A Rotten Special Section

Greetings, people of Scarecrow - Robert Horton here, warning you about an alarming special rental section now playing at Scarecrow. You may know me as a film critic and curator of the "Magic Lantern" series at the Frye Art Museum, but these days I am also the co-author (with Seattle Times writer Mark Rahner) of a new comic book series from Moonstone Books, Rotten. For inexplicable reasons, the good people at Scarecrow have allowed us to curate our own little section at the store. Now, Rotten is a zombie Western. Since there are far fewer zombie films than Westerns, we've picked out our favorite zombie pictures and paired each one with a Western. Some of these are truly strange bedfellows: White Zombie and Pursued? Well, they both have moody black-and-white photography and weird Freudian underpinnings. Land of the Dead and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada? Hey, they both bring old genres into a modern age. Some of the other marriages are easier to spot. I Walked with a Zombie and Stars in My Crown are both directed by Jacques Tourneur. The Omega Man and Major Dundee are chock-full of Chuck Heston. Evil Dead II and For a Few Dollars More are sequels that exponentially expand their directors' stylistic tendencies. And Dawn of the Dead and Rio Bravo: the central plot situation is pretty similar, after all. Except one has zombies. Even when the connection isn't as obvious, we think you'll still be seeing two good movies...for the price of one. That's right, Scarecrow is bundling these unholy double-bills for a single ticket price. You can't beat that with a dismembered limb. Scarecrow is also doing us the honor of carrying Rotten for sale in the store (beginning later this week), which is totally cool. What's it about? Rotten follows the bloody exploits of government agents as they roam the West, fighting to explain and contain a mysterious outbreak of the undead in 1877. Along with head-splattering action, Rotten offers distinct parallels with recent political events - a world in which fear threatens to trump reason. For more info about the comic, go to the Rotten website, which includes links to early reviews and a mysterious diary kept by one of the characters. Check out the display of zombie-Western double bills at Scarecrow. In the meantime, here's the list. White Zombie/Pursued I Walked with a Zombie/Stars in My Crown The Earth Dies Screaming/Comanche Station Plague of the Zombies/Bad Company (1972) Night of the Living Dead/The Great Silence The Omega Man/Major Dundee Dawn of the Dead/Rio Bravo Zombi 2/The Quick & the Dead City of the Living Dead/Django Evil Dead II/For a Few Dollars More Day of the Dead/The Long Riders Dead-Alive/Ravenous Cemetery Man/Dead Man 28 Days Later/Ride with the Devil Land of the Dead/The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada Dawn of the Dead (2004)/3:10 to Yuma (2007) Shaun of the Dead/Blazing Saddles Like to suggest something we forgot? Fire away. In the words of Roy Rogers, happy entrails to you.