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A quick note to recognize and celebrate that the WGA and AMPTP have reached an agreement and the strike is coming to an end.

This year Film Geeks San Diego threw a Secret Morgue themed around Zombies. That means six films the titles unreleased to the festival attendees, with snack, lunch, and a dinner provided. Starting at 9:00am at the Comic-Con Museum in San Diego’s Balboa Park and going until nearly midnight. As with the other Secret Morgues I have attended this was a blast.

I arrived early enough to score a parking spot right in front of the venue which made it easy for me at breaks to head out and grab a cold soda from the cooler I had stashed in my Kia Soul. Sadly, a friend I hadn’t seen in years came down sick and wasn’t able to attend as planned but I was more social than usual and managed a few conversations.

And I should note that my predictions for the schedule turned out to be utterly wrong.

The First was The Zombies of Mora Tau. Produced in 1957, a dozen years before George A Romero reinvented the entire zombie genre with Night of the Living Dead, Mora Tau centers on a group of treasure hunters intent on recovering lost, cursed, diamonds from the bottom of a bay. The diamonds however are guarded by the zombies of the men who stole them, enactors of the curse. Neither Voodoo nor Romero styled zombies, the living dead her are closer akin to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, though vastly less intelligent. Hardly a great film it was still a fun one.

The Second movie was Pontypool from 2008. Set in a radio station experiencing Canada’s harsh winter, this film follows the experiences of a tiny news crew as they attempt to make sense of the reports filtering in and the eventual threat that invades their AM Radio station. Inventive, character driven, and well-designed this film shows a lot can be done with very little.

Next up was Deadstream, released in 2022. This movie I had heard about but actually avoided because it was of a style I find usually distasteful, the ‘found footage’ made so popular by The Blair Witch Project, a movie that earned praise all out of measure with its quality. Deadstream that takes as its central conceit that we are watching a liver stream of a YouTube-like influencer attempting to reclaim his followers after a social media disaster, was fun, funny, and at time surprisingly horrific.

The next pair of movies were ones I had seen before. The Return of the Living Dead (1985) a black comedy written and directed from the screenwriter of Alien, and truly one of my favorite zombie films, and Day of the Dead the disappointing conclusion to Romero’s original trilogy, filled with one-note, cardboard characters and most fantastic element ever seen in a zombie movie, vast subterrain caverns in South Florida.

We concluded the evening with a Mexican animated movie El Santos vs La Tetona Mendez. Over-the-top with far more crude humor than suits my sensibilities it was not without it comic moments but far from the sort of film I would seek out and watch more than once.