Episode 43: Alone and The Serpent and the Rainbow

Send us Fan MailTwo movies this week that barely scrape into the zombie bracket for me, although google uses the z-word for both.Alone, one of a thousand movies with the same title, is an incredibly slow, dull plague movie where a disease could potentially effect everyone and the only known cure has a chance of turning you into a homicidal maniac. Minimal cast, minimal location, minimal everything really. Production values were fine in terms of the acting, visuals and sound, but the story was just sooooooooooooooooooo boring I nearly nodded off a few times. Nothing happens.  More happens in some movies pre-credits that happen in the whole 80 something minutes of this one. Avoid.The Serpent and the Rainbow, however, starring Bill Pullman and directed by Nightmare on Elm Street's Wes Craven,  has a lot going on, but falls to the edge of the genre because it is more about voodoo, with a bit of dream manipulation (it is Craven after all), and some zombie drug that puts people into a death like state. Not a zombie movie, but harks back to the voodoo ideas of the 1930s and 40s White Zombie and I walked with a Zombie, as well as the origins of the plague in the 1980s with Zombi. Watch once.