The Dead Hate the Living! (2000)
d. Dave Parker, 90 minutes, Full Moon Entertainment

Tagline(s):
Setting: An abandoned hospital.
Story: In the film's prologue, long-haired, mad doctor/zombie master Dr. Eibon (Matt Stephens) spoke into a video camera, announcing his breakthrough study of zombies, reviving them as aggressive undead. One of his zombie subjects appeared, and Eibon shot him, before the doctor was attacked and dragged away. After the title credits, the story officially began with the shooting of a "film within a film" - a pretty female doctor Shelly Poe (Wendy Speake) in a morgue was performing an autopsy on a hunky male corpse. The corpse awakened, killed her by slitting her throat with a scalpel, and she became a zombie. The two zombies began to make love - and then the scene was cut. A group of renegade young film-makers, including struggling director David Poe (Eric Clawson) and his lifelong friend and makeup artist Paul (Brett Beardslee), were attempting to make a cheap horror-zombie film. They had chosen to sneak into an abandoned hospital for the filming. Other film crew members included: geeky production assistant/zombie Marcus (Rick Erwin), goth-sexy production assistant Topaz (Jamie Donahue) - the director's girlfriend, dread-locked, pot-smoking cameraman Chas (David Douglas), and wanna-be actor, horror fan-boy, and special effects expert Eric (Benjamin P. Morris - the corpse from the prologue scene). David's bitchy second sister Nina Poe (Kimberly Pullis) had financed her brother's project. During filming, Eric and Shelly entered the hospital's basement, where they found scientific equipment and an upright coffin. When the group activated the coffin and opened it, they discovered Dr. Eibon's undead corpse. Director David decided they had to incorporate the corpse into their film. They seemed to offend the evil dead (the film's title: "The Dead Hate the Living!"), when Eric was sucked into the coffin and killed, after which a reanimated Dr. Eibon emerged amidst fog and flashing lights. Eibon was accompanied by two assistants, monstrous Maggot (Andre "Doc" Newman) and the tall Gaunt (Matthew McGrory). Unwittingly, the film-makers had opened a gateway to Hell, and hordes of zombies. The chase was on, as the humans were killed, and brought back as zombies.
Notable: A low-budget, fairly crude, direct-to-DVD, horror-comedy zombie film, a "film within a film." This was David Parker's debut film, and Full Moon Entertainment's first zombie movie. With the memorable quote: "What would Bruce Campbell do?" Made in homage to the Evil Dead franchise series, and containing lots of horror movie references and in-jokes, and the film's final scene was similar to Lucio Fulzi's The Beyond (1981, It.).

Versus (2000, Jp.)
d. Ryûhei Kitamura, 119 minutes, KSS/Suplex/WEVCO Produce Company/napalm FiLMS

Tagline(s): "Beware The Past, Fight The Present, Fear The Future," and "Witness a battle no one has ever seen."
Setting: Present-day, in the Forest of Resurrection, deep in Japan.
Story: The film's prologue was about the hidden existence of 666 portals on Earth that connected this world to the other side. If the gates were located and opened, one could obtain the power of darkness. Somewhere in Japan was the 444th portal, known as the Forest of Resurrection. In the present day, the film's protagonist was an escaped fugitive hero, Prisoner KSC2-303 (Tak Sakaguchi) with a prison guard's severed hand hanging from his dangling handcuffs. He met up with Yakuza mafia mobsters in the Forest of Resurrection. They had kidnapped a mysterious female hostage known as The Girl (Chieko Misaka). The mobsters wanted her blood to conduct an arcane ritual to give them ultimate power. The hero rescued the Girl after shooting one of the mobsters - who was reborn and reanimated as a samurai zombie. Other moldering zombies buried in the forest in shallow dirt graves were also coming back to life from the ground and threatening everyone. The main continuing stand-off conflict was between the hero and sinister chief Yakuza bad-guy leader known as The Man (Hideo Sakaki), a centuries-old villain. Everything led up to a monumental, 10-minute sword battle between immortals that would open up the "portal to the other side."
Notable: A violent, non-stop, B-level Asian zombie film - an example of trash cinema, about gun-wielding Japanese Yakuza mobsters battling with zombies. With martial arts, motorcycles, gunplay, sword-fighting, the Matrix's bullet-time photography, ultra-stylized choreography and action scenes, and lots of blood and decapitations - the feature film debut of director Kitamura. With some elements borrowed from Sam Raimi's frenetic Evil Dead 2 (1987) and Street Fighter (1994).

Stacy (2001, Jp.) (aka Stacy: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies)
d. Naoyuki Tomomatsu, 80 minutes, GAGA/Synapse Films

Tagline: "At the beginning of New Era, Unknown death spreads to young girls aged 15-17. But, they got their lives on the earth again such as Living Deads. And then, people in fear named them... STACY."
Setting: A future, dystopic Japan, in a New Era - the early 21st century.
Story: Teenaged girls (aged 15-17) worldwide were dying from unknown causes during a worldwide epidemic, although they died seemingly euphoric from a condition known as NDH, or Near Death Happiness. They came back from the dead as undead, cannibalistic teen-girl "Living Deads" - hungry to gorge on human flesh, and known as "Stacies." The ravenous girls could only be stopped by being "repeat killed" - or chopped into exactly 165 pieces. Government-sanctioned teams of killing squads, known as Romero Troops (in homage to the zombie master), were commissioned. One renegade Charlie's Angels-like "repeat kill" team of three pre-NDH schoolgirls, known as the Drews, was infatuated with Drew Barrymore. The film's main characters were middle-aged, lonely puppeteer Shibukawa (Toshinori Omi), NDH-suffering pre-Stacy Eiko (Natsuki Kato) who wanted the caring puppeteer to be the one to chop her up, and a crazed scientist performing gory experiments on Stacies in a secret research lab.
Notable: The splatter-black comedy was directed by former adult film director Naoyuki Tomomatsu, from Kenji Otsuki's novel, instilling the Z-grade film (digital video) with Asian schoolgirl fetish elements.

28 Days Later... (2002, UK)
d. Danny Boyle, 113 minutes, DNA Films/British Film Council/20th Century Fox

Tagline: "The Days are Numbered."
Setting: Cambridge, England, and London England, 28 days later. Also the outlying countryside in Northern England.
Story: Animal activists had attempted to release experimental chimpanzees (infected with a zombie virus known as the "Rage") from their cages in a primate research laboratory in Cambridge, England, and one was bitten. 28 days later in post-apocalyptic London after the accidental release of a highly-contagious, blood-borne virus had decimated the city (and was rapidly spreading throughout the world), mad, "Rage"-infected, red-eyed zombies were running rampant. One of the survivors, Jim (Cillian Murphy) a bicycle messenger, awoke from a coma in St Thomas Hospital, after being run down. He realized that a completely devastated London had been evacuated. He met up with two other uninfected survivors: Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley) who were seeking shelter in the London Underground. There was a suspenseful scene in a tunnel as the group changed a tire and zombies approached. After Mark was bitten and infected - and had to be brutally hacked to death with a machete by Selena, the two met more survivors: taxi driver Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his teenaged daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). Eventually, the surviving trio (minus Frank who was contaminated with a drop of infected blood) reached a rag-tag military outpost (an old mansion) in northern England near Manchester commanded by Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston), suspected to be power-hungry and mad. The two females were harrassed and needed protection from the sex-hungry military soldiers, who wanted to use them for breeding stock. One zombie, infected soldier Private Mailer (Marvin Campbell), was chained up for experimental purposes. It was revealed that the virus had NOT spread beyond the UK and had not infected mainland Europe. About two months after the outbreak and after escaping the mansion and living in a remote cottage, Selena, Jim, and Hannah spotted a Finnish rescue plane - with the hopeful promise of being saved, but it was likely they were not seen, as Selena wondered in the last line: "Do you think he saw us this time?"
Notable: One of the best zombie movies ever and a big hit film - an intense struggle for survival, with creepy scenes of a desolate and deserted London. In this zombie film (shot on digital video), zombification took place almost immediately (10-20 seconds). Some would argue this post-apocalyptic, plague disaster-drama wasn't a pure 'zombie' film - the creatures were virus-plagued or infected monsters or ghouls. A sequel followed, 28 Weeks Later... (2007, UK).

Resident Evil (2002)
d. Paul W. S. Anderson, Constantin Film Produktion/Davis-Films/Impact Pictures/New Legacy

Tagline(s): "A secret experiment. A deadly virus. A fatal mistake," and "Survive The Horror."
Setting: Raccoon City, in the early 21st century.
Story: A deadly, genetically-engineered viral (nerve gas) weapon, known as T-virus, was released at a top-secret, underground, high-tech, biological warfare research facility, The Hive, contaminating the entire maze-like facility. In response, the complex, super-computer, AI security system (with deadly lasers), dubbed Red Queen, sealed all entrances-exits to prevent outer-world contagion, and killed everyone inside. Elite commando soldiers/guards from the controlling, faceless Umbrella Corporation, led by mini-skirted amnesiac Alice (action heroine Milla Jovovich) and street-smart Rain Ocampo (Michelle Rodriguez), investigated the seemingly-deserted building, to shut down the computer and quarantine the virus. When the computer was disabled, all of the Hive's doors opened, revealing that the virus had 'reanimated' all of the dead bodies into infectious, voracious mutant zombies, including infected lab dogs and a beast known as The Licker. There was a race against time before the Red Queen sealed the facility, auto-destructed and locked them inside, and a race to discover the whereabouts of an anti-virus to be used to treat those infected. In the downbeat ending revealed by a newspaper headling ("The Dead Walk!"), the T-virus spread to the surface after the Umbrella Corporation reopened the Hive, creating an army of undead that completely devastated the city.
Notable: An excellent, yet highly derivative sci-fi horror film. Led to lots of sequels of varying success, of the videogame franchise: Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), Resident Evil: Retribution (2012). Based on the same titled series of survival horror games first developed in 1996 by Capcom, also known as Biohazard. In addition, director Anderson helmed Mortal Kombat (1995), also based on a computer game. The cold and efficient super-computer The Red Queen paid homage to HAL in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

House of the Dead (2003, Germ./Can./US)
d. Uwe Boll

Tagline(s): "The Dead Walk... You Run," and "You Won't Last the Night," and "You'll Die Laughing."
Setting: Unnamed island in the Pacific Northwest, although known as "Isla Del Morte."
Story: A group of college friends from Seattle were looking for "The Rave of the Century" party during spring break. They included Simon (Tyron Leitso), Greg (Will Sanderson) and his girlfriend Cynthia (Sonya Salomaa), Karma (Enuka Okuma) (with a crush on Simon), and Simon's love-interest Alicia (Ona Grauer) (Rudy's ex-girlfriend). After missing the main ferry, for $1,000, they chartered a private fishing boat owned by salty, grisly gun smuggler Captain Victor Kirk (Jürgen Prochnow) and his first mate, yellow-slickered Salish (Clint Howard) to a sinister-named island to attend a rave party. When they arrived, the party site was mostly deserted. Three survivors on the island: Rudy (Jonathan Cherry), Asian-American Liberty (Kira Clavell) and nerd-camcording Hugh (Michael Eklund) told them that the fast-moving zombies attacked and killed the party-goers. One by one, members of the group were massacred, first Cynthia, then Salish. Zombified, Cynthia killed Hugh, and then Greg was the next victim. Captain Kirk revealed an illegal cache of automatic weapons, and the armed group fought off the blood-thirsty zombies, and took refuge in an old dark house (near a cemetery) during the siege - Liberty was killed. Centuries old evil and insane Spaniard Castillo (David Palffy) was revealed to be the creator of the zombies by creating an immortality serum - he was a 17th century Spanish black sorcerer who had used the serum on himself to become immortal. After more battles, explosions, and zombie attacks, the only two survivors were Rudy and Alicia, both rescued by federal agents. Lethally-wounded Alicia survived only because she was given an immortality serum, but she would soon revert to being a zombie.
Notable: This inept, reviled zombie film, with a few gratuitous nude scenes (one with Erica Durance as party girl Johanna topless swimming), was from notorious German-born director Uwe Boll. It was Boll's first US film - critically lambasted, and inferior in comparison to another arcade-derived zombie film Resident Evil (2002). Segments in Boll's film included pixelated zombie action, health bars, "free play" notices, and on-screen instructions to "reload" - references to the Sega game itself. The film was a prequel to the best-selling video game House of the Dead, first released by Sega in 1996, as were Boll's next two films, Alone in the Dark (2005) and BloodRayne (2005). There was an unrelated sequel, without Boll as director - the made-for-cable-TV movie House of the Dead 2 (2005).

Undead (2003, Australia)
d. Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig, 104/97 minutes, Spierigfilm

Tagline: "Prepare Yourself."
Setting: Rustic fishing community of Berkeley (in Queensland, Australia).
Story: Lovely local beauty queen ("Miss Catch of the Day") René Chaplin (Felicity Mason) lost her childhood farm when it was repossessed by the bank, in the small, peaceful rustic fishing community of Berkeley (with beer-loving locals and the game of cricket). As she was preparing to leave for the city, a shower of glowing asteroids-meteorites fell from the sky and brought an other-worldly, contaminating deadly-virus infection from another planet. Everything that came into contact with the asteroids became infected (and the disease was also airborne) - and the dead were awakened as zombies hungry for human flesh ("They can smell us. They want to feed off us"). Trapped, Rene sought refuge in a survivalist-shelter (farmhouse) owned by the town's crazy, paranoid, shot-gun wielding recluse Marion (Mungo McKay), an outcast gun salesman. They were joined with four other desperate survivors: charter flight pilot Wayne Whipple (Rob Jenkins), his pregnant girlfriend Sallyanne (Lisa Cunningham) and two police officers: deranged, obscenity-spewing Sgt. Harrison (Dirk Hunter), and cadet rookie Molly Ford (Emma Randall) - all seeking to survive the zombie rampage. The mysterious plague of walking dead revealed more than just an infection - it was part of an unusual sci-fi conspiracy (Marion claimed he had been abducted by aliens). In the film's twist, the aliens were not harmful but wanted to neutralize the deadly effects of the meterorites and prevent the virus' spread. They had provided a cure for the infection - a cleansing rain. They also had maneuvered their space-crafts to create a giant wall of unworldly spikes around the infected zone, and they snatched up the cured survivors into the clouds to quarantine them before returning them. The infection reoccurred after the aliens left, because pilot Wayne (in an airplane) had escaped the "wall" - and then returned and reinfected Marion.
Notable: A low-budget, zombie horror-comedy, sci-fi (alien invasion) film - the debut independent feature film of the Spierig brothers. It was created in homage to the entire Romero oeuvre (especially Night of the Living Dead (1968)), all the way to Peter Jackson's far-superior Dead Alive (1992, NZ).

Dawn of the Dead (2004)
d. Zack Snyder, 101 minutes, Universal Studios

Tagline(s): "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth...", and "When the undead rise, civilization will fall."
Setting: A mega Midwestern (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) shopping mall, the Crossroads.
Story: After her neighbor Vivian (Hannah Lochner) and her husband Luis (Louis Ferreira) were turned into murderous zombies, Milwaukee-area nurse Ana (Sarah Polley) took refuge in a shopping mall after driving through an anarchic new world. She met up with several other survivors to withstand the siege of zombies. They included: police Sgt. Kenneth (Ving Rhames), resourceful TV electronics salesman Michael (Jake Weber), street-smart Andre (Mekhi Phifer) and his pregnant wife Luda (Inna Korobkina), three stupid mall security guards: redneck C.J. (Michael Kelly), Bart (Michael Barry) and Terry (Kevin Zegers), and other survivors who made it to the mall. The group joined together to fight off the threatening zombies. A bite from a zombie caused a deadly infection. In the conclusion, they sought to escape from the mall to a marina, by boarding two fortified buses. The only ones to survive on a departing boat were Ana, Kenneth, Terry, and Nicole (Lindy Booth). Although Michael had made it with the group to the marina, he knew his time was limited due to a bite on his arm - and so he remained behind and committed suicide.
Notable: A big-budget, major studio remake (or "reimagining") of George A. Romero's 1978 film (the second in the trilogy), with the same title, about a zombie apocalypse (minus the bikers). It was the highest-grossing zombie film at the time, with $59 million (domestic). With fast-running predatory zombies and an action heroine. Featured the memorable line of dialogue: "Is everyone there dead?'' ''Well, dead-ish.''

Shaun of the Dead (2004, UK)
d. Edgar Wright, 99 minutes, Universal Pictures/StudioCanal/Working Title Films/Focus Features

Tagline(s): "A Romantic Comedy. With Zombies," and "Ever Felt Like You Were Surrounded by Zombies?"
Setting: North London.
Story: Electronic goods sales store clerk - hapless, direction-less loser, almost 30-something Shaun (Simon Pegg), often accompanied his unemployed, vulgar, slacker TV addicted drinking buddy Ed (Nick Frost) to the Winchester, a pub in North London. Shaun's ambitious and smart girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) was tired of the two friends when they went out, and dumped Shaun when he broke a restaurant date with her for their anniversary. After Shaun and Ed spent a night of heavy drinking together, they awoke with hangovers on a Sunday morning to a zombie apocalypse outbreak. They were attacked in their garden by two flesh-hungry zombies. They learned from a news report that the only way to kill a lumbering zombie was "by removing the head or destroying the brain." They set out to rescue Shaun's mother Barbara (Penelope Wilton), and then Liz (to win her heart over) and her two roommates, David (Dylan Moran) and Dianne or "Di" (Lucy Davis). They realized that they had to pretend to be undead in order to survive, and they eventually took sanctuary and refuge in their favorite pub. Barbara, David and Dianne were the first ones to die and be reborn as zombies. Ed was also bitten just before the British Army rescued Shaun and Liz (and Shaun's friend Yvonne (Jessica Hynes)). Six months later, daily life had been restored, while a few zombies were left-over for cheap labor (as service industry slaves) and entertainment (as game-show contestants). Zombified Ed was kept tethered in Shaun's shed, while he played video games.
Notable: Edgar Wright's feature debut film, an amusing zombie parody and situational comedy with a pun for a title, about suburban zombie survival. A witty, non-stop horror comedy spoof (dubbed a "rom-zom-com"). With many clever references to former zombie films.

They Came Back (2004, Fr.) (aka Les Revenants)
d. Robin Campillo, 102/105 minutes, Haut et Court/France 3 Cinéma/Gimages Développement

Tagline(s): "Why have the dead suddenly returned..."
Setting: A small, nameless French town.
Story: There was an inexplicable worldwide phenomenon occurring in which 70 million recently dead people had returned as living beings seemingly in good health and harmless - although they were sluggish and slow-moving (but always moving, without needing sleep), with memory and awareness lapses, slow to adapt, detached, serenely blank and uncommunicative, more resistant to infection, prone to gather in groups at meeting places, and with lower body temperatures. In one small French town, 13,000 individuals who had passed away in the previous ten years had returned - walking slowly enmasse down the street from a cemetery. The main question asked by authorities was: how could they be integrated back into society, relearn being human, and return to their jobs? Had the mourners already moved on and made it difficult for them to be assimilated? The 'living dead' were subjected to lab tests and other studies to determine the best approach. The new arrivals or "returnees" were directed to emergency shelters to be claimed (if ever) by loved ones. Reactions from three different 'mourners' to the adjustment of the return of a deceased individual were examined: the loss of wife Martha (Catherine Samie) by the town's mayor (Victor Garrivier), the loss of a 6 year-old son Sylvain (Saady Delas) by a couple - Isham (Djemel Barek) and Véronique (Marie Matheron), and the loss of hospital worker Rachel's (Geraldine Pailhas) architect-husband Mathieu (Jonathan Zaccai). In the strange and oblique ending, the undead were setting off explosions at night, as acts of sabotage, before disappearing into underground sewers or tunnels. The authorities retaliated with military attacks using a toxic gas that caused a permanent coma. The comatose undead were returned to the cemetery to be laid on top of their graves - where they slowly faded away.
Notable: Robin Campillo's debut feature film. Unique in that this serious, intellectual, mystery-style movie was a zombie film without rotting, shambling, drooling flesh-eating corpses, or blood and gore. The film's socio-political implications were a metaphor for the assimilation of refugees or immigrants into a culture or society, or senior citizens, or autistic children, or even coma patients or wounded/handicapped survivors of war - treated as second-class citizens. The revisionistic film was the inspiration for the Channel 4 hit French TV series in 2012, the 8-episode The Returned.

Land of the Dead (2005)
d. George A. Romero, 93/97 minutes, Universal Pictures

Tagline: "The Dead Shall Inherit the Earth."
Setting: Feudal society in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Story: Masses of poverty-stricken residents in Pittsburgh were forced to live in the empty, embattled streets and slums, where they were fed and provided with medical aid by the city. Although protected by mercenaries (armed guards) and electric fences, society had become overrun by undead walkers, nicknamed "stenches." Meanwhile, the self-serving elite lived in fortified Fiddler's Green, a zombie-free enclave (fortified condominium) protected or bordered on three sides by a large river and on the other by an electric barricade, and lorded over by powerful super-capitalist Paul Kaufman (Dennis Hopper). The city's greedy and opportunistic ruler had sponsored the manufacture of the heavily-armored Dead Reckoning - a vehicle armed with machine guns and video cameras and a fireworks-launching pad, to both control and distract-mesmerize the zombies. It was led by Riley Denbo (Simon Baker), who commanded dangerous forays and missions to look for ever-dwindling supplies for the residents of Fiddler's Green. The enclave went under siege by the marauding zombies, led by the more evolved and intelligent Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), a former gas station worker. The undead could be trained to shoot guns, use weapons, and effectively besiege the corrupt city in the inevitable climax. With a backstory of dissension and unrest between the mercenaries and the entrepreneurs, the zombies led a successful, inexorable attack against the fortified area. In the conclusion, Riley fled the city, to head in Dead Reckoning toward Canada, to find land without zombies.
Notable: Romero's unsubtle 4th installment in his long-running zombie series, and his first since Day of the Dead (1985). This fourth film of the Dead series was about a symbolic class struggle - it posited the apocalyptic collapse of human society and the establishment of a feudal society. Although this film was written before the events of 9/11, it was released during the era of the War on Terror. To update its significance, some of the dialogue was revised. (e.g., "We don't negotiate with terrorists.") Zombies were portrayed as more human than the humans: "They're just looking for a place to go." Just a few months after the film's release, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, mirroring the abandoned and desolate city in the film.

Black Sheep (2006, NZ)
d. Jonathan King, 87 minutes, New Zealand Film Commission

Tagline(s): "Get ready for the Violence of the Lambs!", and "There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand... AND THEY'RE PISSED OFF!" and "GET THE FLOCK OUT OF HERE!", and "A NEW BREED OF COMEDY HORROR."
Setting: A sheep farm on Glenolden Station.
Story: The Oldfield family lived on a farm in New Zealand, with two brothers: sensitive Henry Oldfield (Nathan Meister), and his slightly-handicapped, scheming, sadistic, ruthless older brother Angus (Peter Feeney). The bullying Angus played a prank on Henry after killing his pet sheep Dudley and dressing up in the sheep's wool carcass. As a result, Henry developed a pathological phobia about sheep. At the same time, his father died in an accident. Fifteen years later, two self-righteous animal rights activists, vegetarian Grant (Oliver Driver) and young, leggy New Age-ish Experience (Danielle Mason) were trying to investigate Angus' secret genetic experiments on his sheep to create and market a new sheep breed (called 'Oldfields'), turning his flocks into aggressive and carnivorous, 8-foot tall sheep monsters. A bite from one of the modified, 'zombified' sheep could turn a human into gigantic, man-hungry weresheep (half-sheep, half-demon). When the two activists accidentally released a mutated sheep foetus - a major eco-mishap (similar to what happened in 28 Days Later... (2002, UK)), Grant was infected by a bite, as was an entire flock, and began to mutate into a meat-eating sheep. When city-dweller Henry returned to the farm to sell his farm share to Angus, homicidal killer sheep were already on the loose. The infected Grant bit Angus on the hand, and Henry's old friend and Maori farm manager Tucker (Tammy Davis) was also bitten by the rampaging sheep and began transforming (although he was given an antidote shot of amniotic fluid and became human again). Grant, however, was being fully transformed into a weresheep. During Angus' presentation to businessmen-investors about his new ruminant breed, the group was slaughtered in gory fashion by infected sheep. Both an infected Angus and Henry were dis-infected with another antidote shot, although the half-dead, maimed and crazed Angus was devoured by his own sheep. To end the plague of weresheep, the mad sheep were incinerated in a giant bonfire, and Grant was cured. However, the infection might spread further - a sheep dog bleated like a sheep.
Notable: A splatter horror-comedy similar in plot to Night of the Lepus (1972) about giant mutant rabbits, a tongue-in-cheek, one-joke, nature-run-amok cautionary tale, slightly inspired by New Zealander Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (1992, NZ). It was a parody of the many zombie (and vampire) movies with bitten victims slowly transformed. Not to be confused with the comedy Black Sheep (1996) with Chris Farley.

Fido (2006, Canada)
d. Andrew Currie, 93 minutes, Lionsgate

Tagline(s): "Good dead are hard to find," and "He's not just a ZOMBIE, he's part of the family," and "Laugh Your Head Off."
Setting: In the idyllic small suburban Canadian town of Willard, protected from the outer "wild zone."
Story: In a 1950s-esque alternate universe, a cloud of radiation dust from a space meteorite had turned the dead into zombies, who battled with the living. WWII was really the Zombie Wars - fought between the living and the dead (zombies). The Zomcom Corporation (with the motto: "A better life through containment"), founded by Dr. Hrothgar Geiger (Andy Parkin), saved the world from extinction, and created a Bright New World. The company invented protective electrical perimeter fencing, and then the electronic "domestication collar" - a way to remotely-control living or reanimated dead creatures - to tame them like household pets, and exploitatively use them for blue-collar labor, or acquire them as social status symbols. The Robinson family in the suburban 50s town of Willard consisted of zombie-phobic, wimpy, grouchy Bill (Dylan Baker), his pregnant feisty housewife Helen (Carrie-Anne Moss), and lonely and neurotic young son Timmy (Kesun Loder). A stumbling, mumbling, non-speaking zombie named "Fido" (Billy Connolly) became the domesticated 'pet' of Timmy (and Fido was also admired by Helen), although things went awry when Fido's collar malfunctioned and the cranky next-door neighbor Mrs. Henderson (Mary Davis) died. There was an outbreak of zombies and further problems when Fido was blamed for the neighbor's murder. A rescue mission was implemented to save Fido, discovered working at a menial job at Zomcom. Zomcon's abusive security chief Jonathan Bottoms (Henry Czerny) thwarted Timmy's effort, leading to the death of both Timmy's father (killed by Bottoms) and Bottoms (killed by Fido). In the happy ending, Fido was now the surrogate father and husband to Timmy and Helen (and her newborn baby).
Notable: An imaginative, whimsical, and entertaining black horror-comedy (a boy and his dog tale), with sly satire. And with the sensibility of a Douglas Sirk 50s melodrama (and the more recent Far From Heaven (2002)), although parodied.

Slither (2006)
d. James Gunn, 96 minutes, Gold Circle Films and Strike Entertainment

Tagline: "What's Gotten Into You?"
Setting: The rural town of Wheelsy, South Carolina
Story: It opened with the crash of a meteorite near the quiet town. Married resident and car dealer Grant Grant (Michael Rooker) was drunk and in the woods with married acquaintance Brenda Gutierrez (Brenda James), the younger sister of his former girlfriend. After being impaled by a needle-like spike shot out of one of the extra-terrestrials into his abdomen, slippery red slugs or worm creatures from the meteorite entered his system, infected his brain, and transformed him. To his pretty schoolteacher wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks), he claimed it was only a bee sting. Soon after, Grant was at Brenda's place to have sex. She innocently offered him cheese and crackers and removed her blouse. When he removed his shirt, his undulating, bloody chest revealed two tentacles emerging from it. In a highly suggestive scene, he stifled her screams with his hand, as the wiggling, two-tentacled creature broke out of his stomach and bore its way into Brenda's bare abdomen. He also transformed and became a mutant, voracious flesh-eating, killer intergalactic life form with tentacles - a slug-like monstrosity (looking like a giant, mucus-covered squid and ear of corn with bad teeth in a distended mouth) - somewhat similar to Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) in The Fly (1986). In his mutated form, Grant devoured a cow and then casually sliced a man in half with one of his tentacles. In the film's most memorable scene, the now-infected, massively-pregnant Brenda was chained up in a barn. She had hundreds of alien baby parasitic slugs inside of her, after she had become a zombie incubator or host body. She had turned into a sphere or ball of enormously stretched flesh with a small head in the middle of it. She called out when confronted: "Something's wrong with me!..They're tearing me apart!" Her fattened, pregnant self split or tore open and her expanded body exploded in a gruesome mess. Huge numbers of "worms" were expelled from her belly and some ended up in people's mouths, infecting them. In the next tense scene, blue-finger-nailed teenaged beauty Kylie Strutemyer (Tania Saulnier) was taking a bath when one of the slug-like maggots entered her open window, crawled down the wall and along the floor, and squirmed into the bath-water. She first viewed the reddish slug through her legs in the water while taking a bath. As she lept from the tub, it attached itself to her back, and then jumped into her mouth, as she struggled to extract it. The strong-willed teen successfully pulled it out of her mouth as the creature squealed. She threw it against the wall, throttled it with her hot electric hair styler, and held it down to be sizzled and burned. Outside the bathroom, she found her infected mother (Iris Quinn) and sisters Emily and Jenna (Matreya Fedor and Amber Lee Bartlett) - besieged and over-run by a horde of worms invading the house and crawling up the stairs. Her only escape was to jump off the two-story house onto the lawn below. She ran to a parked truck where she awaited her fate - as she was surrounded by the creatures.
Notable: Writer/director James Gunn's directorial debut film was advertised as having "heart-stopping horror" - but the cheesy, sometimes funny, seat-squirming B-horror sci-fi movie was a notorious box-office bomb. In a self-referential way, it paid homage to and was similar in many ways to the classic 50's film The Blob (1958), Cronenberg's Shivers (1975) (aka They Came From Within), The Brood (1979), Deadly Blessing (1981), John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and Night of the Creeps (1986).

The Zombie Diaries (2006, UK)
d. Michael G. Bartlett and Kevin Gates, 85 minutes, Bleeding Edge Films/Off World Films

Tagline(s): "Brace yourself... This time it's for real."
Setting: A dystopic world in the very near future - the early 21st century, in the UK.
Story: The world's viral pandemic started as a variant of the Asian flu (known as the "Omega strand"), a nearly-fatal disease and highly contagious zombie virus. Its dead victims were rising up and reanimated into hungry zombies, causing a greater zombie apocalypse. There were three groups of survivors, armed with video cameras, attempting to document the approaching, progressive zombie-undead catastrophe for future generations, in three segments: (1) "The Outbreak" - a documentary film crew of four conducted unscripted street interviews during the early days of the outbreak in London about the bird flu epidemic, then ventured into the countryside where they found evidence of zombie attacks, (2) "The Scavengers" - about a month later, a married couple (one American, one Brit) who fled London and were joined by a hitchhiker, searched on English backroads and in a deserted town for food and supplies, and (3) "The Survivors" - survivors camped at a barricaded farmhouse were assailed by zombies, now that the plague had ravaged most of Britain. At the end, there was a hook to tie together the three diary segments, and a contrived twist ending. All but one of the documentary crew members (in the first segment) was killed - not by infected zombies, but by two psychopathic murderers. One of these psychopaths also murdered the "survivors" in the third segment.
Notable: A low-budget production filmed with a jerky camera, in the style of The Blair Witch Project (1999), with a non-linear narrative and little character development. A "found footage" film similar to Romero's Diary of the Dead (2007) and another shaky video-cam zombie film, [REC] (2007), both a year later. Followed by director Michael Bartlett's and Kevin Gates' similar low-budget sequel Zombie Diaries 2: World of the Dead (2011).