I love a big budget. AMC/FX’s The Walking Dead has seen a lot of publicity, not least because Simon Pegg has been tweeting his little heart out about it. Has it been worth the characters spent though?
This new zombie/Horror series is based on the black and white comic of the same name by writer Robert Kirkman. To sum: it’s the zombie apocalypse and deputy sheriff Rick James (Andrew Lincoln – more pointy and more American than I remember) has awoken from a gunshot-induced coma to discover that the world has been overrun by zombies. So far so an American 28 Days Later. It’s like the horror version of Sandra Bullock’s While You Were Sleeping only with less hilarious misunderstandings and more gunshot wounds to the head. After the shock of this new world (dis)order sinks in, Rick begins the trek to the standard utopia that exists wherever the people are not, as cleverly mocked in Zombieland, in order to find his wife and young son, picking up other survivors along the way.
The 90-minute opener, 'Days Gone Bye' (see what they did there?), aired over the weekend on FX in the UK and it was good. The SFX are amazing and the creators have got the fast-zombie vs slow-zombie issue sorted. They’re slow when they’re just meandering about, feeling a bit peckish and mooching for live flesh to munch on. But the moment they hear a loud noise – a gunshot for example – or they spot their elevenses - you - they’re loping towards you faster than you can crawl beneath a vehicle to await your inevitable demise.
I’m looking forward to 'Guts' next weekend – it sounds quite promising in the gore department (not that seeing a horse get eaten alive didn’t satisfy my bloodlust – although who knew they are much roomier on the inside than the out? Those zombies got the loaves and fishes of a gut-medley).
