Movie Scum

There was much complaining in the wake of last week’s finale that the pace was too slow with too little to justify its bloated runtime. While I can see the argument, I disagreed with that assessment. This, the second episode, should more closely match fan’s expectations: more zombies, more carnage, more collapse of society. As is stated in the episode: “it all goes quickly.” Madison, Travis, and Nick are mostly in shock at the start following the close of the pilot with Nick’s dealer, having been shot and twice run down with a truck, still giving them the glance-over with that glazed, zombified look in his eyes. Madison’s daughter, on the other hand, is concerned with her boyfriend who flaked on their last meetup and decides to go to his house. There she finds a house torn to pieces and Matt with a high fever and an unknownst to her bite on his shoulder. After finally prying Alicia away from Matt without any damn good explanation of why, the group heads back to their house only ...

Whereas the pilot episode to The Walking Dead began with a bang and a shuffling zombie girl clutching a stuffed bunny, Fear’s pilot takes the more nuanced approach of showing us the world of despair and decay, only for the sake of watching it be torn down even further. Opening in dank, darkened church but strange sounds, heroin addict Nick stumbles around to find a few of his mates eviscerated and his friend Gloria munching on a dude’s face. Unsurprisingly, Nick is shocked and appalled and runs his ass right out of the church into oncoming traffic. Nick is the son of Madison, the level-headed guidance counselor, who has long given up on her son’s drug problems. When Nick turns up in police custody after the accident ranting about what he has seen, Madison is quick to renounce them as ravings of a drug addict and not a looming threat to the world at large. Oops. For as much as this series was built upon the premise of a first-hand report of the collapse of civilization, very li...

AMC's much touted first look at The Walking Dead spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead was quietly tucked away into an early commercial break of last night's season finale of the parent show. Presumably the reason for this being that this 'teaser' stretches even the very definition of a teaser with just a few shots of sunny Los Angeles as a voice-over talks about a "strange virus going around." Given AMC's dearth of notable shows with Walking Dead now done for the season and Better Call Saul and Mad Men wrapping up, I expect we'll see a lot more. Fear the Walking Dead , which I will admit is a better title than 'Be Cautiously Aware of Those That Appear to be Walking Dead', will fill the gap between Walking Dead seasons premiering this summer, showing the beginning of the outbreak. At the very least, I will be looking forward to this if only because so many zombie tales skip the initial outbreak and are thrust straight into the apocolypse. I...