SummaryBased on a comic book series of the same name by Robert Kirkman, a small group of survivors, led by officer Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), must fight a world full of zombies.
SummaryBased on a comic book series of the same name by Robert Kirkman, a small group of survivors, led by officer Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), must fight a world full of zombies.
Darabont uses the TV-series format to break convention not only by defying the predictabilities of the horror genre (boo!) but also by infusing the recipe with more storytelling elan.
If The Walking Dead can build on its promise and run with these ideas, along with unflinching gross-out thrills, it can tell a doomsday story with all the things zombies crave: brains, guts and heart.
It doesn't take a fanboy to appreciate the well-crafted AMC series, populated with capable, if lesser-known, actors, including Sarah Wayne Callies, who spent a couple of years running from less-apparent deadly threats on Fox's Prison Break.
Executive producer Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption") is wonderfully skilled at framing shots to achieve maximum horror effect. But the middle stretch tends to bog down. My advice--watch the first 25 minutes (they're really good), then go trick-or-treating.
Fans of the comic book and first-rate psycho-horror may form a large enough audience to make this a hit. Those not in those groups may want to start by taking a deep breath.