Drive-By Review: Z Nation
Sep. 30th, 2014 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustStillll...kinda feeling like shit. The weather gets odder and odder, which doesn't help. Yesterday I finally picked up my new glasses, and while I still have three distinct fields of vision, all three are certainly clearer than the used to be. Just walking around without them on for an hour and a half was difficult, though. It made me once again think about the fact that if the zombie apocalypse (or something a bit more plausible) ever does come, I'm going to end up against the wall through the simple fact of me not being able to function once my glasses inevitably get broken. Having one eye is bad, but two incredibly shitty eyes? Worse. I mean, sure, Philip Blake doesn't have any depth perception, but he still managed a perfect head-shot from 200 feet away (at least). I'd be forever blundering into walkers I couldn't spot coming and muttering: "Sorry!"
In related news, since the actual premiere of Season Five is still 13 days away, I've ben watching what has to be...okay, not the next BEST thing, because its' frankly and inventively awful, but I've nevertheless fallen into a pattern of watching the Asylum's Z Nation on Fridays, laughing hysterically, then deleting the episodes almost immediately. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the Asylum is an American production company who specialize in blatant rip-offs of megabudget Hollywood films. They usually take four to six months in turnaround to produce their stuff, with the script being written in two to four weeks in order to beat the "legitimate" releases they're free-riding on if at all possible (Transmorphers came out two days before Transformers, for example), and are known for casting tapped-out but recognizable "stars" with a small amount of TVQ. Some of their more famous releases include Atlantic Rim, Snakes on a Train, I Am Omega, Almighty Thor, Apocalypse Pompeii, and--of course--Sharknado.
(I'm sad to discover they didn't actually do Ghost Shark, my favourite SyFy Channel monster mashup ever, because that was frankly pretty rad, and I like their style. But no. I had also previously assumed they "were" Canadian because they shoot (almost) everything they do up here, or appear to, but I guess they're just a backbone part of the runaway film industry, like so many other parasitical organisms originating somewhere in California.)
So: Z Nation, shot on location in Spokane, Washington, is a blatant rip-off of The Walking Dead with a lot more jokes/boobs and pretty much zero dignity. Their effects are mostly CGI and super-cheesy, but because they cost so little, they can budget for stuff TWD wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole: zombie babies, zombie dogs, an entire refinery full of oil-covered zombies which goes up in flames, etc. Last Friday they ended up in Philadelphia and had to switch out one of their vehicles for a flat-bed with the Liberty Bell loaded on the back; when they took a sharp corner, the bell fell off and bounced down the street, smushing a group of zombies still in the process of eating a living human, and leaving behind a trail of broken-off legs still spurting blood. As one of the survivors looking out the back immediately blurted: "I would PAY to see that again!"
I've spoken on Twitter about watching their pilot episode, in which Harold Perrineau Jnr. (poor dude) had to snarl the line: "Damn, I hate moral dilemmas!" Thankfully for him, his tough-as-nails soldier character (an Abraham Ford expy) got eaten by the zombie baby, so he's well out of it. We're currently left with a pseudo-Rick Grimes (Tom Everett Scott), the not-Governor's ex-girlfriend, not-Glenn and not-Maggie (I actually like not-Maggie a lot, because she's a plus-size punkette with red dreads who know how the fix radios and looks like she'd be open to a bonding threesome with not-Glenn/the not-Governor's ex-girlfriend), a version of Hershel who smokes way too much weed, a feral young'un who calls himself Ten Thousand because that's how many zombies he intends to kill and is too wee to remember the Internet ("I've never seen porn. How was it?" Not-Hershel: "Great!" The not-Governor's ex-girlfriend, at the same time: "Eh."), and a woman who's roughly somewhere between Michonne and Michelle Rodriguez. Oh yeah, and also a former death-row inmate who's the only person to ever survive being bitten by zombies, whose antibodies may contain a cure, so that's why they're going to California. Sounds more legit than Eugene's BS, at least.
There's also DJ Qualls as "Citizen Z", the only guy still left alive at the NSA, who uses his mad telecommunication skillz and satellite access to track our merry band across America's denuded surface. Qualls is obviously having the time of his life, not least because he's supposed to be stuck up in the arctic, which means he does most of his emoting from a comfy-ish room while playing off a cute sled-dog he recently rescued. Everybody else is covered in crap and wrestling zombies or cannibal cultists, but he's frying steaks and spinning blues disks like some shock-jock from hell. It's an un-living.
What's the appeal, you might ask? Well, like I said, it's pretty funny, and fairly vicious. It sort of hits a sweet spot between Kirkman's comics canon--SO much crazier than the TV show, and not in great ways--and TWD's weird earnestness. In terms of that, BTW, I'm finally caught up with all of Season Three, having essentially worked my way through it backwards, and am pressing forward with "Death To Everyone", in which truly bad shit is about to start raining from the sky...the Terminus take-down (soon to be jossed by canon, I have no doubt) kicks off a spiral which eventually ends with Rick and Philip stranded alone at the prison, facing Negan single-handedly, as we saw in the initial flash-forward. But there's a whole lot of trauma to get through before we end up there. So maybe I just want to watch people have "fun" killing zombies? Yeah, that might be it.
Anyhow, that's keeping me slightly satisfied, in the interim. I'm also still keeping up with Outlander, Doctor Who (Steve appears to be a fan of the Capaldi version, who knew?), Sleepy Hollow, The Blacklist, Gotham, and my new fave, How To Get Away With Murder, which I should talk about at another time. But today's overcastness is making my head pound and I need to jumpstart some actual work, so I will bid you all adieu.
In related news, since the actual premiere of Season Five is still 13 days away, I've ben watching what has to be...okay, not the next BEST thing, because its' frankly and inventively awful, but I've nevertheless fallen into a pattern of watching the Asylum's Z Nation on Fridays, laughing hysterically, then deleting the episodes almost immediately. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the Asylum is an American production company who specialize in blatant rip-offs of megabudget Hollywood films. They usually take four to six months in turnaround to produce their stuff, with the script being written in two to four weeks in order to beat the "legitimate" releases they're free-riding on if at all possible (Transmorphers came out two days before Transformers, for example), and are known for casting tapped-out but recognizable "stars" with a small amount of TVQ. Some of their more famous releases include Atlantic Rim, Snakes on a Train, I Am Omega, Almighty Thor, Apocalypse Pompeii, and--of course--Sharknado.
(I'm sad to discover they didn't actually do Ghost Shark, my favourite SyFy Channel monster mashup ever, because that was frankly pretty rad, and I like their style. But no. I had also previously assumed they "were" Canadian because they shoot (almost) everything they do up here, or appear to, but I guess they're just a backbone part of the runaway film industry, like so many other parasitical organisms originating somewhere in California.)
So: Z Nation, shot on location in Spokane, Washington, is a blatant rip-off of The Walking Dead with a lot more jokes/boobs and pretty much zero dignity. Their effects are mostly CGI and super-cheesy, but because they cost so little, they can budget for stuff TWD wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole: zombie babies, zombie dogs, an entire refinery full of oil-covered zombies which goes up in flames, etc. Last Friday they ended up in Philadelphia and had to switch out one of their vehicles for a flat-bed with the Liberty Bell loaded on the back; when they took a sharp corner, the bell fell off and bounced down the street, smushing a group of zombies still in the process of eating a living human, and leaving behind a trail of broken-off legs still spurting blood. As one of the survivors looking out the back immediately blurted: "I would PAY to see that again!"
I've spoken on Twitter about watching their pilot episode, in which Harold Perrineau Jnr. (poor dude) had to snarl the line: "Damn, I hate moral dilemmas!" Thankfully for him, his tough-as-nails soldier character (an Abraham Ford expy) got eaten by the zombie baby, so he's well out of it. We're currently left with a pseudo-Rick Grimes (Tom Everett Scott), the not-Governor's ex-girlfriend, not-Glenn and not-Maggie (I actually like not-Maggie a lot, because she's a plus-size punkette with red dreads who know how the fix radios and looks like she'd be open to a bonding threesome with not-Glenn/the not-Governor's ex-girlfriend), a version of Hershel who smokes way too much weed, a feral young'un who calls himself Ten Thousand because that's how many zombies he intends to kill and is too wee to remember the Internet ("I've never seen porn. How was it?" Not-Hershel: "Great!" The not-Governor's ex-girlfriend, at the same time: "Eh."), and a woman who's roughly somewhere between Michonne and Michelle Rodriguez. Oh yeah, and also a former death-row inmate who's the only person to ever survive being bitten by zombies, whose antibodies may contain a cure, so that's why they're going to California. Sounds more legit than Eugene's BS, at least.
There's also DJ Qualls as "Citizen Z", the only guy still left alive at the NSA, who uses his mad telecommunication skillz and satellite access to track our merry band across America's denuded surface. Qualls is obviously having the time of his life, not least because he's supposed to be stuck up in the arctic, which means he does most of his emoting from a comfy-ish room while playing off a cute sled-dog he recently rescued. Everybody else is covered in crap and wrestling zombies or cannibal cultists, but he's frying steaks and spinning blues disks like some shock-jock from hell. It's an un-living.
What's the appeal, you might ask? Well, like I said, it's pretty funny, and fairly vicious. It sort of hits a sweet spot between Kirkman's comics canon--SO much crazier than the TV show, and not in great ways--and TWD's weird earnestness. In terms of that, BTW, I'm finally caught up with all of Season Three, having essentially worked my way through it backwards, and am pressing forward with "Death To Everyone", in which truly bad shit is about to start raining from the sky...the Terminus take-down (soon to be jossed by canon, I have no doubt) kicks off a spiral which eventually ends with Rick and Philip stranded alone at the prison, facing Negan single-handedly, as we saw in the initial flash-forward. But there's a whole lot of trauma to get through before we end up there. So maybe I just want to watch people have "fun" killing zombies? Yeah, that might be it.
Anyhow, that's keeping me slightly satisfied, in the interim. I'm also still keeping up with Outlander, Doctor Who (Steve appears to be a fan of the Capaldi version, who knew?), Sleepy Hollow, The Blacklist, Gotham, and my new fave, How To Get Away With Murder, which I should talk about at another time. But today's overcastness is making my head pound and I need to jumpstart some actual work, so I will bid you all adieu.
