Rob Zombie’s latest is called The Lords Of Salem, a supernatural horror flick which was written, produced and directed by him. The movie stars his wife Sherri Moon Zombie, Bruce Davison,  Judy Geeson, Patricia Quinn, Dee Wallace, Jeff Daniel Phillips, and Meg Foster. Set in the city of Salem, Massachusettes which was famous for the witch trials all those years ago, the movie was released to festivals in late 2012 and made the theatres in 2013.

Heidi is a recovering drug addict and DJ at a popular rock station for a show that airs in the evening. After her shift ends at the station one night and she is leaving with her co-hosts Whitey & Herman, the receptionist hands over a wooden box that came in Heidi’s name that contains a music album by an unknown band that calls themselves the Lords. Herman adds their town name and calls them Lords of Salem. At her home, she and Whitey listen to the record which is of a woman’s voice reciting a mysterious chant. Heidi has a vision of witches birthing a baby then damning it. The vision stops once Whitey turns the album off. However a nude witch seems to be hanging around Heidi’s apartment. The next day Heidi and her friends interview Francis Matthias, an author who has written a book on the Salem witch trials. The station then plays the Lords of Salem record, which causes all of the women in Salem (other than Heidi), who are listening to the radio show, to enter a trance. Matthias goes home and plays the song again, as his wife had recorded the show due to his interview, and tells her that he is disturbed by the name Lords of Salem.

Meanwhile Heidi is drinking wine with her landlord Lacy and her two sister Sonny & Megan. Sonny, a palm reader, tells Heidi that she is destined to given in to her darkest sexual desires, which prompts Heidi to say goodnight. At night her dog Troy barks at something in the hall and Heidi is drawn to the vacant #5, where she goes into a trance and experiences visions of a demon and a nude witch that demands that she lead the coven again. Heidi wakes up in bed and assumes the events in Apartment 5 were a vivid nightmare. A troubled Heidi goes to a church where she is sexually assaulted by the priest but when she comes to she feels that it could be a hallucination. Heidi flees the church but is faced with a ghostly entity who tells her that he has been waiting for her. Matthias does some research on the Lords of Salem and discovers the notes of their music in a book he is reading. He goes to see the author who tells him that in the seventeenth century the Reverend Hawthorne accused a coven of witches of creating the music to control the women of Salem. As a result Hawthorne killed the witches, but not before one of them, Margaret Morgan — the witch Heidi encountered outside Apartment 5 — cursed both the Salem women and Hawthorne’s descendants, calling his bloodline “the vessel by which the devil’s child would inherit the earth.” Further research demonstrates that Heidi is a descendant of Reverend Hawthorne.

Next at the station the show is giving away free tickets for the debut concert by the Lords of Salem and the song being played causes Heidi to have more visions that disturb her. Upset, she spends the night at Whitey’s home, but experiences more disturbing visions before waking up in her own apartment. She then starts buying drugs to consume again and while stones is visited by Sonny, Megan & Lacy who bring her tea and food. While Heidi is in a trance they take her to apartment 5, which suddenly looks like a concert / opera ball – with the same demon from before at the top of the stairs. She approaches the demon and (what seems to me like he impregnates her somehow) he screams. She is taken back to her apartment were she goes back to sleeping for hours at a stretch. The next day Matthias comes looking for her to tell her about what he has learned about the Lords of Salem and her linage but after an ‘interrogation’ by Lacy, Sonny & Megan he is killed by them. Herman & Whitey later come to take her to the concert but as she goes in through a door without them, they are looked out and Heidi is in the concert room with several women – the ones who had heard the song through the radio. Lacy, Sonny, Megan join the ghosts of Margaret and her coven in a satanic ritual and the music makes all the women remove their clothing. In the middle of this Heidi gives birth to a strange creature (supposed to be Satan’s spawn) atop the corpses of the naked audience members. The next day the station announces the mass suicide by 32 women at the concert and Heidi’s disappearance.

Strange, brooding but not scary at all. I was hoping for more although some parts of it were done well. 7 outta 10!

Based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Max Brooks World War Z is a 2013 horror-action-post apocolaptic movie starring Brad Pitt. Directed by Marc Forster screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof with additional input by J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5‘s creator). Starring along with Pitt (who also co-produced the movie) are Mireille Enos, Matthew Fox, Fana Mokoena and a brief role by David Morse.

Pitt stars as former UN investigator Gerry Lane, who is driving his wife Karin and their two young daughters Rachel and Constance to school. Gerry left his travel heavy job to spend more time with his family. While stuck in traffic the city is attacked by a horde of zombies who infect others very quickly as they bite them; in a matter of a seconds the newly bitten person dies and is reanimated as a zombie. Gerry drives his family away from the horde in an RV and they make their way into an apartment unit, after stocking up on asthma medicine for Rachel, and take refuge with a Hispanic family. Gerry phones his former boss and close friend  Deputy Secretary-General Thierry Umutoni – who sends a helicopter to pick up the family. While the Lanes attempts to make it to the roof, more zombies attack and kill the couple who sheltered them but their son Tommy makes it through the roof and is able to be join the Lanes as they are airlifted away from the attacking zombies.

The helicopter takes the Lanes & Tommy to a fleet of U.S. Navy vessels off the coast of New York City, where scientists and military personnel analyze the scope of the worldwide outbreaks. A leading virologist Dr. Andrew Fassbach argues that the outbreak of zombie plague is caused by a virus and that they should analyze the origin in order to create a vaccine against it. Because of his expertise as a former UN investigator, Gerry is tasked with helping Fassbach find the outbreak’s source and along with a team of soldiers travels in a military plan to Camp Humpfrey’s in South Korea. Gerry reluctantly agrees to join up or his family could be removed from the vessel as non-essential personnel. As soon as the land, Gerry’s team is attacked by zombies and Dr. Fassbach is killed when he slips and shoots himself by accident. Gerry learns from the surviving soldiers at the camp that the zombies are attracted to noise and the only way to stop them is to shoot them in their heads. A former CIA agent turned rogue, who is a prisoner at the camp,  tells Gerry to go to Jerusalem, where the Israeli Mossad have established a safe zone just before the outbreak was officially acknowledged, implying Israel might have had prior knowledge of what was to come. As Gerry and his escorts cycle back to the airplane, his phone rings when Karine tries to call  him, and this alerts the zombies who rush at them killing several soldiers as they cover Gerry and the pilot who leave for Jersusalem.

At Jersusalem, Mossad director Jurgen Warmbrunn explains to Gerry that they had intercepted communications from an army general in India, who stated that Indian troops were fighting the “rakshasa,” or “dead spirits’ a few months ago. With this knowledge, they had build the wall around the city and ‘quarantined it’. However loud singing and celebrations of the refugees attract the attention of the zombies who scale the walls in a massive pile on and climb into the city, falling from so high yet getting up and attack people. Massive piling of zombies like army ants attack the running people of Jerusalem as Israeli soldiers try and get Gerry to his plane. During this attack Gerry notices that the zombies avoided an old man and an emaciated boy but attacked everyone else. One of Gerry’s escorts, a soldier named Segen, is bitten on the hand by a zombie but Gerry amputates her hand to stop the spread of the infection. As Gerry’s pilot had panicked and flown away in the plane, the soldiers rush him to the nearby airfield where both Gerry and Segen make it to a Belorussian airliner as it is leaving. The plane is diverted to Cardiff, Wales where Gerry is to meet the scientists in a WHO research facility. However a stowaway zombie attacks a stewardess and artacks the passengers spreading the infection. Gerry detonates a grenade that blows a hole in the plane which sucks out all the zombies but the pilots also lose control of the craft and it crashes. An injured Gerry & Segen are the only survivors and they make their way on foot to the WHO facility.

After 3 days of recovery, Gerry tells the surviving scientists at the facility that, based on his observations, the infected zombies do not bite people who are seriously injured or already terminally ill, since they would be unsuitable hosts for viral reproduction. To test this theory Gerry, Segen and a doctor, must get to a section of the facility which is crawling with zombies, where the pathogens are stored and infect themselves. Gerry gets separated from the other two, who rush back to safety avoiding the zombies, and makes his way to the pathogen vault. After getting cornered inside the vault by a lone zombie, Gerry’s only course of action is to perform an impromptu test of his theory. He injects himself with a completely unknown bacteria and opens the vault door— the zombie ignores him and later the entire horde runs past him. After he makes it back to the safe main building, everyone rejoices at his theory’s success, and they restock their supplies and journey to an extraction point. Gerry & Segen make their way to an evacuation point and are taken by ship to Freeport, Nova Scotia where a safe zone of surviving humans has been setup. Gerry is reunited with his wife, daughter and adopted son Tommy. A “vaccine” derived from deadly pathogens is developed that acts as camouflage for the troops battling the infected, and fleeing survivors can now cross zombie-infested areas with ease to quarantine zones. Human offensives begin against the zombies, and hope is restored.

Good movie, with awesome action. These zombies do not stumble slowly and attack you – the fling themselves in speed and attack you with force. Hurtling across walls, high cliffs and buildings – awesome effects and action, attacking sequences. It’s not engaging enough for me but still is a cut above most zombie films. I see this one more as an action, battling disease film like Outbreak or a much faster paced Contagion rather than a zombie flick. I would give it an 8 outta 10!