With less than a week to go until the highly anticipated release of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls (prequel to publishing phenom Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), Quirk Books has released a blood-soaked trailer for fans to get a glimpse of how the Bennet sisters became formidable zombie killers.

The terrifying and hilarious prequel is a coming-of-age story details the origins of the zombie plague in early-nineteenth-century England and how the five Bennet sisters go from clumsy country lasses to savage slayers of the undead. Fans of the beloved Elizabeth Bennet will witness her clumsy first attempts at training with nunchucks and katana swords to mastering the placement of a ninja star in a zombie’s neck (tasty!).

Written by Steve Hockensmith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls will be available at a bookstore near you on March 23.

Catch the gory (well, 19th-Century gory) two-minute trailer after the jump

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I had a chance to see George Romero’s Survival of the Dead last September during Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX. You can read the full review here. Or, if you don’t want to click a link, I will sum it up by saying I wasn’t in love with the movie.

That’s not to say the movie doesn’t have its good points and isn’t any fun, it does and is. It’s just not a great movie and I was hoping for more.

My opinion aside, the movie will finally be released and to begin the push for that, the studio has dropped the first poster from the film on us. It contains your typical mix of unholy zombies bent on one thing: brains.

Plus, a tag line that actually does a pretty good job of relating one of the central premises of the movie. Nice work marketing team.

Check out the full sized poster after the jump. Survival of the Dead premieres on VOD, Amazon, Xbox Live and Playstation April 30 and in theaters on May 28th.

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It is getting more and more difficult for filmmakers to breathe new life into the tired zombie genre as of late. The most successful zombie movies in recent memory are infused with humor (Zombieland) or introduce a new spin on the classic tale (Pontypool.) The Crazies is a cool little horror film that works because its zombies are not quite typical zombies, which I found more believable and thus more scary than a true zombie movie.

Time for me to fess up. I haven’t seen George Romero’s 1973 film that was the original source material for this film, so this was all a new concept to me.

The Crazies opens with a nifty juxtaposition of small town tranquility and calm (the whole town is watching a local baseball game) with modern day horrors, as a man pointedly walks across the baseball field with a shotgun. He doesn’t look like a zombie.

Instead, he appears to be channeling Michael Douglas’ character from Falling Down. As the horrified crowd looks on, the local sheriff  David (Timothy Olyphant) shoots the man before he can harm anyone.

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This week sees more new film and TV releases on Blu-ray and DVD. Among the ones we’re more interested in this week are Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, Dead Snow, The Box, Season One of Nurse Jackie and Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (pictured above with John C. Reilly and Chris Massoglia).

Check out all the new releases below.

Movies

Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant ~ John C. Reilly, Salma Hayek (Blu-ray and DVD)

Dead Snow ~ Vegar Hoel (Blu-ray and DVD)

Dirty Harry/Magnum Force ~ Clint Eastwood (Blu-ray)

Everybody’s Fine ~ Robert De Niro, Drew Darrymore (Blu-ray and DVD)

Grumpy Old Men/Grumpier Old Men ~ Walter Matthau, Jack Lemon (Blu-ray)

Howards End (Criterion Collection) ~ Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham Carter (Blu-ray and DVD)

Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths ~ Mark Harmon, Alyssa Milano, William Baldwin (Blu-ray and DVD)

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Zombieland was one of the most entertaining films I saw in 2009 and I was eagerly awaiting its arrival on Blu-ray this week. Unlike the George Romero zombie films of the past, Zombieland is a unique blend of “The Odd Couple meets the zombie apocalypse.” Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin have great chemistry together as the last few remaining humans in a world gone zombie.

As a die-hard fan of apocalyptic films such as The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man and The Quiet Earth, Zombieland takes you into a world that has only recently fallen into chaos and shows how those would react when hordes of flesh eating ghoules are waiting for you around every corner.

As I scrolled through the special features on the Blu-Ray disc, I was excited to see that they had added several features that made the disc worth adding to my vast collection. The first feature is “Beyond the Graveyard” which allows the viewer to access picture in picture commentary throughout the feature to learn more about the scenes and special effects associated with them.

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This week, we’ve been bringing you lots of goodies from the release of Zombieland on DVD and Blu-Ray. Since the DVD comes out today, we thought we’d put up two fun featurettes from the release, after giving you two deleted scenes yesterday.

In the first featurette, we go behind the scenes to see how they made their zombies look so realistic in the film. Actress Amber Heard (Pineapple Express) gets to sit in the make-up chair for hours before shooting in order to get her “zombification” just right. Also, we take a look at how some of the extras got to look so undead.

In the second featurette, stars Abigail Brezlin (Little Miss Sunshine) and Emma Stone (The Rocker) get to see one of the first zombies getting made up for the film. Abigail then decides to go on a mission to convince the filmmakers to let her be a zombie, just once.

Check out the features after the jump, and be sure to pick up Zombieland on DVD and Blu-Ray today.

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Much like vampires, zombies are having quite the resurgence these days. Not that they ever really went anywhere, but it seems after the success of Zombieland (and video games like Left 4 Dead) everyone in Hollywood wants a piece of the zombie pie (which, while popular, probably wouldn’t taste very good).

Recently, AMC announced they were adapting Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead for the network with Frank Darabont in charge and now, not to be left out, MTV is apparently turning George Romero’s classic Dawn of the Dead into a TV series.  Yes, one more non-music program on a channel named Music Television.  Don’t worry, it’s doubtful they’ll make the zombies dance.  At least in that MTV will preserve the greatness that is Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.

So far MTV has not made any details about the project available:

“They haven’t given away much in terms of details surrounding the show, how it will link to the original film or even when it might hit the air. They have noted the show will feature a mix of the classic, slow moving zombies and the latest fad of turning the undead into Olympic sprinters. It’s good to see so much diversity on television.”

A television series based on zombies may seem unconventional, but one only has to look to shows like HBO’s True Blood to understand the supernatural appeal. Moreover, I can’t help but wonder if some, if not all, of MTV’s motivation is driven by Zombieland itself.  While made into a movie, Zombieland was originally pitched to CBS as a television series.  Coincidence? Perhaps not.

No matter how the project started, is anyone really going to complain about more zombies to watch?  I didn’t think so.

With both Chris and Matt extremely busy and the American Thanksgiving this week, you know what that means? The Canadians are taking over The Flickcast (are you with me Sal?).

Having celebrated Thanksgiving weeks ago, we’re in the clear to keep the geek news coming while our neighbors to the South take a few days off.  So be prepared to face sentences ending with “eh”, weird dialect (can you say “aboot”) and an abundance of unnecessary apologizing.  Alright, maybe I’m overstating all that but let me take a moment to wish a very Happy upcoming Thanksgiving from all of us up North.

Now, let’s get to that geek news I was talking aboot. Speaking with Collider, writer J. Michael Stracynski commented on one of our highly anticipated film adaptions, Max Brooks’ World War Z. Even having written five drafts of the film Stracynski only had one response as to whether the script was finished, “One never knows.”

He did however mention that a director (no name was given) was attached to the project and Paramount was looking to get the film done having invested so much money in development so far. Given the unique first person narrative of the story Stracynski took a somewhat simple approach to adapting the book for film:

“A series of interviews, so I basically said, ‘Well, who did those interviews?’ And you tell the story of the guy who works for the UN going around the planet interviewing folks to see what happened to them and report on what happened. Through his eyes, you see flashbacks of those storylines.”

The great thing about this is that Stracynski is one of the best character-driven writers in the industry in my opinion.  As great as the zombies will be, the characters should be as equally entertaining to watch. We can’t wait to see World War Z move forward and will keep you posted as more news develops, eh!

Anybody who’s been to a theater in the past year or so knows that zombies are all the rave today. From Sony’s Zombieland bringing in nearly $65 million in a matter of weeks, to the sudden resurgence in the work of George A. Romero, zombies are neck-and-neck with vampires these days.

With that said, of course the craze is bound to hit the video game world, as it did in spades with last year’s Left 4 Dead. The game managed to cram every zombie movie scenario into a first-person shooter to make you feel like you were really fighting for your life against an army of the undead, as scary as that sounds. While there were some pretty haunting moments in the game, there really isn’t anything as cathartic as blowing up zombie heads.

Like clockwork, game developer Valve (along with EA Games) is releasing the sequel to the highly-praised game this year around the same time. The characters are all new, as are the settings, but the most important is the new storyline. Many games these days are more compelling than some films, and the newest trailer for the game only proves that further.

Check out the Zombie Survival Guide trailer after the jump, and be sure to race to the game stores on November 17th when the game gets a nationwide release.

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We’re all pretty big fans of horror here at The Flickcast. All month long, we’ve been putting out a series of Horror Reviews for you to check out in order to get you into the mood for the big holiday. Now, we’re going to help you get in the mood even more, with a little help from Blockbuster.

About a month ago, we teamed up with Blockbuster to bring you the Top 10 Football Movie prize-pack, and due to the overwhelming success of the contest, we’re doing it again–only this time, with monsters!

Blockbuster has put out a list of their top 10 Horror Movie Monsters, which range from The Creature from the Black Lagoon, to King Kong, to just about any and all Zombie/Werewolf/Vampire films. Weigh in at their site if you have any suggestions they may have overlooked.

This time around, much like the last Twitter Giveaway, we will be tweeting a trivia question later today. If you are the first one to @reply with the right answer, you win the prize pack! From there, you’ll have 20 movies to choose from in order to get your Monster fix.

So be sure to keep an eye on our Twitter page and our tweets later today, because you can most definitely be a winner. Happy Halloween!!