ORIGINALLY POSTED ON STRAIGHT.COM, MARCH 8, 2011
By Steve Newton
The Georgia Straight has its fair share of zombie-movie fans on the payroll. There’s one guy in particular, our editorial administrator, who just can’t get enough of the undead. He’s always going on about “Oh, have you seen Dead Snow?” or “Hey, did you know I interviewed George Romero?”. I’ll be tryin’ to blog about Slash hating Glee and he’ll stroll into my office on the pretense of handing out editorial sig sheets just so he can chat about zombie this and zombie that. Dude’s part American, so I just nod and try to look interested.
You don’t wanna tick those half-Yanks off.
But the truth is, even though I love horror, I’m not a big zombie fan. At least I wasn’t until last night, when I came home from taking the family to see Gnomeo & Juliet (don’t ask) and watched the first episode of The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season, which was released on DVD and Blu-ray today.
I’d been hearing rumblings about how good this AMC original series was from another zombie-loving Straight employee, but never got around to checking it out. Now that I have, I can see why it was nominated for a Golden Globe and why, when it premiered last Halloween, it became the most watched drama series in cable history with 3.5 million viewers.
Based on the comic-book series of the same name, The Walking Dead stars Andrew Lincoln as a sheriff in a small Georgia town who wakes up in hospital after being wounded in a shoot-out to discover that the world as he knows it has been taken over by what the title says. The first episode sees him befriending a couple of other survivors and then setting off in search of his wife and son, who he believes have fled for their lives.
The quality of the writing and acting—not to mention the gruesome makeup FX—is top notch. It’s what you would expect from writer-director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) and producer Gail Anne Hurd (The Terminator, Aliens). I’m totally psyched to watch the second episode and see what the sheriff will do now that he’s barricaded himself in that army tank to escape the 200 or so zombies who devoured his horse.
If he has to drive that sucker right over their flesh-eating asses, so be it.