Touched By a Zombie


Sarah Michelle GellarWell, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s back on TV with Phil Leotardo’s new Lifetime series, Touched By a Zombie. Premiering tonight at 8:00 EDT (with repeats at 9:00, 11:00, 1:00 AM, 3 AM, etc.), Gellar plays hardbitten veteran Philadelphia homicide detective Grace Dumbrowski. Grace, we gather from the opening sequences, is a damned good cop even if she does drink a fifth of Old Crow a day, sleep with her equally hard-drinking (and of course married) Vietnam vet boss (Richard Roundtree), smoke lots of pot and eat high-cholesterol snack-foods. Somehow she keeps her svelte figure and good skin, and if I knew her secret I would share it with you.

After all the introductory stuff, featuring Grace’s dysfunctional relations with her hard-drinking sister Terri (Tori Spelling) and hard-drinking mother Terri Sr. (Kathleen Turner), the plot finally starts to kick in with Grace kicking the crap out of a perp with her hard-drinking gay partners (and Desert Storm vets) Antonio (Stephen Dorff) and Rolph (Casper Van Dien). After they lock him up they go to some gay bar on Quince Street and get drunker, and then Grace staggers out to her ’67 Thunderbird and tries to drive home but runs some guy over. She gets out of the car to make sure the dude’s really dead so she can get back in the car and book it the hell out of there when all of a sudden the dead guy stands up and introduces himself.

It turns out the dead dude is a zombie named Earl (William Sanderson from Deadwood), and it was just pure dumb luck on Grace’s part that she ran him over and not some other poor bastard, because everybody knows the only way you can finish off a zombie is by shooting them in the head, or chopping their heads off, or just blowing them up completely with some dynamite or something, but just running them over with a Thunderbird isn’t going to do jackshit. It might slow them down a little, but zombies don’t exactly clip along like Speed Racer anyway. (Which brings up a question: since zombies move so damn slow, how come in all these zombie movies people don’t just run like hell to get away from them, or, you know, like, get in a car and drive away, or catch a bus, or even just walk really quickly? I could never figure that one out.)

Earl the zombie grabs Grace’s arm, trying to find a relatively meaty part to take a bite out of, but she remembers the bit about shooting zombies in the head, pulls out her service automatic and puts a bullet right into his walking-dead brainpan.

But she feels that this incident has taught her something.

Like, if you’re going to get drunk, don’t drive; and if you’re going to drive drunk anyway and you run somebody over then you better make damn sure it’s a zombie.

So, life, or God, or some damn thing has given her another chance. She drives really slowly and carefully home while a Tori Amos song plays on the soundtrack.

It turns out that home is a semidetached on Mascher Street up in Olney, where Grace lives with her hard-drinking old WWII vet granddad (Charles Durning) and her hard-drinking defrocked priest (and Grenada-invasion vet) of an unemployed brother Stosh (Mark Addy). She tells these two that she’s quitting drinking. Her brother asks her if she’s quitting pot, too, and you can tell he’s thinking that if she is he’ll get to inherit her stash. She says, “No. I didn’t say anything about pot, so stay away from my stash, loser.”

She goes to her room and rolls up a fat one. She’s getting high watching a re-run of Becker when she hears a scratching on her window pane. She looks out and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s some more goddam zombies. She gets off the bed (showing off that slender frame I might add, all she’s wearing is a John Kruk Phillies jersey), grabs her pistol, opens the window and points it at one of the zombies.

Fade to black, roll credits and another Tori Amos song.

I for one will be tuning in next week.

(Drawing by Stéphane Lemarchand. This has been yet another Newcritics exclusive for Quinn/Martin productions, but tune in to my humble abode for more crap.)

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Viewing 15 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Ah, if only.....THAT would be appointment TV
    • ^
    • v
    Jason, I for one am going to build my Friday nights around this show. But then I notoriously have no life. In fact, after I go out and get some beer, and after I drink enough of it, I might even start live-blogging the repeats. I think Lifetime is showing it until about seven in the morning. Then I might just stay up and watch Valerie Bertinelli woman-in-jeopardy movies all day.

    If only I had some weed.
    • ^
    • v
    Okay, I'm live-blogging the 10 PM repeat of the show; I've only seen the preview DVD that Lifetime sent me and these opening credits are new. They've got another Tori Amos song on now over this montage of Sarah driving around Center City Philadelphia
    • ^
    • v
    No, wait, I think it's a Bjork song. And I wish Lifetime had given Phil Leotardo a bigger budget, 'cause they show Sarah stopping her car at Geno's cheesesteak stand but when they show her going up to the stand you can tell it's Pink's in L.A.
    • ^
    • v
    Now she's supposedly driving down Broad street but she just went by Musso and Frank's on Hollywood Blvd.

    It could be worse I guess, at least it's not Toronto.
    • ^
    • v
    She's drinking from a bottle of Old Crow in her Thunderbird, but she's using a Dixie cup, she's not a total degenerate.

    You can tell it's tea though. Old Crow is darker. Or so I'm told.

    She just bought some pot from a taco stand proprietor, another sadly out-of-place touch of local color, especially when you can clearly see Hollywood High School in the background.

    Richard Roundtree's looking very fit and healthy in this scene.

    Whoa, thought Sarah was gonna get nude there but the camera cut away, damn it.

    So now we get introduced to the two gay detectives, Stephen Dorff and Casper Van Dien. One thing about a Phil Leotardo production, you know he's always gonna up the ante. Other shows have one gay cop? Phil's gonna give ya two.

    I guess Stephen Dorff finally gave up on the film career, although I thought he was great in City of Industry.

    Casper looks as much like a cartoon character as ever, God love him.

    Oh, wait, my doorbell just rang; my pot dealer. I think the show's gonna get a lot better now.
    • ^
    • v
    Okay, Sarah's arguing with her mom (Kathleen Turner) and her sister (Tori Spelling), supposedly at her mom's house in Chestnut Hill, but, like you don't have these Mission-style houses with bougainvillea bushes and palm trees outside in Chestnut Hill.

    Oh, Tori's a lesbian single mom, I didn't catch that part in the preview disc I saw. Goddam Phil Leotardo, he covers all the bases.

    Wow, these three women do not get along. (What do I care, I got one rolled and fired up now.)

    Tori's just smacked her little boy upside the head, Kathleen smacked Tori upside the head, and Sarah just storms out, leaving them to their own self-made Hell.

    As she drives away you see a street sign clearly reading "N. Ivar Ave."

    I don't know why they just didn't set the show in L.A. and have done with it.

    So far I've seen like 30 seconds of actual Philly footage, and I think it was leftover stock from "Thirtysomething".
    • ^
    • v
    Oh, here's that scene where Sarah and Stephen and Casper are absolutely beating the crap out of this suspected perp, and you know, I didn't recognize him before but the perp is Matthew Perry, with a shaven head and a goatee and a nosering.

    They're supposed to be down at the sports complex in South Philly, but that's Dodger stadium right there.

    Ow, Sarah just pulled Matthew's nosering right out. Damn.

    Okay, they've locked him up, and now they're all getting loaded at this gay piano bar. But, y'know, I know this location they're using, and it's a gay bar on Sunset. I mean, I went there with a friend once.

    Okay, finally getting to the turning point, she's back in her T-Bird, weaving all over what's supposed to be Roosevelt Boulevard I think but, yeah, there ya go, a sign for Venice Boulevard. I really hope Lifetime gave Phil some more money for location shooting in future epsiodes.

    Wham! She just ran the guy over.

    Okay, Billy Sanderson from Deadwood plays the zombie she just ran over, but I gotta say, even as a zombie and after getting run over by this massive hunk of Detroit steel he still looks a lot better than E.B. Farnum ever looked.
    • ^
    • v
    (Yeah, the show's definitely better now.)

    In this little slow-driving montage after she shoots the zombie, I'm not sure but I think they replaced the Tori Amos song with a Sarah McLaughlin song.

    No, it's Bjork again.

    Sarah Michelle's supposd to be in Olney now but I think this is Silverlake.

    Finally a real Philly location shot of the semi-detached on Mascher Street. I'd know that aluminum awning anywhere.

    Swell to see Charles Durning still working as the old granddad. Oh, but isn't he the old guy on Rescue Me, too? Hell, Charles is a trouper, always ready to pick up a paycheck, and after all, all he's got to do is sit in the recliner and drink Yuengling lager and watch TV.

    Good old Mark Addy, good to see he found work after Still Standing ended its run. He's a Brit, y'know, and he's doing a much better Philly accent than he did a Chicago accent. I can't tell if he's supposed to be gay or not. Supposedly he's unemployed after being kicked out of the priesthood for some undisclosed reason and all he does is sit on the couch with an old laptop and blog and send in comments to other losers' blogs. The details here are good, that tatty bathrobe, the economy-size bag of Cheetos, the magnum of Diet Dr. Pepper.

    Sarah's in her room, and I like the way they've got it dressed like a teenage girl's room. What's really weird is she's got a Buffy the Vampire Slayer poster on her wall. She's also got a Slayer poster.

    I'm so glad she's rolling a joint while watching "Becker", and it's the good-era Becker, before they fired Reggie.

    I never saw a show where they show a character smoking pot and watching TV for like five whole minutes. Phil Leotardo is a master. This part could have gotten boring but fortunately it's a really good Becker episode.

    Now she's watching the Geico commercial where the caveman's in the shrink's office and Sarah goes into a fit of pot hysterics when the caveman's phone rings and he says, "It's my mother. I'll put her on speaker."

    Now Sarah's watching that dateline commercial where the hottie girls are working out and the Russian chick says, "Hey, what are we doing tonight?"

    I think one of the zombies outside her window is Denise Richards.

    Okay, fade out and credits, and, yeah, they took off the Tori Amos song here, too. Maybe Tori had a problem with the show? But it's cool, they replaced it with another Bjork song; maybe Bjork's last album didn't do so well and she needs the bucks.

    Great show, can't wait to watch it next week. Unless Lifetime pulls the plug...
    • ^
    • v
    I'm watching the repeat of the repeat now. This show just keeps getting better and better. I'm even starting to like the Bjork songs.
    • ^
    • v
    What's the frequency Dan I can't seem to get this show. Must be some new HD NSA channel.
    • ^
    • v
    And yet there are people who will tell you that the golden age of television is over. Do I foresee a special guest appearance by a certain Mister David Hasselhoff?
    • ^
    • v
    I hate to break it to you, but the only way to kill a zombie is to fill it's mouth full of salt and sew it's lips shut. Read your Zora Neal Hurston.
    • ^
    • v
    Wow, if what you and Zora say is true, Kaiser Bill's Batboy, then it looks like maybe we haven't seen the last of Bill Sanderson's Earl the Zombie character!

    And, Marcus, call your cable company and complain. God knows this series needs all the help it can get without the local cable providers screwing things up!
    • ^
    • v
    Oh, and Estiv, I can definitely see the Hoffmeister as the Zombie King. Let's just hope Lifetime gives this series a chance to find its audience.
 

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