Walking Dead Update!

Oh yeah. That's downtown Atlanta. Cool huh?

The trailer for the Walking Dead AMC series was released this week and I feel it is my duty to inform all of you who are not constant Internet hounds such as myself to inform you!

I really like that the show was actually shot on location in Atlanta. Oh yes, it was---during THIS summer, in THIS heat. So I totally don't envy the actors on the set, but I assure you--that sweat is real.

I totally approve of Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes in this series. He just really looks like the character in the comic book and judging from this freshly released trailer and all the set pictures I've seen, he is a good set for the part.

Andrew Lincoln (hat and gun) as Rick Grimes

From what I've seen of the rest of the cast, they're all chosen with the specific intention of creating a following for the series from the people who've read the comics--which is a godsend because I'm sick of film-makers turning popular comics into movies or shows without listening to the people who made the comics popular in the first place.

I don't know about you....but that's disturbing

See what a lot of people who have recently gotten into zombie comics/movies (such as myself) don't realize about this kind of media is how dichotomous it is--meaning that there are a couple different facets of what makes it so addictive. There is the gore factor--that squelchy level of awful that makes you "WHAT!? DID YOU SEE THAT" as you turn to grab the person sitting next to you. Admittedly this is very important, because at least at the surface it is very hard to like any zombie movie, vampire movie or pretty much any horror flick without there being a reasonable amount of blood-flying action. However! With the guts come the glory, after the blood stops running comes the story. (hey that rhymed!) And while the story doesn't necessarily have to be Citizen Kane or whatever, it has to be cohesive and it has to affect the audience in a way that the gore couldn't. The story either has to be super sick (Hostel, 3 Extremes) or super scary (The Shining or Dawn of the Dead or *shudder*  The Grudge). The reason some of these movies are so awesome (and just as reasonably some of them are so atrociously bad) is because of the double layer. You've got the blood and you've got the mind-messing. Look at how bad Cloverfield was. That movie had so much potential, it even had some totally awesome gore and stuff in it (girl blowing up.....awesome) but it was ruined by this really lame love story folded in and the fairly dumb pithy dialogue and the annoying camera (that made me car sick). I mean its really hard to mess up a giant monster story. And they did because the characters were unrelateably separate from the audience and we didn't empathize with them enough to be disgusted or enthralled by the awful things happening to them.

Which brings me to my point about this show: it has a frame perfectly suited to the aforementioned framework! It sticks with the guts and with the glory aspect! The footage shown puts to bed any fears I may have had about the show being on regular cable instead of HBO or whatever. I'm seeing blood, gore and really gross looking dead and walking dead people. Added to that is the knowledge that even if the show's gore was lame the original story is spectacular and a complete idiot would be required to mess it up; Frank Darabont is not a complete idiot. So the potential for awesome is incredibly high! I'm totally pumped!

Enough of my ranting!