REVIEW: ‘Walking Dead’ and ‘Dead Set’ take zombies to next level
Per HeroComplex:
Zombies are back in a big way this Halloween, with “The Walking Dead” premiering on AMC and the British miniseries “Dead Set” on IFC. Frankly, it’s not a moment too soon. We’ve all but ruined all the other good monsters, turning perfectly decent vampires and werewolves into sad-eyed pin-up boys (and girls), reducing the dimensions of evil and corruption they once represented to eternal adolescent angst.
But zombies, well, there’s not much you can do to a zombie. You can fiddle with their land speeds and their raison d’être (Worldwide pandemic? Overbooking in hell?) but there ain’t no way you’re going to make a zombie sexy. Not even the mopey, seasonal-disorder-plagued Bella could fall for a guy whose jawbone is hanging by a decayed thread.
Which doesn’t mean zombies aren’t complicated. While vampire mythology revolves around sex, and werewolves embody the animal in every man, zombies are more sociopolitical. Originally, zombies were created by voodoo to work the Haitian fields — the ultimate proletariat. They shook off their chains in the 1950s through “Tales From the Crypt” comic books and the novel “I Am Legend,” but it wasn’t until 1968 that they found their true leader. In “Night of the Living Dead” George Romero turned corpses into the ultimate power-consumers, and created the Rosetta stone of the genre.
“The Walking Dead” and “Dead Set” share the standard zombie apocalypse plotline and a slavering, saturated, graphically detailed grisliness (fake blood and disembowelment technology have certainly improved since “Night of the Living Dead,” or even “Braveheart”) but are quite different in ambition, message and execution. “Dead Set,” which aired in Britain last year as a five-part, 21/2-hour series, is a smaller and more pointed social commentary. As news reports of zombies fill the air, the crew of “Big Brother” remains oblivious and soon Charlie Brooker’s tale turns the reality show’s conceit inside out — the house is now one of the few safe places in the world and the ever-shrinking few must work together to survive.
More on “The Walking Dead” from THR:
If it wasn’t for the egregious amount of shoe-gazing vampires flooding pop culture these days — a combination of brooding sex, mopey teen displacement and lame attempts to be fang-tastic — the world might groan at the notion that zombies are back in vogue.
But AMC, which will launch the five-part series The Walking Dead on Halloween, has found in producer-director-writer Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) the perfect person to flesh out the popular graphic novels of Robert Kirkman.
During the 90-minute premiere, Darabont manages to push all of the familiar zombie-genre buttons even while expanding the visual references to classic Westerns — the main character is a lawman, and the title sequences feature him riding a lone horse into Atlanta while the outbound traffic is all burned husks of cars and buses — and dystopian films of isolation and panic. He also adds a complicated love story and an even more ambitious notion: that what we’re capable of doing to one another is far worse than having a zombie eat our guts.
It’s the kind of scope only a TV series can achieve — not having to truncate the see-zombie, kill-zombie-while-running-for-your-life game into two hours. That’s not to say Dead isn’t wonderful popcorn fare. If all you want are superb costume and makeup moments of shuffling zombies with their faces falling off and their incessant need to eat, you can find that here. And because it’s on cable, it’s a veritable exploding-head carnival thanks to everything from high-powered rifles to baseball bats and pick axes to arrows.
Yet people who hate horror and gore should still give Dead a chance to unfold its boldly different story. Darabont, Kirkman and fellow writer Tony Moore have seized on the deeper motivations in Kirkman’s source work, asking what man is really capable of when pushed. Does the moral fabric tear when your world is turned into a nightmare? Is there room for compassion when nothing makes sense and terror rules the day (and night)? Does it take extreme situations for us to realize who we are and what we want? This is familiar territory for Darabont, whose films sometimes pull the heartstrings a little too tight. But here, empathy and sentimentalism effectively disarm any rote zombie tropes the genre might subconsciously trigger in the viewer.
For more of the Hollywood Reporter review, go here.
For more of the Hero Complex review, go here.
Here’s a trailer for “The Walking Dead” that played at this year’s Comic-Con:
And the series’ official website. Series debuts tonight at 10PM EDT (U.S.) on AMC.
The “Dead Set” website here.
UPDATE: THR reports the 90-minute debut episode broke all records for AMC: 5.3M viewers.
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