Kingdom - Netflix Series

Kingdom | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
Netflix

Another series about Korean royalty a thousand years ago, but this time with zombies. We started watching this once before, but the zombie business turned us off. Since then we have watched The Last of Us, which acclimated us to the whole zombie edifice, so now we are more accepting of weird tales.

It all starts when the royal physician attempts to bring the recently deceased king back to life using an acupuncture needle dipped in a potion derived from the 'resurrection plant'. It brings him back to life, but as a crazed monster craving human flesh. The monster king attacks the physician's assistant and kills him. The physician puts his assistant in a coffin and carries him back to his clinic. All the people at the clinic are slowly starving to death due to the general famine. One wise guy gets the idea to cut up the dead body and make soup to feed all the people. The female doctor and her assistant are out in the woods gathering herbs, so they don't get any of the soup. They get back to the compound just in time to see all the people turn into monsters. Evidently the wise guy doesn't eat any of the soup because he doesn't turn into a monster.

So now the disease is spreading, a nearby town is destroyed and the monsters are running loose across the countryside. The only saving grace is that they become comatose during the daylight hours.

The show is full of reminders of how bad things used to be. Besides plague and famine we also have slavery, torture and psychopathic idiots in charge. Okay, that last one is still with us. I imagine there could have been an epidemic of rabies a thousand years ago and it might look a whole lot like a plague of zombies.

The show has several scenes with hordes of zombies running amok and it struck me that it looked just like a modern day riot, which says something about rioters.

P. S. The setting is more like 500 years ago, not 1,000. Besides the usual Samurai swords, bows, arrows and spears, some of the soldiers had matchlock rifles.

The whole point of reviving the King was to keep him alive until the Queen gave birth to what she hoped would be a boy. If she could also dispose of the Crown Prince (her step son), she would be the acting ruler of the kingdom until her son came of age. Actually, she would be a puppet for her father.

But the Queen has a miscarriage. She conceals the miscarriage and collects half a dozen pregnant women and sequesters them in some spare room in her personal palace. Her plan is to wait until the women give birth and collect a boy baby (surely with that many women at least one will give birth to a boy) and claim him as her own. Once that happened, all the other women and babies were executed. Seems unbelievable that someone could be so vile, but if history has taught us anything it's that there is no limit to human depravity.

Christmas Zombies

 

A VERY ZOMBIE HOLIDAY (Instructional video)

Team Unicorn

Came across this video this morning. I thought I posted it once before and I did, ten years ago. 

Via Borepatch

The Henry Rifle

And Zombies!

Henry 1860 rifle - .44 Rimfire

While I was looking up stuff about the movie True Grit, I noticed this little blurb about the Henry rifle on the Internet Movie Firearms Data Base page:

Note how the rifle clearly has a twisting barrel instead of a loading gate.

A twisting barrel?!? What the heck is a twisting barrel? And no, I don't see any evidence of such. Of course, since I don't know what they are talking about, I might not recognize it anyway. So naturally I had to track this down. So I point and click for a while (days it seemed) and I finally found this explanation from stormgale89 on Yahoo! Answers:

the originals had a lift and turn to the side cover on the magazine tube, pull the follower all the way up to the end of the barrel, lift the sleeve towards the end of the barrel and turn it sideways, this opens the loading gate, now drop your cartridges bullet end up, lift and turn the sleeve to close and allow the follower to fall into the notch, done, ready to action and fire.
only other cheaper "replicas" use the kings gate(found on all new centerfire lever actions), which wasn't invented until 6 years(1866) after the henry 1860 was started, so the uberti is the only authentic replica that I seen.


The Henry Rifle
Misha's Guns 

Here's a picture showing the sleeve that needs to be turned:

Twisted!

I had heard about the Henry, but I thought it was just another old gun from another old gun maker who has gone out of business. It is actually a pretty significant weapon. Near as I can tell it was the first commercially successful repeating rifle. This is during the time of the civil war when most soldier still used muzzle loaders.

Update June 2025. Replaced missing video. I remember the old video showed a scene from the original Night of the Living Dead. Looked through that movie on YouTube and only found one scene that shows the gun being loaded (just after the 36:00 mark), and it doesn't show any detail. Did they censor that scene?

 

Christmas Zombies

From Assorted Meanderings, via Roberta X.

Zombies!

What is the attraction? Possibly because the very concept of a Zombie gives your mind license to range freely. Wandering around in the (virtual) woods this morning I stumbled over "Zombies are the New Vampires" which led to "I Was a Regency Zombie", which contained this wonderful bit:

In fact, “Pride and Prejudice” may already be a zombie novel, contends Brad Pasanek, a specialist in 18th-century literature at the University of Virginia.
“The characters other than the protagonist are so often surrounded by people who aren’t fully human, like machines that keep repeating the same things over and over again,” Professor Pasanek said. “All those characters shuffling in and out of scenes, always frustrating the protagonists. It’s a crowded but eerie landscape. What’s wrong with those people? They don’t dance well but move in jerky fits. Oh, they are headed this way!”

"Zombies are the New Vampires" finished up with a video of "The Zombies" playing "She's Not There". A quick look on the net turned up this one, which is one of my favorite tunes. The video is .... I'm not sure what it is. And who are those two guys in sport coats? And why do we care?


Zombies - Time Of The Season HD
Update January 2017 replaced missing picture, replaced dead links.
Update February 2020 replaced missing video.