Monster Scholar

There was an unexpected zombie kill on this week’s episode of Bones (Double Death of the Dearly Departed 4x21). Dr Brennan, Agent Booth and the gang are invited to the funeral of Dr. Hank Reilley, a premier researcher at the Jeffersonian Institute. Brennan suspects foul play when she discovers post mortem bruising on the doctor’s abdomen. Without an injunction to seize the body and the doctor’s cremation only hours away, Booth and Bones hijack the body to solve a suspected murder. As it turns out the good doctor was poisoned with tetrodotoxin, a substance derived from puffer fish that causes a death like paralytic state and has been argued to be the scientific basis for zombie-ism. Apparently dead from a heart attack, Hank’s body did not undergo an autopsy and he arrived at the funeral home in a comatose state. It was when the undertaker proceeded to embalm the body that a nervous spasm caused Hank to open his eyes and sit up on the slab. Seized by panic and thinking the dearly departe...

His week’s zombie kill goes to a zombie! Bub from Day of the Dead wins this honor for most creative kill. Bub is the pet and guinea pig of the crazed Dr. Ted Fisher in an underground research facility guarded by military personnel. Instead of finding a cure for the zombie plague that has spread across the globe, Dr. Fisher believes that through conditioning zombies can be domesticated and trained not to attack humans. He trains Bub to respond to commands, even to hold a gun and rewards him for positive behavior with human flesh. When it’s discovered by Captain Rhodes, head of the platoon guarding the facility that Dr. Fisher is feeding Bub the remains of his dead soldiers, he flies into a rage and shoots the doctor. In the midst of a zombie attack on the facility, Bub gets loose from his chains and stumbles upon the body of his caretaker. Like a scene out of Frankenstein , Bub grieves over the death of his creator and naturally seeks revenge, arming himself with a dead soldier’s gun. ...

This week’s zombie kill goes to Jessica from the teen horror comedy Boy Eats Girl . Jessica is a high school student and the love interest of Nathan, the film’s protagonist. Nathan struggles to tell Jessica that he wants to be more than just friends, but after seeing Jessica with another boy he assumes the worst. Nathan reacts like any other teenage boy would and gets drunk. His antics end in an attempt at hanging made successful by his unwitting mother Grace, who opens his bedroom door and knocks him off his perch. Plagued by guilt, Grace brings her son back to life using a book of voodoo spells she found in a crypt at the church where she works. Nathan is restored to life with superhuman strength but lacks a pulse and has a gnawing hunger for human flesh. Nathan inevitably bites a bully at school who spreads a zombie plague that takes over the entire town. Jessica shows her mettle when a group of her friends is cornered by a crowd of teenage zombies. She jumps into action and has no ...

Zombie Kill of the Week goes to Skip, the owner of the go-go dance establishment where Cherry Darling works in Planet Terror . In real life Skip is actually Skip Reissig, Robert Rodriquez’s real estate agent, who at Rodriguez’s urging took on the part of the likable jerk in this grindhouse feature. Skip is manning the helicopter that will airlift the remaining survivors of the zombie apocalypse to a safe haven. There’s just one thing left to do, take care of the zombies lumbering towards the chopper. Skip pitches the copter forward and uses the fan blades to slice, dice and julienne the toxic undead, much to the excitement of the Crazy Babysitter Twins (played by Rodriguez’s cousins Electra Isabel and Elise Avellan) Honorable mention this week goes to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) for doing this gag first. A band of refugees commandeer a helicopter and touchdown in the middle of nowhere to refuel on their way to greener pastures. Headless of the dangerous helicopter blades, ...

This week’s zombie kill is from the Japanese film To kyo Zombie and bends all the rules of this competition. Though fans call this movie “the Japanese Shaun of the Dead ,” that might be a bit of an overstatement. Fujio and Misou are slackers who would rather be practicing their jujitsu than working at a fire extinguisher plant in Edogawa, Tokyo. The plant is located near the infamous Black Mount Fuji, a repository of toxic waste and other refuse that has also become a burial ground. Brought to life by the toxic waste and negative energy of the lost souls buried there, a horde of zombies rises to invade Tokyo. Fujio and Misou narrowly escape the zombie apocalypse, but when they stop at a grocery store to stock up on supplies Misou is bitten by one of the undead. Unwilling to become a zombie, he throws himself off a bridge and bequeaths his martial arts gear to Fujio. Fujio continues his friend’s legacy of jujitsu in the sport of zombie wrestling, that pits real zombies against human f...

This week’s zombie kill is an interspecies double whammy brought to you by the lovely but always deadly Mila Jovovich of Resident Evil . For Mila’s first truly inspiring zombie kill, she takes down a total of eight zombie Dobermans transformed into vicious killing machines by the spread of the T-virus. Stuck on one of the lower levels of the Hive, Umbrella’s underground research facility, she narrowly escapes being eaten by one zombie dog. After shutting a metal door in its face she breathes a sigh of relief, but it’s shortlived as she turns around to face a pack of seven zombified dogs with nasty looking teeth and claws. Luckily Mila is a quick draw, and she takes them out one by one with her handy Umbrella issue handgun. But just when she’s run out of bullets, the first zombie Doberman crashes into the room through an unsecured glass window. Out of ammo, Mila chucks her gun and uses the wall to catapult herself into the air. With a kung fu kick, she punts the undead beast as it leap...

The winner of this week's zombie kill(s) is Ben from George A Romero's, Night of the Living Dead. Ben is calm and assertive under pressure and takes charge when Barbara, traumatized from a zombie attack remains comatose dead weight. Before boarding up the house he beats two zombies to death with a crow bar, and when a zombie wanders into the house and tries to attack a dazed Barbara, Ben bludgeons the corpse and later sets it on fire in the back yard. Ben continues to do more than his fair share of zombie killing and with a shotgun takes out 5-10 more of the undead as he and Tom make a break for the gas pump beside the barn. After the escape attempt fails and the zombies breach the house, Ben takes shelter in the cellar where the zombified Karen Cooper has finished dining on her recently deceased parents. Ben refrains from dispatching the child zombie and pushes her aside, but when he finds himself alone with the newly risen corpses of Harry and Helen Cooper he plugs them both...

To hype the release of Zombieland set to hit theaters in October, for the next couple of weeks I will be posting a Zombie Kill of the Week were I will feature one of the many inventive, horrifying and comedic ways we have found to dispatch the undead. This week's winner is the crew from Shaun of the Dead who take on the zombified owner of the Winchester pub, where they have sought shelter from the zombie apocalypse. As Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" plays on the jukebox, Shaun, Liz and Ed begin whacking away at said zombie with pool cues in the time to the music. Liz breaks away and wallops him with a fire extinguisher and then Shaun finally shoves the zombie's head into the jukebox, killing him and the music.