After entering the abandoned farmhouse, Barbra discovers...
...a horribly mutilated dead body upstairs.
Ben later drags the body into a back bedroom. But who plays the corpse?
Answer: it's Kyra Schon, who's also Harry and Helen Cooper's ailing daughter, Karen.
Later, a female ghoul plucks an insect from a tree and eats it.
She's played by Marilyn Eastman, who is also...
...Karen's mother, Helen Cooper.
Those Coopers really get around, don't they?
Originally posted on 12/3/18
I neither own nor claim any rights to this material. Just having some fun with it. Thanks for watching!
Originally posted on 4/28/09
In case your TV has been living under a rock for the last couple of decades, there used to be this show on the Sci-Fi Channel called "Mystery Science Theater 3000", in which a human and two robots were forced to watch bad movies which they heckled mercilessly. It was a wonderful idea that generated many memorable episodes and lasted for eleven years, until it finally ran out of steam and got cancelled. Either that, or the show simply didn't get the appreciation it deserved from the Sci-Fi Channel, which is now known as "SyFy" because the people running it these days don't know their wormholes from their asteroids.
Anyway, when the show folded, Mike Nelson took the "making-fun-of-bad-movies" concept, shaved off all the sci-fi elements, characters, and the movies themselves, and started making downloadable "riffs" for people to play while watching their own DVDs. This has now evolved into Legend Films' new series of ten "RiffTrax" DVDs with which viewers may now watch the film with or without commentary by Nelson and former MST3K co-stars Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett. I recently got to watch their take on George Romero's 1968 horror classic, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and found it to be alternately hilarious, mildly amusing, and boring--much like the original MST3K.
If you're a serious fan of the film, the DVD gives you a nice-looking copy to look at even when you aren't in a laughing mood. The thing about NOTLD is that, for me, it's still so engrossing that I get caught up watching it and the riffers start sounding like those drunk high school guys who won't shut up in a movie theater. The parts of the movie that are still powerful, of which there are many, don't take that well to riffing, and often the guys are clearly looking for something to make fun of when there isn't anything.
Animating the Reanimated Turns Up Dead
By Joe Bob Briggs
NEW YORK—Well, it sounded like a cute idea.
I heard that somebody put together an animated version of George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead.
This had to be an obsessed fan in Youngstown doing stop-motion in his attic, right?
Or maybe it was a low-level inker at Marvel who went home every night to her walk-up apartment in Queens and painstakingly drew digital versions of Barbara, Ben, Johnny, Harry Cooper and the rest of the cast, saving the zombies for last because they would be the most fun.
Maybe it was a “reimagining” of the story originally written by John Russo for Romero. Something like Tom Savini did with his 1990 remake—lovingly faithful to the characters, but with unique twists that catch us off guard.
Whatever it was, it had to be a passion project, right? Nobody puts that much time and effort into a homage unless they worship the film and worship Romero.
Wrong.
Backed by big-studio money, directed by an acclaimed animator who does million-dollar commercials, staffed with A-list voice talent including Katharine Isabelle of Ginger Snaps fame, with so many people working on it that the credits go on for seven minutes, Night of the Animated Dead has the soul of Saran Wrap on a three-day-old cookie. It’s basically a paint-by-numbers Xerox that added color to the identical shots in the original movie—including all kinds of massive blood spewing whenever a zombie gets wasted—but forgot to add color to the story itself.
Jason Axinn, the director, had a highly praised first feature called To Your Last Death two years ago at London’s Frightfest, but that film was noted more for its blood-soaked gore than its emotional impact. The same is true here. In Night of the Animated Dead, Romero’s characters become specimens instead of the flawed but sympathetic victims of the original. This is especially true in the case of the Harry Cooper character. Karl Hardman played it straight down the middle in 1968 so that you were able to see that his hard-headedness derived from his desire to protect his wife and daughter. As voiced by Josh Duhamel in the animated version, he’s just a selfish prick. (It’s not Duhamel’s fault. It’s drawn and written that way. Cooper’s face is feckless and sinister.) The Barbara character, too, becomes one-dimensional as she just babbles incoherently or stares straight ahead in a catatonic state, so you don’t get the Judith O’Dea tenderness. (Barbara is voiced by Katharine Isabelle, but again, it’s not her fault that the animation gives her nowhere to go.)
The reason for the lack of character depth seems to derive from the choice of animation style. The characters move in that herky-jerky mode characteristic of shorts normally seen at the Festival of East European Animation with titles like Reflection or Random Labyrinth or Hedgehog in Caligari’s Court. In other words, they don’t bother to sculpt the bodies so that we start to feel they are more than just symbols of people. We’ve already seen the real people in the real movie, so it seems like this would just be basic, but we have far too many moments of Ben being a cardboard bad-ass (voiced by Dule Hill), Harry being a cardboard coward, and Tom and Judy being a pair of cardboard lovebirds making bad decisions.
Far from being a fan-based love letter to the zombie classic, Night of the Animated Dead seems to be created by a bunch of suits in a conference room.
AND SEE JOE BOB IN PERSON AT THESE EVENTS!
* 10/9 How Rednecks Saved Hollywood, Columbus, OH. Tickets
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