Dawn of the Dead

Holy Crap! That's where this starts. So, I checked my watch when the first major amount of blood was spilt. It was at 10:15. The movie started at 10:05 and three trailers played beforehand. So the carnage starts within the first ten minutes (as a nice round number) and stops about three seconds before the credit reel ends. Even the credits are made to look like blood spatered on black porceline. My favorite shot would have to be the sky-high camera following Sarah Polley shortly after said early carnage as she drives down the highway. We see a truck come into the intersection ahead of her, careen off the road, and plow into a gas station which promptly explodes in an impressive fireball. The ickiest scene is by far the zombie baby. Were this a less intense movie I'd be tempted to describe it as a "zombling" or find some other name for it. Instead it must stay zombie baby. The most superfluous character is Jayne Easwood's character (apparently, according to IMDB, her character's name was Norma) who shows up in a truck full of people, walks across the screen once, disappears for ten minutes as the fat lady zombifies, then shows up again as we watch her change into lingere and have sex with Steve (this encounter is actually how we learnt Steve's name) then drift around until dying a chainsaw death.
Something neat is that there are actually two endings to this movie. If you like happy endings where you get to make up what happens next, leave as soon as the credits start. Don't get distracted by what happens on screen, just leave or turn the machine off. If you want the other ending, stick around until the end of the credits.

As a side note to all this, I'd like to talk about how things affect our perspective of the world. When I studied physics, I suddenly started seeing the world in terms of friction, resistance, elasticity, force, and energy. When I took calculus these values became complex equations describing the change between things. When I started making my own levels for Unreal Tournament and System Shock 2 I began seeing things in terms of polygon counts. System Shock 2 also made me excessivly aware of security cameras. There are, I think, many of us out there who have watched enough zombie movies, or really any type of survival movie, and as a result we walk around evaluating the world around us in terms of "where can I get weapons, where's the safest place to hide, where would I get food and water" and so on. Hopefully, when the time comes, this nation of geeks will be able to rise from the ashes of a decimated world and save humanity. Or they'll be the first to go because they never went out and got some exercise.

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