Robots are the new zombies

No, this doesn't mean that some group called the Robots have hired Rod Argent (damnit.) Robots are taking over the cultural position that was until recently held by zombies. Zombies seemed to be the metaphor of choice for activists or performance artists or whoever it was doing all that shambling last year, now I suspect robots are moving into that position.

An article in the NYT today covers the new book How to Survive a Robot Uprising (also reviewed today) and a reference is made in the article to the new play Heddatron, which has something to do with Ibsen and robots. Shades of Hamletmachine. It's only a matter of time, if it hasn't happened already, before street theater activists and pop culture leaders take up the metal helmet for other purposes. Of course, some people were ahead of the curve.

A few years ago, The Zombie Survival Guide appeared, offering sage advice for that impending apocalyptic horde of living dead. This new robot book appears to be a transparent copycat volume, although it could be entertaining if the references to Sealab 2021 outnumber the references to that Will Smith movie.

Turns out, though, that instead of actual zombies all we could expect from the last few years was an apocalyptic horde of zombie movies. Despite my enthusiasm for zombie movies, I've been slow to catch up with them all and not encouraged by the fact that a lot of the new celluloid entries in the ongoing story of Raymond Moody's worst nightmare I have seen have sucked.

Just this weekend, I saw the "Sci Fi Pictures Original" House of the Dead 2, which wasn't that bad. Anything with horror movie stalwart Emmanuelle Vaugier is likely to be better than it would be otherwise, but the makers of this flick were kind enough not to take the material too seriously without taking the audience for a bunch of conditioned monkeys who get a banana without fail every time they push a button. The subtitle of HotD2, "Dead Aim," didn't mean anything, but horror movie subtitles so rarely mean anything it doesn't even matter. After a point, subtitles to horror movies are nothing more than randomly generated words to distinguish the chapters in a franchise. In fact, you can establish a hierarchy or evolutionary progression of sorts for horror movie franchises based on whether or not the franchise makes it past the numbering phase to the number and subtitling phase and then to the numberless, but subtitled phase. These progressions are completely orthogonal to the quality of the series, but there does seem to be some reason to the practices of horror movie naming that I will figure out one day.

They should call the next movie in the series House of the Dead: Armageddon Massacre or House of the Dead: Afterlife Mutation or something like that, then the acronym would be HotD:AM. For some reason I think that would be worth the two seconds it takes to think of.

Anyway, House of the Dead 2 is really more "College Campus of the Dead," but I'm sure that's trademarked by somebody. Favorite line? Early in the movie, the order to proceed on the mission to clear out the plagued campus in question comes from a military officer who claims to have received it "directly from the Secretary of Defense, who got it directly from the White House Chief of Staff, who got it directly from the President, who got it directly from the Vice President himself."

Speaking of whom, maybe "Dead Aim" does mean something.