It's a naughty nurse zombie from the 80s, because I think you'll be surprised how much movie premises resemble crappy girls' Halloween costumes.

Jonah Hill is in negotiations to make his directing debut, and don’t get me wrong: I like Jonah Hill.  He was brilliant in Cyrus, and he’s totally underrated as a character actor.  But this project sounds like it could be the high-water mark of lazy premises.

Hill is in talks to make his feature directorial debut on The Kitchen Sink, the Oren Uziel script for Sony Pictures about the unlikely alliance between a high school-aged vampire, zombie and human as they try to save their town from invading aliens. The script was a top choice on the recently released 2010 Black List.

It seems pretty obvious why it’s called “The Kitchen Sink,” but in case you didn’t get it…

The title The Kitchen Sink is a self-aware reference to the fact that the scribe has thrown every known and currently popular movie menace into a story that is at its core a coming-of-age tale. When I first revealed that [producer] Tolmach had bought the script, the former Sony co-president of production told me: “I love high school movies, and sparked to the authenticity of these characters. It’s more in the spirit of The Breakfast Club than anything, but you get an idea of the title in an early scene where two kids are running from zombies. Those zombies suddenly are attacked by vampires. Just when they are all facing off, there’s a bright light overhead. You realize the aliens have landed and these groups have to band together, suppress the urge to kill each other, and it becomes thematically the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That makes it different than your usual zombie, vampire, or alien movie.” [Deadline]

Hmm, so basically like Cowboys and Aliens, then? I’d love to believe that this is some hilarious, new take on the material, but at a certain point, everything’s been done.  It’s a Charlie Sheen t-shirt.  “Huh, so this time the zombie is… a piñata?” And the title, The Kitchen Sink… Do execs not know when they’re being screwed with anymore?  Hey, I got one for you: it’s about zombies, vampires, werewolves, and alien invasion.  It’s called “I’m Mailing It In.”

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George Romero’s Survival of the Dead releases on OnDemand on April 30th, and they just released a new red-band trailer you can watch below.  It’s an improvement over previous trailers, because it has a zombie whose head explodes through its eyeballs and that has always been the best thing about zombies.  I think they should just go Monty Python with this, where some scholar comes in and starts explaining why zombies are a perfect metaphor for the current cultural zeitgeist and the decline of blah blah blah and then his brains shoot out his face and he gets stabbed with a wiener fork. That’s how my grand dad went.

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Courtesy of Bloody-Disgusting, this is the new red-band trailer for Survival of the Dead, George Romero’s latest.  If you read this site, you know I never really drank the Romero Kool Aid (zombie flavor), mainly because I’m sick of hearing zombies painted as a timely metaphor for everything from the Cold War to 9/11.  They’re dead people that walk around. And we’ve been making these for 50 years so let’s cut the sh!t, pretty please?

Off the coast of Delaware sits the cozy Plum Island where two families are locked in a struggle for power, as it has been for generations. The O’Flynn’s, headed by patriarch Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) approach the zombie plague with a shoot-to-kill attitude. The Muldoons, headed by Shamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick), feel that the zombies should be quarantined and kept ‘alive,’ in hopes that a solution will someday be found.
The O’Flynn’s, who are clearly outnumbered, are forced to exile Patrick by boat to the mainland, where he meets up with a cynical band of soldiers, headed by Guardsman Sarge (Alan Van Sprang). They join forces and return to the island, to find that the zombie plague has fully gripped the divided community, and the body count is rising.
As the battle between humans and zombies escalates, the master filmmaker continues to reinvent the modern horror genre with wicked humor and pointed social commentary.” [B-D]

Yes, the pointed social commentary, that was my favorite part.  That and when he stabbed the zombie with his wiener.

Here’s the trailer for Breck Eisner’s The Crazies, which Timothy Olyphant decided to be in for some reason. It’s a remake of a George Romero zombie film that Overture CEO Chris McGurk said they made because they were trying to do something “clever and smart.” That’s right, he thought redoing someone else’s movie… about zombies… was both clever and smart.  I feel like even a Bedouin nomad or a Kalahari bushmen has already seen this movie like 20 times.

[via THR]

Every day I wake up hoping that something zombie related will come out that’s so lame that it will finally make people as tired of zombies as I am.  How is this concept still going strong?  It’s like the “Don’t Stop Believin’” of movie clichés.  Anyway, historically, no one’s better at making stuff uncool than the Mormons (they make banging five chicks at once seem lame!), which is why I have high hopes for Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite)’s new web series, “Woke Up Dead.”  It’s about a 20-something loser zombie with student loans or something. I’m sure tons of people will watch it, because all the kids are watching web serieses these days.  It’s all about iPod and web 2.0 and kindle and keyboard cat, at least that’s what my granddaughter says.  I never know what the hell she’s talking about anymore.   Here’s what creator John Fasano (who looks like a Harry Shearer character) had to say:

This was a re-imagination of the zombie mythology, and an allegory for the disconnection of youth.

Hold the phone, the zombies are an allegory?  My bad, this is brilliant.  Also, Newman.