zombies

The Uncanny Valley

/ Shane / 2 Comments

I don’t remember how I originally stumbled upon this years ago, but it was something that always really stuck with me.  You know how in really creepy horror movies or even video games, the ghost or whatever it is will seem mostly human, but it will just be…off…a little bit?  Like it will move a little jerkily, or it’s face is a little messed up or something? And this is way creepier than something that looks totally inhuman.  Those usually just come off looking comical.  

Let me give you an example.   Make sure you watch the part about 35 seconds in when he kicks it and it recovers, and there is another good part about 1:25 in when it is on ice.  Aw heck, just watch the whole creepy video! (You might want to turn down your sound a little, it is loud)


Do you see how creepy that thing is??  Well there is actually a term for it, with research and everything to back it up!  It is called the “Uncanny Valley“.

Basically, the theory says that when things are completely inhuman looking, we don’t like them.  As they start to get more and more human looking, we like them more; we think they are cute.  However, at some point the curve has a sharp downward spike (a valley if you will) where something is a little too close to being human and it creeps us out.

There are two parts to the explanation of why this is that make sense to me.  The first is that when things don’t really look much like us, we tend to focus on the positive ways in which they ARE like us.  “Isn’t that monkey cute, he looks so human like!”  But when things look a lot like us, we tend to focus on the negative ways in which they AREN’T like us. The second part is that we seem to have a built in survival instinct that makes us shy away from messed up looking people (that’s the scientific term). Biologically, these people are probably diseased or, basically, no good for us.

Notice that zombies are the pinnacle of scariness. 🙂 There is a good biological reason for us to be afraid of decaying flesh. Also, a zombie might eat your face.

Consider the pictures below.  The first one is an industrial robot.  It is neat when it does things that humans normally do (like pick something up) but I have no attachment to it.  If it is destroyed, I won’t shed any tears.  The second one has arms and legs and sort of moves around like a human.  It can also talk, and laugh, etc.  It is, of course, the beloved robot from Lost in Space.  The third robot is just creepy.  Look at the way it moves.

   

This probably explains why I find cartoons where people are drawn with computer animation to be way creepier than regular old Scooby Doo style cartoons.

Another good example of this, is seeing someone whose toe was used to replace their missing finger.  Creeeepy!

Babies know from birth that bacon is delicious, FACT

/ Shane / 3 Comments

I was frying up some bacon yesterday and apparently the smell is somehow inherently delicious.  I don’t know how Evie would know the smell of bacon or know that it is something that she wanted!  She was just sobbing and sobbing, “Baaacon!  Baaacon!” and demanding “bacon” on her “plate” in the “big girl chair”.  On one hand it was quite funny on the other hand it was very sad because I too know the want of bacon when you don’t have any.  I was kind of thinking about grabbing the video camera for bacon posterity and then Sara said, “You’re thinking about recording this, aren’t you?”

So, the other day Sara sat me down for a Zombie Intervention.  “Shane” she said, “You know that zombies aren’t really going to attack, right?”  This was a funny thing to say since she had just given me the Zombie Survival Guide for my birthday.  I told her that of course I didn’t really believe that and it was a big joke and I am astounded that after all of this time she couldn’t tell the difference.  She seemed to accept that, so I think it bought me some more time to really get my zombie plans in place.  I mean, I know i might not be zombies per say, it could be velociraptors for example.  Anyway, she said that she was sure that some readers of this blog wouldn’t be able to tell if I were joking or not.  So what do you think, gentle reader? Vote in the comments.

I’m only half way through the Survival Guide, but so far it has been pretty good.  The only downside is that it presents only one type of zombies and says that is the only type.  So if you depend only on this text and it ends up being fast zombies or voodoo zombies or comet zombies, you will be in trouble.  Anyhoo, it has opened my eyes to a couple of interesting points, for example, consider holing up in a school.  They are often on lock down (at least inner city schools) and you will have access to both food from the cafeteria and first aid supplies from the nurses’ office.  So I am now thinking about abandoning my house (as I’ve said, it is indefensible) and moving to one of the schools down the street.  In addition to the benefits of schools, it also has a fenced in back yard with like 12 foot fences which could potentially allow for a secure vegetable garden of some sort.  “You see” Sara said, “This is when I start to think you take this too seriously.”  “I’m doing this for you!” I replied.  Oh well, when the dead start to rise, we’ll see who gets the last laugh…

In other me news, I have been quite the handy man about the house lately.  I’ve put up coat hangers and shelves including wall anchors, replaced 3 very high light bulbs, replaced a light switch and even repaired our broken, all-set-for-the-trash coat rack with some cement.  I even had to make two different trips to the hardware store.  Carpenter, electrician, mason…you want it, I got it.  In fact, the garbage disposal was clogged and I was a little disappointed that the trick I read about on the Internet cleared it out, because I was all set to take apart the pipe and add plumber to my resume.  Oh well, all’s well that ends well.

Biker Zombies from Detroit

/ Shane / 2 Comments

A few years ago, Sara received the greatest gift ever from my family dice game.  The game is one of those games you play around Christmas where everybody is fighting over a wrapped present and then you open it up and it ends up being a blank VHS tape or something.  But on that particular year, Sara won a copy of Biker Zombies from Detroit.  I have been dying to watch this for years, but somehow I never really got a chance.  So finally, when my brother was here, I finally got around to it.

There was absolutely no plot whatsoever, the acting was terrible, the sound quality was terrible, a lot of the shots were fresh out of art school, and last but not least, there weren’t actually any zombies.  Let me repeat that, Biker Zombies from Detroit didn’t contain any zombies, nor did it take place in Detroit.

So the movie starts with a 10 minute montage of shots of a motorcycle with a voice over from the head zombie or whatever he is.  This scene was unnecessarily long and annoying, but I understand they wanted to have a voice over. Unfortunately, this exact same montage was then repeated at the end of the movie for absolutely no reason whatsoever.  My best guess is that they needed to make it longer (even though it still ended 20 minutes shy of the listed run time).  I thought the soundtrack was actually okay, but it was mixed badly so it was hard to hear the dialog over the music.  I actually thought the dialog wasn’t too far off, although I was the only one who held that opinion.  But look, I watch a lot of crap movies and it really wasn’t that bad.  Unfortunately the writer tried way, way, WAY too hard to put foul language and vulgarity in there, forcing it in where it didn’t make any sense.  I feel like he fancied himself a Quentin Tarantino or a Kevin Smith, but it didn’t feel natural the way it does when they write it.  But if you could have removed that, I think it had promise.  I’m just saying with a little experience he may have a future in script writing. And to be fair, this wasn’t exactly Daniel Day Lewis delivering the lines here.  Instead it was 30 something “actors” who I’m guessing were the director’s friends, playing 14 and 15 year olds.  And why didn’t they reshoot the two different scenes where someone messed up their lines?  It’s not like they were paying the actors so much they couldn’t afford the time.

Okay, but those are the technical aspects, how about the storyline?

SPOILER ALERT (didn’t want to ruin it for you)

Well, there wasn’t one.  The zombies aren’t really zombies, just like regular people with ghoul-like faces or something. The entire movie takes place in some suburb which really could be anytown U.S.A.  Half of the movie revolves around the main zombie guy “recruiting” zombies for his zombie army or something, but that doesn’t even play into the movie. Meanwhile the new guy in town who we are supposed to believe is tough (even though he rides around on a dirt bike and can in no way be considered a biker) has some romance story or something.  He fights with the losers next door and then the zombie master decides to turn him into a zombie because he has a “special project” for him.  There is absolutely no logic to that at all.  The zombies are supposedly in Detroit, so why do they even know or care about this dude?  And what is the special mission, that he kills like these 2 or 3 people that he knows?  Why does the zombie master even care?  As long as we are asking rhetorical questions, why was there a random homeless guy with a sack that kept showing up after the zombies attacked but seemed to have nothing to do with the movie whatsoever?  Why did the Shell station attendant and the cops just start blasting away as soon as they saw the zombies?  I mean, they really just looked like people in makeup and I doubt that people would just start shooting before they were even threatened or anything.  I don’t know, maybe the zombies are scarier in person or something.

Now, I realize I have been harping on the bad points and not pointing out the good points.  This movie had two of the most fantastically bad scenes ever, and the best (worst) line of dialog I have ever heard.  The dialog is not suitable for printing on a nice PG blog like this one, so you will just have to watch for it when you see the movie.  The 2nd best scene took place after the main guy turns into a zombie.  He knocks a guy to the ground and then slowly backs his dirt bike onto the guy’s crotch and then revs the engine causing a jet of blood and gore to just fly all over the place.  The scene goes on and on with the guy screaming and the whole time, even while the zombie was slowly backing the bike up, the guy on the ground never makes even the slightest attempt to get away or even shift slightly so as not to be torn up by the tire.  The best scene though was one we had to rewind and watch about 5 times in a row.  The main-guy-who-is-now-a-zombie’s mom comes running out of the house and he pushes her in front of a car.  The car is already stopping and can’t be going more than 5 mph at the time.  Also, the guy doesn’t really push her enough to go in front of the car, so she has to sort of jog the last few feet to make sure she gets in front of the car.  Oh the indignity, having to jog to your own death.  Well, since they aren’t really zombies, maybe they have some kind of mind control power or something that can cause people to commit suicide.  Who knows?

So, in short, it was a fantastic movie.

It was really the sort of thing you would shoot with your friends.  Watch this one when you are in the mood and there are plenty of laughs.  It still doesn’t beat Vampires vs. Zombies as greatest bad movie of all time though.

Maybe I’ve been going about this all wrong

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Image courtesy A Softer World by way of Ichiban News.  

There are so many hilarious ones on A Softer World, I anticipate spending hours and hours reading them!

For those of you who can’t get enough zombies

/ Shane / 2 Comments

As with anything, the more I write about something the more links, etc. come pouring in about it.  The topic du jour of course is zombies.

In a related note, Nathan and I seem to be trading videos and links back and forth like some sort of really really slow zombie conversation.  It is weird because normally if I see something on a blog or whatever that I think y’all would enjoy I put it here and reference the place where I got it and that seems to work okay.  But for some reason when it is my brother, even though I reference him, it seems weird somehow like I’m copying.  I guess it is a brother thing, like “Mooooom!  He’s copying!”

Anyway, here is a very easy to understand zombie survival guide which I stole from Baconpalooza quid pro quo since he stole my last one.

And that video led me to this really fantastic Zombie Survival and Defense page.  There really is a lot of information there and I haven’t had time to go through it all, but what I’ve seen seems pretty good!