Not exactly cosplay!!

In my day we never called it cosplay, It was just called fancy dress! I suppose cosplay is much more focused on becoming a specific character from geek culture whereas fancy dress you can be anything you like really. I remember as a kid I used to love getting dirty and scruffy and being a tramp for fancy dress!! Strange chap I was ha ha As an adult for Halloween I'd always be a zombie, torn clothes, shambling gait... kind of like a tramp really but with a LOT more blood!!

The Grey Man: now in glorious technicolour!

I also did a few Halloween gigs with my death metal band Suffering. One time I was all dressed up in a suit with a skull mask which I altered to fit better and added better elastic to it. I emptied a mannequin's head full of fake blood over myself midway through the set. I so wish I had videoed that show :(

 

 That mask has had a lot of use over the years, every now and again I break it out for a bit of a dress up. Also the cloak that my mum made for my brother's vampire costume one time.

That vampire cloak also got used for a silly superhero get-up I once did for a party, I won a prize for my Gut-Man costume!!

The closet I came to cosplay I suppose was my take on The Joker, my mum made me a purple suit, I got a green shirt, white facepaint and there you go, Cesar Romero would've been proud!!

My less than stellar attempt at The Joker!


Can't help thinking that the effect could've been better if only I'd tucked my bloody shirt in.!

I actually reprised this Joker costume for a friend's birthday party and me and a lady playing Poison Ivy won prizes for our costumes!! Which of course proves that DC comics are the best!! I look terrible though, my mate painted my face on a bench outside the pub and we ran out of white make up!!

I have never considered myself a cosplayer and have never even attended a convention even though I am a dyed in the wall geek I have always been a solitary one really. I really should start thinking about going to at least one in my life just to see what the fuss is all about really! I like dressing up too, pretending to be something else. Recently the only dressing up I have done is at Halloween but not even planned costumes just throwing stuff together when I have visited my nephews and gone trick or treating with them.

I recently came into possession of an army looking helmet and loving the game Fallout I am tempted to get a vault suit, but they cost a bloody bomb though which may be appropriate considering the game story! I have the nuclear survivor type beard already though. 

War, war never changes

I do wonder though what/who could I play now if I were to attend a convention?? Any ideas anybody? All I can think of is if there is any group out there of Doom Patrol cosplayers looking for a fat beardy bloke to sit in a wheelchair playing The Chief, Niles Caulder then I am your man!! Not too sure though if it's proper protocol for an able-bodied person to play a disabled one... might be considered insensitive.. not too sure, and besides my hair is too long for him!!

Anyone got any betters ideas?

Oh I nearly forgot I have played Santa too a few times!! I have dressed up for Christmas heavy metal gigs in London and once even had a sackload of presents to give out to the crowd!

Give it another 10 years and I will probably be able to play Santa without the fake beard and I would definitely be down for that :D

I love Super-Heroes but I can't stop thinking that The Thing from the new Fantastic Four film looks like something that should be flushed down a very large toilet bowl. More like The Turd if you ask me, looks like he fell out of Galactus' arse. 

Some of The Grey Man's Ebay items! Look for them now and bid, bid, bid he needs to make room for more comics. Ebay ID grjfmetal. 

Zombie Ritual

I have never done cos-play as such but I like to be a zombie at Halloween now and again. Nothing like a good death-like shuffle to get you in the Halloween mood. I really get into character whenever I have zombied up and this slightly out of focus, very old photo of me is one of my favourites. Thinking about it, of all the horror genre monsters I have always loved to get scared by hordes of shuffling flesh eating zombies more than any other.

Obviously George A. Romero's zombie "...of the Dead" series have been a massive part of this. I missed seeing Night Of The Living Dead when it 1st came out in 1968 on account of not quite being born yet. I did eventually get around to seeing it though and the remake of 1990 that I also thought was a pretty decent. 

The one I remember seeing 1st was Dawn Of The Dead which came out in 1979. I saw it over my dad's house when he hired it from the local video shop. I imagine it hadn't long come out so I must've been all of 10 when I saw it!! I can't admit to seeing any social commentary on consumerism in it, too young to understand any of that highbrow stuff, but the shuffling hordes biting lumps of flesh out off people certainly stuck in my mind. The small group hiding out, struggling to survive whilst unthinking, inexorable flesh consuming cadavers pound on every door certainly makes for good tense scares.  There was a remake in 2004 which I saw at the cinema, it was OK but not particularly memorable.

The 3rd of Romero's trilogy Day Of The Dead came out in 1985. I was too young to see it in the cinema but I bought it on VHS as soon as it came out. It followed the same sort of format with the last of humanity struggling to survive underground. Human nature amongst the living leads to conflict which leads to the dead getting in and turning most of the living into lunch. It's quite a familar theme in most zombie movies where the living are a bigger problem than the dead half the time. The dead just wait patiently till some misguided, stupid or vindictive living person lets them in.

That was the last of the original trilogy which then ended up turning to a sextuplet, sextology, hexology.... 6 part thingy with the addition of Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009). All of those are well worth a watch but don't have the classic status of the 1st 3. George died in July 2017 sadly but films in the series are apparently set to continue with Road of the Dead and Rise of the Living Dead. The first film focuses on zombie prisoners that race cars in a modern-day Coliseum for the entertainment of wealthy humans. Matt Birman will direct the movie from a script he co-wrote with Romero. The latter is a prequel story set at the height of the Cold War and is in production, written and directed by G. Cameron Romero, George A. Romero's son. At the time of writing neither of these have a release date but they are definitely worth keeping an eye out for.

Other great movies of the zombie genre include the magnificent Evil Dead series and the one off classic Braindead. When Evil Dead 1st came out it was during the "video nasty" era of sensationalist journalism when Mary Whitehouse or the BBFC or some other do-gooder, busy-body, spoilsport body or other deemed it that we couldn't see the films as they were originally envisioned by their creators. They chopped out all the best bits most likely, getting rid of the gore, kind of cutting out the 'cutting up' I guess. I never really watched when it 1st came out, I was put off by tales of how terrible it was so I never got to see it till it came out on general video release rather than just rental, This was back in the days when they were released to video shops maybe 2 years before they were sold to the general public. I saw Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness/Evil Dead 3 at the cinema I think. The 2nd stayed with the horror of the 1st but with some more humorous moments and the 3rd went with outright comedy almost. Still very entertaining though. Now there is a TV series, Ash Vs Evil Dead and that sticks to the O.T.T. horror/comedy formula and is a great horror geeky watch. The Evil Dead film franchise was rebooted with none of the humour in 2015 with a remake that I thoroughly enjoyed but I think the TV series with Ash put paid to the film reboot franchise taking off with sequels. 

Braindead, from 1993 (called Dead Alive in some countries) is another zombie film that has huge swathes of laughs involved. It was made by Peter Jackson, long before he made the also awesome Tolkien films, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies. In it a Sumatran monkey rat is taken from the wild and put into a New Zealand zoo. It bites hero Lionel's mum and she becomes undead. Lionel stores her in the cellar but she manages to infect others. The film is chock full of sick/funny gore and is a classic. One of my favourite films ever. I used to run a heavy metal gig night with 2 mates which we called The Braindead Club after the film.

Later you had the comedy zombie movie or ZomRomCom Shaun of the Dead which completely negated the horror elements replacing them with some great laughs at the genre.

Other zombie films of note include -

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue

Which was a Spanish/Italian film but was made in Manchester England which was pretty surreal for that and pretty gory, but it was the name that I always remember it more for than anything. It is also known as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

Zombie Flesh Eaters

which was another nasty as I recall with a victim's eye-view of a death scene which is pretty gruesome

and the The Return of the Living Dead trilogy which was another of those horror movies with laughs that are very entertaining with their impossible to kill, more intelligent, talking zombies that just can't get enough of them juicy brains. 

A quick search up reveals that you can almost team up any word with "zombie" and you'll find a film called it!! Hence you get Cockneys Vs Zombies, The Zombie Farm, Zombies Of War, KFZ Kentucky Fried Zombies, Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies At Christmas, Zombeavers and my favourite title Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead!!

*******************************************************

I haven't even mentioned The Walking Dead TV series yet!! I am one of those annoying sods who read the comics long before the series came out and may have once or twice ventured the opinion that they are better than the TV series but that's just the way of things lol. The TV show is pretty good though, obviously it changes things from the comics but that's to be expected really. Characters stories get changed, new characters get added, plot timelines differ but the basic story of the living fighting each other for resources to the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse is still very much the same.