I'm rather looking forward to seeing the remake of "Dawn of the Dead", featuring as it does a remarkable new innovation in the shape of fast zombies! Historically, of course, the zombie has always been a slow-moving, shambling creature and so any tension in early zombie films was always diluted for me by the thought that the protagonists should just, like, run away and their problems would be solved. But fast zombies, that's a whole 'nother ball game.
As a young teen I was something of a zombie movie/video nasty connoisseur - I was in the enviable (?) position of having a father and uncle who were budding 'entrepreneurs', on a small town scale, always hatching a new crackpot get-broke-quick scheme, anything to avoid getting a proper job, bless them. Anyway, in the early days of VHS (circa 1982) they invested in a state-of-the-art Ferguson VideoStar VHS player and a primitive projection system. So primitive, in fact, that it was literally a portable colour TV in a pine box with a lens at the end, which projected a weak, milky, magnified image onto a 6ft wide concave silvered screen. The picture was terrible, of course, but it pitch dark it was just about watchable, and besides, we didn't know any better - this was WAY before plasma screens, man.
Their brilliant business plan entailed installing said projection system in the back room of the Globe pub in our home town of Wells-Next-The-Sea, hiring videos from the local spar shop at two quid a pop, and then charging customers two pounds each for admittance to the venue. Being shrewd operators, they quickly figured out that the bored youth of Wells would be the most avid customers, particularly if they showed video nasties which they would not otherwise be able to enjoy at such large size and poor resolution. So it was that I spent many pleasant saturday evenings in the summer of '82 in the company of my peers (from whom I was largely completely alienated since I went to boarding school and was also a 'brainiac' and hence they hated me, but I digress...) watching such time-honoured classics as Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombie attacks shark and bites of sharks dorsal fin, Zombie pulls screaming victim's eyeball towards wooden splinter in slooooow motion, etc), C.H.U.D. ('cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers' run amok), and the not-very-good-at-all "I Spit on Your Grave" (woman exacts revenge on gang who raped her by killing them horribly). It never did me any harm.
Sadly, some lily-livered do-gooder caught wind of their inspired corruption of the youth of Wells (yeah, right) and the operation was closed down soon after. For shame. That was the end of my big-screen zombie fun, because there were no cinemas for 30 miles (which seemed a long way when I was a kid, and before I married a Canadian, which nationality has an entirely different conception of 'a long way' than us Brits), and the zombie movie as a genre had long vanished before I managed to claw my way out of Wells to somewhere which actually had culture. Ho hum.
Imagine my delight, then, at the recent resurgence of the horror film genre in general and zombie movies in particular. Advance notice has it that Dawn of the Dead is actually rather good. I shall be disappointed if there isn't a considerable advance in brain-eating special effects in the last twenty years.
