As It Stands blog: Get your lurch on! It’s Zombie Friday at the movies

     Good Day World!

Once upon a time vampires were all the rage.

Vampire books written by such wordsmiths as Anne Rice (Interview with a Vampire) were hot and made into movies.Vamps were sexy.They were big time too. Brad Pitt was sexy as he sucked blood from his willing victims in Interview With The Vampire in 1994.

Vampires are still sexy I suppose, but they’ve had to step aside and let Zombies lurch past them in popularity ratings lately!

When Brad Pitt goes after Zombies…you know they’ve arrived! I have a review of his latest movie “World War Z” to share with you.

I also have links to a List of Zombie Movies worth watching right here. Right now, let’s take a look at what one movie critic has to say about Pitt’s performance and the movie itself:

Zombies generally don't work together, but in "World War Z," they use each other's undead bodies to form a ladder to get over a wall to eat humans.

Movie zombies have staggered from slow to fast -- is smart next?

“In Brad Pitt's new movie, "World War Z," a soldier gives Pitt's character the lowdown on their undead opponent: Bullets to the body only slow them down, though head shots kill them. They sometimes ooze a kind of black tarry substance, and they love biting humans "like fat kids love Twix." And as filmgoers watch, they discover that these zombies c

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an hear a Pepsi can drop a mile away, tackle like a Dallas Cowboy in the Super Bowl, are willing to fling themselves off skyscrapers and over giant walls, and are smart enough to use the bodies of their fellow undead as a ladder to clamber toward their human targets.

These are not your grandfather's zombies.

Moviegoers have seen the undead evolve in a thousand gruesome rotting ways since the creatures of 1932's "White Zombie" were docile enough to work in a sugar plantation. George A. Romero took the creature -- which he called a "ghoul," not a "zombie" -- to a whole new level in 1968's classic "Night of the Living Dead," making them totter out of graves to munch on the living. And from then on, Hollywood was off, shambling down a rotting cinematic pathway littered with discarded body parts and ever-evolving zombie lore.

Zombies stayed about as fast as your walker-using Aunt Fannie until the 2002 release of "28 Days Later." Purists will tell you that the infected in that film weren't dead, so are not technically zombies. But no matter, they still introduced the public to the idea of fast movie zombies who no longer staggered after you like a drunk uncle, but match Pittsburgh Steeler Hines Ward (who played a zombie on AMC's "Walking Dead") for speediness.

"I do think that if you had to be bitten by slow movers to turn, you could avoid them and eventually defeat them," said Cal Miller, author of numerous zombie books and zombie comic strip TedDead. " It would be like fighting an army of senior citizens. The fast ones are just horrifying to me. They’ll run you down." (FULL STORY HERE)

Time for me to stagger on down the road…