#Harry samba short dreads full#
#Harry samba short dreads series#

Rick fell asleep in one world and woke up in another. Many of the zombie encounters in the pilot are one-on-one, as the focus is less on action than on conveying a feeling of loss.

(Though James does upstage Lincoln in the process.) That subplot”s pretty much beat-for-beat from Kirkman, and it plays out beautifully.

It”s wonderfully creepy, and then Darabont turns on the pathos as Rick makes the acquaintance of Morgan Jones (guest star Lennie James of “Jericho” fame) and his son Duane (Adrian Kali Turner), who have suffered a horrible, seemingly unending tragedy as part of this zombie apocalypse. (The zombies were designed by acclaimed make-up master Greg Nicotero, and understandably look fantastic/disgusting.) He takes a less-is-more approach to the score by Bear McCreary, letting long stretches play out with nothing but the sound of the wind, the creaking of doors, or the shuffling of zombie feet.

#Harry samba short dreads full#

Lincoln”s quite good in that mode, and a solid hero once Rick links up with a group of survivors on the outskirts of Atlanta.ĭarabont knows when a moment needs to be goosed and when he simply needs to hang back and let us share Rick”s view of this terrifying landscape, full of empty cars, decaying corpses and, of course, many, many, many zombies. Rick spends much of the pilot alone and in silence, simply reacting with horror to what the world has become. Lincoln”s Southern accent is pretty terrible, though no worse than most of his co-stars, and Darabont and company have wisely pared down the wordy dialogue from the comics.

Written and directed by Darabont, it”s a master class in suspense filmmaking, of dread and atmosphere and grief.īritish actor Andrew Lincoln is our lead as small-town Kentucky cop Rick Grimes, who”s wounded in the line of duty, goes into a coma and wakes up weeks later to find a world overtaken by zombies, with only small pockets of frightened and angry humans trying to stay alive without getting bitten by the “walkers.” Going into the show as someone without deep affection for either the genre or the source material, I still found myself riveted by the pilot episode, which will air in a 90-minute timeslot on Halloween.

#Harry samba short dreads series#

The comic has many fans who have been understandably excited about what the TV team – including Frank Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption”), Gale Anne Hurd (“Terminator”) and Kirkman himself – will do with the property, and I suspect they”ll be pleased, even though the series takes notable liberties with the comic, altering the story at points, introducing some characters earlier and inventing some new ones altogether. Though I”m not a devout zombie fan overall, I enjoyed the first few collections, then started to find it monotonous and depressing and stopped. I will say upfront that I generally felt the same way about the Kirkman comics. When you ask the creative team behind AMC”s “The Walking Dead,” which debuts Sunday night at 10, what differentiates their series from every other filmed zombie story, they”ll point to the fact that it is a series – that, like the Robert Kirkman comic books that inspired it, it is an ongoing, never-ending nightmare, as opposed to two hours of scares and out.īut an ongoing nightmare requires ongoing viewers, and therefore a show that stays strong as it goes along, if not one that gets better and better over time, and I”m not sold that “The Walking Dead” is that kind of show.