Grr Zombies, Aarrghgghhh, Bbbrraiiinnss

Sooner or later zombies are going to take over. When that happens, us slackers are going to have to get off the couch and fight for our brains, but until then, there are plenty of things to help us prepare for the inevitable zombie apocalypse.

Keep in mind that there’s no way I could possibly document all of the wonderful zombie media this world has to offer: movies, videogames, comics, how-to guides, novels – there’s plenty out there, but where to begin?

Well, there’s Call of Duty: World at War.

I know … what does a first person-shooter WWII videogame have to do with the undead? The answer is a bonus game that you unlock after playing through the main game. It’s called Nazi Zombies.  I’ll let that sink in.

Nazi Zombies.

“Nazi Zombies is a four-player, cooperative survival mode that looks like it’s a little bit Counter Strike and a little bit Left 4 Dead,” said Dustin Quillen of 1UP News, from www.1up.com.

While I haven’t played the main campaign in Call of Duty: World at War, I have had the pleasure to extensively play Nazi Zombies. It starts when your character’s plane crashes in the middle of a decrepit battlefield, where the (inexplicably) reanimated corpses of German soldiers roam the countryside, looking for fresh brains.

Gaming is smooth, stressful, challenging and rewarding. Listening to the boarded-up windows rattle against the clammy hands of a zombie horde is extremely satisfying, but only if your character is well equipped with a Thompson submachine gun and a double barrel shotgun. Otherwise, it’s horrifying.

On a different note, zombies will invade the big-screen once again. According to Jared Pacheco at Arrow in the Head News (a horror movie blog on joblo.com), Danny Leiner, the director of Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, will be developing a brand new zombie movie: The Corporate Zombie Killers.

“Once in a lifetime, a script comes along which is beautiful, devastating and life-changing,” Leiner said. “The Corporate Zombie Killers is none of those, but it is an amazingly hilarious, satirical and action-packed ride in the undying and often overlooked world of corporate zombies.”

One may think that Shaun of the Dead ruined zombie comedies for all other filmmakers, if only because it was so good. That may be true, but Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (also known as Braindead), the New Zealand-zombie splatter comedy, showed that a little crude humor combined with copious amounts of gore are all it takes to make a cult-classic.

I’ve heard zombies described as the preferred monster for the modern misanthrope. George Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead) used his zombie films not only to scare at the box office, but also to make serious social commentary about the times in which his films were released. This strange mixture of B-movie camp with CNN-worthy commentary may rub some the wrong way, giving off the appearance that the zombie moviegoers are just twisted sickos who can’t wait for an excuse to shoot their neighbors, but looking closer, it seems zombies are just a reflection of ourselves.

Mmm, brains.