You’re casting a deputy sheriff from Kentucky who wakes from a coma to find the landscape littered with corpses and overrun by flesh-eating zombies, so who do you call? Well obviously Andrew Lincoln, the irritatingly drippy English actor from Teachers and This Life. But it’s amazing the difference a reasonably plausible Southern accent and a hunk of iron from Smith & Wesson can make.Right from the opening of this pilot episode of director Frank Darabont’s ghastly horror saga, Rick Grimes (Lincoln’s character) was shooting zombies point-blank through the head or coolly battering them to a pulp with baseball bats. Come to think of it, Lincoln did appear in Chris Ryan’s SAS yarn Strike Back on Sky1. Maybe he’s in the midst of the biggest career turnaround since Hugh Laurie went to medical school (zombies on promotional visit to London, pictured below).
The Walking Dead clearly owes a debt to George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and subsequent school-of-zombie flicks, but the specific source was Robert Kirkman’s comic-book series, also called The Walking Dead. Darabont, best known for his big-screen adaptations of Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, has brought a sense of Hollywood scale and polish to the series, with locations, design and camerawork all distinguished by a quality and detail which make it pretty obvious that everybody had at least one eye on the Blu-Ray box-set release.
The major hurdle the show has to surmount is the over-familiarity of its basic theme, which is the survival of a grizzled band in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event (in this case, a virus which kills everybody and then causes them to rise again in zombified form). We’ve recently been there or thereabouts in the movies, most recently The Road and Zombieland, but also The Book of Eli, The Crazies and Carriers, not to mention TV series Survivors and Jericho. The Walking Dead hasn’t made it any easier for itself by the way the man-awaking-from-coma set-up so closely mirrors Danny Boyle’s horror-virus nightmare, 28 Days Later.
Then there’s the absurdity of semi-decomposed cadavers lurching around making hissing and growling noises as they search for live flesh to eat, when surely their rotting innards wouldn’t be able to digest food anyway? They’re dead, for ****’s sake. And how come the full might of the US military couldn’t overcome a bunch of unarmed semi-skeletons moving at half a mile an hour? The spectacle of a half-corpse dragging itself and its straggling entrails across the grass (pictured below), still gamely trying to sink its teeth into something warm-blooded, was sheer Monty Python. “I’m sorry this happened to you,” said Grimes earnestly, before putting a bullet through its putrescent head in a caring sort of way.
Nevertheless, the notion of being trapped in a petrified wilderness where you can’t even find a wifi network for your iPad and the only people you meet are walking corpses does possess an undeniably chilling quality, and Darabont has cunningly worked in some effective man-against-the-unknown archetypes. The best scene was when Grimes had abandoned his search for non-existent gasoline, mounted a horse called Blade (the very same horse that appeared in George Romero’s latest zombie movie Survival of the Dead, as it happens) and set off for Atlanta, where supposedly there was a secure survivors’ camp. In one iconic tableau, Grimes and the nag clip-clopped up the deserted side of the freeway towards the distant towers of Atlanta, while the outbound carriageways were choked with ossified, abandoned vehicles. It was a certified Planet of the Apes moment. Unfortunately Atlanta turned out to be crawling with zombies, and the bastards ate the horse.
So… probably nonsense, but possibly addictive nonsense. The Walking Dead debuted on Halloween in the States, scoring over five million viewers on the AMC cable network (which also gave us Mad Men). There's life in the living dead yet.