Christine Ebalo – The Good

Zombies have been taking over cinema and television, and audiences have been flocking.

“Zombieland,” a zombie comedy film, was a box office success in 2009. On TV, “The Walking Dead,” based on the comic book series, has become AMC’s highest rated show. “World War Z,” a post-apocalyptic zombie film, is set for release in 2013. The zombie craze has even shaken up the literary world. “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” written by Seth Grahame-Smith, is a mash-up novel combining the classic Jane Austen story with a zombie epidemic. The book made it to number three in The New York Times Best Seller list.

The presence of zombies in movies isn’t a new thing, though they weren’t always considered a mainstream success. The current image we know today of the zombie as a mindless, flesh-eating monster can be credited to George A. Romero’s 1968 cult classic “Night of the Living Dead.” Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, zombie films were thought to be tasteless, “B movie” type films that appealed only to a tiny segment of the population.

The resurgence of the zombie genre is in part due to current societal problems and fears. Zombies are a blank slate for people to cast their concerns upon, whether those concerns are the economic downturn or social isolation. In the 1978 film “Dawn of the Dead,” the sequel to “Night of the Living Dead,” Romero had the remaining humans hiding out in a shopping mall from the surrounding zombie epidemic as a way to critique consumerism. It’s not a coincidence zombies have shot to popularity during a period of slow job growth. If zombies give us an exciting outlet for these issues, it can only be a good thing.

The best of the zombie genre includes “Zombieland,” a horror-comedy with the necessary scares as well as the feel of being in a video game and battling zombie mobs. In a running theme, the movie has a list of rules on how to survive a zombie epidemic. The movie suggests as a society, we’ve become too “zombified” and have forgotten to “enjoy the little things,” one of the rules on the list.

“The Walking Dead,” one of the best shows on TV, is about a disparate group of people who must band together to survive a zombie apocalypse. The show isn’t just notable for its realistic special effects and edge-of-your-seat thrills, but also for the moral questions it asks, such as, can a zombie still be considered human if it was once a living, breathing person?

A fun phenomenon, zombies going mainstream has served up supreme entertainment, and in teaching us how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse which could totally happen, is also super helpful. Zombie mania is here to stay, and people no longer have to feel embarrassed about partaking in the madness.

Chris Lopez – The Bad

My childhood was filled with vampires, ghosts, ghouls and other creatures that go bump in the night. I still remember the countless nightmares that followed the dreaded horror-movie nights with the parents. But like my mom and pop, I inherited their interest in movie monsters, strangely enough, no matter how scary. However, one particular movie monster has been losing its luster during this generation: the brain eating, neck biting, shambling entities known as zombies.

I first came across these flesh hungry creatures during my grade school years and, to say the very least, they scared the crap out of me. The concept of the dead coming back to life was a scary notion to a 10-year-old kid, not to mention gross, given the cannibalism. Even the occasional visits to the cemetery became a problem for fear the undead may rise.

I remember a time when zombie movies were few and far between. Now media bombards us with such excessive amounts of decaying flesh and gore that many of us don’t even bat an eyelash.

Movies, video games, television shows and even phone applications have been flooded with these abominations. There are zombies in things that most of us wouldn’t expect. I recently saw a zombie pedometer for smart phones simulating outrunning an undead horde.

That’s all well and good, but being exposed to them on a regular basis has partially, if not completely, desensitized a good number of us to the very notion of the living dead.

There’s just no scare factor in zombies anymore. The sight of a zombie chewing on the remains of its prey in past years would have made many of us retch just thinking about it, but in most occasions today people just shrug it off, not giving it a second thought.

Overused and overworked, these fellas need some reinventing. Many video games and movies have attempted to do just that, but unfortunately bile-spewing, tongue-lashing, super-human-powered offshoots aren’t a drastic departure from the norm.

In short, I feel that we need to return to the drawing board, or at least cut down on the amount used in media. Until then zombies will just continue to bore rather than scare.

Nathan Mendelowitz – The Ugly

Zombies have become a huge success in movies, captivating audiences with vicious undead and heart-pounding fear. This has also led to zombie movies doing neither yet are still watchable and we call these ugly zombie movies.

Ugly zombie movies aren’t necessarily bad, but it also doesn’t mean they are good. It’s those zombie movies making people cringe in horror not from being scary, but from the ridiculous nature of the movie itself.

The first note of ugliness comes from zombie movies having a plot so odd it leads to an eye-roll fest. These plots are so bad, they usually turn out funny.

Like the film “Boy Eats Girl” which involves voodoo zombies. A girl finds a voodoo book and accidentally kills the guy she likes. She then brings him back to life, but the voodoo magic slowly turns him into a zombie and begins to infect everyone at school.

It’s funny to watch as no one realizes he is turning into a zombie. It’s also odd that every girl all of sudden wants to date him even though he wasn’t very popular. It just adds to the humor as a serious zombie movie turns into a comedy.

The film “Undead” does the opposite where it portrays how a ridiculous plot is not good or even funny. In the film meteors turn people into zombies, aliens come and turn humans into clouds that spew acid rain and the acid rain is the cure for zombies. The film is listed as a comedy but the outrageous plot doesn’t work.

It turns the zombie outbreak into a cosmic problem and somehow human generated acid rain is the cure. The seriousness over takes the plot and just makes a huge mess of a movie.

Another note of ugliness is when a film turns the zombies into grotesque creatures as if zombies are caused by a mutating virus and are now almost super-human.

French film “La Horde” takes place in Paris where police and drug dealers have to team up to fight a zombie outbreak. The film seems normal and even stays true to the zombie outbreak for most of the plot. That is, until people see the huge tank sized zombies wreaking havoc in the city.

It’s one thing to have the usual good guys team up with the bad guys to fight zombies, but when you start adding in horribly mutated zombie tanks, it gets weird.

“La Horde” also commits a foul by making the zombies fast and strong. The point of a zombie is to make them dumb and slower than normal humans. However, when a zombie becomes faster than a human, it defeats the point. It takes away from the normal zombie fear where zombies come out of nowhere and creep up on people from afar like a constant threat.

It turns a zombie from a creeper into a crazed madman with a lust for blood, and vampires to fit that role.

Thankfully these types of movies don’t happen often, but they do enough to keep us laughing.