See Dawn of the Dead FREE tonight!

Ok, so just the first 10 minutes of it:

From: http://www.usanetwork.com

Tune in to Final Destination TONIGHT at 8/7C, when USA presents a television first: the terrifying first 10 minutes of the upcoming motion picture Dawn of the Dead - uncut, uncensored, and before it hits theaters

 

And your point is...?

 

Dang it...the clip hasn't come on yet. They must be saving it for the end of the show.

 

I managed to flip back and forth between the end of the Rockets game. The first 10 minutes look pretty good. I really like the look of the movie. I ran across this on another site.

WHAT TO DO IN CASE THE DEADS RETURN TO LIFE

So Hell has reached maximum occupancy and the deads are coming back to life. I understand that being a zombie might be a cool experience but I'll explain here what to do in order to survive as a human. If it's already too late, please see How To Survive Against Humans.

First, you can't be alone. If you already are, you have almost no chances to stay alive. So bring your friends with you. If you absolutely want to follow the classic B movie plot line, you'll need a lovely cute blond chick (be sure she likes to scream a lot), a black man (he usually dies at the beginning so don't put all your hopes on him) and a bold college football player who likes to make dirty jokes (usually goes with the blond girl). There you are, ready to kick rotten asses!

Now that you have cannon fodder/valuable friends, you need a shelter. There are two good kind of places where you can hide: military bases (Day of the Dead) and shopping malls (Dawn of the Dead). A normal house (Night of the Living Dead, Dead Alive) is not a good idea (especially if it's your home) because eventually the zombies will be able to break the windows/doors and you'll be stuck in the basement.

The Military Base

Normally, all the zombie soldiers should be in the local village killing and raping poor innocents (business, as usual) so we'll assume the base is empty. Stockpile the food in different areas (never all at the same place) and same thing for weapons. A military base is usually surrounded by a wall of some sort. Don't think this will block all the walking cadavers, but that's gonna help you. With all the ammo you'll have, I don't think you'll have to worry about anything. If you're lucky you will even have a helicopter or at least armored trucks. Load them with food and weapons in case you have to leave before the end of the party.


The Mall

The first thing to do is to block all the exits. Take anything heavy you can find and condemn all the doors/windows. If there is a weapon store in it, you have nothing to worry about. If not, there will be plenty of hammers, golf clubs, baseball bats for everyone. And the food should not be a problem to you (in case of shortage, tear open the various vending machines). Watch for scavengers and looters because you are now controlling a gold mine. Especially if a gang of bikers tear open your main door and let the walking cadavers inside. Anyway, try to have fun because everything is free.


Killing Them

Go for the head! In order to stop a zombie you have to crush his skull. Firearms are great for that but in case you are not very good with them, here are some other good weapons:
- Sledgehammers: deadly but you need some strength to use one.
- Weedeaters or chainsaws: Pretty good. If you can't hit the head, at least cut their legs or something like that. {Funny tip: try to cut the arms and legs of a zombie and lock a chain around his neck. Now you have a pet zombie.}
- Gasoline: set them on fire, they won't try to extinguish it.
- Spears and sticks: try to pierce the eyes and have fun watching them running around.

They can't be drowned and, contrary to the popular beliefs, you can't knock them out with tranq guns or poisons of any sort. Blood is not flowing in their bodies anymore. Forget about most of the movies you saw, it's evident that those directors have been contaminated. Not that I'm saying The Zombie Conspiracy is true... But paranoia never hurts.

Now that you are settled with food, friends and weapons, wink at the blond girl and slowly change the subject to the different ways you now have to restart the human race.

Good luck and don't forget: friends don't let friends snack on brains!

And here's the next one:

How to Survive Against Humans

So, now you are a zombie. A walking cadaver. An undead spawn of Satan. A sickening meatbag. You are slow, rotten and HUNGRY!

HOW TO SURVIVE AGAINST HUMANS

Your biggest disadvantage is certainly your speed. Forget about running. You have to kill those pesky slimebags using surprise and fear. Closets are your best friends (other good places to hide are: back of a car, behind a door and in the shower). Hide and sneak but be sure to roar loudly (I doubt you can do anything else anyway) when a living being sees you.

Once the cattle is frozen in fear, flail your arms rapidly in it's direction. Now this shouldn't be too difficult. Crack open the skull and feast upon it. You may take a spoon if you feel dandy.

Choose your victims carefully

Go for slim women, children and weak old men. If you see a man wielding a chainsaw, shotgun or weed eater, forget it and run (crawl if your legs ran the other way). Screaming blondes are a meal of choice and don't need a lot of preparation.

If you live outside a city, you will need extra skills to find preys. Hide in rest stops, hitch hike or simply leave for the dense population areas. And don't forget that cows, horses and chickens are not really tasty. You will only get more and more bitter if you keep eating animals.
In cities it's pretty easy. You will be able to survive for days before the cattle even starts understanding what's going on and thinks about hiding or fleeing in a lone house deep in the woods. Then go for the malls, subways, schools and radio/TV stations (it's inevitable that the food will try to communicate with the outside).

Help! My snack is locked in a house!

At some point, groups of humans will start hiding in houses and block the exits with everything they can find. My suggestion is to wait outside and let your comrades get killed by trying to force the entrances. Try to shut down the electricity by munching through the power lines. You have nothing to fear, you will only feel dizzy for a couple of minutes.
If you are nearby water with body parts. One day or another, the diner will have to go outside for food or gas. Now it's your chance!

Random tips

- Use rocks to break windows. Don't punch through it, your hand may fall.
- Wait a few days before eating your snack, it will taste better.
- Humans having sex are the easiest preys, just join in the fun.
- Hospitals are great but it's entirely self-service.

I hope this file will help you in your new unlife. Send me your personal experiences.


Good luck and don't forget: keep your eyes in their sockets!

 

I agree but there is a whole generation of movie goers who have never seen the original and probably wouldn't watch it if you rented it for them.

 

So cool to be a ghoul — again

By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY

Shove them, shoot them or blow them to smithereens. Zombies may come and go, but as horror icons, those swarms of reawakened corpses never really die. Not when Hollywood insists on resuscitating and reinventing the scare staple for gore-hungry movie fans.

The walking dead's last cinema heyday was in the early '90s, right before the once-menacing maniacs devolved into moldy comedy props. Long before he won an Oscar, The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson spoofed zombies in entrails-strewn fashion in 1992's Dead Alive. Even a Simpsons Halloween special from the era mocked them with a more PC label: the living-impaired.

But in the 21st century, as terrorism and disease outbreaks haunt the headlines, it's a grave new world once more as Dawn of the Dead descends upon theaters Friday. The R-rated remake pumps fresh blood into the 1979 fright classic, zombie master George A. Romero's satire that relocated the mindless flesh-munchers of its predecessor, 1968's Night of the Living Dead, to a shopping-mall setting.

Night transformed zombies into invading cannibals, but the sequel took consumerism to the next metaphorical level. "It's a very powerful image of middle-class America eating itself," says Peter Dendle, author of The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia. "What zombie movies do for the human consciousness is to strip away layers of civilization. Underneath all the birthday cards and polite gestures, we are pitted in an evil primal battle for power over others."

Dawn is just part of a revival of zombie cinema, which kicked off last year with the surprise hit 28 Days Later. Other recent or upcoming titles include video-game spinoffs House of the Dead and Evil Resident: Apocalypse, Shaun of the Dead and Aussie import Undead.

"There is something inherently cool about zombies," says Zack Snyder, a commercial director making his feature debut with Dawn. "There is a bubbling groundswell for these kind of films that don't feel like a Hollywood movie exactly, one that puts the cult experience back in."

That proved true last fall when an update of another underground horror classic, 1974's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, buzzed its way to $80 million-plus at the box office.

A sign that zombie fever is heating up: A just-released remastered DVD of the original Dawn, last available in 1999, is selling briskly even before the remake opens. Mark Ward of Anchor Bay Entertainment, which will bring out a multidisc edition packed with extras in September, calls Dawn collections "our Lord of the Rings" and says it's the company's most-requested oldie.

"Zombies have long lives," says Bryan Senn, author of Drums O' Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema, who links the word's origins to the African term "nzambi," the spirit of a dead person. "It's both our fascination and our fear of death that makes them so popular. We want to believe in something after death, but we sure don't want to be a zombie. They attract and repulse."

They certainly attracted Sarah Polley (My Life Without Me), who takes a major detour from art-house fare to star as a zombie destroyer in the big-studio Dawn. "I love zombies," says Polley, 25. "Who doesn't?" She used to play zombie games as a kid, even though she didn't personally witness any movie ghouls until she was a teen.

"My brother saw the first Dawn of the Dead about 10 times in the theater, so I guess it trickled down."

Just in case her Gen-Y counterparts don't dig those clumsy, lumbering creeps of yore, the makers of the new Dawn have turbo-charged their feasting freaks.

"When I first heard they moved fast, I was a bit disappointed," says Polley, who plays a nurse who joins a band of survivors barricaded inside a shopping mecca. "I like the idea of the zombies being the hapless enemy, loping, dumb and hilarious. But now I'm sold. It really does add a caffeinated feel to the film. Besides, we live in a fast-paced, cutthroat culture. Monsters have to be fast, too."

One of those monsters is Justin Louis. As Polley's husband, whose horrifyingly humorous sprint through suburbia is an early Dawn highlight, he formed the behavioral template for all the zombies.

"It was fun to explore their explosive nature," says the actor, who goes zombie after being chomped on by an 8-year-old neighbor girl. "All of a sudden you're energized, like drinking 10 Red Bulls. There are certain times in life I wish I could go into zombie mode. Like dealing with rude people. I could be powerful for a second, like the Hulk, and check them quickly."

What wasn't fun? The 2½ hours it took to apply his gushing neck wound. "Some zombies had to sit for up to 10 hours to have prosthetics applied," he says. Dawn's filmmakers are as committed to a maximum gore quotient as Romero was with his original, but with new twists. Just wait until audiences get a gander at the zombie birth, which manages to mix The Exorcist with Rosemary's Baby.

Behind every zombie rediscovery lurks a rabid fan, and that would be Dawn co-producer Eric Newman, son of composer Randy.

"What I love is how they're anti-individual, the mass hordes who try to convert you," Newman says. He believes what George Lucas did for sci-fi with Star Wars, Romero did for zombie flicks with his Dead series (his second and final sequel, Day of the Dead, came out in 1985). "They took genre films and executed them on the highest level."

Any attempt to redo a cult fave often is met with protest, and Dawn of the Dead is no exception. "There was a furor on Web sites like Ain't It Cool News," Newman says. "People forget the good remakes, like The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They were worried we would make a really tame, PG-13 exploitation movie. But we were pretty faithful."

It isn't only zombies making a comeback. Ancient terrors such as vampires and werewolves are at large in last year's Underworld, action-adventure Van Helsing (May 7), Cursed (Oct. 1) and the Blade series (Blade: Trinity, Dec. 10).

Universal, the studio behind Dawn of the Dead, Van Helsing and Peter Jackson's King Kong, has a big stake in younger moviegoers connecting with old-fashioned frights. "For us, as a studio, that is our heritage," says production chief Scott Stuber of Universal's reputation as the home of Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's monster. "We want great storytellers to bring them to life for a new age with state-of-the-art visual effects."

After the self-referencing Scream and the silly Scary Movie franchise sucked the blood out of more contemporary scares, why not go back to horror's roots? "It's a combination of a new generation coming of age and technical advancements," says David S. Goyer, who wrote the Blade films and directs Trinity.

The challenge is to rattle audiences when post-9/11 reality itself is so unnerving. The irony was not lost on those working on the new Dawn, which connects the zombie invasion to a virulent disease, when the SARS epidemic broke out in Toronto during the shoot.

"It's very fertile ground for classic horror, when people are uneasy and would rather invest that fear and anxiety in creatures that don't exist," says Goyer, who uses Dracula (referred to as Drake) as his main villain in Trinity. "That cycle is just beginning."

Someone who hopes that cycle continues is Romero, who is still spinning new zombie tales at age 64. He no longer has the rights to Dawn, which was made for $1.5 million (the 2004 version's budget: about $28 million) and grossed $40 million worldwide.

But Romero has a fourth Dead film, titled Dead Reckoning, which he is struggling to get made. "People are a little afraid of me," says the filmmaker, ever the proud Pittsburgh-based outsider. "They still think I have fangs. They don't see me on the tennis courts in L.A."

He still considers horror "as just a platform to say something about what's going on." His new story "is about ignoring the problem" — meaning, the zombies — "and trying to live a normal life around the problem." Sounds like a post-9/11 situation if there ever was one.

Romero hasn't caught the Dawn remake yet. But he's fine with how his zombies have become perennial favorites, like vampires. "They're blue-collar," he states like a proud parent. "They are the Democrats of monsters." Though he still prefers them to be "slow and inexorable. We don't need ninja zombies." He likes frights on an intimate scale, too, "not over the top or worldwide. It's too big to be scary."

Besides, Romero says, "what scares me most is what is outside the window."