Zombie politics

Posted by Marielle in Movies.

I was flicking through the channels one afternoon last week with my horror-buff beau, desperate for something mindless and entertaining to watch, when we discovered a rare jewel in the zombie genre called “Gangs of the Dead.” I knew it was a winner when we read this description:

“When two rival gangs unexpectedly meet in a warehouse in Los Angeles, violence is sure to ensue. But it’s not the gang members causing the trouble in this horror film — it’s the zombies.”

As the premise might suggest, the film teeters dangerously between “bad” and “so bad it’s good,” but the 2006 flick proves to be an interesting commentary on race and economics.

Basically, the film starts when a meteor crashes to earth, specifically into a mass of vagrants in Los Angeles who have gathered to listen to one homeless guy in particular prophesy doom. Well, what do you know? He was right! They have all been killed by the meteor and reanimated into mindless flesh-eating corpses. Cue the entrance of the Black and Latino gangs, which don’t have names, and appear to have only three members each. They accidentally meet up in an abandoned warehouse where they are supposed to be picking up drugs at different times that day. The dealer, a balding white guy that looks not unlike Riff from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, tries to diffuse the situation, but not before they discover the homeless zombies attacking the Black gang members’ car, which contains one member’s scantily-clad and rather weak-minded younger sister. Two white cops also get involved (they drive into the warehouse somehow managing to run over the dealer, making the first non-zombie in the movie to die a white guy). From there on out, the film becomes a battle to survive — a study in what happens when you lock up six hoods from two different gangs, their respective hos, and two cops in a warehouse with spare weapons and rampaging zombies. You get themes of brotherhood, misogyny, racism, and classism — all from this Los Angeles Film Festival B-horror film.

Zombie flicks have a long history of politics, best illustrated by George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.” That notion of becoming one of the mindless horde echoes both our cannibalistic capitalist structure and, some scholars argue, the crimes and carnage of the Vietnam War. As it turns out, the same notion makes zombies the one ghoulie that truly terrifies my fiance (then again, he is a registered Republican).

So, if zombies and gang war flicks (and brain-hemorrhagingly bad plots and dialogue) are your thing, “Gangs of the Dead” is the perfect cure to your afternoon boredom and will make a great warm-up for your Halloween movie marathon.

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