So I must admit, full disclosure, that Rusty and members of Hazardfactory (cough) Drago and (cough cough ) Ryan and (hack) Todd did pyro stunts for Zombies of Mass Destruction! hint, it’s a movie and it’s funny as hell with an overt humanist and egalitarian vibe that asserts that Arabs, and gays, are in fact just as American and alright as any other just plain alright citizen.

The movie is a bit ambiguous in it’s treatment of zombies. A good number of Port Gamble citizens were turned into Zombies for the purposes of this film. Many of these same Zombies were treated with a certain sort of cavalier ambivalence. They get shot, stabbed, maimed, and assaulted a little more frequently than the other characters in the film, but overall, blood, gore, gore, blood, and gore aside, the movie satirizes the American post 9-11 (god I hate to type that) pre-occupation with ethnicity and ongoing inability to normalize same-sex relationships successfully.

So, if you see the movie and it’s on fire, yeah that was us, and hooray for Arab Americans and gays you are as American as any of us, congrats and condolences are both in order and perhaps in that order.

Oh yeah, ZOMBIES. So the idea owes it’s origins to Haitian lore. You may remember Haiti, poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, one of the only colonies to organize a successful slave revolt against the neo-liberalists of the period. Haiti is generally speaking, the most damning indictment of the neo-liberals and the free trade policies of the west.

On top of everything else, they suffered an enormous earthquake, about which you may have heard. Please send them money. Please. You can do it from your phone. It’s useful. Please.

Haiti has suffered a major earthquake over 100,000 feared dead. You can donate. I know you’re broke, so am I, but you can always pay your phone company in a month. •Donate through Wyclef Jean’s foundation, Yele Haiti. Text “Yele” to 501501 and $5 will be charged to your phone bill and given to relief projects through the organization. 100% of your donation goes directly to relief immediately.

I went to the premier last night. I never would have guessed that Zombie film fans were so erudite, well spoken and generally showered. I caught up with the director Kevin Hamadani and his producer John, the same man that produced Iraq in fragments.

I recommend catching the film. It’s a comedy and completely over the top. It is an energentic send-up of living as an ethnic or gender minority, in the paranoid post 9_11 world. I would have liked to see a stronger intellectual effort, maybe an attempt to look at why Americans tend to isolate and persecute our minorities, but, it was a bit beyond the scope of a bloodspatter send-up.

I spent a little more time with the cast before the show and hopefully will pull some more independant f/x work in Seattle this year. Welll paid f/x work.

Rusty