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The Walking Dead review - NY Daily News

Started by MutantKeys,

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999ghosts

999ghosts

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The thing I loved about it is the realistic feeling it has (even if it's a zombie series). No fancy heroes, no fancy color (filters), straight to the point filming without all those fancy camera angles you get now a days in all those other movies and series. Don't get me wrong, that can be fun, but this straight to the point story telling and filming works for this series. The gore level was good too. I hope they ceep that up when they come to the even more gory parts of the book; I was sold after seeing the first episode and can't wait to see more.

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Kramerica

Kramerica

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A nice sized group of us are having a 12 hour Halloween Horror film festival :headbang: and we're going to fit this in right in the middle - I'm definitely looking forward to it. We'll see how it stands up next to the original Dawn of the Dead and The Thing. Alien, The Shining, Phantasm and Re-Animator are also in the cards. (thumbs u

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dupont2005

dupont2005

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A nice sized group of us are having a 12 hour Halloween Horror film festival :headbang: and we're going to fit this in right in the middle - I'm definitely looking forward to it. We'll see how it stands up next to the original Dawn of the Dead and The Thing. Alien, The Shining, Phantasm and Re-Animator are also in the cards. (thumbs u
Sounds like a good line up! I have Friday The 13th and I think I might watch Stir Of Echoes as well. It's more of a thriller but I still cringe when I watch it :)
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jonjesper

jonjesper

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not surprised. the trailer looked bad. :popcorn:

 

You need to read the review, he was not bashing the show, but complimenting it for all it is...

 

what? i'm illiterate. i only believe what i see with my own eyes. :ohnoez:

 

I always knew there was something about you... :slapfight:

 

See you at WonderCon next year :wishluck:

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supapimp

supapimp

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review by TIME:

 

The Walking Dead Review: Exquisite Corpses

 

 

Are you team vampire or team zombie? It's easy to see why vampires have a pop-culture edge. They clean up better for photo shoots. They embody sex — all that sharing of fluids — not decay. They are refined, orderly, even courtly. Zombies tend to be poor conversationalists.

 

But when it comes to bringing actual horror, it's no contest. A vampire will nibble your neck, but zombies will take down your entire civilization. (Ever pragmatic, bloodsuckers prefer to keep their food supply sustainable.) The zombie apocalypse is the premise and setting of AMC's new series The Walking Dead (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.; premieres Halloween night). And judging by the first two episodes of its six-episode debut season, the scariest part of the series is not what the animated corpses do but what the surviving humans are driven to do. (See pictures of the rise of zombies.)

 

Adapted from graphic novels by Robert Kirkman, with author-sanctioned liberties, and produced by Frank Darabont (director of The Shawshank Redemption), Walking Dead centers on Southern sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), who has the good fortune to be shot nearly fatally before a viral outbreak that turns most of humanity into ambulatory meat.

 

Rick awakens from a coma (à la 28 Days Later) in an abandoned hospital. He staggers out into the depopulated world, searching for the wife and son he hopes are still alive, and learns about the outbreak bit by bit. Survivors are rumored to have massed under military protection in Atlanta. The virus, transmitted by zombie bites and scratches, kills you and then wakes you up; the flesh-eating revenants can't speak and are physically and mentally slow, though they retain vague memories of their lives. (They can be killed only by shots to the head, because you don't mess with tradition.)

 

A Zombie Story with Heart

The 90-minute pilot, directed by dara-bont, paints a thoroughly convincing postapocalyptic world, both visually and emotionally. Yes, it delivers astonishing scenes of devastation, but its more affecting — and more horrifying — concerns are human.

 

How do you hold on to your morals, your laws, your faith, when no one is around to compel you to? Does the calamity drive the few remaining humans to band together or revert to barbarism? And how does it feel when the "walkers" on your street — whom you must put down or be killed yourself — are your friends and family? A subplot in the pilot, in which Rick befriends a widower and son holed up in their house alone, recalls Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic novel The Road. (See TIME's photo-essay "Cinematic Visions of the Apocalypse.")

 

AMC's series (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Rubicon) are gorgeously shot for basic cable, and Walking Dead, rotting flesh and all, is no exception. Darabont opens the pilot with a scene — a flash-forward to Rick after his awakening in the hospital — that establishes the show's world by gradually offering information in a slow pullback. First we see an empty road. Then a car moving, from which Rick emerges with a gasoline can. Then an overturned car. An overturned truck. A traffic light with no power. And then an entire roadway of burned vehicles, lined with abandoned encampments littered with children's toys.

 

In the second episode, Rick (played with flinty stoicism and a credible accent by the British Lincoln) heads into the world in search of his family. The series adds several more characters — turns out it is not always the nicest folks who survive an undead uprising — and ups the encounters with zombie mobs considerably. It doesn't skimp on the gore, but the pilot is actually more bloodcurdling for showing fewer undead. (After decades of creep-show movies, not to mention the "Thriller" video, it's hard for a shambling, moaning zombie army to entirely avoid kitsch.) (See the top 25 horror movies of all time.)

 

The more intriguing aspect of the series is the survivors and whether they can maintain a society worth surviving in. Which makes zombies an ideal metaphor, as Godzilla was in the nuclear age, for our nightmares du jour: pandemics; decentralized terrorism; the collapse of social, financial and ecological systems. Zombies are viruses, really — leaderless networks, organized on no other principle than destruction, multiplying exponentially until they burn themselves out, taking us with them. If The Walking Dead can build on its promise and run with these ideas, along with unflinching gross-out thrills, it can tell a doomsday story with all the things zombies crave: brains, guts and heart.

 

This article originally appeared in the November 8, 2010 issue of TIME.

 

 

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2028067,00.html#ixzz13xlGWZ5W

 

 

 

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The Black Hand ®

The Black Hand ®

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Sounds like the reviewer felt the same way I did when I read the comic. It is relenting, crushing, and depressing. So it sounds like the series will mirror the books well.

 

I had to put the books down simply because they made me feel....bad. Well scripted tale but not for the faint of heart.

 

There is a woman in my office who loves to read and she loves zombie. She is reading The Walking Dead ahead of the series and she feels the same. Its depressing to read...I hope I can keep up with the series.

 

+1

 

I f I get depressed I'll put "Pride and Prejudice" or "Babe" in the DVD player. I'm either going to get depressed watching the zombie series or watching my GIANTS lose tonight, anyway.

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mrmitchgro

mrmitchgro

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For those of you who waited to watch it on AMC, what did you think? Overall I was really impressed - very true to the comics and the makeup and costumes were amazing.

 

Favorite part: Dad going upstairs to target practice and telling the son, "stay down here and read your comics" lol

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