Servants

George peeked his head out the door.  The coast was clear.  He stepped out into his kitchen and opened up two cabinets.  Out of the first he picked out a lowball glass and out of the second a bottle of eight year old bourbon.  He filled the glass and cautiously entered the living room.  After he sat down on the couch he looked at his glass and realized something: he had never seen a servant take a drink, ever.  It’s funny the things you think of when you get that close, he’d never even approached the thought before.  The fact that none of them drank alcohol wasn’t surprising; hell, they didn’t drink anything.  What was surprising was that in his hands was the last drink George was ever going to have.

Yesterday was his last dinner.

George figured it was akin to facing death and in a way it was.  This was the first time he had really understood why the philosophers discussed it to no end.  He took another sip of his bourbon and thought, “Do they have souls?” 

That wasn’t the question about which he really cared.  He cared if he would have a soul at this time tomorrow.  He wondered if he would be conscious, aware, alert, trapped.  He could hear them, the servants, starting to stir in the garage.  It was almost six in the morning so they would walk in soon to start breakfast.  Ironic, he thought, the only people in the world who cook are the only ones who don’t eat.

He took another sip.  Since he was in kindergarten he had learned that they don’t actually need to eat but that the only parts of the brain that are still active in servants are the ones that control the baser instincts.  In fact, every high school graduate knew that if one was able to take out a servant’s chip then all that that servant would want to do would be to kill, eat, and unsuccessfully fornicate.  But every child was also informed that removing the chip would sever the connection between the servant’s brain and body, making it useless.  George rubbed the back of his neck.

He knew how it would happen: he would lie in his bed as the doctor put him under, that’s the last thing he would know in this world.  Then the doctor would transport him to the hospital, cut through his spinal cord and insert the chip.  The last step was for the doctor to inject him with the virus.  “The next time I wake up I’ll be one of them,” he thought.

The two servants shuffled in and wordlessly moved to the kitchen.  George wasn’t even sure that they saw him sitting there.  Sure, plenty of studies had shown that people lost virtually none of their vision after conversion but George was never really sure about it.  Maybe it was the fact that they were vacuous behind the eyes.  What does it matter if you can see if you don’t know what you’re seeing?

There wasn’t much to preparing a meal anymore.  For breakfast it was little more than cracking some eggs into one spot and throwing half a pound of bacon in another.  George and his wife Helen had already programmed into the machine how they liked their eggs, bacon, waffles, et cetera.  The machine made the waffles, pancakes, and hash browns automatically.  Throughout George’s life that had been the big push of technology: to make a mundane task so easy that even the servants could do it.  Well, that and various ways for the living to occupy themselves.

George reflected a bit more.  This was the first time in history that the people in a society didn’t need to work.  The servants were able to grow crops and raise livestock with minimal supervision.  They also did the majority of the labor in home construction.  Use of the servants had made most of the old economy useless.  The new world had grown from extreme hardship to a life of ease, made possible by the chip, and in this new world people truly pursued their passions instead of whatever paid the bills.

There were those who refused to subscribe to this new world. The Moralists, as they called themselves, refused to join the rest of society.  The Moralists had mostly come from old religious traditions: Muslims, Jews, Christians.  They believed that to own a servant or to become a servant was wrong and as such they toiled their days away in menial activities pursuant to their own meager survival.  They would not own servants because they believed that the servants had lost their souls and were forced by God to wander this world until someone was gracious enough to end their miserable existence.  Most of the historians likened them to the Amish of the old world, unwilling to engage in the activities of general society because they saw those activities as obscene.  For his young life George had always seen this view as overly harsh and unproductive and like most people George had unwittingly entered into a societal contract, one from which most had never seen any reason to extricate themselves.  As the final hours passed toward his 65^th birthday, and his conversion, George started to see how those damn Moralists might be right.

What were these things cooking his breakfast?  They weren’t men, although they looked like men, old men.  They weren’t animals, although they were treated as such.  George wondered what these men had done for the world before they had come to be his servants.  The internet had been reestablished in the new world but most families would remove any trace of a person’s existence when a loved one was converted.  It made George think of the Amish once more.  More specifically the connection historians had with the Amish that they didn’t have with their own age.  A man could, if he were so inclined, find a book 300 years old documenting the genealogy of an old Amish family but he couldn’t successfully find the accomplishments of his own grandfather, he had only stories passed down from his mother.  It created a most unusual dichotomy: a world where a man was as free as ever to make the most of himself and at the same time he had the least chance of his accomplishments being passed down to posterity.

Of course there were exceptions to the rule.  Proctors would never be made to convert and on the rare occasion that a proctor chose conversion he would be given a job even easier than the one he had in life. For regular men like George conversion was mandatory and he could only hope to be placed in a servitude as light as that of his own servant, if he would even know the difference.  Those who were still hearty at age 65, as George was, would end up in fields or farms, or worse yet in steel mills or factories.

Helen roused and in her nightgown walked from the bedroom to the kitchen and shooed away the servants.  George set down his empty glass as they shuffled through the living room and back to the garage.  He inhaled deeply of the delicious smell of honey coated bacon and felt Helen’s hand on his shoulder, “You know I’ll always love you,” she whispered.

George brought his fingertips from each hand together just in front of his nose, “What will you love?”

“Well, I’ll love your warmth, kindness, your strength, intelligence,” she was quite taken aback by the question and it showed in her answer.

“But you won’t love my body.”

“Dear, we all know that we aren’t just our bodies.  Why, our bodies are just the container for who we really are,” she was going back to what every child learned in school.

“But, dear, if what I am is no longer contained in my body and what I am is not readily accessible, then what will you love?”

Helen wrapped her hands around him and squeezed tightly, “I’ll love everything that you are, everything that you were.  I’ll love you as I do now and I will know everything that you are into the future.  Come now, it’s time for breakfast.” She walked back into the kitchen and brought two plates to the table.  George obliged his wife and sat in his normal seat before she handed him a fork and knife.

He stared at the food as he never had before, “This is my last meal, Helen.”  He poked at his eggs, unconsciously wishing that the longer he ate the longer it would be before conversion.

“Oh George, don’t think of it that way.  It’s not like conversion is death.”

George slammed his fork down on his plate, “Well then what the fuck is it Helen?  A Goddamn walk in the park?  It’s not like I’m coming back after conversion, nobody ever has.”

They both continued eating in silence until the servants walked back in a few minutes later.   George grabbed the bottle of bourbon off the counter and walked back into the living room.  He refilled his glass and sat back down on the couch.

“Oh, George, come now.  You know that the anesthetic won’t work right if you’re drunk, put that down,” Helen reached for his glass and he pulled away.

“What the hell are they going to do if I can’t be converted, kill me?”  It’s amazing how the fear of ‘death’ will turn a 65 year old man back into his 16 year old self.

Still though, he was right.  His bride walked to the kitchen and came back with another lowball glass, she poured her own drink.  “If I can’t stop you from drinking, which I never could, I might as well join you,” she brought up her glass and George clinked his against it.  They both downed the entirety of their glasses just before the doctor rang the doorbell.

ZEP #2

ZEP #2: The government

This is really the plan that’s someone else’s plan.  Obviously the oncoming zombie apocalypse would be considered an emergency and as such there would be a response from an array of different government agencies.  This could take lots of different forms but the one that seems to be the most common in zombie media is the camp or safe zone set up by the government and the location broadcast on TV and radio.  There is obviously some big upside potential with this plan:  army dudes with guns and lots of ammo, tanks, helicopters, food, water, et cetera.  The biggest downside of this is what most commonly happens in zombie movies:  lots of promise but the safe zone ends up not being there or overrun with zombies.  This is a great plan if it works out and if it doesn’t then, well, you’ve put yourself into an area infested with zombies to the point that the US Army couldn’t keep it safe.

Short term

I don’t really think that there is a short term option for this plan.  I consider short term to be like in Night of the Living dead, i.e. one night or maybe two nights.  And if there’s anything we’ve learned from the DMV (or hurricane Katrina) it’s that the government doesn’t do anything quickly.  So if the zombie invasion takes only a night or two then I don’t think there’s much chance that there would be anything set up or official.  So if it is your plan to wait for your Uncle Sam to save you then I’d suggest you prepare to hunker down for a couple days (see ZEP #1).

Feasibility:  You’ll lose a night of sleep holding your rifle but some people do that for fun.

Difficulty:  You’re sitting at home right now, aren’t you?

Extra Supplies

·         AM/FM Radio or television

·         You may want a power screwdriver and screws to board of some windows

Bottom line:  It’s going to be a tense couple days listening to the radio.

Medium term

You’ve heard the news that they’ve set up a shelter, now all you have to do is get there.  You’ll want reliable transportation (hopefully in the garage) and you’d probably want to weld some metal over the windows to make sure they can’t get in.  Gather up all your guns, ammo, knives and supplies and hit the road.  The most likely problem you’ll face is that the roads are clogged up with broken and abandoned vehicles so you may want a vehicle with 4-wheel drive or a push bar on the front. Once you get there you had better hope that there’s someone there to meet you, but not too many people.  It’s very possible that if there are plenty of survivors like you that there won’t be enough room in the safe zone for everyone.  Obviously that would be a pretty big problem and you may be worse off with people than with zombies.  However, if you get there and everything works out fine then you’ll be sitting pretty.

Feasibility:  Well, you’ll probably have to kill a dozen zombies or so and ram some cars off the road, what could go wrong?

Difficulty:  It will be tough; stick together and stick to the plan.

Extra Supplies:

·         Welder

·         Extra metal

·         A good plan

Bottom line:  Yeah, it’s dangerous.  Yeah, it’s a big risk.  But the dead are roaming the earth, are there really any safe or sure things?

Long term

You’ve made it.  You’re sitting pretty behind barbed wire and more .50 cals than you can count.  Granted, it’s not the Bahamas and you get rationed water instead of sipping on 7 & 7s, but it beats being out there, right?  Well there are a few problems with this camp.  First of all you’re the only game in town which means sooner or later they’re going to figure out that you’re there.  Once they do the army will start shooting which will undoubtedly alert more of them that you’re there and you can see how this ends:  either they kill every zombie in your geographical area or they run out of ammo and you’re all defenseless.  Now, there’s always a chance that the government has a bigger plan here, like eventually evacuating everyone to a more secure facility. Or if you live close enough to an underground missile silo they might set up a base there that would be very secure and have years worth of supplies.  The second problem is that in a fenced in camp there would be little room to grow any food and the fences would also keep out any animals that you may want to eat.  This would make it very hard to sustain any kind of life in the camp, especially so in a missile silo.  So the real problem here, even if they camps do exist, would be that in the long run you would either be taken down from within or without unless the government has a viable, long term plan for you (good luck with that).

Feasibility:  You can go for a while, but not forever.

Difficulty:  It’s not hard at all until you run out of food and water or the place gets overrun with zombies.

Extra Supplies

·         Farming supplies and tools would be great, as would some space in which to use them

Bottom line:  You’re outnumbered in a battle of attrition, never a good prospect.

AMC's The Walking Dead - My First Take

When I first heard about a TV show about zombies I got pretty excited.  Think of the possibilities!  Zombies have broken through to most media now, but had not yet crossed to the small screen.  After starting in movies there are now zombie books, short stories, video games... blogs.  But a TV show, that's breaking new ground as far as I know, at least as a show being solely about zombies and not just having zombies as part of a show that's mainly about something else.
If you haven't been watching, "The Walking Dead" is a new show on the cable channel AMC that's about an outbreak (they seem to be virulent zombies) of zombies.  It centers around a sheriff's deputy from a small town in Georgia who is involved in a shooting and wakes up to find the world overrun with zombies.  Essentially the same premise as "28 Days Later."
Well, I'm not ready to call it yet because they still have the time, opportunity, and set up to make this a really good show.  Unfortunately, I'm leaning towards setting up my DVR to stop recording this show and I only keep holding on because of the opportunity and set up that are there.  The biggest problem, though, is that this show is more of a chore to watch and less of a pleasure and the biggest reason for that is simple: not enough zombies.

---SPOILER ALERT---

If you have been watching you may feel like me in that there is way too much talking on this show and not nearly enough brain eating/shooting.
The zombies are good.  They're your basic, virulent, Romero style.  The makeup and shuffling are good and overall I'm very happy with the zombies on this show, just give me more of them please.
Other than the lack of zombies, here's a list of questions that I have about the show that I'll need answered before I can really get onboard with it:
Seriously, who wanders into a major metropolitan area after seeing that the army couldn't handle the outbreak in a little podunk, hillbilly town?
Why didn't the zombies eat that dude?  Can you keep them from eating you by laying down and closing your eyes?  Will they not eat you in your sleep, apparently?
Do the writers of the show realize that military, police, and citizen's band radios all work on different frequencies and are not interchangeable and do not work together?
What supplies were they getting at a department store?  Blazers and dishwashers?
Where did they pick up every racist, misogynist d-bag in the Atlanta area?
Why do they need to wash their clothes every day?  How many clothes are they wearing that it takes 4 women all day, every day to wash them?
Why is there only one person hunting?  Why is he hunting alone?  Why isn't anyone else helping him to make sure that they can keep what he kills?
What do all the guys in the camp do all day?  Sit on their asses and complain that their RVs don't run?
Why would you go all the way into Atlanta to get supplies?  There aren't any stores on the outskirts that have the same things?  Did they need to pick up the symphony or something?
Why aren't they farming anything?
All these trees around and nobody can make a fence around their camp?  Well I guess if the zombies won't eat you in your sleep there's not much need for a fence, right?
Why are they all such jerks to each other?  As far as they know there's only 20 or less people in the world and they still can't work together?
They brought like 6 people into Atlanta to get supplies and they leave with one backpack full of stuff?  Even if their plan gets messed up can't they find more than a backpack full of stuff to bring back?  Maybe some more clothes so they don't have to wash them all the time.

I really am sorry to get so nitpicky about this but every time I watch the show I end up with more questions than answers.  Maybe the writers could take some more time to make sure that the character's actions are realistic and a little less time trying as hard as they can to pump in as much fake emotion as they can.  I could even deal with fewer zombies if they just made things a little bit more realistic.  Not all the characters have to be liars, murderers, wife beaters, klan members or whatever other character flaw d'jour they wish to inject into the show.  I'd much rather see a zombie show that's about man vs zombie instead of man vs man and I think that most zombie fans will agree with me on that.

Bottom Line:  I'm not ready to stop watching yet but I'm much closer than I was after the first episode and that's not a good thing.

I guess they were right

Steve put his foot up on the ledge, resting his hands on his knee, “Yeah, I see her.  What’s your point?”

“Man, come on.  Someone that young walking around, it has to be over,” Lex pulled off his dusty, worn-in Budweiser cap and slapped it against his thigh.  “Look at that, she’s got her little teddy bear and everything.”

Steve shot back around, a scolding finger ready, “Quiet there.  It’s just one of them and having a Goddamn teddy bear with it doesn’t mean a damn thing and you know it.”  He kicked off the ledge and picked his rifle back up, heading back across the roof to the ladder.  His dirty, button-down overshirt ruffled in the nighttime breeze as he muttered to himself under his breath.  Lex was starting to crack; it was the only explanation.  Hell, after three months cooped up in a warehouse store just about anyone would be, especially without any human contact for the last two (and that’s generously counting those things as humans).

Steve plopped himself down in a cheap plastic chair as soon as he hit the break room, leaned his rifle against the table.  He doubled over and poured his head in his hands.  I’m gettin’ too old for this shit.  And it was true, at 53 he should have been barking orders at some kid who just graduated college like he used to.  He was built to be a middle manager too, at least physically.  Average height, slightly overweight with hollow brown eyes and thinning brown hair, he definitely looked like the boss at your first office job.  Then again that didn’t matter in the last three months; since then if you’re heart was beating you just looked like food.

Not that that was even a big problem anymore.  Staying alive wasn’t a problem for Steve and Lex, the problem was wanting to stay alive.  Maybe that’s all that got into Lex, he just wanted to believe in something, believe that it’s finally all over.

“Hell, maybe I should indulge the kid,” Steve finally announced to the table.  Figuring out whether or not that girl was still a girl might be a good thing.  Hell, if she was still a girl that’s a great thing, it would mean that those things were gone. But how to let her in safely?  Both men were still too leery to venture outside.  It didn’t matter that it had been over a month since they’d seen one.  Once you’ve seen one you’ll stay just about anywhere for a year before you’d ever consider dealing with them again.  He grabbed the radio, “Hey Lexy, come on down here.”

The thinner, younger man soon walked into the room, “What’s up, Steve?”

“You’ve been watching that girl for a few nights now, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, I have,” Lex dropped his hat onto the table.  “She walks a little slow but I think that’s just because her leg is hurt.  I’m tellin’ you, man, she’s still alive.  What would a 5 year old girl thing be doing around after the rest of them have died out?”  You could see him getting excited as he talked about it, he really thought that this whole mess was over.

Steve put his hands up defensively, calmly, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to argue with you.  I just wanted to ask if she ever walks around back.  You know, by the loading dock.”

“Yeah, she comes that way every night.  I think she walks across the street to the supermarket to get food and water,” he was a little dumbfounded.  Steve had never acted like this before, maybe he was cracking too.

 “Well, sit down, I got a plan.”

Steve stood to the right of the door and held the chain tight, “Remember, don’t do anything stupid and for the love of God do not put your gun down.”  He then patted the revolver on his hip to make sure it was still there.

“Come on, man, would I still be alive this long if I did stupid shit?” Lex pulled the lock open on the loading door.

“Yeah, you would with me around,” Steve started reeling the chain, pulling the door open from the floor up.

Lex held about 10 feet shy of the door while it opened, semi-automatic pistol at the ready.  With the door about 5 feet up Steve stopped the chain and wrapped a section of it around his left hand before he pulled out his revolver with his right.

They waited.

In about half an hour Lex spotted her and started inching closer to the edge of the dock, “Hey there!  Come on over here!  We’re alive!”

They waited.

Finally Steve could see her from his poor vantage point.  He stood motionless, squinting, studying her like a man trying to remember which combination of stripes on a snake means it’s poisonous.  It had been so long since he’d had this kind of worry that he lost himself in the moment.  He didn’t notice that Lex had inched all the way up to the door and was crouching down, his arms stretched out the door and his pistol lying on the concrete.  “Lex!” he shouted.

Lex turned and looked up just as the little girl grabbed his right arm and chomped in on it just below the elbow.  Instinctively, Lex sprang back but her teeth were in too deeply.  The skin peeled down his arm as he fell back onto the floor, flailing his other three limbs vainly and smearing his own blood on the loading dock.  The little bloodsucker climbed onto the dock with the skin still in her teeth.  When Steve yelled again she turned to face him, ripping the skin clean off up to the poor man’s wrist.  He laid on the floor and writhed in agony, grabbed his exposed, loosely connected muscle and cried out.  Steve had to turn in disgust at the sight: a sweet 5 year old girl still wearing her PJs, now stained with blood, and that damn teddy bear still hanging from her dead, soulless fingers.  Her eyes were sunken and cold as she looked upon her potential meal, a long, ragged pelt hanging from her teeth.

Steve had let go of the chain as he turned away and let the steel door come crashing down to the concrete floor with a raucous clamor.  The sound startled the little girl and she turned back to her first target.  She descended on Lex and dug her dirty teeth deep into his throat.  Blood came gushing out his neck and with his good hand he tried to bat at the little terror to no avail.  Steve regained his composure a little too late.  He grabbed the girl by the collar and threw her up against the steel door.  The walls of the large, empty room rang with the shot as the now faceless girl sank down to the floor.

Steve rubbed his hand over his face and breathed a sigh of relief.  Good God that was a bad idea.  He heard a gurgle and a moan from behind him.  He turned and immediately knew that Lex was gone but couldn’t be forgotten.

Steve lowered his boot onto the man’s throat, blood still gushing from it.  He looked down despondently as what used to be Lex started scratching at him, the muscle dangling from his arm.  “Well I’ll be damned,” he murmured as he lowered the sights of his revolver to between what used his friend’s eyes.  “Hall and Oates were right,” he said as he pulled the trigger, “she’s a maneater.”

Time Burial

Tonight I would like to talk about a short story I recently read.  It's called "Time Burial" by Howard Wandrei and is compiled in a book of the same title by the same author.  I believe it was written in the 1930s and as such is not specifically labeled as about zombies but gives some zombie feel nonetheless. 

It's about a guy who finds an immortality serum while searching for a cure for the common cold.  This serum keeps him free from disease and allows him to not age in perpetuity as long as he drinks a bit of the concoction every few weeks. 
SPOILER ALERT

Without getting into too many non-zombie details I'll say that this guy lives for over 2000 years on this serum and only tells one person about it in that entire time (which is in the beginning of the story).  In these 2000 years he never ages a day and never even catches the sniffles; he never needs to sleep or eat, either.  There are down sides though, one of which is that anything he eats never leaves his body so he just gains the weight of everything he ingests pound for pound (I'm also guessing that that would mean he couldn't drink much booze either). Also, his heart has slowed to the point where his circulation is so low that his skin is cold to the touch.  He also lives a transient life so nobody will ever find out that he's immortal.  In the end he runs out of the key ingredient for the serum and fails to buy more before he needs to; he dies and ends up as chalk, falling away onto the floor as nothing.

What I find interesting about this is that he has almost no pulse and needs to neither sleep nor eat.  These are reasons why I think of him as a kind of zombie.  Granted, not a Romero style, brain eating zombie nor a single minded, goal serving voodoo zombie.  But he does seem to me to be a kind of chemically induced zombie, one who's only real mission is to serve his own serum.  He never allows himself to love or to ever truly live because he's too afraid of others finding out about the serum.  He must always end up drinking it for the risk of death, almost in the same way that a Romero zombie lusts after brains.  He needs neither food nor sleep, both hallmarks of zombies whom may strike at any time or may horde around holed-up humans for months on end.
Really the only difference between the man in this story and a traditional zombie is that this man is seemingly rational and cognizant.  He actively makes the decisions that enslave him.
The biggest reason, though, why I think of him as a zombie is that the way the story is written insinuates that he loses his soul to this serum.  In my mind this is what separates men from zombies: a soul.  If, as I think, the man in the story chooses to give his body and soul to this serum, then he truly is a zombie.  But if not, then perhaps he's just a wayward man, lost in his own creation.


Bottom line: not a bad book, this particular story is pretty good.  I consider the main character to be a cognizant, chemically induced zombie who chose to become what he did.

Kudos to Sears, shame on you Ford

So the time of year is upon us when children get settled into school and all of us are able to focus our minds on something more important than education:  zombies.  I think that we've all noticed more zombie-centric themes around the general media lately and as such I would like to write about a couple of them tonight.

First of all, please take a look at these two sites and meet me on the other side.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu4_F_QNqYc

http://www.sears.com/shc/s/dap_10153_12605_DAP_Zombie

Now, I know that that's not the full, official site for Ford's Fiesta zombie campaign but I couldn't see the whole thing because I'm not on the Facebooks.  That's the first problem I have with Ford's new campaign:  it restricts access to only those with faces.

But onto the real point of this post which is this:  on which side of zombie advertising do you fall?

Personally, I find it very refreshing to see Sears step up as the first major retailer to advertise specifically to the zombie audience.  I've had a few conversations about this now and I believe that the zombie audience is an under-served niche market.  You see ads all the time for Pork: the other white meat, but what about Brains: the gray meat?

Obviously, the first answer that comes to mind is the fact that historically zombies have never been big spenders.  Very few have jobs that pay "people money" and the ones that don't have jobs are unable to get any kind of assistance due to their technical lack of life.  As we all know this has forced many zombies into low or non paying positions or out on the streets wondering where they will find their next full cranium or delicious, delicious intestines.  Due to this, most retailers have steered clear of zombie advertising on the premise that it "isn't worth it."  In the last few years though, zombies have made great strides in the community and many more have been able to obtain good, honest work.  That is what makes this such a great move for Sears:  they're the first retailer in on it.  They are gaining an entire generation of loyal zombie customers.
Don't worry, zombies won't forget this... wait, yeah I guess they will.  Despite this fact, though, I think that this is a great move for Sears to move into the zombie realm. 

Note: I won't be shopping there... only an idiot would go to a store full of zombies

On the other hand we have Ford.  What happened Ford?  You used to be cool.  I'm not saying that I have anything against such a zombist advertising campaign.  I'm saying that it's incredibly misleading:  when is there ever JUST ONE ZOMBIE?  Terrible, Ford.  You should only do this kind of one-on-one "test" when considering a firearm, not a car.  If there's just one zombie why do you need to drive away?  Sac up and destroy the brain.  I understand, nobody in that ad is going to be able to do that, but that doesn't change my opinion.  We need to face the facts and in this case the fact is that if you're vehicle doesn't have a full steel frame it's not a good zombie vehicle, period.  But I'm getting off topic.

Is Ford right to advertise to the anti zombie crowd?  Yes, absolutely.  The undead are terrible drivers (I know I'll get flamed for that but come on, you know it's true).  Does this specific ad achieve it's job of making the Fiesta look attractive to the anti zombie enthusiast?  No.  All 3 of the people in the spot should be dead but the only reason they can still be alive is because each must live a relatively sheltered life.  What would be a more effective advertisement for anti zombie enthusiasts?  Show me what the zombie handler drives.  He obviously knows what it takes to handle their kind and I'll bet you dollars to donuts it's not a Fiesta, Fit, or Yaris he's driving.  If I were to judge a book by it's cover I'd say he probably drives something like an F-350.  That's the vehicle in which anti zombie enthusiasts are interested and that's the vehicle Ford should be trying to sell us.  Show us a big ol' lifted truck with steel welded over all the windows and a .50 cal mounted in the bed.  That's a vehicle that will let you escape zombies, not the new Ford Fiesta.

Bottom line:  Advertising to either side is acceptable and can even be celebrated.  However, in this case Sears' ad campaign is much more appealing to their target audience than is Ford's.  Sears' advertised products are much more appropriate for their target audience than are Ford's.  Lastly, the Ford Fiesta is much more appropriate for making out with Twilight vampires than it is escaping any kind of zombies.

Movie review: Vampires vs. Zombies

Tonight I'd like to review a zombie movie: Vampires vs. Zombies.  Well, I should say that I would like to review a movie that I bought because I thought that it would be a zombie movie. 

This is normally where I would have a spoiler alert.

But since there is no plot to spoil the entire point of the alert is ruined, so I'll just get to the point.  There is only one scene in this entire movie with zombies, and it's the last scene.  It's a pretty good scene but only because you've been waiting the entire movie to watch somebody, ANYBODY kill these stupid lesbian vampires.  The zombies kill them in about 5 seconds and the movie is over.

The 84 previous minutes consist of some stupid, hard to follow plot about an amulet intertwined with softcore lesbian sex scenes (that aren't even good).  The only reason I finished the movie was the same reason I finished Catcher in the Rye: because I thought that at some point something had to happen.  Although I was slightly less dissatisfied with Vampires vs Zombies I was still extremely dissatisfied.

The zombies themselves seem to be on the vein of 28 Days Later: fast and most probably virulent.  They don't much move or act like they're dead which adds to the speed with which they dispatch the vampires.  If you don't already know it I am not much of a fan of fast, virulent zombies.  Dead things aren't fast and transmission of some kind of zombie virus just seems too convenient and hacky to me.  There are a lot of other reasons for this but that's for another time.  Suffice it to say though, that if the writer of this movie had even bothered to explain that these were virulent zombies it would have been a serious upgrade to the movie.  One could just as easily say that these are angry, hungry Romulans or really extreme homophobes.

For the record I bought this movie used and lent it to someone from whom I haven't gotten it back.  I never asked for it back and now I don't even remember who has it because my life is better off without it.

Bottom line: not enough zombies to really make it a zombie movie, not enough plot to really make it a movie.  Don't watch it unless you have insomnia or are really into vampires or poor quality softcore lesbian porn.