One of the things I loved about "Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp" was the incessant and unnecessary origins of everything from the film. "Oh, that song from the movie? There's an origin for that too."

Still odd that if you want to catch up on shows like Broad City, Nathan for You, Review, Another Period, etc., your best bet is the Internet, not the channel they were made for.

Me too.

I couldn't make it through the first episode, but I agree. It was also edited within an inch of its life, so all the beats were off, which made the sudden abrupt turns into "now for an emotional moment" all the more awkward and cloying. @midnight is surely also heavily edited, but it feels like it has a natural rhythm.

I still can't get over how cable channels - not just CC - tend to ignore their stores of original content, take their top-rated show and just play it all day long.

That's a really thoughtful comparison. Thanks for that.

His upcoming adaptation of Jeff Vandermeer's "Annihilation" is my most anticipated SF film of this year, even more so than Blade Runner 2049 - mainly because the source novel is so good.

Incidentally, Katie wrote a good article and I'm not even talking about her article at this point.

So do people now believe George Romero invented the idea of the dead rising from the grave? Is that what we're talking about? I'm so confused.

I'm pretty sure that tall guy in the Tourneur film was a corpse. Did you see his eyes? Pretty creepy stuff.

Thanks for the thoughtful post. Plague of the Zombies reminds me of what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might have done with the zombie genre. And all of Val Lewton's films are so special, Cat People probably being my favorite - but The Seventh Victim, about devil worship, might be the most disturbing and morbidly effective…

Right, but I believe Romero has said that novel was an influence on Night of the Living Dead. That's all I was saying.

Lifeforce is one of my go-to guilty pleasures, but as insane as the movie is, there's no question that's the movie he wanted to make.

For me he will always get a lifetime pass for Chain Saw, and I have to respect that when he had his arm twisted into making a sequel, he did it in a most original way - something no other director of Leatherface and his clan has been able to do.

I just watched The Funhouse a few weeks ago and I second your opinion. It's actually wonderfully directed (even if the story doesn't add up to much) - he really captures the feel of an authentic small town carnival as it would actually appear to the young characters walking through it, with lots of POV shots, noisy…

The three films I recommended are all examples of living corpses (used as slave labor). EDIT: Maybe not White Zombie, on reading the plot summary from Wikipedia. It's been a few years since I watched it last. But definitely in I Walked with a Zombie and Plague of the Zombies.

You must be referring to the Tom Savini-led biker gangs always driving their motorcycles through the mall. Hooligans.

Not sure I quite follow you (or if we're disagreeing). Zombies were reanimated corpses, not just "voodoo related people." Romero's innovation was adding flesh-eating to the mix and linking them to Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend" concept of a post-apocalypse horde. He definitely changed the definition and invented the…

Add a heaping dose of general racism as Hollywood writers would struggle to figure out how to handle voodoo. But there are some worthwhile pre-Romero zombie films: Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's atmospheric "I Walked with a Zombie" and the Bela Lugosi feature "White Zombie." Hammer's "Plague of the Zombies" is good…

I went about 10 years ago - specifically making a point to visit it since we were driving through Pittsburgh. It's pretty big, but at the time we visited it it was also very empty (granted, it was probably a week day in the middle of the day). I bought a copy of Dawn of the Dead there, and we visited the zombie museum.