#zoombies

My ★★★ review of Night of the Zoopocalypse (2024) on Letterboxd:

Xylaria polymorpha Dead man’s fingers

With a little imagination, these club fungi may look like the fingers of some abominable hand just about to resurface itself to prey on the living.

Luckily, they have a seemingly reliable preference to tree stumps over brains.

Investigate their tough flesh a little, and it might be a surprise to find them clean and snowy white inside.

While other black fungi such as devil’s urn or black trumpets mostly elude me, I find dead man’s fingers everywhere.  They stick out at you even through the camouflage of dirt and detritus.

I’m so intrigued by how often I find them when I’m not looking for them compared to how I can’t find black trumpets for the life of me, I wonder if there’s less imagination to their common name than I think.

SO:

Yesterday was the first day of Halloween, as you all know. So, @deadcatwithaflamethrower decided to pull together the family and sit us down to watch horror movies every night, so I shall be posting my reviews of each here.

ALERT: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIES. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

DAY 1

ZOOMBIES

???/5

At first glance, you'd think this was a movie about super-fast zombies, right?

Wrong.

It's about a Zombie virus that explicitly infects animals spreading through an endangered wildlife reserve zoo. It's never explained where it comes about from, only that it apparently affects the brain of literally any animal except humans (which, really, doesn't make sense. Granted, most of this movie doesn't.) I don't even want to go in-depth on this one, it's so bad. The CGI and occasional gorilla costume just shows the budget that went into this.

And there was an attempt to make it a good movie- it just did not go over well at all. The best way to describe it, as put by DeadCat, is "a Republican's wet dream."

And it managed a sequel. By the gods, it managed a sequel.

DAY 2

THE CURSE OF BUCKOUT ROAD

3.5/5

On the complete opposite spectrum from ZOOMBIES, The Curse of Buckout Road is very much a ghost story. It's wonderfully shot and told, and tops off with a great twist.

The only thing that really tips it off for me, and drops the score down to 3.5, is the ending: a cliffhanger. Now, normally I don't mind cliffhangers, because they're good hooks, when used properly. But the movie... kinda didn't. Also, there doesn't seem to be any form of a sequel, so that pisses me the heck off. I wanna know what happened with the evil at Buckout Road, dammit!