Rick knows he’s a warrior, he knows he can survive if he thinks on his feet. What we see at the final scene of “A,” is that Rick finally knows the type of man he is. He knows he’s a warrior and he shalt not be fucked with. Most of all, don’t ever lay a hand on Carl.
What’s worse than a bad zombie movie? A bad zombie where the zombies are painfully easy to kill. How can you be terrified of zombies that can be killed by drum sticks and golf clubs? It’s also a lot of fun when the director can’t seem to decide if his zombies are shamblers or runners. Sometimes they run, sometimes they shamble around in a sleepy haze. Sometimes they bite relentlessly, but when lunging at our characters, they’re easier to fight than a toddler with a full diaper. Which is a shame, because nine times out of ten, the zombies look creepy as all hell, while director Logan McMillan manages to paint a pretty atmospheric apocalypse. For the first fifteen minutes, at least.
You can definitely look at director Eric England’s horror drama in two plains. You can either watch it as a gory tale of a woman rotting gradually in to something beyond herself, or you can look at it as a metaphorical tale of a woman rotting in to the ugly being she’s probably always been her entire life. When you cut it down, the character Samantha is the protagonist, but never really is an empathetic individual. She’s this lecherous, vapid, and utterly narrow minded being who does nothing but ride on people’s good will and expects big returns. That’s not to say she deserves what is coming to her, but who’s to say her final transformation isn’t what she’s been her entire life?
Hopefully someday we’ll be able to see the director’s cut of “Knights of Badassdom” as originally envisioned by Joe Lynch. Truth be told, he’s a very talented director, and I’d be more than willing to watch this again. Anything with Summer Glau gets a free pass by me. In its current state as the Producer’s Cut, “Knights of Badassdom” is still a great horror comedy that takes a bunch of LARPERs and drops them smack dab in the middle of a horrific situation involving a flesh eating demon with the face of a goddess.
Director Dave Cholewa’s “Dead Shadows” is HP Lovecraft meets “Night of the Comet,” and while surely that sounds like the ingredients for an amazing horror film, in the end it’s just a serviceable post apocalyptic horror thriller. It’s by no means a waste of time, but it never delivers on a lot of its ideas and story themes. Much of the concepts and sub-plots feel very under developed and half baked, with “Dead Shadows” unfolding in a very inexplicable series of events. I tried my best to follow along, but Cholewa really offers horror audiences a convoluted narrative for a movie that boils down to shooting aliens and monsters in the dark.
I didn’t think it was possible, but Greg McLean has managed to create a sequel to “Wolf Creek” that’s even more despicable than the first. Almost ten years later, Greg McLean has seemingly come up dry in the realm of new ideas for his character Mick Taylor, and apparently fulfills a contract, judging by the quality of this long in development follow up to his terrible 2005 horror film. Not only does “Wolf Creek 2” drop the pretense of a narrative, but it reduces the entire film to nothing but a string of really violent deaths, turning Mick Taylor in to a maniac who kills just because he has nothing else to do. Director McLean revels in cruel and disgusting murders that are repetitive and senseless and lacks any and all ability to provide scares, tension, and a genuine sense of unease. It’s just a large maniac running around destroying people left and right, and nothing else.