Tag Archives: zombies

Horrible Horrors – “Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill”

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Like westerns? Like zombie movies? Like slashers? Well, you’re going to absolutely hate this. Even if you like zombie-western-slashers you’ll probably hate this.

It’s like a succession of shlock-horror vignettes alternating with mini music-videos, with the only real consistency in the movie being the panto-esque acting and excruciating (though occasionally unintentionally hilarious) dialogue.

The movie begins in the desert with a drug dealer being pursued in a low octane car chase by a police woman, who of course breaks off pursuit when the dealer hurls a mound of coke from his car and it bursts all over her windscreen.  A little tip for you killers out there: this also works with murder weapons. Just throw your bloody knife or smoking gun at the pursuing law enforcement vehicle and, BINGO, you’ve got away with it. Most of the movie’s landscapes are bleached, much like the atmospheric Mexican vistas in the movie Traffic, while the movie itself is about as entertaining as being stuck in actual traffic.

The dealer’s car breaks down and he finds himself at Sunset Valley, a mysterious ghost town that, unfortunately for Mr No-Blow Escobar, is filled to the gunnels with zombies, who waste no time in, well, wasting him. Their leader is the vengeful Bloody Bill, a Confederate soldier consumed with eternal wrath following his long-ago execution.

A little later, a mini-bus containing a debate team is hijacked by Earl, the earlier drug dealer’s pissed-off partner. They, too, end up in Sunset Valley, and proceed to be picked off by the undead. Beyond the principals’ broad character types – hick; screaming beauty; bad-ass babe; mouthy smart arse; preachy do-gooder; angry black drug dealer – there isn’t much to commend them as actual people that you might bring yourself to give a single, solitary shit about: Earl, the dealer, shouts about drugs, money and killing people; and the debate team spend a fair amount of time actually debating things, which doesn’t make for a particularly arresting zombie-slasher flick.

‘So you’re saying the beliefs of the world’s three major religions are invalid?’ asks one of the unfortunates, seeming genuinely upset.

‘No, I’m saying they’re unsubstantiated. There’s a difference.’

The writers obviously thought to themselves: ‘Well, we’ve made these guys debate champions. We’d better have them randomly debate things every once in a while.’ I guess we can be thankful that they weren’t written as champion Morris Dancers, although at least that would’ve been funny.

The not-quite-yet-fully-zombified dealer from the start of the movie shows up at one point, screaming at the doomed congregation: ‘Bloody Bill! He’ll find you!’ Of course he’ll find you, I thought to myself. The town’s only got about seven buildings in it. It wouldn’t exactly take a hide-and-seek champion.

It’s clear that the director, Byron Werner, wants to show off the toolkit of techniques he learned in film school – bleaching, colour filters, jerky cuts – without ever marrying them to mood or effect. The zombies appearances are mostly scored to goth rock, which really helps capture that old timey, Civil War feel. I should have felt dread at the zombies’ arrival, not get the sense that my six-year-old son had just accidentally flicked the channel to a 24-hour station specialising in German heavy-metal music. In fairness, Werner shows himself to be a very capable and inventive cinematographer, and adept at crafting effective sequences, he just doesn’t appear to care much about threading it all together to achieve consistency of tone or vision. It wasn’t much of a surprise to discover that Byron Werner has indeed gone on to enjoy a lucrative career directing the music videos of some very well known artists. So, in a way, this movie was his audition reel. And good luck to the guy. He’s obviously got talent.

Not so the editor or the people in charge of continuity. Not only do we see a two-lane track suddenly become a one-track lane during a crucial (almost) collision, but at one point Earl is caught mouthing the line of one of the other characters as they’re speaking it (that’s probably my favourite bit of the movie).

Earl’s death is also my favourite, for reasons both good and bad. Good, because he goes to his reasonably noble death with a face-full of crack daubed on his face like war-paint, and live grenades in his clutches. And bad, because the special effects budget couldn’t supply Earl with a worthy, flashy enough send-off. We should’ve seen a slow-mo blow-out, as a fireball smashed through the building and engulfed the first floor, sending fiery debris and shards of glass shooting after the screaming women. What we saw was, em, sort of close to that: a wee puff of black smoke slowly drifting out of a window, like a freshly-released genie just couldn’t be arsed making a grand entrance.

Bloody Bill himself doesn’t look too bad, as far as straight-to-video villains go. He’s like a low-budget Leatherface, or the Creeper from Jeepers Creepers, but without much of the creepiness, or indeed jeeperiness. I won’t tell you how the film’s lone survivor manages to bring down Bloody Bill. Not because I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s just that I don’t really care enough to tell you.

Some of the gore is commendable, some of the film’s sequences undeniably are well shot, and there are a few unmeant but magical laughs, but even if you’re a connoisseur of shit movies like me you might still want to give this one a miss.

Year: 2004

Run-time: 88 Minutes

Studio: The Asylum

Director: Byron Werner

Bad Bad Shit or Good Bad Shit? Bad Bad Shit.

Jamie on the Box: Fear the Walking Dead, The Affair

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TV Review: Fear the Walking Dead (S5 E14); The Affair (S5 E4)

The dead still walk, and old habits die hard.

Sunday’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead (AMC), ‘Today and Tomorrow’, began with Morgan watching himself discussing his dead wife and son on Al’s video-tape. I thought we might be about to delve into the sort of episode that The Walking Dead franchise does so well: a powerful, stand-alone, self-contained ode to misery or paean to hope that halts the trajectory of the season’s viscerally depressing arc in favour of fleshing out a character’s motivations or back-story.

Alas, the camera clicked off, returning us to the cold, bleached hues of the show’s sombre cinematography. It says a lot about the show’s present state that I was disappointed not to be spending the entire forty minutes listening to Morgan simply remembering his dead family. Maybe I miss the old Morgan, before the franchise bleached his soul the same lifeless grey as the distant Texan hills.

‘Today and Tomorrow’ is a treading-water sort-of-an-episode in a season that seems to have done nothing but tread water (nonsensical situations and logic-defying set-ups notwithstanding). Morgan and Althea shield a frightened man from The Pioneers – a cowboy cosplay troupe with fascist intent – and then agree to infiltrate their lair in order to rescue the man’s captured sister. Meanwhile, Daniel, Grace and Daniel’s cat share some moments of levity as they bond over LPs, zombie-killing, audio-books and dive-bar guitars. It’s not good, but it’s not strictly bad, which, sadly, is something of a win for season five. A sad state of affairs and a thunderous back-slide indeed for a show that in its third season was starting to outshine its parent.

It’s disheartening how thoroughly Fear the Walking Dead has gutted its big hitters. Daniel, once the show’s greatest asset – the brutal pragmatist; the one-man, hair-dressing Die Hard, – is now barely recognisable as the Daniel of old. Strand, too, once had a dark and mysterious edge – a snake who’d remortgage his grandmother’s soul a thousand times over for as little enticement as a half-bag of Fritos – but who now stands before us a neutered, one-note teddy bear, as bland and hopelessly generic as most of the rest of the characters. John Dorie is starting to suffer the same fate.

Of all the actors in the franchise, though, Lennie James – powerhouse actor, British national treasure – has been let down the hardest. Morgan’s mission to atone for his guilt and murderous sins, and stave off feral madness, was once utterly compelling, but I now find myself anticipating the character about as keenly as a weak cup of lukewarm tea. I’m now actively rooting for Morgan to go absolutely batshit, rip-the-room mental again, just to give Lenny James something to get his teeth into, to give Morgan somewhere to go, even if it’s right back where he started from.

I’ve got a feeling that’s exactly where we’re headed. ‘Today and Tomorrow”s main function appears to be to get Morgan to a place where he’s finally made peace with the tragic deaths of his wife and son, and ready to declare his love for Grace, ostensibly so it can crush those nascent feelings of hope. Indeed, the moment Grace finishes her dive-bar duet with Daniel, she immediately gets to work on her new, one-woman show, ‘Dying of Radiation Poisoning’. Poor Morgan. Lucky us, though, if he flips the fuck out.

And unlucky for Ginny, the franchise’s next (in an insufferably long line of) murky, morally-relativistic bad-guys-who-actually-think-they’re-good-guys. She may waltz about with armed, be-hatted soldiers and throw around that aw-shucks charm like some bat-less, good-for-nothing Shegan of the south, but if Morgan takes his safety off, it’s bye-bye quasi-fascistic brunette.

Whatever happens, I hope something gives soon. I don’t want my happy memories of this show’s very recent hey-day to become long-forgotten relics.

Speaking of memories, ‘remember when’ is The Affair’s (Showtime) stock in trade. Its central conceit – the telling of the same story multiple times, from differing perspectives – has always proven to be as compelling as it is maddening. We know that human memory is fickle and fallible, and that people sieve and filter stories to suit their psychopathologies and agendas, but The Affair offers us wild variation often without the anchor of context.

In the first season the narrative was framed by a police investigation that was unfolding in the future, which explained some of the divergence in the characters’ recollections. Most of the time, though, the audience is forced to become forensic detectives of the soul, hunting for ghosts and searching for shadows over shifting sands of memory. There’s never been a definitive answer to the problems of perception raised by The Affair, only more questions.

Whose story is this? To whom are they telling it? Is what I’m seeing in this person’s account of these events the result of wilful lies being told to a third party, or is it a case of the person lying to themselves? Is a particular emotion or underlying trauma exaggerating this or that aspect of the event? Why is person A wearing a red coat in their own recollection, but nothing at all in the other person’s? Are we knocking against madness here (the third season makes this explicit)? What the fuck is going on?

The only real certainty in the world of The Affair is that Noah Solloway is the fucking worst. Always. Worse than Tony Soprano. Worse than Walter White, Vic Mackey, Hitler and the rotavirus all rolled into one. He’s an angry, whining, arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit-stain of a man, who’s never happier than when he’s lighting the torch-paper on yet another narcissistic firework display. But even then the show’s conceit throws doubt in your mind. Often, the very harshest critic of Noah is Noah himself, and you’ll find multiple examples throughout the series of his equally powerful propensity towards self-flagellation. Maybe we, the audience, are simply responding to, and absorbing, the character’s self-hatred, and projecting molten hatred right back at him. Can we really trust the perspectives of the other characters? Maybe they’ve got it in for him, or are threatened by him, or feel guilty about their part in sending him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit? Maybe… maybe he isn’t an angry, whining, arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit-stain of a man after all. Maybe he’s not all that bad?

Don’t be fooled. He’s the worst. Always. He really is. Just when you start to feel sorry for him, he’ll do something irredeemably awful like, oh, I don’t know, sneaking in to Helen’s new boyfriend’s house during a party dressed as a gorilla and trying to plant dildos under his pillow. Although he has a sudden change of heart about taking these actions, when a lonely co-worker and co-reveller later expresses her sexual interest in him, Noah uses the opportunity to cruelly take advantage of her and steal her bra, which he then proceeds to shove under the new boyfriend’s pillow in the dildo’s stead. Oh, Noah, you are utterly fucking awful. His segment in this episode plays like some twisted cross between Mission Impossible and a particularly bad episode of late-era Red Dwarf. When he was caught in the act, I half-expected him to morph into Ricky Gervais.

Noah’s ego is in free-fall. The book he wrote about his affair, that rubbed his ex-wife’s (and his new wife’s) face in shit is now being adapted into a movie, from which process he’s being excluded on account of the famous actor/director playing him in the movie now dating his ex-wife, and re-writing his story to boot. This season is very much Noah’s turn to have his face very publicly rubbed in shit. It’s quite cathartic in a way, but, after a powerful, tour de force fourth season, also shark-jumpingly ridiculous.

Better handled is Whitney’s segment, which serves to flesh out and humanise this archetypal spoiled brat, and also show the ways in which the aftershocks from the original affair are still affecting the lives of everyone in the family.

Whitney is a beautiful young woman from an affluent family who is engaged to and supporting a struggling, down-on-his-luck artist from a far more humble family. In this dynamic, her fiance Colin is pretty much a Noah-surrogate, and Whitney is her own mother. Framed this way, it’s interesting that Noah would try to enlist Helen’s help to sink his daughter’s relationship. He’s basically poo-pooing himself. There’s that self-hatred again.

If Whitney ‘is’ her mother, then she’s got something that Helen never had in her position: the benefit of second-hand hindsight, essentially a psychological time-machine. Whitney can see what her mother has now, post-affair, post-grief. She has a relationship with a renowned and feted Hollywood actor and director. So when Whitney’s abusive – but handsome, influential and renowned – artist ex-boyfriend, Furcat, returns to woo her and beg her forgiveness, she has the chance to hop-skotch the parts of life her mother ultimately suffered through and leap straight to the rich celebrity part. She takes it, albeit temporarily. Whitney has an affair.

I interpret what Whitney does here as an attempt to avoid the trap of her parents’ pain, rather than her answering the call of some shallow or materialist impulse.

“I don’t want to be looked at any more,” the former model tells a supposedly earnest and sophisticated aesthete at Furcat’s party. “I want to be the one doing the looking.”

Later that night she has raw, carnal, drug-induced sex with her ex-boyfriend, as the perverted aesthete is permitted to watch.

Poor Whitney is a confused, helpless, unhappy, selfish, cheating mess. She’s a victim. She’s a perpetrator.

She’s very much her mother’s daughter.

And she’s very much her father’s daughter.

PS: I like to pretend the Joanie bits aren’t happening for now. Please God let them be leading somewhere consequential or meaningful.

The Walking Dead Rolls Rick

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I know what you’re thinking. Does this review of The Walking Dead S09 E05 contain one spoiler? Two spoilers? Three? Go on, punk. Click. Make my day.

Season 9 Episode 5 – “What Comes After.”

Word up, people. You’ve been Rick Rolled. Where did Rick Roll? Under a dumpster, motherfuckers. Only this one had wings.

I don’t know how I allowed The Walking Dead to pull this bait-and-switch trick on me again. In retrospect, dwindling audience figures notwithstanding, it seemed slightly desperate and insane to make a massive spoiler – ‘It’s Rick Grimes’ Final Episode’ – the focus of the show’s marketing campaign.

I guess it was technically Rick’s final episode. They never said ‘dead’. I assumed ‘dead’. But what else is there but ‘dead’ on The Walking Dead? In my defence: why else would a character leave? What other possible, plausible reason could they have for exiting the show? The chance of a modelling career in Paris, perhaps? A new job teaching community college in Mississippi? Mind you, Morgan left ‘The Walking Dead’ alive, but he immediately went on to join the spin-off show ‘Fear the Walking Dead’. So is that the future for Rick? Another spin-off show? ‘Fear We Go Again’?

Just after the bridge blew up I scribbled something down on my notepad and read it aloud to my partner: NO BODY – SEE YOU IN SEASON 13, RICK. We laughed and I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Watch this, he’ll turn up in a few seasons time and they’ll reveal that he was fished out of the river and whisked away in a helicopter.’ The idea amused me: Rick rocking up to the Hill Top disguised under a heavy cloak and clutching a walking stick, Willy Wonka style, and then casting off the cloak, chucking the stick away and doing a big comedy forward roll, before jumping to his feet and shouting, ‘Did somebody call 911?’

I quickly realised that I’d accidentally discovered the ending. Well, not the stuff with the forward rolls, of course, but the helicopter rescue. I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen – at least until Judith Grimes showed up. WHAT ARE YOU DOING, WALKING DEAD? YOU’VE ONLY JUST GIVEN US ETERNAL PEACE FROM ONE IRRITATING-AS-FUCK GRIMES KID – AND THE REPLACEMENT’S HERE ALREADY??

Negan goads Rick by taunting Karl’s eye again

Still, sad as Judith made me, I could never be sadder than old Saddam Hu-Negan, ripped from his cell by Maggie and ready to die cause he missed his baseball bat, or his dead wife or something. His whole reaction here is really in-keeping with the character, just as long as the character you’re talking about isn’t Negan. I always hoped they’d add a little colour and substance to Negan’s X-rated panto-villain schtick, but instead of nuance, we got no-ance.

On a side note, how strange that a show as nihilistic and violent as The Walking Dead would choose this time to take a stance against capital punishment, even if the show’s argument does appear to shy away from the moral and ethical considerations and lean heavily into the assertion that prison fucks people up more and for longer, so let’s do that!

So what did this episode teach us, apart from the two most obvious and painfully apparent lessons, namely: 1) that we should never, ever trust The Walking Dead, and 2) that we shouldn’t let four very good episodes fool us into thinking that the show is now fixed and back on track after two-and-a-half disappointing – and often downright duff and dull – seasons?

Nothing. It taught us nothing. Nothing that we didn’t already know, and in any case nothing of any real interest or consequence. We were reminded that Rick is a weird, kaleidoscopic chameleon of a character; a conveyor-belt of mixed bags and action archetypes spinning round and around on the carousel of plot; a man with no discernible qualities outwith his own exquisite ‘Rickness’.

“Why are we herding these thousands of zombies?”

“I AM RICK!”

“Why are we stabbing sleeping people through the head?”

“I AM RICK!”

“Why are you such a poorly defined character?”

“I AM RICK!”

It’s a shame, really, because there were elements of this episode that could’ve lent a poignant sheen to Rick’s death, had the show had the balls to actually bump him off. I wrote things in my note-pad like, ‘the herd represents the death that has stalked him from the pilot episode, that stalks us all, now catching up with him’ and ‘Rick is looking for his family – he will find them in death’. And what a nice touch it would’ve been for Rick to have died willfully destroying the literal and metaphorical bridge he’d spent the season wholeheartedly believing in and building. But in the end it was all a lot more wanky than that. (See also: ‘I GUESS YOU WERE MY FAMILY ALL ALONG, GUYS!’)

It was either this, or Shane, Hershel and Sasha appearing in the sky above Rick scored to a John WIlliams’ composition.

I went with the Rick Roll angle in naming this review, but the other title I was toying with was: ‘A Rickmas Carol’. After all, Rick was visited throughout the episode by three ghosts of Walking Dead past, each with some nugget of knowledge to impart to the man who had directly and indirectly caused all of their deaths. Shane said, ‘Hey, Rick, you’ve got to get angry and keep stabbing people, man,’; Hershel popped up to say, ‘Something something something big cuddle’; which left Sasha to cover the mystical angle: ‘Confucius say these aren’t dead people you’re standing on, Rick. This is a carpet of almost inscrutable super profundity, and we’re going to have a stilted, cod-philosophical conversation all about it, my friend.’ At one point in their dialogue, Sasha says something about going toward the good, toward the brave, and a teary-eyed Rick replies by splurting out ‘toward love’, which I felt was a rather an incongruous almost-coda for a man who’d spent so much of his time beating people to death with his bare hands and running them over with his car.

This was no ‘Rickmas Carol’ (or ‘Rickmas Corrrrrrrrrraallllll’, if you prefer), though. In ‘A Christmas Carol’ Scrooge emerges from his Xmas Eve hauntings a changed man; Rick emerges from his slo-mo horse-based chase… well, exactly the same, but exactly the same and flying through the air in a coma.

It was awesome to see Shane again, ditto Hershel, whose appearance was all the more poignant for being actor Scott Greene’s final time on screen. It was good to see Sasha, too, but ever-so-slightly mystifying, since I can’t remember Rick and Sasha ever even saying ‘hello’ to each other, much less having an actual conversation. I guess the production team’s rule was, ‘If they say yes to reprising their roles, then they’re in. Even if it’s the Bike Zombie from the pilot episode – we’ll find a way to make it work.’

In the final analysis, it didn’t work. Mainly because the analysis wasn’t final.

Rick may very well be alive.

But I’m not sure how much longer the show will be.

#10seasonsandthreemovies

Civil War on The Walking Dead: Crock or Cracker?

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The Walking Dead has been with us for so long that it’s hard to remember a time when zombies weren’t staggering, swiping and shambling their way through the TV schedules.

Robert Kirkman’s and AMC’s success allowed zombies to eat their way into the TV mainstream. The Walking Dead naturally spawned would-be rivals, masses of imitators and latterly a child of its own, while simultaneously emboldening producers and networks to green-light ever-quirkier spins on the undead phenomenon.

But – much like its titular ambulatory corpses – the longer The Walking Dead has remained in motion, the more thoroughly the rot has set in.

Over the years, as the characters in the show quickly became inured to, even bored of, the zombies, so too did the audience. When the show tried to counter this slackening of grip upon the audience’s attention by sidelining the zombies and positioning mankind itself as the series’ major threat and obstacle, people said they were bored, and demanded more zombies.

Let’s call that a Scratch-22.

Of course, the blame doesn’t rest solely with the poor, put-upon zombies or the audience’s fickle nature. The show undeniably suffered when it shifted focus away from its core unit of characters to service a multitude of old and new faces across multiple locations. It’s a narrative balancing act that Game of Thrones handles with aplomb, but which The Walking Dead has always struggled to pull off without dropping threads, circumventing reality or stalling momentum – sometimes all three at once.

Over the last handful of seasons The Walking Dead’s characters, even those like Carol whom the show has occasionally serviced very well, have started to feel less like actual people with their own drives, wants, needs, vulnerabilities, and complex motivations, and more like walking plot-putty, there to be moulded to fit whatever shape best suits the story.

So earlier this year, when the closing moments of The Walking Dead’s eighth season appeared to be setting up a civil war between Maggie and Daryl on the one side, and Rick and Michonne on the other, I baulked.

Maggie’s grief and Daryl’s pride may be incredibly powerful forces, but were they really strong enough to over-ride everything that the core group had suffered through together? Somehow, it didn’t ring true. I wrote it off as yet another narrative sleight-of-hand designed to magically generate conflict out of thin air, at the eleventh hour, again at the expense of character.

While season eight was a vast improvement upon the plodding, tepid and occasionally ridiculous season seven, for the first time ever I found that I wasn’t excited about – or even really that interested in – the prospect of The Walking Dead’s return.

But then I started thinking about it.

Really thinking about it: the season; where the show was heading; where it had come from. Everything. I felt I owed The Walking Dead a degree of analysis and introspection before I cast it aside. If only for old times’ sake.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that two things had happened/were happening inside my head:

One: I’d performed a nuance-ectomy upon the show, and reduced the two-seasons-long conflict to a classic ‘The forces of good triumph over the forces of evil’ narrative, a la Return of the Jedi, or a children’s fairy-tale (you might argue that the two aren’t mutually exclusive).

The baddies are vanquished, the goodies cheer, and everyone moves on to have a happy, hassle-free time. Cartoonish, yet undeniably cathartic. Obviously, framing the story in this way leaves no room for ambiguity or the possibility of future struggles along ideological fault-lines.

Two: while the show has certainly dipped in terms of quality and consistency over recent years, maybe over-exposure to the critical consensus was prejudicing my enjoyment; perhaps by expecting disappointment at every turn, I was actually inviting it. Was the bitter cocktail of cynicism and apathy that burbled in my gut as I watched latter-day seasons of The Walking Dead preventing me from giving the show-runners and the writers the benefit of the doubt?

While I stopped far short of venturing into ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ territory, I’d convinced myself that it was time to cut The Walking Dead a break. I let the ebbs, flows, highs and lows of season eight continue to tumble and percolate inside my brain; I held everything in there until the jumble made sense; or at least until it made more sense.

I still felt that the plot seeds leading up to the impending civil war had been peppered rather too clumsily throughout the eighth season, but I was beginning to see how (and why) betrayal, and its bedfellow war, might erupt around Negan’s prison-cell in the wake of the territory’s uncertain and unexpected freedom.

The process of interrogating history helped give an anchor to my thoughts; history helped not only to illuminate the fractured and ever-fracturing tribal loyalties of the post-Negan apocalypse, but also to give a rich and fruitful context to the show’s evolution from ‘Days Gone Bye’ to ‘Wrath’.

By drawing on some of the defining epochs of human civilisation I was able to re-frame and re-interpret the world of The Walking Dead, and in the process ignite some excitement for the ruckus (or should that be Rickus?) to come.

In the end, the beginning; in the beginning, the end

While it’s true that people in the West today are generally less inclined towards violent protest when times are tough or rulers are corrupt (except for the French, who would gladly burn the country to the ground rather than allow the passing of even one mildly disagreeable traffic bye-law) this shift can’t solely be attributed to our new-found civility.

There’s also the matter of our (comparative) richness, in both time and wealth, and access to a wider range of leisure pursuits and luxury goods than at any other point in our history. And, perhaps most crucially, the sheer might of the state which, thanks to the development of ever-more destructive and invasive technologies, has never had so much deadly power at its disposal.

If a group of angry artists and artisans tried to take a leaf out of Robespierre’s book and rush towards 10 Downing Street with rakes and rifles held aloft they’d be a puddle of blood on the street before the first of them managed to get within spitting distance of the rather bored-looking policeman guarding the front door.

If by some miracle they managed to break into the building unchallenged, it wouldn’t be long before tanks rolled down the street. Before they rolled down every street in the city.

This highlights one of the main reasons that The Walking Dead has always been so enduring and intriguing: it takes all of that away – states, nations, bureaus, satellites, nuclear weapons, stock-piled wealth, an inter-connected planet – and levels the playing field again.

The show allows us to travel back to a more violent and uncertain age, and show us what might have happened at various critical junctures of human development if we’d had access to modern weapons, vehicles and modes of thought.

The Walking Dead essentially forces a hard-reboot upon the human race, and then re-runs key events in the evolution of human society on a hyper-accelerated timescale.

When Rick wakes up in the hospital in ‘Days Gone Bye’ he’s a man taking his first steps upright in a new and terrible world, with only one rule: survive. Rick is early man, charting an alien environment with a million hungry mouths waiting round every corner.

In the early days of the show the members of Rick’s group huddle together in the darkness, terrified of the horror and death that surrounds them on the fringes.

Over time their suffering teaches them the tricks and tools they need to survive. They drift across the landscape as nomads, wanderers, hunter-gatherers, but as they become faster, braver and bolder they form tribes. They meet other tribes, but only in battle. They rise, they fall, they rise again, each time stronger than they were before.

As their dreams get bigger, so too does the world around them and their place within it. Before long, they’re sending emissaries and quasi-diplomats to other colonies and proto-nations to trade goods, ideas and arms; their ingenuity, adaptability and resolve bring them stability, which in turn allows them to talk about things like the future, families and farming; and debate concepts like freedom, justice and worth, instead of constantly fretting and obsessing about the mere fact of survival.

In the short space of (in-show) time between season one and season nine the new human race has crawled from the swamp, got to its feet and rushed headlong into its first ideological conflict: its first war. It’s raw progress, but it’s progress none-the-less.

It’s tempting to view the conflict that follows the arrival of the Saviours through the prism of the American Civil War: to imagine the Alexandrian north taking up arms against the Saviours in the south, to oppose and destroy the forces of slavery and corruption. To my mind, though, the French Revolution is a much better fit, because the battle between Rick and Negan is really, at its heart, a battle between democracy and dictatorship; a showdown between the downtrodden masses and their King.

Hail to the King, Baby

Supporters of the UK’s monarchy see in the Queen and her sprawling web of dependents a reflection of everything that is refined, restrained, civilised and genteel in the world (with the possible exception of Fergie), overlooking the fact that in a different time Queen Elizabeth would almost certainly have played football with the axed heads of her political enemies.

Status of this magnitude isn’t bestowed upon ordinary men and women as a reward for good manners or having impeccable taste in cardigans. Whatever may sustain or shape power once its attained, it’s nearly always taken. The truth is that all bloodlines must have begun with one male realising he had greater strength and better resources than all of the other males in his territory, and deciding to use that imbalance as a basis to establish dominance over everyone and everything else. There’s nothing noble or worthy about that. It’s disgusting, immoral, and sadly all-too-universal.

Negan, of course, is the show’s true King, in deed if not in name. While Ezekiel is a show-man and a politician, Negan is a tyrant who rules with a switching mixture of vanity, brutality and cruelty; a righteous cloak of benevolence billowing around his bloodied bat that’s invisible to all but him. Like other famous sociopaths – Manson, Hitler, Thanos – Negan is all the more chilling for believing himself the good guy.

If The Walking Dead has any enduring theme beyond ‘Ha ha! Life’s a bitch!’ it probably lies somewhere in the ethics and limits of killing and survival.

Most would-be revolutionaries in our world – save for the most impassioned and anarchic – try to respect the rule of law. They want change, but they won’t turn their backs on civilisation in order to get it. They’ll wave banners, sign petitions, sing songs, set up websites, organise media interviews and try to cause minimal disruption to traffic (think of them as Dale, Hershel or early season 4 Rick). What they probably won’t do is storm parliament and summarily execute the entire cabinet. I guess the reasoning goes that if you have to become a barbarian in order to effect positive change, then the change might not be worth it.

Except that France, and arguably most of Europe, might still be ruled by the unclenching fist of absolute monarchy if not for a bit of storming, burning, rioting, beheading and massacring back in the eighteenth century.

The Walking Dead makes the dichotomy between war and peace its stock-in-trade. OK, Rick, we get that Negan is a murderous oppressor, but does that really make it okay for you to run people over with your car in cold blood, or stab scores of people to death in their beds? OK, Morgan, killing people probably does lead to madness and disgrace, but is it a good idea to abstain from it when someone’s running towards your best pal with a steak knife? Same question to you, King Ezekiel. Should you appease a maniac when your own people might eventually starve?

In the end, Rick led and won his revolution against The Walking Dead’s ruling class, but in contrast to this revolution’s real-life ‘inspiration’, the King escaped with his head. The decision to let Negan live may well have put a target and a ticking clock above Rick’s head.

The architects of the French Revolution achieved a feat that no-one thought possible, the aftershocks of which are still felt today. Their revolution helped to spread democratic ideas around the globe, and provided direct inspiration for the American Revolution.

Did they revel in this spectacular, epoch-altering achievement? Did they all join hands and whoop and cheer like the crowds at the end of Return of the Jedi, their friendships and alliances stronger than ever, their fates and spirits bonded for eternity?

No. No they did not.

They’re human, after all.

They all died, pretty much to a man and a woman. And mostly at each other’s hands, through a combination of paranoia, mistrust, skullduggery and cruelty. They tore each other apart on points of principle, for things they did leading up to and during the revolution, and for the things they envisioned for the future. Ironically, some of them were put to death for being considered too blood-thirsty.

Liberty? Equality? Fraternity?

Betrayal. Murder. Death.

The Walking Dead has demonstrated that it’s ready to give us a war that will finally make us feel something. Not a war between goodies and baddies, but a war between friends and allies, sisters and brothers. Maggie’s and Daryl’s hateful sneers in the closing moments of season eight now seem all the more explicable, not to mention auspicious.

The end of season eight now feels like a new beginning, a chance for the show to evolve again and … possibly… hopefully… endure. Especially now that the show is beginning to detach itself from the canon of the comics.

So what happens next?

Will the post-Negan era usher in freedom or pave the way for wholesale destruction? How will the differences between and within the disparate groups be reconciled? Can humanity get it right this time, or will utopia always remain a pipe-dream? Will the cycle of death and revenge and greed and violence simply repeat itself, ad infinitum, until the end of time itself, in the manner posited by Battle Star Galactica? Will we forget all about the zombies? (Or will we meet something that isn’t quite zombie and isn’t quite human? Shhhh. Keep that to a whisper.)

But do you know what?

When I really start to think about it…

I’m looking forward to finding out.

F*** The Walking Dead Season 3: The Return of the Un-Fun-Dead

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How can I describe Fear The Walking Dead for the benefit of those who haven’t yet sampled its delights? Here goes.

Imagine writing a list of all the things you love about The Walking Dead. Now imagine pulling your pants down and taking a long, slimy shit all over that list, working and twisting your hips so you actually spell the word ‘shit’ with your own shit as you shit it out, like piping the icing on the world’s most abominable cake. Imagine stomping your bare feet into all that shit, really spreading and squishing it around, and then getting a lamb to lick the mess from between your toes.

Well, I’d rather watch you do that than watch another season of Fear The Walking Dead.

So I guess that makes me a sicko as well as both an unhinged completist and a self-flagellating masochist, because I am going to watch another season of Fear The Walking Dead. Why don’t you join me? Or jump back in? Catch up. Take the plunge. Misery likes company, after all.

Here’s a re-cap of the action so far, presented in the sort-of style of a sort-of recipe.

Ingredients you’ll need to make:

A series which purports to show the fall of civilisation

The fall of civilisation (4 episodes)

Getting to a boat (2 episodes)

Being on a boat (4 episodes)

I wish that they were still on that boat (3 episodes)

What happened to that boat anyway? (2 episodes)

A hotel? A Mexican death cult? This could get interesting (4 episodes)

I was promised way more boat than this (2 episodes)

I suppose Fear The Walking Dead itself is a little bit like a boat, a broken boat; cast adrift on a rolling sea of plot as the tides of tired tropes and waves of cringe-worthy contrivances hurl and tug it hither and thither. It’s doomed to sail on uncertainly and aimlessly, at least until the day it’s dashed on the rocks of viewer apathy.

Despite garnering higher ratings than Better Call Saul (What the hell is wrong with Americans? No wonder you voted for Trump!) that day surely can’t be too far away. The only thing stopping me from jumping overboard with this show – “ABANDON SHIT!” – is the faint, infinitesimally small glimmer of hope that things might get better; that I might actually start to care about the characters.

Earlier this year The Walking Dead – FTWD’s zombie daddy – wrapped up what was arguably its weakest season yet. Even in its better days The Walking Dead was never likely to earn itself a place in Television Valhalla, standing shoulder to shoulder with the mighty classics of our age. It’s often clunky, schmaltzy and over-padded. Who cares though, right? Not every painter can be Van Gogh. Not every TV show can be Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos or Rectify. But at least The Walking Dead is capable of turning out exciting, haunting, affecting and powerful episodes, and I actually care about most of its characters. Especially Carol. And except for Carl.

Fear The Walking Dead, on the other hand, is objectively – on the evidence of its episodes to date – a bad show, as I’m sure the subtle analogy I deployed at the beginning of this piece, involving lambs and human feces, made clear. The tag-line for Fear the Walking Dead’s upcoming season might as well be: “YOU ACTUALLY THINK THIS SHIT’S GOING TO GET BETTER, DON’T YOU?”

I hope it gets a lot better. I really do… Or at least marginally better.

Anyway, here’s a re-cap of the characters:

Madison Clark

Hi. I’m Madison. I’m an archetypal strong female character in the kick-ass-mom mould. Good, right? Well, no, because I’m poorly written and portrayed as if I’m a Vulcan at a funeral, walking around with a jaw like a steel-trap, frowning and moaning the whole time. Seriously, I’m so unlikeable I can’t even stand myself. I was in Deadwood. Remember that? Man, that was a good show. And now I’m in Un-Deadwood. Fuck. I wish I’d taken that part in The Strain. At least I’m not a total pussy like my boyfriend… whatever this name is.

Travis… thingy. Or am I?

Hi, I’m Travis. Or am I Curtis? I think I’m Curtis. Am I? Or is that the name of my actor? One’s Travis, the other’s Curtis. No, I’m Travis. I am Travis, definitely. Or am I Curtis? Fuck, is my name Cliff? Christ, I’m so boring and devoid of a concrete identity it’s no wonder I’ve no idea who I am. Dull, dull, dull. I’m desperately trying to survive a fledgling apocalypse here: how the Hell do I manage to be so utterly boring in the process? I just mope around all day looking like Tully from Sesame Street, and pissing on people’s parades. But don’t worry. I beat two punks to death at the end of last season. That was a wee bit interesting and people seemed to dig it, so they’re going to ‘Rick’ me up for season three. WE’RE GOING OVER THE CLIFF EDGE, BABY! Hmmm. That doesn’t work if my name’s not Cliff though. Travis… Travis… Travis… A-HA! WHY DOES IT ALWAYS BRAIN ON ME?!

Or am I Curtis?

Alicia Clark

Hi there, (bats eyelashes) boys are like soooo gross, shutup I love boys, oh God I love my iPod, but oh God I’d die for my boyfriend, he’s like my bff, oh my God, gross that is like SO unfair, oh my God I hate you guys, I’m such a girl, I’m so ditzy, oh I’m on a boat, OMG, boys, I can talk to boys out here, uh-oh I almost got us all killed, FML, I wish I wasn’t so naïve and blindly trusting and … (CHUNG CHICK) Hi there, that was the sound of me loading a fresh cartridge into my shotgun, that’s the kind of thing I do now, because I’ve just inexplicably woken up in possession of the wise, noble soul and tactical combat knowledge of a 900-year-old warrior-general, and the inner-calm of a Lara Croft android. I’ve gone from ‘Damn, she MOAN’ to ‘Michonne. DAMN’ in less time than it takes a man to check IMDB to see if I’m safe to wank over.

Nick Clark

OK, let’s get all of the Johnny Depp and heroin addict gags out of the way first, shall we? What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Zombies, that’s what! I’ll also give you Edward Needle-hands, Willy Wonky and Crack Sparrow. There. All out of your system now. Hi, I’m Nick. I worked out how to walk safely through hordes of zombies pretty early on in the apocalypse. You just smear yourself with zombie guts. I tend to do it every single time I’m out amongst the zombies, because I quite like being alive, unlike those fucking idiots on The Walking Dead. Anyway, give or take my recent spell in a Mexican death cult, I’m probably the best character on the show, which is a bit like being awarded best in show at Crufts when you aren’t actually a dog. Or maybe it isn’t. I’ve taken a lot of heroin.

Victor Strand

I’m mysterious. Christ, I’m mysterious. Look at me lounging against the bars of this cage in my dapper clothes, offering gruff nuggets of cod-philosophy and intrigue to my jonesing new friend, Nick. It’s like my old dad used to say: if you find yourself imprisoned under martial law during a zombie apocalypse, make sure you’ve got a junkie as your right hand man. Junkies are indispensable survivalists, and not a liability at all; everybody knows that. I’m Strand, by the way. Or am I? Who am I? Who are you? Who’s Abigail? Ah, forgive the mystery, it’s my boat, you see. And I’m going somewhere. Where? Well, aren’t we all going somewhere? Christ, there’s that mystery again. I’m also dangerous. Did I mention that? Can’t you see it? Dapper and dangerous. Positively stranger-ous. I’ll cut you and you won’t even know you’ve been cut. I’ll cut the rope on your dinghy. I’ll shoot you. I’M IN LOVE WITH DOUGRAY SCOTT. He was great in Love Actually. He wasn’t in it? Well, what was the one… Kathy Burke was in it. He had the long hair and that? Anyway, I love him, and we’re all going to Mexico so we can… Oh. He’s dead. Fuck. Erm… eh. Yeah. (sigh) I’m boring now.

Chris Manawa

Hi, I’m Chris, which is short for ‘Christ, I’m an awful character.’ Remember how you thought Carl Grimes was the most awful boy in existence? Well allow me to introduce you (points at self) to this cunt.

You watched me at the end of last season and thought to yourself, ‘Oh, thank goodness he’s dead, I hate that fucking guy’, and then when the guy who plays me appeared in Agents of SHIELD – as Ghostrider’s brother – you thought, ‘Phew, well that seals it then, he’s absolutely, definitely, incontrovertibly dead,’ and then the character was only in the show for about three episodes, and you thought, ‘Oh, fuck, maybe Chris ISN’T dead’. And then you couldn’t quite remember if my death had only been hinted at or if it had been shown on screen, and you thought to yourself, ‘Actually, now I’m thinking Curtis killed him… or did Curtis kill the guys who killed him? Wait, is it Travis or Curtis… but… shit, I can’t remember’, and then you didn’t even care enough to Google it.

Oh, and Ofelia, too. I guess she’s a thing?

F*** the Walking Dead returns to US screens on Sunday 4th June with a host of new characters, and hopefully the tragic death of a few old ones.

The Walking Dead Season 7A: What happened, and what’s going on… and what went wrong?

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It’s fair to say that the front-half of The Walking Dead’s seventh season has attracted a lukewarm response from audiences and critics alike, despite the arrival of Negan, everyone’s favourite trash-talking, bat-wielding sociopath.

So what went wrong? I’d contend that The Walking Dead’s biggest enemy has been the audience’s expectations. Never before has a show or a movie taken such a continuous, long-form look at the nuts and bolts of a zombie apocalypse. A zombie movie has a definite arc: there’s an outbreak, society collapses, the survivors endure horror and heartache, a plan is hatched or a quest undertaken, and slowly and painfully the survivors learn to adapt. The movie then ends on a note either of hope or nihilism. The zombies never linger long enough to lose their terror, certainly never long enough to become a manageable nuisance.

The Walking Dead has entered its ‘manageable nuisance’ stage, and many viewers now find themselves struggling to reconcile the show’s new direction with their expectations of it being a man-against-monster zombie survivalist saga. Nobody can talk such viewers out of their apathy or active dislike; however, it’s worth pointing out that if the show had simply continued to place its zombies front-and-centre – if the story hadn’t expanded to incorporate new challenges, obstacles and threats – we would have become as desensitised to the undead as the show’s characters have by this point in the narrative. The Walking Dead had to end or evolve, and if you’re willing to accept its evolution, then you have to cut it a certain degree of slack during its transition.

I only started reading the Walking Dead comics after the show’s sixth season finale. I very quickly gorged myself on them, catching up and then overtaking the TV show. By the time Lucille had crashed down on the heads of her flesh-and-blood victims, I was already in a post-Negan, Whisperer-infested world. I’d also decided that the quintessential Negan could only be the brutish, black-and-white, fuck-fuckity-fuck-stick version from the comic books (you can read my article about that here). It’s fair to say that Jeffrey Dean Morgan had something of an uphill struggle against my expectations. As did the entirety of the seventh season itself.

While the show doesn’t follow an identical trajectory to its source material – and has different characters and different versions of existing characters to boot – I already knew the main thrust of the narrative, meaning that when certain scenarios began to unfold on screen, I had a fair idea of what would happen next, and in some cases who would die. I wonder if these two related things – how much I’d enjoyed comic book Negan, and my knowledge of the main story beats to come – robbed me of my objectivity and sense of surprise, which in turn left me pre-disposed to view the show comparatively and analytically, instead of through the gut and the adrenal gland (which of course is the manner in which The Walking Dead is best enjoyed).

That being said – and while it’s obviously impossible for me to un-read the comic books and watch those first eight episodes again through untainted eyes – I do believe something has been severely off-kilter with season seven so far; problems that run deeper than the show’s new direction, and my foreknowledge of the source material. I can’t remember ever enjoying a fresh batch of episodes less. Sure, The Walking Dead has always had slower episodes, and weaker episodes, and filler episodes, but these are usually buoyed by a mix of competent, good and occasionally great episodes either side. Not so this season. All of the episodes thus far have felt lukewarm and lacklustre, and somehow lacking thrust and cohesion. Many of the big dramatic beats, especially the deaths in the premiere and Rick and Negan’s jolly RV trip, were handled clumsily and gratuitously. The show has never felt so coldly nihilistic, and that’s saying something in a series threaded through with so much death, destruction and misery.

I understand that in order for the coming war to mean something, and for the inevitable victory to provide us with a visceral dose of catharsis, our heroes must first be trampled deeper into the dirt than they’ve ever been trampled before. We have to fear for them, we have to feel their sense of pain, impotence and outrage. We have to be introduced to and start to care about all of the potential allies that are going to be thrown together in the back half of the season, and have a fair idea of the mechanics of the enemy camp, and the tenuous fear-soaked peace that keeps the Saviours in power. I understand the chess pieces have to be moved into place, and the pace slackened to prepare for the fireworks. But still… meh. At first I thought the problem was Negan. But I’ve come to realise that the real problem is Rick.

Not Andrew Lincoln, you understand, who has always done terrific work as Rick Grimes. But Rick the character, who suffers in comparison to his more effective comic-book counterpart. While it’s true that Comic Rick has had his lapses of judgement, spells of foolhardiness, and suffered the odd psychotic break, he’s always felt like a leader in both name and deed, fully deserving of the title and capable of handling the weight of the crown that goes with it. His ruthlessness and occasional recklessness is tempered by a strong conscience and a pragmatic outlook. I can see why his people like him, trust him, respect him and follow him.

The only real evidence that TV Rick is a great leader is the amount of times the other characters repeatedly tell each other that Rick is a great leader. To my mind, he only has two stock responses to most managerial and logistical problems: cry face, or full psycho. Case in point, Comic Rick only swallows down Negan’s brutality in order to lull him into a false sense of security. Even as Lucille swings down atop Glen’s skull, Rick is formulating a plan to take that mad, cackling bastard down, despite the seemingly insurmountable odds against him, because that’s who Rick is, and that’s what he does. He’s strong and capable, even in his darkest and most testing moments.

Game of Thrones may be able to juggle the narrative demands of an entire world and its multifarious clans and characters, offering up a smorgasbord of delicious little interlocking short stories that served together are greater than the sum of their parts, but The Walking Dead – while definitely an ensemble show – really needs Rick as its focus, its point-of-view, its through-line. The lack of Rick – and especially the lack of a strong Rick more in-line with the comic book incarnation of the character – has been to the show’s detriment.

Unless of course this Ricklessness is part of a deliberate strategy. I’m thinking more and more that perhaps the ground is being prepared for a shocking shake-up that will serve as the biggest break from the source material imaginable: the death of Rick Grimes. One thing season seven has done particularly well is to promote the strength and resilience of the show’s female characters, especially Maggie, who is an obvious and believable contender for the top spot should Rick ever take a long, one-way walk into Walkersville. It’s worth steeling yourself for such an eventuality. For once in the show’s history, the possibility of Rixit doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

I sincerely hope that, whatever lies in Rick’s immediate future, the Walking Dead will return with a barnstorming, seat-of-the-pants, solid smattering of tense and exciting episodes, to exorcise the malaise of this season’s opening half, and perhaps even grant it a retrospective pardon. The first eight episodes may not have rocked my world or inspired much in the way of hope or enthusiasm, but there was still plenty to enjoy: Carol (she’s my ‘if x dies, we riot’ character); the introduction of King Ezekiel and his pet tiger; the effective and over-due fleshing out of peripheral characters like Rosita, Father Gabriel and Tara; Daryl’s stay at Dick Dastardly’s Dog-food Motel; and the mid-season finale, which was actually very good, and finally convinced me that Jeffrey Dean Morgan was the right man for the role of Negan; he really owned the character in ‘Hearts Still Beating’, seemed to swagger straight onto Alexandria’s twee suburban streets from the pages of the comic book. I’m sorry I doubted you, Jeffrey. Perhaps you just needed a shave.

One thing I didn’t enjoy – and which I gather had fans howling into their hankies – was the emotionally manipulative reunion of our band of heroes at the episode’s climax. Those few minutes of silent smiles, nods, tears, hugs and raised eyebrows, all set to uplifting music, felt a bit too on-the-nose, like a cross between a music video and an episode of a soap opera. I couldn’t help but remember a funny video I watched on YouTube a few years ago, where the musical score was removed from the scene at the end of Return of the Jedi, as the heroes are receiving their medals. It just looked ridiculous, and made me laugh like a loon.

I’m under no illusions about The Walking Dead. It’s a compulsive show, incredibly popular and lucrative, but it isn’t, and never will be in my opinion, a truly classic show; certainly not when stacked against worthy behemoths like The Wire, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. That’s not to say that it hasn’t produced thrilling narratives, or produced some truly great episodes: the pilot, 18 Miles Out, Better Angels, Seed, Clear, Internment, Too Far Gone, After, The Grove, No Sanctuary, Consumed, What’s Happened and What’s Going On, JSS and Here’s Not Here, to name the stand-outs.

Lest you imagine I’m launching an attack, it goes without saying that I’m very fond of The Walking Dead, else I wouldn’t expend so much time and energy thinking and writing about it. And while the show may never be uttered in the same breath as the true classics of TV’s first and second Golden Ages, it’s shown itself more than capable of greatness in seasons gone bye (sic). And I sincerely hope that it’s able to reclaim some of its past vigour.

So come on, showrunners, Let’s do it.

Let’s make The Walking Dead great again.

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MORE ZOMBIE ARTICLES I WROTE FOR ‘DEN OF GEEK’

Syfy’s Z Nation: fun, low budget and well worth your time

How will The Walking Dead end?

When zombies attacked … Neighbours (and other shows)

And another from this website, reviewing S05E09.

 

Movie Reboots – 28 JAMES MAYS LATER

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The BBC Top Gear boys get to grapple with rabid monsters in this novel re-imagining of Danny Boyle’s gory zombie thriller.

It begins innocently enough. James May is depressed because he is unable to keep up with Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson: the duo are currently appearing in every single television show broadcast in Britain. So, with the help of an unhinged BBC executive, James May decides to clone himself. Unfortunately, things, as they always do in these sorts of movies, go horrifically wrong.

The cloning machine turns out to be faulty. ‘Because it was manufactured in Germany…’ Clarkson later tells us, ‘by French engineers… you think they would have learned… about teaming up… after they collaborated on the Vichy government.’

The clones are all evil, and quickly dismiss the reason for which they were created. They certainly prove to enjoy the taste of brains more than the taste of fame, ably demonstrated when they crack open the head of the original James May like it was an egg, and eat the goo within. And, because they’re James Mays, they even use the correct cutlery.

It’s not long before the James Mays are chomping their way across the country. Each bite turns its victim into a drooling, savage, and psychopathically famished James May, adding to their terrifying numbers. The only words they can speak are ‘Would you mind awfully if I just killed you?’ Within hours, Britain is literally swarming with James Mays, and there are only two men who can stop them: Hammond and Clarkson.

‘Well, if there’s one thing of which we can be sure,’ drawls Clarkson, ‘…it’s that May’s about as quick… as a Fiat Panda… that’s been engineered in Poland… by a one-armed Serbian goat herder… with AIDS…’

Their sluggishness makes them easy to deflect and herd into a giant vineyard, a feat the twosome accomplish through a combination of Hammond’s dazzlingly white teeth, and Clarkson’s increasingly loud and unhelpful comments about foreigners.

‘I’ve not been involved in many post-apocalyptic scenarios… except if you count my recent trip to Belgium…’ Clarkson says, ‘but I’ve got to say… that this must be… one of the greatest threats that mankind has ever faced… in the world.’

IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU’LL LOVE: It’ll Be Alright on the Night of the Living Dead. Dennis Norden (who has been dead for thirty years) takes us through the most side-splitting (literally, in some cases) zombie mishaps and outtakes. See also: I am Legless. Will Smith fights his way through New York, beating people up, talking to dummies, shooting zoo animals, playing golf off the top of skyscrapers, and sleeping in his bath, until somebody points out that he’s just had a bit too much to drink. Out later this year, the terrifying House of Ruby Wax.