Zombies, Catsuits, and the Profit Motive

A new addition to the Resident Evil saga is scheduled for a September release. Here’s the trailer:

I enjoy a good zombie movie as much as the next four or five people, but something is really starting to bother me. If the Umbrella Corporation’s goal is global dominance, they chose an ungainly way of doing it. Their schemes put theĀ needlessly-complex terror plots of “24” to shame.

They are obviously not motivated by anything as mundane as profit, because nearly all of the human race–perhaps better known as customers–are either dead or bloodthirsty zombies. I am not an economist, but as far as I know dead people and zombies do not spend money on consumer products. Nor do they invest in markets. Nor do they power an economy in a way that would enable financiers to profit.

Umbrella obviously expects to gain from this somehow. Or, the whole movie franchise is just a series of excuses to showcase Milla Jovovich kicking the crap out of monsters in a hottified way. I don’t have a problem with that at all, except that sometimes I wish they would just be honest.

Another example would be Underworld: Evolution, which built on an intriguing premise of an ages-old feud between vampires and “lycans” (werewolves) in Underworld. The sequel was mostly an incoherent gore fest, with Tony Curran‘s vampire leader running around killing everything in sight for no reason, and Kate Beckinsale

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…I’m sorry, what was I saying?

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The Zombies are Here, and They are (Mostly) American. Or Not.

'Zombies 79201360' by iluvrhinestones from seattle, oceania, upload by Herrick (rampant) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsSometimes an event makes the news and it inspires reports on other similar incidents around the country. The incidents might be quite common, and only suddenly newsworthy because that first event piqued the public’s interest for one reason or another.

And then sometimes an event makes the news and is quickly followed by other similar, yet uncommon, newsworthy events. These subsequent events may or may not be related to the original one. They might simply be serendipitous (or anti-serendipitous) coincidences. Either way, the result is the same: we hear about something in the news, and then suddenly we start hearing about an ongoing string of similar events.

Events in the recent news have a theme: face eating, dismemberment, and generalized cannibalism. The question it raises is this: is there some sort of outbreak of zombie-like behavior going on; or is this something that actually happens now and then, and we’re only just now hearing about it?

To review:

A man in Florida was shot and killed by police when, in an alleged drug-fueled frenzy, he refused to stop eating a man’s face.

A man in Canada, who the press loves to keep mentioning was a gay porn star, is accused of dismembering a person and mailing body parts around.

A Maryland college student reportedly admitted to killing his roommate and eating his brain and heart. Continue reading

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