David Dubrow

Author

Zombie Redoubts on the Go

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The first book I wrote was The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse.  I wrote it under the pseudonym F. Kim O’Neill, because I thought that survival skills and zombie-killing techniques would be more credible if they came from a fictional military veteran than a real-life goofball like myself.  Despite my past and present goofball status, my book is still the most realistic primer available on surviving a Zombie Apocalypse, bar none.

Since the book was published in December 2010, I’ve written some shorter pieces on zombie apocalypse survival skills.  What follows is a rewrite of an earlier piece.

Zombie Redoubts on the Go

In The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse, I described methods to turn your house or apartment into a Zombie Redoubt: a place of refuge that can be readily defended during a Zombie Apocalypse.  If, for whatever reason, you can’t or won’t take those steps to make your home more zombie-resistant (almost no place on Earth is completely zombie-proof), then you will want to read on.  Even if you have stocked up your Zombie Redoubt with weapons, supplies, and water, the longer you stay in one place, the more likely it is that you’ll meet wandering, hungry undead.  Every fight can be your last, be it from bad luck, a jammed gun, or an overwhelming number of enemies.  Eventually you’re going to have to move out of your Zombie Redoubt and find a new place to live.

Whether you’re looking for a place to sleep for the night or a home for a few weeks, identifying a suitable  Zombie Redoubt on the go should include the following factors:

  • That Prius May Save the Environment, but It Won’t Save Your Life: If you use an abandoned car as a temporary hotel and are surprised by zombies, you’re in a very bad position.  Inside an automobile there’s little room to dodge attacks or access a weapon (let alone swing one), and the entire top half of the thing is made out of glass that a determined undead attacker will eventually break.  You’re also very easily surrounded in a car, and it can be extremely difficult to get out of one in a hurry.  
  • More Than One Exit: Any place you go into should have at least two means of egress: the one you entered and one other that leads to a ground floor exit.  If you’re running from zombies and lock yourself into a structure that only has one exit, you’re just delaying the inevitable. Sooner or later you’re going to have to get out and deal with the problem that brought you there in the first place.  Of course, you can’t always immediately tell if the building you plan to hole up in has a second way out, so before you commit to staying for any length of time, do a thorough sweep of the first floor and test any exits you might see: that back fire door may be locked or rusted shut.  
  • The Visible Man: Places like libraries, schools, supermarkets, convenience stores, and other retail establishments may have things like free food, water, and books, but they also have very large windows and glass fronts.  This glass may be zombie-proof, but it also provides both living and undead enemies with an unobstructed view of the interior of the building.  If zombies see you in there, they will never leave.  Sure, you can try to block all the windows, but with what?  Will it block all light?  Did you leave yourself enough peepholes to see what’s going on outside?  Use these kinds of places as resupply stops and very temporary shelters, not homes.
  • Knock Knock, Who’s There: Depending on the size of the structure you’ve entered, you will want to make certain that you’re alone in it.  If it’s an office building, secure all ground floor methods of entry or egress to keep upstairs tenants from sneaking up on you.  Just because the building doesn’t have power, it doesn’t mean you can’t be surprised by undead in the elevator shaft, for example.  If it’s a house or smaller structure, go room to room on a search for enemies before relaxing.  During the Zombie Apocalypse most surprises you’ll experience will turn out to be nasty ones, not birthday parties. Minimize the chances of being surprised.
  • Squatter’s Rights: Be prepared to face down other scavenging humans in your quest for shelter, but unless your intent is to kill everyone you see, you may want to avoid places that show obvious signs of habitation.  If you’ve managed to survive the first few weeks of the Zombie Apocalypse, you’re a tougher customer than you used to be.  The problem is, so is everyone else.  You don’t know what that scruffy-looking guy and his wall-eyed girlfriend in the abandoned 7-11 had to go through to survive.  With thousands of hungry undead seeking your brains, do you really want to fight everybody?  There’s probably a suitable place to crash down the street.

Practice assessing places as Zombie Redoubts on the go before the Zombie Apocalypse. Take a casual look around the next time you’re in an unfamiliar building.  Identify the exits, check out how much glass is out front, and give it a general look-see.  Imagine yourself having to sleep there with minimal creature comforts.  You’ll be surprised at what you discover.

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New Review of The Blessed Man and the Witch

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Nev Murray at his Confessions of a Reviewer!! reviewed my first novel The Blessed Man and the Witch:

“You know those little men you see walking around with the placards around their necks declaring “The end is nigh”? Maybe we should speak to them and find out when because this book makes it sound like it is entirely possible, and just around the corner.”

It’s a lengthy, detailed analysis from an experienced well-read book reviewer who’s not afraid to tell it like it is.  Did he like it?  Click to find out!
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Movie Review: The Babadook

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I’d read nothing but good things about The Babadook, so when it became available for Netflix streaming, I couldn’t wait to see it.  It had been hyped as a terrifying, low-budget horror story that apparently scared the hell out of William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, so it had to be awesome.

It wasn’t awesome.  But it was really good.

This review will contain spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it yet, go see it before reading.

  • slasreveR eloR: A great strength of the film is that you weren’t ever sure who the true antagonist was until the end.  Samuel started out as the obvious antagonist, and everything Amelia did made her the victim of his mood swings until she wasn’t anymore.  Over the course of the film, her anguish made her the actor instead of the acted-upon.  It was only at the climax, when the Babadook manifested itself as an external expression of Amelia’s grief, that the antagonist could be defeated.
  • Samuel: Some of the earlier scares surrounding Samuel were blunted somewhat by his general unlikability.  The actor did an extraordinary job of portraying a disturbed child, a performance made even stronger by the film’s ending, when you finally begin to sympathize with him.  At the beginning of the film’s final act, when you weren’t sure if there actually was a Babadook or not, Samuel transformed effortlessly into the hero.
  • Amelia: One of the film’s more effective subtleties was that Amelia didn’t have an obvious mental condition to blame for the Babadook’s presence.  She was grieving and at loose ends with a difficult child, but who could blame her?  There was no one triggering event that manifested the Babadook; it just sat within her until it was time to come out.  Don’t forget, though, that she wrote The Babadook book, and even added pages to it until she cooked it on the grill.  Despite everything, she was (and probably still is) mentally ill.
  • F/X: The Babadook has been labeled a low-budget movie, but it didn’t look that way.  There was no CGI and very few actual sightings of the eponymous monster, which worked very well.  The filmmakers did a great job with the budget they had, and there was little reason for the audience to walk away from the film unsatisfied.
  • Whither the Babadook?: Samuel’s gadgets at the end seemed a little reminiscent of Home Alone, but they worked well enough to exorcise the Babadook from Amelia.  Allegorically speaking, I think that the film is telling us to try to make peace with our demons, but it’s a bit muddled.  If you can’t keep the Babadook down, how long will it stay in the basement, eating worms?  Can Amelia write a new ending for it, finally banishing the monster forever?

A bit long, a bit thematically muddled, but definitely worth watching.  Four out of five stars.

(I’m also looking forward to the sequels: The Baba Ghanoush, about an Arab family dealing with a childhood monster, The Gabagool, about possessed Italian cold cuts, and Baba Black Sheep Squadron, about WWII U.S. Marine pilots fighting off a clawed black monster.)

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Movie Review: Truth or Die

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Truth or Die is a movie that is extremely English insofar as the characters all have very stiff upper lips and, like an afternoon tea, there’s nothing in it to particularly discomfit or terrify you.

Which is unfortunate, because it’s supposed to be a horror film.

There are some interesting bits in it, including a fairly horrible death scene, but for the most part it’s pedestrian, boring, and not worth your time.  It suffers from the problem plaguing many horror films: bad things happening to unlikable people, so it’s hard to care about any of it.

  • The Bad Guy: I’m one of those people who almost always roots for the bad guy in movies.  Pleasantly, the best thing about Truth or Die was David Oakes’s portrayal of antagonist Justin, a psychopathic military veteran.  Creepy, physically strong without being infallible, he managed to bring both menace and a tiny bit of humanity into the role.  You want him to see his work done, you want him to win, but unfortunately, that didn’t happen, which was disappointing.  Someone like him shouldn’t have been vanquished the way he was, but the movie had to have a happy ending, of sorts. A shame, really.
  • Whodunit: That was a bit of a surprise, which made it enjoyable.  The problem was that the rationale for sending the postcard, while plausible, seemed very last minute.  The character gave no indication of feeling that way earlier in the film, which made it too sudden, too sloppy.
  • Stiff Upper Lips: Paul, Chris, Gemma, and Eleanor were all quite tough.  Paul’s gunshot wound didn’t seem to pain him as much as being kneecapped might a normal person, and the defiance all four seemed willing to give to Justin would have been admirable if it wasn’t so unbelievable.  None of them panicked.  They all found incredible steel inside of them when it was needed.  I didn’t buy it.
  • Femme Fatale: Eleanor proved to be at least as psychotic as Justin and twice as tough, which didn’t make sense outside of a writer or producer’s requirement to have a super-strong female character.  Didn’t like her, didn’t find her sexy, didn’t find her interesting, didn’t find her believable.
  • The End: The rationale behind Felix hanging himself was way too complicated.  Did they really need that much backstory, with corporate intrigue, blackmail, gay sex, and a bizarre family code of honor to uphold?  Especially when it’s all just spat out at the last five minutes?

Truth or Die gets two stars out of five.

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The Prophecy’s Angels as Immature, Brutal Childen

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Gregory Widen’s The Prophecy is an extraordinary, imaginative film that shows angels in a much different light from the celestial beings humanized by television shows like Touched by an Angel and articles in Reader’s Digest.  Widen’s angels are brutal, savage, animalistic.  Rather than create an angel mythology out of whole cloth, Widen mined the Bible for angelic references to show us that angels are, in their hearts, killers.

This central theme is stated quite clearly when Thomas Daggett, the protagonist, says, “Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?”

Physically, Widen’s angels display birdlike behavior, given that their true forms are winged, eyeless humanoids.  They perch like raptors, a bizarre affectation that works very well in the film.  Uziel, Gabriel’s lieutenant, scents for the angel Simon like an animal would, and their subsequent fight is extremely brutal, without human finesse or mercy.  After stabbing Simon, Uziel literally digs into the wound, trying to pull out his heart.

Uziel’s autopsy scene further shows how separate the angels are from humans, from the lack of growth rings on their bones to the bizarre makeup of their blood (chemicals usually only found in an aborted fetus).  Hermaphroditic, lacking eyes, they’re just different.

Later, we see the Archangel Gabriel literally tasting the shed blood on the wardrobe after Uziel and Simon’s fight, able from this to determine that it came from Simon.  Not even a higher order of angel like Gabriel is exempt from this kind of base animalism.  They’re not beautiful, celestial messengers of God, but are, in Daggett’s terms, “creatures.”

In addition to their bestial nature, the angels in The Prophecy are bizarrely childlike in both temper and behavior.  The entire conceit of the film, that certain angels became jealous of humans for being created with souls and acquiring God’s chief affection, is essentially a gigantic, millennia-long temper tantrum.  A war, with casualties and spiritual consequences that affect the spiritual future of the human race, based entirely on envy.

This is shown most clearly in Gabriel, arguably one of Christopher Walken’s greatest roles.  He contemptuously refers to humans by the juvenile term “talking monkeys,” but can’t even drive a car, showing an immature helplessness.  During his confrontation with Simon, Simon tells him, “Sometimes you just have to do what you’re told,” which is very reminiscent of a parent scolding a child.  When Simon won’t tell Gabriel where he’d hidden Hawthorne’s soul even after being tortured, Gabriel stamps his foot and shouts in a childish fit of pique: a mini-tantrum.

Perhaps the best indication that the angels are emotional children, bereft of a father as a result of their ruinous war in Heaven, is when Gabriel tries to entice Thomas to fight alongside him: “Nobody tells you when to go to bed.  You eat all the ice cream you want.  You get to kill all day, all night, just like an angel!”  Gabriel’s speaking ironically about the bed time and ice cream, but the language he uses still evokes images of childlike freedom.  Despite his contempt for humans, he is himself beneath them in maturity and ethics.

And what of God in this war-torn universe?  The only time we hear of Him is when Daggett asks Gabriel, “If you wanted to prove your side was right, Gabriel, so badly, why don’t you just ask Him?  Why don’t you just ask God?”

Gabriel’s answer is poignant, and in many painful ways puts him on the same level as us: “Because He doesn’t talk to me anymore.”

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