Excuse me while I go hide under my bed in a fetal position with a shotgun and my copy of Night of the Living Dead on DVD, because one of the greatest subgenres of horror has been irredeemably profaned.

Folks, it’s no secret.  I LOVE survival horror.  The grand Romero saga, and some of the many, many, MANY imitators it has spawned have given me lots of thrills and even a few laughs over the years.

But now I discover that those miserable soulless bastards at Summit Entertainment are about to bring us the ZOMBIE LOVE STORY, Warm Bodies.  It’s about a zombie who falls in love with the girlfriend of one of his victims.

Yes, you read that right.

Although, the more I think about it, this isn’t such a canonical screw up.  I mean, consider Bub from Day of the Dead.  He’d discovered revenge and irony by the end of that one, so maybe love is a possibility.  And with the sheer number of people out splatting zombies on sight, well, I suppose if you keep the “doomed love” angle to a minimum this could be an interesting new look.

Yes indeed, folks, there are plenty of good reasons to be psyched for the upcoming release of Burke and Hare, the story of two Scottish fellows who kill their neighbors for the express purpose of selling cadavers to the local university.

1. Confirmed Master of Horror John Landis (Family, Deer Woman) will be directing, marking his first feature length horror flick since 1998′s Susan’s Plan.

2. Simon Pegg, of Shaun of the Dead, is involved.

3. David Tennant, one of the Doctors, was involved.

Wait…why is number three good?  They got RID of him!  You get rid of a Doctor (as in Doctor Who, folks!) you’d better have a good replacement in mind for it to qualify as a good reason.  You throw out my gold watch you better have a platinum one waiting!

And we do.

Who’s replacing David Tennant?

Andy. Serkis.

Gollum, folks, is replacing a Doctor.  That’s a pretty good replacement to me, and I think most of you will approve too.  So there’s plenty of good reason to be happy about Burke and Hare, and considering it’s projected for release later this year (maybe a Halloween release?), we’ll get to see it soon enough.

You know, when someone introduces a short film to me by calling it “Left 3 Dead”, I start to worry.  I never much liked the Left 4 Dead series to begin with (not even a TRACE of Romero principles in there, and the zombies keep respawning, which is a joke.), so someone trying to emulate it always puts me on edge.

Flux operates almost like Stephen King’s Cell, with a signal driving people insane–or most people, anyway–and then they run around trying to kill everything in sight.  The difference here, of course, is that this is nowhere near as fleshed out as a Stephen King work would be.

But as short films go, it’s actually pretty fairly well done–they’ve packed a nice little twist ending in here which is pretty rare as far as that goes.  And the plot is at least mostly fleshed out.  So, yes, Flux is a solidly not bad title that you’ll likely enjoy should you take seven odd minutes to watch it.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands this one a six out of ten for being solid if unimpressive, and well done if not overly fun.

Oh wow.  This may be one of the best sounding horror movies I’ve ever heard of to date.

It’s called Knights of Badassdom, and it revolves around a group of Live Action Role Players (LARPers) that set off for a great game in a wooded part of New Jersey.  One of them has recently broken up with his girlfriend, but discovers a possible new love in sexy huntress Gwen.  But when the group’s wizard casts an all too real spell from a book he got from eBay, he unleashes a terrible evil onto the world.  Thus, it’s up to the Knights of Badassdom to save Jersey…and the world!

Sounds just a smidge like an old Clint Howard movie called Evilspeak to me, but that’s a remote connection at best.  Like I said, I’m definitely interested in this one.  No word on release dates yet–no word on SHOOTING dates yet–but keep it here, because this is one we’ll definitely be watching closely.

Today we’ll be grappling with Infect, a short film about zombies that will bring us the immortal life lesson: “contact with zombies is generally contraindicated by most everybody.”

In this case, we won’t get a full on zombie apocalypse–we’ll just get a really small outbreak of zombies.  But the size won’t really matter as we’ll only have three people to deal with, and as each one of them becomes infected through an attack from one of their previous number, you get to see just how rapidly a zombie infection can spread throughout even a very small population.

Seriously, imagine how freaky it would be if this concept were introduced, say, into a large city.  There’d be millions of zombies in hours.

Sadly, Infect really is only scary by implication rather than by presentation, because all Infect basically is is a bunch of guys chasing each other with a camera.

So the Screenhead Ten Scale can really only give this a four out of ten for being a wildly scary idea executed on entirely too narrow a scale.

Sometimes when you’re blundering around looking for short films, you discover something that’s wildly out of the ordinary.  And Zombie Valley is exactly one of those unexpected treats.

In Zombie Valley, a local sheriff, generally regarded as the last line of defense of the law in any particular county, finds himself staring down the barrel of a full on zombie apocalypse.  And when he goes out on a call to save some lives in the midst of this, he finds himself in danger instead.

I admit, this is a pretty clever idea.  I don’t see a whole lot of zombie shorts, or zombie movies in general, that work from the perspective of law enforcement.  Usually, it’s just some everyday chump who’s taking on the mob–it’s rare to see this angle.

And there’s a great surprise in here that I wouldn’t dare spoil, but trust me on this, it’s going to blow your mind.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this unconventional little short thriller a seven out of ten for doing something highly unique with just a little time.

I posted a picture of a piranha from Piranha 3-D last week. Now I have the teaser trailer thanks to First Showing.  The movie is being promoted as Alexandre Aja’s  Piranha 3-D with an impressive cast including Richard Dreyfuss, Elisabeth Shue, Ving Rhames, Adam Scott, Christopher Lloyd and Diana Meyer. 

The quality of the trailer is a little blurry because it’s in 3-D, but my 3-D glasses didn’t help any. From what I can see, the movie seems good and worth seeing in 2-D. 

The movie is a typical piranha tale.  A tremor in Lake Havasu, Arizona cracks the lake floor open, a prehistoric strain of fish are set loose and people are eaten while they swim in the lake. 

The trailer says the movie is coming out in April.

Today I bring you a little something clever to enjoy, a zombie film where people aren’t afraid of zombies, but rather, try and get them to fit in modern society.

Our film of choice today is called Lou, and it’s set several years after a Zombie Apocalypse, except that, much like in Shaun of the Dead, zombies have been integrated into modern society, and society, meanwhile, has gotten back on its feet.

The end result of this is zombie panhandlers–some of whom have very funny signs–and other zombies rapidly moving up the corporate ladder.

Lou is a hilarious little short and shows where zombie movies could go if given a chance.  I spent a lot of time laughing at this one, and that, at least to me, is the truest mark of a successful comedy.

It’s a short little thing, too, just over five minutes, so even if you don’t like it you still won’t be out much.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, when it can finally stop laughing, hands this hilarious zombie romp a seven out of ten for bringing the funny and in large doses.

Behold a piranha in 3-D!

If you want to see some real excitement, head over to ACIN where there is a slew of beach clad bodies with piranha bites in their beautiful bikini bodies. You will also see some dismembered bodies floating in blood-stained water with a couple of green screen legs next to savagely eaten leg.  All for entertainment!

I just love this fish. He has some mean looking eyes that go well with his razor sharp  teeth!

Elizabeth Shue and Richard Dryfuss are starring in this film.

Considering that these guys put “Winner of 5 Academy awards including best picture” in their more info section, I’m not exactly walking into this one with the best of intentions.  In fact, just seeing that little bit of snidery made me dubious for the whole experience.

But would they turn it around?  Let’s take a look.

Phase 6 revolves around that favorite impetus of so many films, short or otherwise, the Zombie Apocalypse.  We don’t really know why the dead have risen to life and are attacking the living, nor do we really need to.  All we need to know is that, for our Phase 6 family, the end of the world is here.  Will they survive?  Stay tuned.

Phase 6 is a surprisingly well executed film that watches like large portions of it are missing.  The short will ask you to glibly accept things that happen, whether or not they have any clear reason for doing so.  Zombies will pound on a front door one moment, only to have managed to find the back door, enter it, and walk through the house in the time it took the house’s occupants to answer the front door.  Taking your eyes off a child in an empty field for nine full seconds is just asking for trouble, and I don’t know where the zombie came from that broke into that car window.  Seriously, they stop by the side of the road, two seconds later a zombie punches through the window, despite the fact we’d been shown the car driving down a totally empty road.  Where did this zombie come from?  Had it been running alongside the car the whole time and we just didn’t know?

That’s most of the problem with Phase 6, even though it’s actually well executed and will have blood to spare, they just didn’t pay very close attention to their pacing.  Or their continuity–that door was standing open when they left the house.  Or to their sound engineering, either–word of warning, crank the speakers even if all your systems are on max volume otherwise you can’t hear this thing AT ALL.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this mangled wreck of a terrific movie a five out of ten for doing a great job in some parts and badly bungling others.