And on this, the 76th day of October, the end finally arrived. When I first started, I would have never guessed it would take me an average of 3 days per post to conclude this. And yet here we are.

Z.

A moniker I have frequently responded to. (This intro seems to be waning a bit, maybe we should move on to the end.)

Odds are pretty good you have seen this movie already, if you haven’t it would be like trying to explain who Gandhi is. If you haven’t seen it, check out the Ben Kingsley biopic Gandhi, it’s really good. Also check out Zombieland, it was great fun.

And great fun isn’t the sort of description many zombie tales are allowed to have as blurbs. I mean “Walking Dead: Great Fun in Atlanta” just doesn’t feel right as a title.

Zombieland is a first person story about how one loner geek manages to survive after the zombie apocalypse starts. Mind you, this loner quickly teams up with another loner, but they decide names are a bad thing to share. Not good to get close to anyone when they could die at any minute. So they use city names for each other instead, and the legend of Columbus and Tallahassee begins.

The two wind up meeting a pair of sisters who gank their SUV and leave them stranded. Columbus and Tallahassee roam about a bit until finding a new vehicle. They catch up to the girls who have broken down, but the girls essentially kidnap them in their own vehicle.

The dynamics of trust are rather tricky in this world. Also there are zombies to deal with. Getting bogged down in the details of a long recap would do a disservice to this movie. Just go watch it. You won’t regret it. And if you do regret it, believe me it won’t be the worst regret in your life. Something will happen to make you say “Wow, remember when I was salty over JimmyZ suggesting I watch Zombieland? Today was so much worse than that day.” You’ll thank me later.

Amazon attempted a series to cash in on the success of the movie. They got as far as a pilot. Having none of the cast might have hurt things. I haven’t watched it, so I can’t comment on anything other than it existing.

And then there was a second movie. And there is talk of a third movie, but the plan may be to do one every ten years, so you gotta wait until after the next presidential election before that may happen.

I was not aware of this Japanese series prior to yesterday (my yesterday, I don’t know when you are reading this, but if you want to pretend they are the same yesterday, I’m willing to play along.) And to be honest, I didn’t want to indulge in it. I have been trying to avoid doing a series here. Now a series of films is different. But a show like Dexter wasn’t what I wanted to do for D even if it is utterly amazing.

The Z series here appeared to be a bit different. For one thing, each had a different name, so it felt more like individual movies. And they all had differing runtimes. So I took a leap of faith and jumped in. Well, I googled which was the first one (because they all had the exact same description on the streaming site) and then I jumped in.

The movie started with a society scene vignette where a zombie is on the street and gets snatched up by a government type vehicle. We then drift back in time to the start of things. And follow two high school girls suddenly caught up in zombies. A bad ass woman shows up wielding a Nagachi polearm weapon and rescues them. The three stick together more or less before making it to a hospital. As part of a small group things begin to get weird, as happens in survival movies.

Someone turns and they have to kill him. Luckily the bad ass warrior woman is always ready. It happens again. And again. And they all begin panicing.

There are lots of other things going on, naturally. But this movie eventually ends with a select few making it to the roof to be rescued by a military helicopter.

Jumping to the second movie, Z Madness and Angels. I glossed over some details because they come back.

In the second movie, we jump back to before the outbreak. And follow a guy we saw very briefly in the first movie. He was holed up in a room on a different floor with a woman who was a zombie. She was tied up and he was very protective of her. This second movie shows his story. And I instantly was hooked. A person who got like 5 minutes of screen time is now getting a 70 minute movie. Awesome.

He is in the hospital for some surgery. Most of the nurses find him creepy and weird, but one nurse is nice to him. He takes this a bit to heart and thinks she likes him. He happens to be stalking her when the outbreak happens, and takes her to safety when it does. Safety being an empty room in the hospital as everyone is fleeing.

Shortly after hiding her, she turns. He manages to subdue her and tie her to a bed. As days go by, he indulges in a fantasy about her love for him as they are now dating. And it rapidly crosses over into very uncomfortable territory for me. She is no longer alive, so has obviously lost some rights, as most flesh eating monsters tend to. But he has now captured and sexualized her for his own satisfaction. And that feels very wrong. He has undressed her, so she is just in bra and panties for most of the time.

And then we get the tie in to the first movie. There are two teenage boys who are part of the main group. They heard about a zombie girl being naked on a different floor, so they need to satisfy their teen hormones and go get a peek at the naughty bits of the zombie.

One of the boys though wants more than just a peek. And wants her naked. With her bra off, he begins groping her and masturbating. The zombie girls caretaker/captor returns and lashes out at the boys. In the fracas, she winds up biting the teen on his dick. They escape and get back to their story as we saw in the first movie, with a few more details added.

The captor of the girl though decides to go all the way. He gets naked with her and rapes her, letting her bite him.

And here I am torn, because I love the weaving of the story the way they did. But the content of the second movie was something I couldn’t wrap my head around.

I started the third movie, but stopped less than ten minutes into it. This one starts with the two teen boys right before it all goes to hell. And I was keen on the idea at first. Another tangent being brought in. The boys weren’t a huge part of the story. But then my brain started going and I realized that about 40 minutes into their 70 (ish) minute tale, we would get to the two of them and the groping assault on the zombie woman.

I didn’t finish the third, and didn’t start the fourth.

And find myself here after 76 days and 26 letters ending on the most unhappiest of notes possible.

In part because what started with me highlighting films I loved for each letter turned tough at the end. For X,Y, and Z I had to search out movies to talk about. So these final entries shifted from stuff I love to “I found this that starts with a Y, let’s talk about it.”