iZombie=Rob Thomas (VM) love; dS/C6D alum on iZombie

[verushka70]

K, so last weekend while running an inexplicable fever (sinus/cold related, apparently) I completed bingewatching iZombie now that S1 is on Netflix.

I love it! It has the smarts, running musings and sassy chick of Veronica Mars, plus zombies. (Not my favorite horror trope -- I've yet to watch an episode of The Walking Dead.) There's also David Anders (whose ambiguous sexual presence has always made him kind of sexy, if creepy, in his villainous roles). And a sexy east Indian newcomer, Rahul Kohli, whose facial hair makes me wonder what he can do with it and just where it should be applied, lol.

Since it is filmed in BC, it had several old dS/C6D alum (from BSG and DVI) pop up in S1, yay. Most recently, however, in tonight's ep (S2E03), I could have sworn I saw Anne Marie Deluise nee Loder! Yes, the former Stella Kowalski on dS!

I have yet to confirm this (details of S2E03 aren't yet available on imdb.com or Wikipedia), but I'm not done watching yet (and I hate rewinding on Hulu because then I get the commercials again, and I'm too cheap to pay the extra $$ for commercial free).

Will double check and update this post if/when it's confirmed.

But I really like iZombi. They even threw in a reference to one of producer/co-creator Rob Thomas's YA books (the astronaut from RATS Saw GOD). So I'm really enjoying iZombie and all of that sassy girl snark and snappy dialogue that made Veronica Mars crackle. So much that I would've watched it tonight when broadcast, if it hadn't been preempted on the local WGN/CW station by a Bulls game. A Bulls exhibition game.

What was the point of that?? The entire city (except for me) was watching the Cubs game. (If I'm a fan of baseball at all, it's of a. the form-fitting uniforms and the baseball athlete body, and b. the Chicago White Sox.) Whatevs (she said, rambling.) It's on Hulu now so I'm watching it. They low-censused me for work tomorrow so I can stay up late and drink beer on the couch with my dog and cats and this has been posted via email using Speech To Text on my phone, courtesy of an ongoing tendinitis flare-up.

And btw, fuck you, tendinitis, you suck pigsty hog balls.

Comments

[glitteryv]

I so wish zombies wouldn't squick me. :( Not so much for things like The Walking Dead, but for stuff like this show and the YA book and movie Warm Bodies. ETA: also the "Pride and Prejudice and Zombie" profic (soon to be a movie, IIRC)." I don't like the idea of something dead and having only the barest levels of consciousness (unlike the Western vampire which is dead but fully aware of what's going on). IDEK.

Ugh, I hate when things get preempted (especially for an exhibition game). How tacky!

[verushka70]

It is really too bad zombies squick you. I like horror as a genre (though not splatter-gore or torture-porn horror, ugh -- the least talented, lowest common denominator -- and my liking of horror/suspense/ghost stories really stems from things like Edgar Allen Poe and Conan Doyle horror stories I read as a kid/teen). Zombies don't squick me, but they just aren't my thing. FWIW I found the original George Romero b/w Dawn of the Dead super scary. I still think it's the scariest and best.

I've meant to check out P&P&Z, but I just never got around to it. My sister's a Jane Austen freak. I should ask her if she's checked it out. Tho' probably not; she's not a big zombie fan, either, lol.

I did really like Warm Bodies. But for me there has to be more going for a show than just zombies and survival -- which WB definitely had, a redemptive aspect. And at least the Romero movies had some social commentary and satire (I saw all of them back in the day).

But TWD has been in my queue for years, yet I keep bypassing it in favor of other stuff because... I just don't see the point, even though lots of people have told me it's really good.

[glitteryv]

I have watched several zombie movies, but my threshold for being able to sit through them without feeling like I'm on the verge of freaking out is very small. IIRC, the last zombie movie I watched was "Another 28 Days Later". Strangely enough, I have less of a problem dealing with zombie media when it's on printed form. So I've read World War Z and most of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I know that World War Z (the movie) differed a lot from the book (because they kinda made Brat Pitt a character made up of about 5 characters in the book and the movie also ended up being more focused on ACTION than a criticism on certain aspects of modern living like in the book).

As for P&P&Z, I didn't finish it because it was fic about P&P. Although I do like the films (especially the 2005 one with Keira Knightley as Elizabeth), I find Jane Austen's books to be incredibly dull.

Romero's zombie films were the first ones I ever watched. If anything, I'll have to say that they scarred me because, like you said, they were really scary. I think I was about 10 years old when I watched them. :(

All I know about TWD is that there's been some criticism that the characters seem to be going in circles (plot-wise) in the last two seasons. Oh, and that some things have changed from the comic book canon to the TV one.

[verushka70]

I guess I can take or leave zombies. If they're well done and there's a point, okay, I'll watch it (like 28 Days Later or the first b/w Romero zombie flick). If there's nothing compelling about it, meh.

I forgot WWZ was a book first. I think I bought it years ago when the movie came out and then never read it. (That happens sometimes, sigh -- I lose books. I've moved more in the last several years than I had in more than 15 years combined, from my apartment in my mom's 3-flat building to my bf's and then split up/moved out from my bf's to my own place. So I've lost and culled a lot of books, even books I hadn't read, 'cause I figured if I hadn't read them for the years they sat on my bookshelves, I probably wasn't going to -- especially when there were other more precious books I'd read and re-read for the umpteenth time in that same time period.)

I think zombies don't bug me so much because a zillion years ago when I was a child, Chicago had our own version of Elvira, Son of Svengoolie, who showed bad old horror and scifi movies. My TV watching was controlled when my dad came home from work but not so much on Saturday mornings or in the afternoons before he got home. This was the 70s, when all kinds of non-child appropriate afternoon movies were broadcast by local affiliates to fill in the time between soaps and evening news. Plus as previously mentioned, I got stuck watching what my older siblings wanted to watch A LOT. So I saw a bunch of old (often silly/non-scary) horror movies (and campy scifi) at (probably) way too young an age. IIRC, I think that's how I first saw Night of the Living Dead -- before age 10. (I was 1 year old when it came out in 1968, to give you an idea). Even at that age (maybe from my older sibs? don't recall) I gathered that in the end, the true horror wasn't merely the zombies but the fact that racist white Southern cops killed the only human who'd survived just because he was black and they made an assumption.

Also I think I raised my zombie tolerance threshold by virtual empowerment. A million years ago when I had healthy, functional wrists, I was working with a bunch of guys in IT. After work they (and often I) would play networked video games together, typically first person shooter games. Staggering mindless humanoids featured somewhat prominently as threats/obstacles in some early networked PC games like Doom and Doom II as well as some early 1st gen Xbox games (which I had). You had no choice; you had to kill them to progress in the game. So I think maybe my early horror movie exposure desensitized me to scary environments (probably gave me a taste for them too), routine zombie killing in my 20s (sometimes rather entertainingly, like shooting a barrel of flammable toxic waste next to 2-4 of them to take them all out at once) changed the zombie paradigm for me -- at least such that they don't squick me.

I totally forgot TWD was based on a comic book series. So is iZombie (not that I ever read it). iZombie features actually far fewer mindless staggering zombies than what I've seen in previews of TWD. After the set up of the first few eps in S1 (which involves a zombie "outbreak" on a party boat), the premise is that the main gal Liv maintains who she is (and doesn't degenerate into a mindless brain-eating zombie) because she works in the Seattle morgue as a ME with easy access to brains.

So she can feed at will and keep herself from starving and becoming a mindless zombie -- and on top of that, whoever's brains she's eaten typically give her "visions," flashes of their memories, which helps her solve their murders. She occasionally goes "full on zombie" when she's defending herself, but that's typically short-lived (a few seconds of screen time). Only once in S1 did she and her colleague Dr. Ravi (Rahul Kohli), who knows her secret, encounter a full on mindless hungry zombie. In fact, all the zombies in iZombie except for the initial "outbreak" and the one they found by the waterfront, are "normal" because they buy brains (at extortion prices) from Blaine (David Anders) who segues from drug dealer to brains dealer after he becomes a zombie.

It's actually a pretty entertaining show. I mean, it's not going to change your life and will probably never win an Emmy (just as BTVS and Veronica Mars never did). But it's fun and snarky and witty. And similar to the way Veronica would fake her way into situations as a PI (becoming a cheerleader, sexpot, etc.), Liv takes on the personality traits of whoever's brain she's eaten whose murder she's trying to solve -- with naturally entertaining results. The most recent ep (S02E03) was titled "Real Dead Housewives of Seattle;" her take on a "real housewife" was pretty funny, as are the reactions of her friends who witness these temporary transformations. She's variously been an agoraphobe shutin, hacker, stoner, and assorted other types.

So, I can't say there are NO full-on mindless brain eating zombies on iZombie. But FWIW, based on clips and previews I've seen, I think iZombie has the least actual zombies of any current zombie show or movie. It's probably not too popular with people who love zombies because it doesn't actually have many, and the main zombie character is normal and non-zombie-like 98% of the time because she's actively trying to preserve her humanity.