The original came out in 1973, to mixed reviews. The new feature looks like an extra hyped-up stylized version of the original. While many people protest that Romero's other work is far superior, we've always been partial to this classic. Still, this new remake looks like it's delivering plenty of "crazy."

The official synopsis:

About the inhabitants of a small Iowa town suddenly plagued by insanity and then death after a mysterious toxin contaminates their water supply.

The film will be out Feb. 26th, 2010.

Nothing would make us happier than a return to zombie greatness like Dawn of The Dead and Night of the Living Dead. Sadly, it's been a hard road for this much-loved zombie director. Especially after his last flicks Diary of the Dead and the zombies-that-can-learn feature Land of the Dead. But we haven't lost hope yet, and this is the first trailer for his new film Survival of The Dead that has us really excited. But what do you think?

The Crazies
This recent remake seems to be similar in spirit to Romero's original. Town gets infected, starts killing its citizens, military steps in, hell breaks loose. But watch the whole trailer below, right through the end. I'm quite enjoying the bloody pitchfork scene.

Synopsis:

The American Dream goes horribly wrong when the residents of this picture-perfect town begin to succumb to an uncontrollable urge for violence and the horrific bloodshed escalates into anarchy. In an attempt to contain the epidemic, the military uses deadly force to close off access into or out of town, abandoning the few healthy citizens to the growing mayhem as depraved killers lurk in the shadows. Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant); his pregnant wife, Judy (Radha Mitchell); Becca (Danielle Panabaker), an assistant at the medical center; and Russell (Joe Anderson), Dutton's deputy and right-hand man, find themselves trapped in a once idyllic town they can no longer recognize. Unable to trust former neighbors and friends, deserted by the authorities and terrified of contracting the illness themselves, they are forced to band together in a nightmarish struggle for survival.

I Kissed A Vampire

Next up: Lucas Grabeel, the chorus line dancing, hat-wearing "director" from HSM is pulling out the fangs for this little vampire musical. It's not bad, but it's not good. I wish they had gone a bit more over the top... I mean, if you're going to do a vampire musical, do a vampire musical! Go bananas with puppets, sex and blood! But you be the judge.

The Revenant
David Anders, who did some time on Heroes as well as the Children of the Porn Syfy remake, stars as a friendly zombie in the much-chatted-about The Revenant. The film is a "horror movie/buddy comedy about Joey and his undead friend Bart who comes back from the dead as a revenant: an articulate zombie that needs to drink blood to arrest the decomposition of his body." It did pretty well at Fantastic Fest and is gaining a lot of chatty momentum. Check it out:

UK publisher Headline has signed Romero for a book delving into the mythology he helped create, simply titled The Living Dead. The book will explain what zombies can and cannot do, and will finally give us Romero's take on the origin of zombies and how the world at large reacts:

It starts in San Diego, where a corpse sits up and begins to walk during an autopsy, while a reporter from Atlanta shows viewers "glimpses of increasing chaos from around the globe."

Headline will publish The Living Dead in July 2010.

[Guardian]

Survival of the Dead follows a group of survivors who are lured to a small island, which they are told is a haven from the zombies, only to discover that the island's inhabitants have been unwilling to kill their reanimated friends and family, keeping them chained up in the hopes of finding a cure. In this two-part video, Colonel "Nicotine" Crockett talks about the island, laments that humanity has turned on itself, and explains where Survival intersects with Diary of the Dead.

Bloody Disgusting also has a behind the scenes featurette, which shows some of the trouble we can expect our hapless survivors to encounter and, of course, plenty of zombies:

[Bloody Disgusting]

Dogoo Girl
Here's the trailer for the Japanese TV Show The Amazing Dogoo Girl, from the wonderfully terrible minds who brought us Tokyo Gore Police and Robo Geisha. I'm not sure what I love more about the new TV show: the evil coy transforming lady, who is later seen in full-out make-out fish mode with another character, or the bee-breasts picture above. This isn't the first time we've seen super-powered lady parts being used for fighting crime, but it may be the first time I've heard about it on television. Hey, as long as you're using your lumps for justice, I'm behind you, Dogoo Girl!

(Thanks for the tip, Robert.)

Survival of the Dead

Next up is the first clip from George Romero's Survival of The Dead, which will be screening at Toronto for the lucky folks in Canada. I'm still not sure how I feel about this film, but I am happy to see the master tackling the much talked about zombie fishing scenario. Check it out...

Patient X

Twitch has the first trailer for Filipino monster movie based around the legend of the aswang, a beast that feeds on the insides of humans. As far as I can tell, it's your standard monster fare: people stuck in a building with the big bad, and trying to escape while being picked off one by one in the dark. But according to a very quick Google image search, the Aswang looks like the pictures below, which is a winged vampire beast with boobs, so that's Patient X one, Relic, zero.

Under The Mountain

Also from Twitch, which is a great place for Toronto Film festival updates I may add, are a slew of new clips from the Under the Mountain movie. The picture (which was actually an old TV series) stars a pair of twins that discover a freaky scary as hell alien race underground, then Dr. Grant shows up to help out. I've included a few of the clips from the upcoming premiere at TIFF. Jonathan King, who directed Black Sheep, is the brains behind this New Zealand film.

Here's the official synopsis:

When teenage twins Rachel and Theo Matheson investigate the creepy old house next door, they discover the Wilberforces - shape-shifting creatures that lurk beneath Auckland's ring of extinct volcanoes. Guided by the mysterious Mr Jones and with the help of their older cousin Ricky, the twins must rekindle the unique powers they once shared if they are to destroy this ancient evil - before it destroys them.

And if you don't remember the TV series....well here's that as well....

Up until now, the sequel to Diary has been referred to simply as …Of the Dead, but today Romero announced its official, oxymoronic title: Survival of the Dead. This installment will be blissfully free of the documentary style that Romero used in Diary, focusing instead on a group of soldiers who travel to an island they believe to be the last safe haven from zombies, which will, naturally, prove as unsafe as any corner of Romero's world.

We posted the Survival of the Dead trailer a few months back, but it looks like we'll have to wait until the film's September premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival to see if this will truly be a return to form for the Zombie master. [Bloody Disgusting]

As an influence:

Nichelle Nichols decided to quit playing Lt. Uhura at the end of the first season of Star Trek, because she felt the role wasn't stretching her as an actor, and she wanted to return to the theater. But then she met a Star Trek fan at an NAACP event: Dr. King, who asked her to reconsider because of her character's tremendous visibility. Here she is talking about it:

Ammonite author Nichola Griffith says that MLK's marches and speeches coincided with a new wave of science fiction that asked readers to identify with "the Other." For example, John Wyndham's The Crysalids is told from the point of view of a mutant.

Author Harlan Ellison marched with Dr. King from Montgomery to Selma. So did Sulu actor George Takei.

Robert J. Sawyer quotes MLK in several of his books. He has one fictional president quote the "I Have A Dream" speech, and has his characters discuss "the content of his character" in another story. One of his novels begins with a quote from MLK: "Though the arc of the universe is long, it bends toward justice."

George Romero finished his zombie epic Night Of The Living Dead, which has an African American hero, just as MLK was assassinated. And that shaped how people viewed his film, Romero explains:

We cast an African-American actor because he was the best actor from among our friends. And when we finished the film, literally as we were driving it to New York in the trunk of a car, that was the night Martin Luther King was assassinated. So the movie became a reflection of the times. There's a certain anger in the movie already, but a lot of why that film gets applause is because Wayne is a black guy. In the script, his race is never mentioned. In my mind, when I wrote that initial scene, he was a white guy. And he would've been shot by the police even if he was a white guy. But because he happened to be an African-American, that made it much stronger, particularly after the assassination. We shouldn't take all the credit for that. A lot of it was an accident.

Fictionalized representations:

The fictional character most frequently compared to MLK is, of course, Charles Xavier, the leader of the X-Men, a mutant organization that includes a school for gifted and talented mutants. Xavier wants mutants to live in peace among the normal humans, and assimilate as much as possible— in contrast to the mutant villain Magneto, who's usually compared with Malcolm X. The first X-movie makes this comparison more explicit, by having Magneto utter the words "by any means necessary."

But Professor X isn't the only MLK surrogate out there. Paul Fenster, the African American civil rights leader in Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, is frequently described as representing the recently assassinated MLK. He's described as a "colored man up from the South, some civil rights, militant-type person." And the chaos that envelops the midwestern town of Bellona, cut off from the rest of the world, is reminiscent of the riots that struck after King's assassination.

John Barnes' novel Earth Made Of Glass takes place on a planet torn by racial hatred. The only hope is a prophet named Ix, who's portrayed as a Martin Luther King archetype.

DC Comics' black superhero Amazing Man didn't manage to save MLK from an assassin's bullet, but he was a responsible for apprehending shooter James Earl Ray afterwards, in the DC version of events.

In the story "The Space Traders" by Derrick Bell (which later became an episode of the HBO miniseries Cosmic Slop) aliens arrive on Earth on Jan. 1, 2000. They make a simple offer to the United States: we'll give you untold wealth, clean energy, and substances that will clean up your environment. All we want in return is your African American population. After much debate, the U.S. accepts, and hands over all of its African Americans — in chains — on MLK day:

The last Martin Luther King holiday the nation would ever observe dawned on an extraordinary sight. In the night, the Space Traders had drawn their strange ships right up to the beaches and discharged their cargoes of gold, minerals, and machinery, leaving vast empty holds. Crowded on the beaches were inductees, some twenty million silent black men, women, and children, including babes in arms. As the sun rose, the Space Traders directed them, first, to strip off all but a single undergarment; then, to line up; and finally, to enter those holds which yawned in the morning light like Milton's "darkness visible."

The Star Trek anthology Strange New Worlds IV includes a story about the psychiatrist who treated Benny Russell, Captain Benjamin Sisko's 1950s science fiction writer alter ego. (Sisko had a hallucination/vision that he was a 1950s SF writer. Sort of.) In the story, the doctor hears of the assassination of Dr. King, and thinks about his former patient and his stories of a post-racism future Starfleet for the first time in years.

In Roger Corman's batty 1970 film Gas, Or It became Necessary To Destroy The World In Order To Save It, aka GAS-S-S, an experimental nerve gas kills everyone in the world over the age of 25. At the end, all the characters are running around, and people wearing masks of JFK, MLK, Che Guevara and Alfred E. Neuman show up.

Aliens and time travelers:

In Christopher Pike's young-adult Remember Me book series, a woman named Shari Ann Cooper dies, but her spirit winds up in another dimension. She visits demonic aliens on Mars and then goes inside a black hole and nearly gets atomized. But she finds out she's supposed to return to Earth in the body of a living person, as a Wanderer. And it turns out Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were both alien-possessed Wanderers as well.

In the children's TV series A.J.'s Time Travelers, A.J. Malloy travels through time in a ship called the KYROS. In one episode, he decides to celebrate Martin Luther King day by traveling back to witness the famous "I Have A Dream" speech first-hand. But in a (no doubt hilarious) mishap, he sets the coordinates wrong and arrives too early. Instead, A.J. meets King as a teenager, and uses his "time telescope" to share with him a vision of the future, inspiring him to fight to end segregation in America.

Around the same time, a children's book came out called Time Trap: Martin Luther King. Two school rivals are forced to work together on a report about the 1960s, but then they become trapped in that time period together. (And, I'm just guessing here, Martin Luther King explains to them why they should work together.)

In alternate history:

Commenter Grey_Area points out that Harry Turtledove features MLK in many of his alternate histories. In particular, The Two Georges — cowritten with Richard Dreyfuss of all people — features an alternate America where the Revolutionary War never happened. Sir Martin Luther King is governor general of the North American Union, and Richard Nixon is a used car dealer.

Writer Brent Adrian maintains a list of ideas that you can use to start a science fiction story, if you're in need of inspiration. One of his suggestions: an alternate history tale that takes place in a world where the first MLK assassination attempt succeeded. In 1958, a woman stabbed Dr. King in the neck, and he nearly choked on his own blood. If she'd succeeded, who would have replaced MLK in the civil rights movement? Would anyone have been able to?

What if MLK had attended the 1956 Dartmouth workshop on artificial intelligence? That's the question this research paper by Will Fitzgerald at Kalamazoo College asks. Would A.I. research be more humanistic, and possibly more self-aware? He quotes MLK, right before his death, talking about the "technological revolution" of "automation and cybernation," and lamenting its failure to advance human rights.

Perhaps most famously, an episode of Aaron McGruder's cartoon version of The Boondocks took place in an alternate history where the assassin's bullet didn't kill Dr. King. Instead, he merely went into a coma, and woke up 40 years later. He's ill-prepared for this new world of shock jocks, hip hop and Fox News, and especially taken aback by what's happened to African American culture in his absence. It culminates in this scene, which caused angry protests and which you should probably not watch at work with the speakers turned up:

Romero's next movie takes place on a little island being overrun by the undead. But instead of hacking up each former family member into little zombie bits, the residents are trying to find a cure. Unfortunately we all know what happens when you have one zombie: they reproduce like bunnies. There's a fight over who shall inherit the island — people looking for a zombie-free oasis, or those looking for a cure. But most folks in the little town are content to chain up their loved ones inside their houses and pretend everything is all right. So of course, havoc and mayhem ensue.

There still isn't a release date for this film, as it is in production, and who knows if the ...Of The Dead title will stay. But still, it's good to see Romero back in the undead business, even thought the quality of this clip is questionable. But I keep my mind open for a redeeming and graphic thriller, after that whole Diary nonsense.

[Voltage Pictures]

The remake was batted around over that last few years and passed off by director Brad Anderson. But now it's been been picked up by Breck Eisner and today Overture Films announced it would be backing the pic — whose themes fit nicely with today's bioterror fears.

The 1973 Trixie is actually a nasty virus that accidentally gets unleashed on middle America. The virus makes people insane with rage and riots break out all over and the Army is called in, and that's when everything really goes to hell. Sounds very 28 Days Later.

Overture CEO Chirs McGurk explained the reason that they were interested in this endeavor because they were looking for horror that was smart. The script was penned by Ray Wright and Scott Kosar and Romero will watch over as executive producer.

[Variety]

Romero told Movieset that:

“We’re shooting underwater zombies,” Chartier revealed. “They’re swimming, grabbing people’s legs, pulling them down. It’s a lot of fun.”

Good, good — methinks the World War Z people will be pissed to hear this, but it sounds like more of a Lord of the Flies take on the zombie genre. At least I hope it's more LOTF and not Survivor. Shock Around The Clock was told by Romero:

“It’ll be about three weeks in [past the outbreak] and it doesn’t start with the people in the mansion [at the end of Diary]. It starts with the blonde who drove away and the national guardsmen who robbed the people. So those are the only characters that return. What it’s about is tribalism. How the internet creates a Hatfields and McCoys situation. It’s on an island, where people have been lured by someone on the net as a safe haven, but really what these guys are trying to do is hold them up at the boat docks.”

Wow Hatfields and McCoys-type fighting, fantastic. Will there be banjos? Either way I like the idea. It sounds relatively new (for a zombie pic) and I still love everything Romero.

[Movieset and Shock Around The Clock]

The two main characters are Mitsuo and Fujio, two ordinary blue collar workers who work at a fire extinguisher factory. They accidentally kill their boss, so they bury him at the foothills of Mt. Fuji. It's fertile ground for zombies to be born, and sure enough, that's exactly what happens. The two guys manage to escape the doomed city, and they end up living—one as a slave, one as a zombie—in a walled enclave where rich people pit poor people against zombies in spectacular cage fights.

Hanakuma is a quirky guy with unique artistic sense. He was drawn to illustrating at an early age, and worked at factories all day and wrote manga all night until he finally had enough cash to quit his day job. He drew Tokyo Zombie in heta-uma style, an aesthetic that commands high quality drawings that look deliberately bad. Another distinctive characteristic of his work: he uses the same characters over and over in his different works. In Tokyo Zombie, the bald guy and the guy with the afro star as two jiujitsu-loving blue collar friends. Baldie and Afro have made numerous appearances in Hanakuma's earlier works, too, but they take on different personas each time. Sometimes they're evil; at other times they're just ordinary businessmen. "It's similar to how Tezuka used archetypes in his different works," says Ryan Sands, who edited and translated Last Gasp's English version of Tokyo Zombie. Afro and Baldie have also appeared in ad campaigns, and on little wallets and other paraphernalia carrying the Hanakuma brand.

Most of the time, protagonists in zombie movies use hand-held weapons like guns and axes to slay our dead-but-alive enemies. Hanakuma—himself a serious practitioner of martial arts—eschews conventional arms for jiujitsu. He also uses the cage fight scenario to make social commentary about blue collar exploitation and the human inclination to prefer brainless entertainment over real skill. (Even though Fujio is the reigning champ at the cage fights, the crowds of rich people hate him because he almost always beats his zombie opponents with one swift move rather than putting on a show.) "It's very Roman Empire," Sands says.

Tokyo Zombie was first serialized in a manga collection called Ax from 1998 to 1999; the movie—starring the super popular Tadanobu Asano—came out in 2005.

The zombies in Tokyo Zombie are generic humanoids that walk really slow, eat brains, and make stupid noises that really aren't that scary until they bite you and you turn into a zombie too. But Tokyo Zombie is not just about stupid zombies; it's a metaphorical story about friendship, class warfare, and the appreciation of high art. And most importantly, as Sands points out: "This is one of the first zombie tales where the apocalypse begins with a female zombie biting a junior high gym teacher's dick off."

Enough said.

Tokyo Zombie (Amazon.com)