The New Zombie Movie Rules

When I was a kid, zombie movies followed The Romero Protocol: zombies were slow, shambling monsters that could only reproduce by biting a live victim. You could only kill a zombie by destroying the head, and zombies operated on a wildly variable scale of noise making.

Now there's a new kind of zombie movie: the sucktacular no holds barred flick that's probably based on a video game. Something I'm seeing from the latest spate of cable zombie movies:

• Zombies are now usually created at illegal raves deep in the woods
• Zombies talk. Their vocabulary is basically limited to saying "brains", but even this is far beyond the Romero Protocol.
• Zombies are fast now. Whatever causes zombieism is no longer relegated to the lowest-level brain function. Advanced motor functions are ship-shape.
• If knocked over, a zombie can become erect again like he's a stuntman in a latex facial appliance.
• At some point, there will be a topless female zombie. In life, she was probably a hooker, stripper, or slut.
• Zombies are now usually the result of an army experiment gone horribly awry. Instead of creating an undead supersoldier to deploy overseas, the zombie ends up infecting a college student somehow.
• If you lace ecstasy tablets with the army government zombie chemical, kids will call it "Z" and still ingest it by the handful at illegal raves in the woods.
• The popularity of the Men in Black movie means that there will usually be an elite squad of zombie hunters who show up to help the civilian protagonists. They will give heavy ordinance to teenagers at the drop of a hat.
• Semi-automatic pistols apparently behave like revolvers. When facing one last zombie, it just goes "click click click". Civilians have access to advanced weaponry all the time now.
• The bunker mentality — find a safe place and wait out the infestation — is extinct. Today's zombie fighters usually have an objective and navigate through entire cities in order to accomplish it.
• Zombie films exist to demonstrate a maximum of two or three different special effects. Pasty-looking people with torn clothing and bloody lips have now given way to realistic flesh-ripping (probably made of USDA-approved ingredients) and usually one or two remarkably decomposed zombies that are animatronic.
• Zombies are created much more quickly. Instead of the bite at the 65-minute mark that turns our hero's best friend into the last zombie he has to kill at the end of the movie, a person can go from living to undead in about ten minutes these days.
• The black guy still always gets killed.