The Walking Dead Series on AMC

This October one of the best zombie stories to be brought to the public is coming to the small screen and here's the trailer The Walking Dead Comic-con trailer. The Walking Dead debuted as a black and white comic in 2003 with 75 issues of wonderful zombie greatness. Image comics has also released a variety of collections with anywhere from 12 issues in one book to 48 issues in one very large book for easy consumption by the masses.
The story of The Walking Dead centers around Rick Grimes, a small town police officer who during a regular non-undead shootout is put into a coma for just long enough for the world to be overrun with flesh eating shamblers. As Rick wakes up from his coma in a hospital full of the dead he begins running, killing, and screaming. Once that is out of his system Rick gets his bearing’s and begins to look for his wife and son.

With that idea alone you could have a great story. Rick empties clips of bullets into zombies, finds his family and then lives happily ever after. Maybe there is a samurai sword wielding ex-lawyer somewhere in there to boot.

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A true zombie story never ends, Max Brooks writes in the "The zombie survival guide" on his 10 lessons for surviving a zombie attack "The Zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on". This is true with "The Walking Dead", even though Rick finds his family he then has to deal with finding a safe way and place to live, staying away from the zombies, and surviving with his fellow human’s.
Most zombie movies end with the survivors finding a new place to live away from the living dead or escaping in some RV or helicopter. "The Walking Dead" takes those ending's and shows where the survivors go from there. If the group finds a place to live away from zombies, we then follow how that sanctuary treats them, and how they treat each other.
With great characters, constant death, jaw dropping twists, non-stop carnage, and so many different outlooks on how to live in this new world "The Walking Dead" is the perfect comic for any horror geek. If you can read you'll enjoy the exposition. If you can't they are pretty pictures of people being devoured and having their brains blown out, sometimes in that order.
AMC is now bringing the comic series to T.V. and it looks spectacular. The actors they have portraying the victims/survivors look like they will be able to really pull off the feel of the comics. The actors we are seeing in the trailer are familiar faces who played a few roles here and there on different television shows in the past. I was able to notice Lennie James who has been in both “Lie To Me” and “Human Target” as my favorite guest characters of both series.

The fact that “The Walking Dead” is getting such great actors is just another indication that this series is going to be getting the attention it deserves. Best of all though is the director, Frank Darabont. With movies like The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Mist under his belt we know that Darabont can not only direct a great personal movie but bring some real horror to the production.

With great source material, amazing actors, a director who understands the mechanics of horror, and subtle special effects “The Walking Dead” will be a great visualization of ordinary people trying to live in a world coming apart all around them.

Review of Inception *Spoiler Warning*

Inception should be watched with a calculator for some of the more difficult scenes near the end. I was one of those people who were in the theater counting on my hand like a slow two year old before my girlfriend Emily raised her outstretched hand. The answer is -5-.

Christopher Nolan directed a movie that was exactly what a Christopher Nolan movie should be. With great action scene's, awe inspiring visuals and damn good writing that is able to explain a wacky theoretical concept while also accommodating what every heist movie needs, friendly bantering between two professionals who respect one another but would also like to beat the other with a rusty tire iron.

At the core of it Inception is a heist movie, a great one in fact. It gives you the rules the thieves have to play by, the vague plan of the con and how they are going to break every law that they can. The only difference between movies like Ocean's Eleven and Inside man is that the whole con exists in a sci-fi world with gritty rules.

There are no lasers in this world, no light saber's to speak of, but there is fighting along walls, lack of gravity, and the longest car crash ever recorded.

----Spoilers Below----

Inception's greatest part is not in the movie itself though. It's in the discussion after wards where you and whoever you saw it with (if you are lonely talk to one of the voices you hear.) bring up the evidence from the movie and try and make your point as to what was real and what was a dream.

Or if it was a dream and then became reality. Or if it was reality and ended in a dream. Or if the whole thing was a dream. You can even argue that it was all set in reality, you'll be wrong but you can go for it.

I'm of the camp that the movie started in reality, then went in to the dream world and then came back to reality at the end. The only reason I can believe this is because I can ignore all of the things that would make it look like it ended in a dream.

The end of the movie shows the Totem that Cobb has been using to test if he is in a dream or the whole time still spinning but wobbling. If it were to continue spinning then Cobb would be in a dream. If it topples then he is in reality....maybe.

One could say that if the totem topples that Cobb is in reality or that he is forcing his mind to accept this dream as reality and changes the rules of the totem.

The totem itself is suspect. As soon as we hear of the totems and what they mean we are told one very important rule. No one should ever touch your totem. If someone else can touch your totem then they can replicate it perfectly in a dream and you could be swindled of your porn site passwords. Cobb's totem is actually not his; it started as his wife's so could her presence in his mind take that knowledge and fuck with his perception just a little bit more?

This is the kind of revolving question and answers that Inception is full of. There is so much evidence from both sides of the argument that if you can find a friend you like to argue with you can have a damn good talk/rant/fistfight/talk again for a while bringing up new ideas and twisting the conclusions of the other person to suit your own needs.

Inception: planting the idea that your friends don't know shit.

Book Review of "The Passage" By Justin Cronin

As a society we all sometimes worry that there is nothing new under the sun. This is how I felt while I was cyber strolling down the internet version of the bookstore. The feeling only grew as I saw the list of new releases under the horror section and realized that everything I was seeing seemed to be to horror what pre-pubescent singers are to music.

“Never judge a book by its cover” is a lie told to kids when they are young. At least when it comes to a book the cover should be high up there on how you should judge one, Graphic designers are trained to make images that convey the feeling and tone of books. The cover of “The Passage” told me everything I needed to know, by what was not there. There were no generic fashion models with photo shopped fangs and glowing red eyes leaning against a brick wall on a dirty street corner. Instead, all I saw was the name of the book, the author's name and an unpopulated winter forest as morning light lit up the night*.

On the cover alone I was sold, once I read that the book had vampires, viruses, and the end of the world I was grabbing my wallet and keys. The book was nothing short of a pleasure to read. From as early as page twenty-five you get to experience the writing talent Cronin contains to draw you deeper into the story with every character shift.

While “The Passage” has many strengths ranging from great pacing, vivid descriptions, and a full fleshed out view of a world we are not very far from the thing that stands out above all the rest is the characterization. Justin Cronin brings to the reader scores of characters who all have their own part to play in the whole narrative.

The truly remarkable talent that Cronin has mastered is the ability to write from the point of view of any of the characters from the righteous to the ruthless and all of the grey in between and make them understandable so quickly. This tends to happen so fast that within one page you can go from hating one character to fearing for what will happen to them. The development of his cast of characters and how they interact is one of the best skill’s Cronin is bringing to the table in this book.

With a well thought out look at how the world would react to a sudden attack of vampirism it feels that Justin Cronin is a talented biographer of the world from the near future rather than a gifted writer of fiction in the present.

“The Passage” is the first in a trilogy with the next book “The Twelve” to be released in 2012 and “The City of Mirror’s” to be released in 2014. A website dedicated to “The Passage” with downloadable images for everything from computer and Iphone wallpapers to Twitter icons and recent news can be found here. At findsubjectzero you can also follow the spread of the infection, watch discovered footage of attacks and read articles about the world that Justin Cronin has brought to us.