Cover Story - Top 12 Tomb of Dracula Covers

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It is currently the dregs of August, and there’s really nothing going on in pop culture.  The dizzying high of summer blockbuster season has given away to the drippy sludge that is the late August offerings while the fall awards season has yet to begin.  If there is one small bit of comfort in the pre-labor day dark, it’s that we’re entering the season of fall TV premieres, which is perfect for someone like me that clings to media topicality as a guiding light in these troubled and rudderless times.  

This week will be bringing us the premiere of the latest season of The Strain, FX’s prestige vampire apocalypse show from the mind of Guillermo Del Toro (he wrote the books it’s based on.)  Even though I don’t like The Strain all that much it is pretty much the only name in vampire fiction these days, thank Twilight, which means I get to talk about the biggest name in comic book vampires- Count Dracula.  I’ll get more into this as we go along but for a time in the ‘70s Count Dracula was one of Marvel comics biggest success stories and today- we honor that legacy. 

Cover Story - Top 16 Walking Dead Covers

What can you say about The Walking Dead?  Well, I can say that another season of the hit AMC comic book show has come to a close, which is the entire reason this article is getting written.  More than that, though, I can say that it is pretty impressive how much AMC’s The Walking Dead has managed to elevate the place of independent comics in terms of their marketability.  Previously, indie comics hadn’t really been a major force outside the comic market since the speculator bubble burst in the ‘90s. 

Back then, names like Youngblood, Spawn, and Savage Dragon were all big names and even though we had Hellboy in the mid-2000s the idea of adapting creator owned indie books to the small screen was more or less written off till Walking Dead got big.  So even though I haven’t read the comic in forever and really don’t like it or the show very much I certainly acknowledge that good things came out of this multimedia phenomena.  So, with that said let’s dive into the shallow end and get the cover story on the top 16 Walking Dead covers.

Movie Monthly - The Crazies

And so we reach the final film in the Month of the Zombie.  So far we’ve seen weird dehydration comet zombies, voodoo zombies, and resurrected mortician corpses so I thought I’d close things off with a much more contemporary film featuring a more modern understanding of the zombie: the infected.  The idea of “infected” rather than zombies is part and parcel to the explosion of zombie popularity that hit during the culturally defining years of 2007-2010. Zombies had been brewing for a come back in the nerd culture sphere since the early days of the 21^st century with popular cult hits like 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, and the Dawn of the Dead remake feeding the flames.  However, from 2007-2010 we had the birth of Left 4 Dead, the Call of Duty zombie mode, Zombieland, Dead Snow, and The Walking Dead, a 5-way punch that cemented zombies as the defining cultural monsters of the 2010s.  However, with this resurgence came change as the idea of zombies as shambling corpses gave way to a more fast paced and destructive flesh machine zombie and the term “the infected” developed to describe them.  Suddenly zombies became infinitely more dangerous and powerful than humans but in only one film did they actually get smarter, 2010’s The Crazies. 

Panel Vision - Top 10 Tales of the Zombie Covers

It’s October, Halloween is happening, I’m talking about zombie movies for literally the whole month, and the Walking Dead is on every Sunday.  Given that, of course I had to dedicate a listicle to the best zombie book covers.  The only thing is that there are as many zombie comics as there are stars in the sky and it’d be nearly impossible for me to cull through all of them so I’m narrowing my list to just one zombie comic.  It was originally meant to be Walking Dead before I remembered Walking Dead’s covers are incredibly bland so instead I fell back on my standard answer to most comic book questions: the ‘70s.  I’ve mentioned before that in the ‘70s an agining audience forced DC and Marvel comics to experiment more with what content they were putting out.  DC started releasing its classic horror anthology comics again and Marvel released a whole ton of horror comics including Tomb of Dracula, Frankenstein, and today’s topic Tales of the Zombie, and the covers by the brilliant artist Boris Vallejo. 

Movie Monthly - Dead & Buried

Edited by Robert Beach

Welcome back to Movie Monthly’s Month of the Zombie where I celebrate zombie movies that only I consider to be zombie movies. There are just so many generic zombie films out there with your standard range of infected rage zombies or slow, shambling Romero zombies that you don’t need another person spotlighting them. In keeping with that trend, the zombies from this week’s movie are less of your standard issue undead and something more like the bizarre hybrid children of Re-Animator, The Fog, and Shutter Island.

It’s also notable as being from the writing team behind Alien…sort of.  Ronald Shusett, who’s credited with creating Alien’s story, while Alien’s actual author Dan O’Bannon has repeatedly distanced himself from the film, wrote the main script.  It’s a bizarre mash-up of zombie flick, seaside terror tale, retro throwback and atmospheric horror. Let’s talk about Dead & Buried.

Movie Monthly - The Serpent and The Rainbow

Edited by Robert Beach

August of this year, the world of horror lost one of its last great legends when Wes Craven, creator of Nightmare on Elm Street and co-creator of Scream, passed away at the age of 76. Craven was one of the greatest masters of horror to ever grace the screen, standing tall in the genre beyond his two major corporate successes. 

He first broke onto the horror scene with the harshly uncompromising Last House on the Left followed by the ugly, grindhouse classic The Hills have Eyes. I’ve also previously discussed his very enjoyable B movie horror/action Swamp Thing flick that helped give us Vertigo Comics. Today, we’re talking about yet another amazing installment in one of the most impressive horror filmography ever seen: Serpent and the Rainbow.

 

Week of Review - Vacancy

We are 3 installments into this shorter Week of Review as American Horror Story: Hotel looms ever near, rumbling towards us all like a kind collective, television based prostate cancer.  Today I’ll be looking at another 2007 horror film, because apparently that was just a really good year for hotel horror.  However, unlike Saturday’s 1408 today’s topic skews much more in line with the key trends and themes of horror in the mid-2000s.  As much as I like to talk about the amazing 4-year period of 2007-2010 as the time when the 2010s truly began I’m thoroughly aware that change doesn’t happen over night. 

As I mentioned 2007 was a horror landscape dominated by the twin success of Saw and the blossoming trend of horror reboots.  Texas Chainsaw and Amityville Horror had both come out in 2005 and made a ton of money with Rob Zombie’s Halloween picking up steam to complete the hat trick that same year.  Haunted house movies wouldn’t pick up again till the twin success of Paranormal Activity and Indisious and zombies didn’t fully enter the mainstream till 2010.  Combine all this with the still lingering impact of Eli Roth’s Hostel, also from the truly terrible year of 2005, and horror was in bad shape.  Which makes it all the more impressive that Vacancy, which conforms to all the horror tropes and standards of the day, is really good.

Movie Monthly - Night of the Comet

Welcome back to Movie Monthly where we spend a whole month talking about movies of a particular theme.  This month is October, the scariest month of the year, so to celebrate the spooky season this is going to be the Month of the Zombie.  Yes every Monday in October I’ll be showcasing a different zombie movie, category which will be left entirely up to my own definitions of the term.  Basically I’m saying I won’t be playing that hard and strong with the definition of the term “zombie” in these flicks, there’ll be talking zombies, voodoo zombies, smart zombies, basic infected, pretty much anything I deem zombies gets to be showcased.  I bring that up because the zombies in our first film probably wouldn’t be considered zombies by most folks in the classical sense in that they talk, use tools and weapons, and don’t come in horde flavor.  However, it’s my blog so we’re gonna talk about it, this is Night of the Comet.

Aliens vs. Zombies #1 Review

If you like this review feel free to 'like' Lido Shuffle on Facebook here or follow me on Twitter here.

New review up on All-Comic of Zenescope's latest genre bending zombie comic: Aliens vs. Zombies, and don't worry, despite the jokey name it's a great read.  Full review here:

http://all-comic.com/2015/aliens-vs-zombies-1/

The Strain S2E1 "BK, NY" Review

If you like this review feel free to 'like' Lido Shuffle on Facebook here or follow me on Twitter here.

The Strain returned to televisions this past week and I was there to review it for All-Comic.  It's a mixed 90 minute premiere with a great opening sequence directed by Guillermo Del Toro himself.  Read the whole thing here:

http://all-comic.com/2015/strain-s2x01-bk-ny/