Orvar Säfström says not to get hopes up

[Sammich]

This is very bad. If there isn't enough in the show to interest a non-zombie fan like this orvar guy, then TWD viewer numbers will drop dramatically after halloween. The only positives are that it is on AMC where viewership tends to be comparatively low anyway and the other is that they have episodes already finished to air. AMC could sell some bargain ad time and show the rest of the series late weeknights.

[MikePizzoff]

Pretty awesome stuff, Thorn. It's always cool finding out shit like this; so many people on these forums have/had interesting & awesome jobs.

[sandrock74]

Aces I worked as a colorist for around 4 years, for Marvel I worked as an assistant trying to crack the big time but sadly I had a falling out with the artist I worked for and I never seemed to recover from it as far as my career goes. Most of my work for myself came for a company called Continuum and they were most well-known for a boo called "The Dark" the owner of the company was also the editor and main writer, his father had a lot of money... one book I worked on was drawn by Larry Stroman. For Marvel I worked on a number of projects but sadly I was not credited. That is the life of an assistant but I worked on Nick Fury, Defenders of Dynatron City, a Conan graphic novel (Ravagers of time I think it was called?) and that was full color so that was really my proudest contribution. I also worked on silver surfer and was allowed to design a color scheme for new villains that Ron Lim introduced. It was a good time, but I was young and head strong and my boss (who I will not name but if you are enterprising it is easy enough to do for yourself with the information given) was equally stubborn and set in his ways. I see him from time to time and we ignore each other. Sad really. Ah well I can say I lived my dream once upon a time, and that is good enough for me. Dude, I was a HUGE Silver Surfer fan back in the day! I probably have all those issues! Whoa.

[kidgloves]

If Orvar Säfström is Sweden's equivalent of Roger Ebert he should consider another vocation with this opinion.

[ProfessorChaos]

yeah, tell your boy ovary i said not to give up his day job. the walking dead is gonna be THE BEST THING to happen to zombies since george romero flipped the script in 1968.

[bassman]

If Orvar Säfström is Sweden's equivalent of Roger Ebert he should consider another vocation with this opinion. Yeah. "Don't get your hopes up", my ass. The pilot is incredible. Hopefully the other episodes follow suit.

[MoonSylver]

If Orvar Säfström is Sweden's equivalent of Roger Ebert he should consider another vocation with this opinion. Well, let's remeber what Eberts initial reaction to NOTLD was as well (an excerpt): The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying. I don't think the younger kids really knew what hit them. They were used to going to movies, sure, and they'd seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else. This was ghouls eating people up -- and you could actually see what they were eating. This was little girls killing their mothers. This was being set on fire. Worst of all, even the hero got killed. It's hard to remember what sort of effect this movie might have had on you when you were six or seven. But try to remember. At that age, kids take the events on the screen seriously, and they identify fiercely with the hero. When the hero is killed, that's not an unhappy ending but a tragic one: Nobody got out alive. It's just over, that's all. I felt real terror in that neighborhood theater last Saturday afternoon. I saw kids who had no resources they could draw upon to protect themselves from the dread and fear they felt. Censorship isn't the answer to something like this. Censorship is never the answer. For that matter, "Night of the Living Dead" was passed for general audiences by the Chicago Police Censor Board. Since it had no nudity in it, it was all right for kids, I guess. This is another example, and there have been a lot of them, of the incompetence and stupidity of the censorship system that Chicago stubbornly maintains under political patronage. Censorship is not the answer. But I would be ashamed to make a civil libertarian argument defending the "right" of those little girls and boys to see a film which left a lot of them stunned with terror. In a case like this, I'd want to know what the parents were thinking of when they dumped the kids in front of the theater to see a film titled "Night of the Living Dead." The new Code of Self Regulation, recently adopted by the Motion Picture Assn. of American, would presumably restrict a film like this one to mature audiences. But "Night of the Living Dead" was produced before the MPAA code went into effect, so exhibitors technically weren't required to keep the kids out. I supposed the idea was to make a fast buck before movies like this are off-limits to children. Maybe that's why "Night of the Living Dead" was scheduled for the lucrative holiday season, when the kids are on vacation. Maybe that's it, but I don't know how I could explain it to the kids who left the theater with tears in their eyes. Or "Day" But the zombies have another problem in "Day of the Dead": They're upstaged by the characters who are supposed to be real human beings. You might assume that it would be impossible to steal a scene from a zombi, especially one with blood dripping from his orifices, but you haven't seen the overacting in this movie. The characters shout their lines from beginning to end, their temples pound with anger, and they use distracting Jamaican and Irish accents, until we are so busy listening to their endless dialogue that we lose interest in the movie they occupy. Maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe Romero, whose original movie was a genuine inspiration, hasn't figured out anything new to do with his zombies. In his second zombi film, the brilliant "Dawn of the Dead" (1980), he had them shuffling and moaning their way through a modern shopping mall, as Muzak droned in the background and terrified survivors took refuge in the Sears store. The effect was both frightening and satirical. The everyday location made the zombies seem all the more horrible, and the shopping mall provided lots of comic props (as when several zombies tried to crawl up the down escalator). This time, though, Romero has centered the action in a visually dreary location - an underground storage cavern, one of those abandoned salt mines where they store financial records and the master prints of old movies. The zombies have more or less overrun the surface of America, we gather, and down in the darkness a small team of scientists and military men are conducting experiments on a few captive zombi guinea-pigs. It's an intriguing idea, especially if Romero had kept the semiseriousness of the earlier films. Instead, the chief researcher is a demented butcher with blood-stained clothes, whose idea of science is to teach a zombi named Bub to operate a Sony Walkman. Meanwhile, the head of the military contingent (Joseph Pilato) turns into a violent little dictator who establishes martial law and threatens to end the experiments. His opponent is a spunky woman scientist (Lori Cardille), and as they shout angry accusations at each other, the real drama in the film gets lost. In the earlier films, we really identified with the small cadre of surviving humans. They were seen as positive characters, and we cared about them. This time, the humans are mostly unpleasant, violent, insane or so noble that we can predict with utter certainty that they will survive. According to the mad scientist in "Day of the Dead," the zombies keep moving because of primitive impulses buried deep within their spinal columns - impulses that create the appearance of life long after consciousness and intelligence have departed. I hope the same fate doesn't befall Romero's zombi movies. He should quit while he's ahead. IIRC he later flip flopped on both & became a bit of a Romero supporter. Just goes to show that I don't always put a lot of faith in reviewers. They're prone to having a bad initial reaction or having their opinion informed by their viewing experence same as everyone else. And reversing that opinion later.

[ProfessorChaos]

oh shit, i failed to realize that being a critic is his day job....um, yeah, like kg said, think about another line of work or go see a psychologist or something.

[Trencher]

Orvar Säfström should read escape of the dead that caters more to boorish drugged out metal heads like him. Seriously, who the hell cares about what a metal head thinks? They are the white equivalent to hip-hop artists. This TV series rekindled my like for the zombie genre.

[Wyldwraith]

Here's the thing, TV is a complete wasteland right now. Cop shows, Reality TV ala "Dancing With the Stars", and a few light dramas and not-funny comedies. If the time isn't right NOW for The Walking Dead, it never will be, because people in huge numbers are looking for something new. PARTICULARLY the crowd that's been dialed in on Stargate, Buffy/Angel/Charmed, Firefly, Farscape etc. (In no particular order.) Now, ALL of those well-received, 8 season + shows in the sci-fi or urban fantasy/horror genres are gone. I have a very strong feeling that The Walking Dead will appeal to many who are not/have not been fans of zombie movies in the past. If for no other reason than it being new and different compared to yet another Law & Order or CSI. Almost everyone I talk to on a regular basis has either abandoned TV almost completely, or watches no more than a couple of specific shows. ("House" and "Criminal Minds" tend to have followings. They're definitely among the very few shows I can still watch. Don't much care for stuff like Ghost Hunters/Ghost Lab, but DO like shows like Paranormal State/A Haunting. Go figure. Anyways, my point is that those who haven't given up on TV entirely are clinging to a handful of shows, and otherwise ignoring TV when those shows aren't on. Into that creative void comes The Walking Dead. How can it not succeed? Even if it only grabs a small % of the people fed up with the current creative wasteland, its ratings should still be quite respectable. After all, many people thought Supernatural wouldn't make it beyond its pilot, and it went 6+ seasons...

[bassman]

TWD will definitely appeal to audiences outside of horror/zombie fans. As I and a few others here have mentioned, we've shown it to friends and relatives that don't really care about this stuff and they've loved it. Darabont has done this show total justice. It's a compeling human drama rather than the fast blood and guts action of recent zombie films. This show fits in very nicely with AMC's programming and i'm sure will have a life long past this initial six episode season. Hell....I still think they've already been given the go with the second season. They just denied that in an attempt to cover it up so people wouldn't think they were getting ahead of themselves. I would put money down that Darabont and crew have already begun thinking about or writing the second season. AMC knows what they have on their hands. And for anyone that's seen the pilot - you know it too.

[Wyldwraith]

Agreed, Finally yielded to temptation and watched the pilot today. While I didn't care much for the black guy's overdone agonizing over shooting/not shooting his zombie wife, I dug everything else about it, and found much of it downright unsettling. The aggressive way the zombies behave when riled up is sure to appeal to people who don't like shamblers, but the zombies are slow and slow-to-react enough to be perfectly acceptable to we pro-shambler folks. One thing about the effects though. Ballistic splatter/blowback. I understand WHY it's hard to do well on TV/a movie, but that being the case, wouldn't it make sense to limit the # of times a human presses the barrel of a gun to a zombie's flesh point blank and pulls the trigger? After all, if a zombie is still "juicy enough" to have a big spray of blood leave the bullet's exit wound, if that show is delivered point-blank, barrel touching target's flesh, the shooter WILL end up with blood visibly on them, inarguable fact, UNLESS you're using VERY small calibers, in which case it isn't that there's no blowback, its that the blowback is minimal enough to be unnoticeable. Other than that and a few other overly nitpicky points, I loved it in its entirety. ---------- Post added 28-Oct-2010 at 01:46 PM ---------- Previous post was 27-Oct-2010 at 03:53 PM ---------- Just re-read my previous post, Realized I didn't do the pilot nearly the justice it deserved. The ambiance was EXCELLENT, as was the pacing, settings and SFX. The zombie behavior is compelling, chilling and is definitely the sort of thing that even non-zombie-movie people will find scary/unsettling. Can think of 3 scenes off the top of my head that don't have zombies visibly onscreen that are quite creepy/scary. Stuff like the doorknob turning and the peephole viewing. The scene in the hospital with the doors....::shivers::. Later on the pace picks up and it goes more for overt tension/scares, but I fell in love with many of the camera-shots in Atlanta, particularly the above-and-looking-straight-down shot at the tank. Everything combined, the zombies don't just feel like antagonists, they're used to create a feeling of an omnipresent hostility of the environment. The pilot has the goods. If the rest of the episodes can pack that kind of punch I have no doubt The Walking Dead can hold its own ratings-wise. I doubt it'll be the next Sopranos as far as the wider viewing audience is concerned, but I can see it easily doing as well as some other basic cable shows. Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, The Glades...all those are successful ratings-wise, and even judging TWD only by characterization, plot pacing and atmosphere, it easily outstrips any of those shows. If it had to compete with the old HBO and Sci-Fi lineups things mighta been more touch and go, but the Everythings-the-same TV environment we've got right now just makes it look better and better.

[Legion2213]

If Orvar Säfström is Sweden's equivalent of Roger Ebert he should consider another vocation with this opinion. I LOLed...and then I nodded sagely... Orvar Safstrom = Epic Fail. Walking Dead = Epic Win.