USA Today and BloodyDisgusting broke these new stills from George Romero’s latest zombie flick, and surprise, they’re boring and lame.  Another shocker: Romero’s still claiming zombies are the perfect topical allegory.

“It’s about tribalism,” says Romero about [his new film, which] unfolds on a small island a couple of weeks after the original outbreak in 1968′s Night of the Living Dead. “There are two factions. It’s the idea that even when faced with a crisis, tribal concerns about power control people’s motives.”

“It’s this whole idea of tribalism, that we can’t pull it together,” he says. “News reports about the presidential race still bring up religious topics or racism. That’s pretty much the central theme.” [USA Today]

Oh f-ck off.  Every couple of years he comes out with a new zombie movie and every time he tries to convince us that zombies are the perfect metaphor for whatever’s in the news at the time.  Dude, you’ve been making the same movie since 1968.  You know what a new political climate requires?  A new metaphor.  You’ve ascribed so many different meanings to zombies they’ve become only what they are on the surface: people shuffling around saying “Braaaains.”  Forty years of that.  Can you fathom how insanely goddamned boring that is?

So according to Variety, some dicklicker is doing a remake of George Romero’s 1973 film The Crazies.  In related news, George Romero has been remaking Night of the Living Dead since 1968.

Redo will be directed by Breck Eisner [Michael Eisner's son, shocking -Ed.] ; Romero will serve as executive producer.

“Crazies” revolves around people in a small Kansas town who are beset by a virus that causes insanity and death after a mysterious toxin contaminates the local water supply.  Overture CEO Chris McGurk and chief operating officer Danny Rosett felt it was a good fit for the company’s expanding slate.

“We’ve been trying to move into horror fare that is clever and smart,” McGurk said.

It’s times like these I wish my site had a giant buzzer sound.

Hey, remember like 800 years ago when zombies were still a relevant metaphor for something?  George Romero does, shit, he’s still wearing the same glasses.  Anyway, he’s shooting a new movie in Ontario this week.

Plot involves inhabitants of an isolated island off the North American coast who find their relatives rising from the dead to eat their kin. The leaders of the island feud over whether or not to kill their reanimated relatives or preserve them in hopes of finding a cure.

Just once, couldn’t they rise from the dead to play dice and freestyle?  Or backyard wrestle?  Would anyone give a shit?  George Romero is like Alfred Hitchcock if all his movies were about birds.  And if I did gay porn, my screen name would be “Alfred Shitcock.”

This is the trailer for Troma Entertainment’s Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.

Confession: Okay, so I’m not cool – I didn’t know about Troma before this trailer (I’d heard of many of their movies, but didn’t realize the connection).  They’re apparently a production company that’s been making funny low budget stuff like this since the 70s, including the Toxic Avenger movies and Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Cannibal the Musical, to name a few. 

Lou Lumenick of the New York Post wrote in 2007 that Troma President, Lloyd Kaufman’s "horror comedies stretching back to the ’80s have been cited as influence by Peter Jackson, the Farrelly Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Takashi Miike and Guillermo Del Toro, just to cite a few of the prominent examples." [Wiki]

Namedropping aside, it’s nice to see someone using zombies they way they were meant to be used – for comical gore.  I know George Romero’s been trying to convince us that zombies are metaphors for grand social issues for the last 30 years, but that’s just pretentious college-boy rationalization for why he likes watching people eat fake brains.  It’s okay man – it’s only stupid people that have to pretend they don’t like fart jokes.   

Poultrygeist opens May 9th in New York, June 13th in LA.  See the website for more info.
UPDATE: Someone over at G4 was kind enought to direct my attention to this interview they did with the director and a voluptuous ginger.

Hey, anyone else tired of zombie movies? It’s like… it’s like they won’t die or something…

Anyway, George Romero comes back from the dead to introduce this trailer for Diary of the Dead, which opens next month.  I think the big secret of Cloverfield is that it’s actually this movie.

I don’t know what’s so scary about the dead coming back to life anyway.  Isn’t that what happened to Jesus?  He came out of his cave, saw his shadow, then got pissed and ate peoples’ brains and there were six more weeks of winter?  And then the rabbits came. 

That would’ve been way cooler.