The Evil Dead and Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout

It is time for a booze fueled review of Sam Raimi's holy trilogy of slaphappy horror.  It's EVIL DEAD!  1981 hasn't been the same since.  You can't talk about The Evil Dead without talking about Bruce Campbell.  Who?  BRUCE FUCKING CAMPBELL THAT'S WHO!!!  Before getting fat and lazy as Sam Axe on Burn Notice he was a horror movie hero....well a b-rate horror movie hero at least.   This guy gets his real time movie debut in one of the greatest horror movies ever!  He slams it out of the park!  Then he limped on for a bit not getting proper recognition until 1987 when Bruce did what Bruce does best......Ash.  He does Evil Dead 2 and his career explodes (as much as a b-rate horror career can, context people, context).  After that it was bad movie after bad movie (all great!!) until Army of Darkness (AKA Evil Dead 3) in 1992.  If you haven't seen these films then stop reading this post, report directly to Best Buy and slam your 30 bucks down on the counter for The Evil Dead (ULTIMATE EDITION).  You'll regret this less then your high school hair cut that's for sure.

A beer is a beer....until it becomes Old Rasputin.  Then it becomes something more.  Our friends over at RATEBEER.COM give this big bastard a rating of 100 overall with 98 for the style.  This is bigger and blacker than Ving Rhames so watch out.  It's 9% abv with 75 IBUs to kick you in the teeth and laugh as you sniffle.  It doesn't give a shit.  I guess that's the whole Russian thing?  Just kidding......but seriously.  And this beer is a cross legged, sheepish little wimp compared to Old Rasputin XII which is 11.2% abv, unknown IBUs, and more whiskey barrel character than you can probably handle.  Just leave it on the shelf.  You don't want to have to explain to your girlfriend why you spend $25 on a 22oz bottle of beer.  Yikes!!!  I wouldn't have this problem because i would tell my wife "My beer, Damn it!!"  With a grunt and a firey glare.  She would inquire no further......maybe.  Anyway this beast pours a thick thick black.  It's the portal to intoxication, the vile nectar of taste and punishment swirling around in an intimidating pool.  "Focus Daniel-san" (Mr. Miyagi joke).  Not only is this beer the blackest of the black but it's deep brown head tells you that this beer will stain your very soul.  Once you've been marked there is no return.  You can't undrink this beer.  You'll be stuck in beer hell, roaming the coolers with dead eyes while you fill your cart with $12 four packs.  That's what happens.....no joke.

You start as the evil spirit in this movie, gliding over the autumn leaves and a pond.  As an evil spirit what do you encounter but a car with four young lovers (and a tag along) on their way to a cabin in the hills of Tennessee.  I'm not so scared of evil spirits and undead, i'm really scared of "Hill People"!     Their get away cabin has to be the creepiest most obvious setting for an evil spirit to brutaly murder people.  Come on!  Anywhere that has bones just hanging randomly in a shed is not a place you should hang out in.  It's the straight forward manner of this film that makes it so wonderful.  It's not going to pump fake and go deep on you.  No!  This son'fabich is going to pound the ball right down your throat until you give up.  The cinimatography is also just awesome.  So many films of this time frame use single shots for long periods of time and keep the same basic angles and points of view.  That makes it boring.  Not Sam Raimi though.  He uses lots of different shots, with multiple angles and keeps the camera moving.  While we are getting introduced to our characters they come across the book of the dead and a knife with a tiny skull and spine handle.  And the best part is they don't think there's anything weird about it.  All this foreshadowing is making me thirsty.

There's big aroma spilling out of this beer like a stab victim.  There's dark roasted malty goodness, caramel, burnt sugar, and tons of coffee.  There's also dark chocolate and this strange floral/citrus hoppiness that mingles with it all.  It's not overpowering it's empowering.  It's get up and do push ups good.  Now for the taste.....BOOM! (that was an explosion).  Some people say the taste is a bit of a let down and i say these people need to get real jobs and real friends.  It's affecting their ability to accurately taste beer.  It's thick and viscous (same thing?) and delivers a powerful blow of charred roasted malts and dark caramel.  The aroma is in the taste for sure.  There's the chocolate, and the coffee.  I don't think i have to say this but if you were to drink i cup of coffee and take a sip of this beer you wouldn't be like "ummmm which is which, i don't know!" but it's there in levels enough to be told.  Same thing with the chocolate.  The beer finishes big and with a long bitter and greasy aftertaste.  All of that in the best of ways.  This beer lingers on your tongue.  You don't drink this beer, the beer drinks you.

Our friends break out an old tape recorder and by playing the tape accidentally unleash an evil from the forest.  Ash is such a player.  He does the old "fake like your sleeping with a jewelry box in your hand".  What a card. He gives his girlfriend the gift that says "I love you" more than anything, a women's best friend, a circular piece of glass necklace!!!!  How romantic.  You get a brief shot of side boob and then it's on to the haunting.  Brace yourself for one of the most wildly inappropriate sex scenes in the history of horror movies.  One woman leaves the cabin in her robe in order investigate some strange noise when she is assaulted by some seriously perverted vines!  I mean they rip her clothes off and.....and.....well watch the movie because it's brutal and strange.  She turns into a zombie and has one of my favorite not for the squeamish scenes ever. She stabs a girl in the ankle with a pencil for like 5 minutes.  So they lock her in the basement.  But you can't stop evil.....not forest evil!  It takes another girl.  But, this one they throw on the fire.  Nice guys these two.  The blood is flying as limbs are being chopped off, people are eating their own limbs, and people are getting stabbed with skull knives.  All this is capped off with my favorite dismemberment with an axe scene.  Bing bang boom.

I could go on and on about the gore that is just splattered all over this movie but instead i thought it would be good to make a little list.  It will be quicker and more to the point.

The Evil Dead

2 Stabbings

1 Tree Rape

1 Shovel Beheading

1 Complete dismemberment with an ax

1 Blood pipe rupture

3 Gunshot wounds

2 Gouged out eyes

2 Total body liquefactions

  Amazing?......YES!  Zombies?.......maybe?  I mean this is included in every great zombie movie list and it sure as hell feels like it should go.  But to throw down and put this in a pile with Dawn and Day just doesn't feel right.  I mean it's really more of a possession movie than anything.  I think this movie probably fits better with 13 Ghosts than it does with The Horde, or Dead Alive.  So there you have it!!!  Not bad.  One of the best horror movies ever even.

The Beer:

Aroma – 11/12

Appearance – 3/3

Taste – 19/20

Palate – 5/5 

   Overall – 9/10

Total = 47/50

  

The Movie:

Production – 4/5

Plot – 5/5

Gore – 5/5

Zombies – 2/5

  Overall – 4/5

Cemetery Man and Deschutes Hop in The Dark

When it comes to Italian zombie movies I'm left feeling less than impressed.  Zombi 2 was okay at best, even in the context of being made in the 79'.  As you start moving further and further down the Zombi line things get worse.  Zombi 5: Killing Birds.....really?  How are you coming up with more money for these movies?  Despite the sea of super weird and at times wildly inappropriate Italian zombie movies there are a few gems.  You just need to give them a chance to shine.  Corny, i know.  But hear me out.  I saw Cemetery Man (AKA Dellamorte Dellamore) on the AskMen.com top 10 zombie movie list (clickey the link).  I thought it looked dumb.  I watched the trailer and decided that there were much bigger fish to get in the boat before I would start keeping guppies like that.  As fate would have it I found my self in FYE with a gift certificate and a $4.99 Cemetery Man DVD in my hand.  With a chip on my shoulder I brought it home and popped it in.  What i experienced was magic.  The incomparable thrill of being proved wrong from an underestimated enemy.

As for the beer.  I should have named this blog post "Deschutes Brewery: We make beer better than you do anything that you do."  If you live west of the Mississippi and haven't indulged in some of their special beers then you need to go by your local beer store and pick up Black Butte XXIII, The Abyss, Jubel, and a Hop Henge.  Now that you've spent $50 on beer go home and down all four while watching zombie movies.  I'm drinking Hop In The Dark which is a Cascadian Dark Ale.  It's a cool mix of IPA and Stout.  Before i start the movie I open the beer.  It's dark black with a tan head that leaves sweet ass lacing for the whole glass.  It's not as thick as i expected.  I checked the bottle and it's only 6.9% abv.  Warming but not the thick beast that i expected.  There is a full hoppy nose, dripping in citrus and pine, grapefruit and...well...pine!  It's everything I hoped it would be.  There is also a rich caramel and dark roasted malt character that mellows the hops and adds complexity.  The first sip is strikingly bitter with hops punching you right in the face.  But there is also layer after layer of rich malty complexity driven by the roasted malt.  This beer is much more roasted and balanced than i expected.  I thought it would be an IPA but black, instead it's a Russian Imperial Stout that moonlights as a Double IPA.  This beer reminds me of Stone's Sublimely Self Righteous Ale.  Another feather in the Deschutes cap.  Well done friends!

The first scene sets the entire movie.  A tall dark haired man (Francesco Dellemorte) answers the phone still dripping wet from his shower.  During the phone call he tells the caller to "hold on a sec" in order to answer the door, shoot a zombie in the head, and go back to his conversation.  It is with that nonchalance that Francesco and his sidekick, the mute Gnahgi, kill all the zombies.  They are more of an inconvenience than a horror.  Life is pretty bleak in the cemetery until one day a mysterious woman (the beautiful Anna Falchi) comes to the cemetery for the funeral of her much older husband.  Anna Falchi is the Italian Angelina Jolie.  Seriously, they look identical.  Francesco falls in love immediately and is able to seduce her in the cemetery's ossuary where she loses control of herself.  She's a little creepy.  For all you strange sex people this movie has a bunch of it.  Making out in an ossuary, sex on her dead husband's grave, nude zombies, it's all there.

If you watch this movie and don't immediately see the striking similarities between this movie and Dead Alive then you need to watch them again.  Yes the premise is different but the way each movie was shot and the blending of humor with gory goodness is the same.  Things get weirder and weirder.  It turns out having sex on your dead husband's grave is bad for business.  He comes back and......chomp....revenge!  Francesco is forced to kill her (when she comes back to life duuuuhhhhh).  Then a motorcycle accident kills over a dozen people, including one kid who was so badly mangled in the crash that he got buried still stuck to the motorcycle.  The kid comes back half motorcycle half zombie!  That's a first.  I appreciate the originality.  Then the love interest of Gnahgi comes back as just a head.  They are in love and he keeps her with him.  Then Anna comes back (look out now!) and bites Francesco.  I'm sorry but that's rule #1.  Don't sleep with zombies.......ever.  I guess i just don't understand men.  The bite doesn't turn Francesco into a zombie though......don't quite understand why.

Every time i watch this movie i pick up on some new weird shit.  Take this for example.  Francesco gets really cross with Gnahgi for burning the phone books which are his favorite reading.  Strange.  Then the grim reaper shows up in out of the ashes of the phone book and tells Francesco to stop killing the dead and that if he wants the dead to stay dead he needs to kill the living.  Now things get psychedelic with parallel realities and a groundhog day like feel.  So Anna just won't take no for an answer.  She comes back as different people.  Francesco starts going crazy and is killing everyone indiscriminately including a doctor and a nun.  A NUN!!! That's edgy.  He's walking out of the hospital where he just killed three people holding the gun and the cop yells to him "Francesco there's a murderer in the building...oh good you have a gun!"

I'm going to give it all away.  The beer is gone, leaving nothing but sweet lacing and the memory of the beer that was.  Francesco pulls Gnahgi into his car and goes steaming away only to find out that there is no rest of the world.  It's just a broken road to nowhere.  And to make matters worse they're living inside of a snow globe.  Isn't that the way it always is.  This movie rocks like few others in my collection.  Cemetery Man i would like to apologize for ever doubting you.  You are a symbol of what every one of us should strive to be every day.  Thank you.

The Beer:

Aroma – 10/12

Appearance – 3/3

Taste – 18/20

Palate – 4/5 

   Overall – 8/10

Total = 43/50

The Movie:

Production – 4/5

Plot – 5/5

Gore – 5/5

Zombies – 4/5

  Overall – 4.5/5

The Beyond and Bridgeport Hop Czar

The IPA.  If you don't like it, then maybe you should find a different blog.  When you drink an IPA for the first time many find it's too powerful, way too powerful.  It's a beer you need to warm up to and understand.  I think i like it because most people can't handle it.  Then try a double IPA and the weak will be dropped from the rolls.  It's serious beer business.  This weeks hop journey takes us to the Lucio Fulci film The Beyond hand in hand with Bridgeport's Hop Czar.  I had almost given up on this movie.  I had heard that it was out of print and extremely rare.  But there it was in FYE for the cheap used price of $12!  I did a little wiki research and found out that after going out of print in the early 80's this movie became a rare and highly sought after horror film.  Then gory director extraordinaire Quentin Tarantino acquired the rights to the film and distributed it's uncut version with tons of extras.  Thanks Quentin!

The movie opens with 1927 Louisiana.  A mob storms this mansion and brutally tortures and murders a "warlock". There's some mention of the seven gates of hell, that once opened, unleash evil (undead) into the world.  This movie has enough plot to keep it moving.  I actually found myself excited and anxious to see what happened next.  "This is a big deal?" you ask.  YES!  The following is a list of Fulci movies i've seen.


Zombi 2
City of the Living Dead
Zombi 3


I guess it's not as many as i thought.  After looking at a complete list of Fulci films i found out that Zombi 4: Afterlife, and Zombi 5: Killing Birds were actually not Fulci movies.  Fooled me!  Anyway Zombi 2, Zombi 3, and City of the Living Dead all lag quite a bit in the middle and have less than compelling plots.  The Beyond does something that the other three films of his did not achive....suspense.  It's done in a way that only classic horror movies achieve.  New age horror has to cater to our A.D.D. societal processings.  Blam! There's a monster!! Blam!!! People are dead!!! Blam! there's another one!!!!  You get what i mean.  We're a headline society.  Nobody reads through the whole story anymore.  That's what makes this film so great.  Sure there are a couple of "wham bam" murder scenes, but by an large, the lead up and the visualization of each gory scene is savored for long moments.  There are two scenes that make this incredibly clear to me.  The first is the woman who is killed in the morgue and the other is the man killed in the library.  Both had the high pitched strings letting you know danger was near and both took painfully long to display the exact manner in which each person was bruttally murdered.

Murder #1:  This woman is dressing her dead husbands corpse for the funeral when all of the sudden.......she screams!  At what you have no idea.  The camera shifts to her daughter who was waiting outside.  The daughter runs in to find her mother passed out on her back with a tipped over jug of acid slowly pouring out all over her face.  Which leads one to wonder why there is a GIANT UNCOVERED glass jar full of ACID on top of a shelf?  Seems aufly suspicious to me.  The next few minutes are close up shots of this womans face melting, skull breaking, and blood spraying.  It's pretty brutal.  Frothy blood mixed with acid pours out across the floor and the daughter runs.  EPIC.

Murder #2:  This guy is climbing up a ladder in a library looking for building plans on the house that supposidly has the "7th gate to hell" in it.  As he opens the plans book there is a thunderous boom of "lightning?" he goes falling off the 10 ft ladder.  Dead right?  Wrong!  Here is where it gets awesome.  Now a dozzen tarantulas come out of nowhere to cover this guy and eat him alive.  They really do!  One's pincers rip off part of his lip, another goes into his mouth and slices off his tounge.  Yet another goes into his eye socket ripping out his eye.  The best part of the scene is that some of the spiders are real and some are fake.  The fake ones are obviously on wires or something because instead of creeping they wobble arround.  Awesome!

As i search through the piles and piles of DVD's for the best zombie movie, I am also searching for the best IPA.    It's packing the most hops you can into a beer while keeping the balance and pushing through something unique. I picked up Bridgeport's Hop Czar.  It's the Czar of hops!  It must be the best!  It's 7.5% ABV and a light copper color with a fluffy off white head.  This IPA isn't the american powerhouse that i normally drink.  Instead of big citrus blasts this beer has more earthy and grassy with a bit of pepper.  There's a malty, sweet vegetable aroma there as well.  Given enough sniffs you can get some pine but it's not in your face.  What you smell is what you taste with this beer; grassy, earthy, with a bit of bread.  It's almost sticky as it finishes but with a substantial astringent hop bite.  Medium mouth feel.  It's not bad.  Not what i'd go hanging my hat on as a brewer.  Definitely not a CZAR of any kind.  No sir.  The sixer was cheap enough to warrant the $8 splurge now and again.  Check it out if your bored or really thirsty.

Back to the movie.  There's the classic case of "The girl who cried Zombie".  This tough guy doctor just is not buying the fact that this woman who owns the hotel is being assaulted by the living dead.  He's not a big believer.  He's the only guy that figures out only a head shot will kill a zombie but still decides to take body shots just to make sure.  "I'm a scientist DAMN IT.  I need a logical explanation!"   Well i need a logical explanation as to why you would waste bullets trying to make sure it's just head shots instead of dispatching as many undead as you could!!!  So the gates of hell open and it doesn't really explain how.  Just that it happened.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!


So our two main characters go into a basement which happens to be the hotel.....which then happens to be hell....where there's nothing really going on........then they're blind!  That's it.  No resolution, no explanation.  I've got an explanation......Fulci is a wine drunk.  He was wasted when he decided how to end this one.  I still love it.....but just because of how ridicules it is.  This one is a must watch but i'm not sure why.

The Beer:

Aroma – 6/12

Appearance – 3/3

Taste – 14/20

Palate – 2/5 

   Overall – 6/10

Total = 31/50

The Movie:

Production – 3.5/5

Plot – 3/5

Gore – 5/5

Zombies – 3/5

  Overall – 3.5/5

Edges of Darkness and New Belgium Ranger IPA

So in my first trip to my local FYE I was able to add two new films to the zombie movie collection.  It's beginning to take over the entertainment center shelves.  The two movies i found were Lucio Fulci's "The Beyond" and some other movie that i vaguely remember hearing something about.  I was beside myself to finally own "The Beyond".  I've read a lot about it and thought it was not being released anymore, but there it was in the used section.  I decided to start with the more unknown of the two films.  This one was called "Edges of Darkness".  The cover makes some lofty claims as to the enjoy-ability of this film but after Zombie Diaries I'm not sure how much faith i put in cover claims.  I put this beer with the rest of my New Belgium IPA six-pack.  Throw another IPA on the fire!  I've begun marinating with IPA, battering with IPA, and baking bread with IPA.  I........love.........hops.

Before I start my review i feel like i need to stress that this is NOT a Mel Gibson movie!!!!  I repeat: NOT a Mel Gibson movie.

Right off the bat i can tell that production is going to take a couple of knocks.  This one is filmed much in the same way "Days of Darkness" was filmed.  It's a professional camera but lighting is a big rough at times.  This is overly apparent in the night scenes and in the outdoor daytime scenes.  It could use a nice dark lens or something.  Like in MUTANTS!!!  That's the kind of feel that works the best for most zombie movies.  The action is very angle oriented.  By that I mean that nobody really gets punched in the face they just shoot it from behind and the zombie jerks his head and spits a mouthful of blood on cue.  The movie seems to follow three sets of people.  A computer obsessed husband and his wife, a black couple with a......disturbing addiction, and a warrior woman who saved a mother and son.  I feel like i need to point out that for a movie released in 2009, staring a computer enthusiast, you would think he would be working off more than a green screen desktop!  Not to mention his terrible acting.  He is indifferent and distracted in a way that showcases a lack of conviction rather than a compelling character.  And if zombie movies aren't weird enough, the young black couple EATS people.  Like zombie style without the undead thing.  They kidnap this (Asian?) woman and pull off blood periodically.  Then two scenes later, instead of being the terrified woman, she's the compassionate friend with Stockholm syndrome?  Meanwhile the husband and wife pair slip further apart.  He's too busy writing on his computer to notice her, meanwhile she falls in love with a zombie outside her window.  She looses touch with reality and things get.......weird.

The beer and the movie are about even in ranking at this point.  The beer is a B+ by the people on Beeradvocate.com and a A- by the Pros.  It's not bad.  It pours a light brown/medium amber with just a tinge of chill haze.  There is a medium hoppiness dominated by the grapefruit and orange that I've come to know and love.  There's a slight piney stickiness in the bouquet.  This is a light bodied IPA with a significant bitterness at the base of it.  There is fresh citrus in each sip.  This beer is an IPA for sure it's just not the powerhouse that some IPAs are.  This is a good flavorful beer to have around the house as a staple.  Grilling?  Just pop a New Belgium IPA....cool fall evenings need a little warming? It's good for that too!  Eating fish or a light chicken dish.....WHAMO! New Belgium IPA.  It's a good beer to have arround.

The movie is taking turns for the weirder.  Now the woman that the cannibals captured turns out to be......something else.  By drinking her blood the two cannibals fall severely ill and realize that this woman they kidnapped......is something else entirely!!!!!  It also turns out that the black kid that our road warrior woman saved is actually the anti-Christ trying to save people from God's purging zombies so that the sin of man can continue.  There are some really cool zombie kill scenes at this point.  A head crushing with a bowling ball and a machete extreme slaughtering which we only get to see the aftermath of.  Our road warrior decides to team up with the Anti-Christ in order to save mankind.  What will she become in the process.  Things with computer nerd get stranger as well.  The computer processor he installed begins to kill plants, rats, etc... in order to keep power and grow.  It doesn't really explain much other than that.  oh and i almost forgot!  There is a pack of priests that are trying to kill the anti-Christ and allow the zombies to wipe out man.  They're a strange bunch.

The computer ends up eating the nerd and his wife.  There was really no point to their characters in this movie and it never explains what the computer thing is?  Why it's alive?  Anything!  It also doesn't really explain who the Asian woman is?  It doesn't show what the deal with the anti-Christ is?  It's a big open ending where the cannibal wife runs off into an alley chopping up zombies.  It feels like they ran out of money and just stopped the movie.  That's not to say it's a bad movie.  Like i said, it ranks with Dead Moon Rising and Days of Darkness but this was overall......a plot train wreck.  It was saved by some cool gore and the feeling that the writers (and some of the actors) were really trying.  This film is not for the easily bored or the faint of heart.

The Beer:

Aroma – 7/12

Appearance – 2/3

Taste – 15/20

Palate – 4/5 

   Overall – 7/10

Total = 35/50

The Movie:

Production – 3/5

Plot – 2/5

Gore – 3/5

Zombies – 2/5

  Overall – 2.5/5

Mutants and Microbrasserie Charlevoix's La Vache Folle

So I don't know why it took the French 40 years to from when Night of the Living Dead was released to make a zombie movie but they have taken the genre by force.  First with The Horde and now with this weeks movie Mutants.  Not the 2008 Mutants about some synthetic sugar that makes people "Zombies"?  I've never seen it but the cover looks dumb.  And not The Mutant Chronicles starring everyone's favorite primate Ron Perlman.  I thought a Saison would be a good pairing....only because they're both French.  But then i realized that I had something deep in my fridge that would work even better.  On my recent trip from Alaska to Seattle I found myself in a beautiful little town called Jasper.  Jasper is buried deep in the heart of the Canadian Rockies this town is miles from anywhere.  Literally.  It's in the middle of Jasper National Park.  It's surrounded by green in the GPS.  They had a craft beer and wine store with a giant walk in cooler.  Deep in the back of the cooler I found two beers that I bought and managed to sneak over the boarded to where they now sit.....my fridge.  The first is Black Albert.  My #1 beer ever and a beverage I'm saving for another post and La Vache Folle (Mad Cow), a French (Canadian) made IIPA.  I think due to the Frenchness of the beer it would make a good partner.

I have to tell you this movie starts off powerful right from the beginning.  The movie is shot with a dark, almost blueish lens that gives it this creepy feel.  There is a girl attacked in the woods but she manages to escape.  She keeps running until finally she reaches a "safe spot".....a highway.  She decides it would be a great place to catch er breath after the attack until.......WHAM she's exploded thanks to a ambulance careening through.  I'm not going to go scene for scene with this review like i do for most of my others.  Not because I'm lazy but rather because unless your French you've never seen this movie.  It's gory.  It's REALISTICALLY gory.  But it's also just a slight bit over the top in order to keep wowing you, the audience.  Gunshots spray blood and giant chunks of flesh.  There's no cut aways or wide shots either.  It's fast paced, in your face action.

Before popping this beer open I did my usual googling to shed some light onto the background of the beer I'm drinking.  This is especially important when I'm stepping into unfamiliar territory like i am now.  Come to find out the beer i had bought was a Columbus IIPA.  I didn't fully read the label when i bought it i guess. Microbrasserie Charlevoix puts out an entire series of single hopped Imperial IPAs.  How awesome is that.  I would love to watch the Return of the Living Dead series while tasting this Imperial IPA series.  According to BeerAdvocate.com there are 8 beers in this series all weighing in at 9% abv.  There's Armillo, Bravo, Centennial, Columbus, Herkules, Simco, Yeoman, and even a mystery hop beers.

Enough talk, I pour the beer!  It's a brilliant orange with a thick cap of off white foam.  I sink my nose deep into the glass expecting those greasy american hops.......but.......wait.........what the?  No hops!!  There's a nice malty, sweet caramel aroma, with just a slightly sour tinge.  I'm shocked.  In disbelief i swirl my snifter and try again.  There they are.  If you push past the bready malt aroma there is are flowery and slightly piny hops in there.  Oh good!  Now that I'm mildly prepared I take a taste.  It's surprisingly malty with a significant sweetness.  It's not what i expected but it's very good.  A lemony, grapefruit hoppiness cuts nicely into the sweet malt making a very balanced and enjoyable beer.  There's some bitterness but not the Chinook tongue piercing that i was looking for.  Moderate carbonation, moderate mouthfeel.  I liked the little heat that the alcohol brought on and enjoyed the complex flavors of this beer.  I will appreciate it even more the next time I try it.  Because I'll be drinking it for what it is, instead of what i think it will be.  I think it's a double IPA but it's definitely on the edges.  This is a beer all of it's own and one i highly suggest.

Back to the movie.  It's got a bit of a lull after the initial punch.  I would say that the first 15 minutes of this film are as compelling as the opening sequence of the Dawn of the Dead remake.  It's THAT good.  But then the film takes a turn for the I, Zombie path where it does a long sequence of the transformation of a person into a zombie.  However don't fret, the only similarity to I, Zombie is the idea of showcasing transformation, the transformation itself is WAYYYY more awesome.  I'm beginning to rethink how Zombie these creatures really are.  At first i thought they were absolutely zombies.  At the very least they might be 28 Days Later zombies (yea i called them zombies).  But towards the end of the film the disfiguring caused by the transformation makes some of the characters seem less human and more mutant.  The horror of the zombie movie is the striking similarity that zombies have to people.  There's always a strange conflict by their very being.  If you start making zombies into mutants the whole things gets dilluted and there's no connection.  That being said they were not over the top with most of the zombies and the zombie aspect shines through clearly.

While the end of the film turns up the same character types that seem to slosh back and forth across the vast sea of zombie moves, this movie was still rather interesting.  It's not a top 10 back breaker like i expected after the first 15 minutes but it's a solid zombie movie coming out of a sleeper of a country.  If you get a chance to watch this one get it in Blu Ray.  It's worth it!

The Beer:

Aroma – 8/12

Appearance – 3/3

Taste – 17/20

Palate – 4/5 

   Overall – 7/10

Total = 39/50

The Movie:

Production – 5/5

Plot – 4/5

Gore – 4/5

Zombies – 3/5

  Overall – 4/5