I cheated on the quiz, though, because I knew what answers I'd have to check off in order to be a 'Romero/Night-Dawn-Day-of-the-Dead Zombie.'
'Resident Evil zombie' should not even be on that list. I tell you this as the purest of zombie purists. Fantastic Playstation game, but shit-ass-awful movie. I tell you that as someone who only had to see the previews to know it would be a testicle-twisting abomination. I don't care if it wasn't; it was. The other zombie-types in the quiz were acceptable. Evil Dead, Dead Alive, Lucio Fulci's Zombie... they are all excellent, in their own distinct ways. The Italian 'sequels' to Fulci's movie get progressively less frightening (and increasingly similar to mid-1980's movies starring such people as Michael Dudikoff or Rutger Hauer) as the number following the word "Zombie" gets higher, but they're still worth checking out. Even Hong Kong's comical Bio Zombie has some noteworthy moments.
However...
As far as I'm concerned, George A. Romero invented the modern zombie. Granted, he wasn't the first filmmaker who choked on his coffee one morning at the thought of "Holy damn! I oughta make a movie about the shambling undead!" (see I Walked With A Zombie, or White Zombie, fer instance), but he laid the ground rules for how to make a zombie flick that's horrifying, funny, action-packed, apocalyptic, and with the aid of Tom Savini, gory as shit. The Return of the Living Dead series, while completely unrelated to Romero's movies, and while brazenly ignoring his zombie 'rules', were hilarious, because they featured zombies saying witty things like "I know you're in there, because I can smell your brains." No joke.
I've said it here before, and as sure as shit rolls downhill I'll say it here again, but... Dawn of the Dead is the best zombie film ever made, in addition to being one of the best all-around horror movies ever to pass before my eyeballs. Though there's not much that carries over between Night of the Living Dead (the first in Romero's 'trilogy'), 'Dawn', and Day of the Dead, other than the increasingly-unbalanced ratio of humans-to-zombies, you could do a lot worse for yourself some Friday night than to get comfortably drunk and watch the three movies in order.
In related news, I still haven't seen 28 Days Later. Hopefully I'm going tonight.
In other related news, here are some on-set pics from the upcoming 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. I have not yet formed an opinion about this one, though I will say I don't think the movie needs a remake, in the same way that Casablanca doesn't need a remake. Tom Savini remade 'Night' in 1990, as director, and the results were not self-mutilatingly bad, so... we'll see.
Random thought: If the Alkaline Trio ever record a song about zombies, and put it out on a limited-edition 7" picture-disc with a photo of a zombie on it, I'll probably go fucking berserk with zombie glee.
