Maureen Dowd, "A Zombie Scare With a Zombie Chaser": A $190 Million Horror

Movies? Where would I be without them? Every night I begin watching a DVD with a bowl full of ice cream and quickly drift off into never-never land. Horror flicks? They don't do it for me. I am embarrassed to acknowledge that I kind of liked Roman Polanski's "The Ninth Gate," but nothing else comes to mind. You see, I watch movies for escapism, and the horrors currently being perpetrated by Assad's government forces and the Syrian rebels put to shame any gore that you might ever chance to see coming out of Hollywood.

In her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "A Zombie Scare With a Zombie Chaser" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/dowd-a-zombie-scare-with-a-zombie-chaser.html?_r=0), Maureen Dowd describes "World War Z," an apocalyptic action horror movie based on a 2006 novel of the same name. Dowd writes:

"The last 40 minutes of the movie had to be rewritten and reshot, and the ending still isn’t fixed. The $190 million 3-D, C.G.I.-enhanced spectacle is kind of fun, but it isn’t a classic of the genre, like George Romero’s 1968 'Night of the Living Dead,' Val Lewton’s 1943 'I Walked With a Zombie,' and the 1932 'White Zombie,' the first full-length zombie feature, with Bela Lugosi playing the evil voodoo master of Haiti, Murder Legendre.

Pitt just seems happy that the blockbuster is not as dreadful as it was when he saw the first cut. 'It was pretty rank,' he told USA Today."

Sorry, but I would need to be paid to watch this.

A budget of $190 million? Those aware of the medical miracles that could be achieved or starvation which could be averted using only a tiny fraction of this amount must surely be horrified.