Your favorite zombie fails?

November 24, 2014 9:21 AM

What movie clips demonstrate what NOT to do in a zombie apocalypse/natural disaster/etc?

We're teaching a two-day high school class on surviving the zombie apocalypse/natural disasters, and we'd like to do a segment where we show the students movie clips of people doing stupid things (like, here's what NOT to do in this situation). Any recommendations?

posted by sleepingcbw to Grab Bag (7 answers total)

Best answer: The first 5-10 minutes of Zombieland have a helpful "do this / don't do this" voiceover, with supertitles and everything.
posted by psoas at 9:27 AM on November 24, 2014 [15 favorites]

There's the classic shot of the motorcycle ganger who just *has* to try the blood pressure machine in the original Dawn of the Dead. (SPOILER: 000/00.)
posted by Gelatin at 11:29 AM on November 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Also, it isn't a movie, but Max Brooks' book World War Z is chock full of examples, from the dude who rollerbladed down a New York street fighting zombies with a meat cleaver taped to a hockey stick (worked great until a Z got hold of his ponytail), to the US army fighting with shock and awe weapons that did bupkus against walking corpses that couldn't be shocked or awed, to refugees who toted DVD players and laptop computers to the Canadian wilderness, to people finding out a golf club isn't efficient enough at breaking heads.

By contrast there are tales from survivors (obviously) who managed not to panic and use available resources, including a blind man who not only survived but partially cleared a wilderness area in his native Japan (the zombies' stench always alerted him to danger and as a former gardener, he carried a wicked shovel).
posted by Gelatin at 11:36 AM on November 24, 2014 [3 favorites]

The TVTropes Zombie Apocalypse page is a gold mine of examples, as is the Humans Are The Real Monsters trope page and some of the Failure is the Only Option page.
posted by Happy Dave at 12:13 PM on November 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

Best answer: There is a scene in episode 2 of season 3 of The Walking Dead, in which the protagonist survivors are trying to teach some convicts how to kill zombies.

Instead of staying in formation, staying quiet and going for the head, the convicts scream wildly, run around flailing and furiously shiv the zombies in the ribs, 'prison riot' style, to little effect.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:00 PM on November 24, 2014 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Much of Shaun of the Dead, actually - I know, it's comedy and so on, but there's some legit stuff regarding the way the idea of zombies won't even occur to people during everyday stuff, and they may do dumb things right off the bat.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 4:40 PM on November 24, 2014

Response by poster: Thanks for the help! The students loved this segment. :)
posted by sleepingcbw at 11:01 AM on November 25, 2014