maniacal assault from hordes of flesh-devouring recently deceased, it is an entirely different matter to insert nothing less than visiting aliens from a faraway world into the story, too. But, this is exactly what our intrepid duo of Ryall and Moss does—and in a fashion that works very well, it must be stressed. Add to the undead and the extraterrestrials a cast of survivalist fruitcakes, gun-toting, small town gangs, and a slightly sinister government agent lurking in the shadows, and you have a great story unfolding before your very eyes.
It is most refreshing, too, to see a high degree of thinking outside the box taking place. There is a nice touch about how the aliens themselves—or their unearthly biology, at least—have an impact on the nature and effects of the zombie virus. Sly and wry humor abounds. And we even get treated to the freakishly fun sight of not just human zombies, but the animals of the undead, too. Of course, the fact that Colonized is set in small-town USA means we are talking farm animals. Or, perhaps, Barn of the Dead would be far more apt. Have you ever seen a pig, a chicken, or a horse wildly racing and raging around like the fast-running infected of 28 Days Later? To be sure, it’s not a pretty sight, to say the very least. But it is highly entertaining.
As is always the case when fiction and zombies cross paths, things finally reach their bloody finale, and it all too quickly becomes a case of do or die—and that goes for the humans and the aliens alike. Even the dead do all they can to avoid death—for a second time, naturally. In finality, Colonized is a decidedly surreal, alternative, and fun take on a topic that brings something very welcome and important to the table of the reanimated and the cannibalistic: it is called originality.
The Colony
Made in 2013, The Colony is a Canadian movie that, when all is said and done, is pretty good. The film stars Lawrence Fishburne (Briggs), Bill Paxton (Mason), and Kevin Zegers (Sam). The latter took on the role of Terry, a security guard, in the 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Whereas in Dawn of the Dead the flesh-eating monsters are literally dead, in The Colony they are the starving survivors of a worldwide apocalypse that have descended into primitive, cannibalistic states.
The storyline is an interesting one: The Colony is set midway through the twenty-first century, at a time when weather-modification technology has brought the human race to its knees. In the decades leading up to disaster, such technology was used to try and combat the effects of ever-increasing global warming. As the planet gets hotter, the machines try to combat things by lowering the temperature. They do so, but in catastrophic fashion. Not only does the planet cool, but it starts to snow—everywhere. And the snow does not stop. Ever. As a result, and years later, the earth is now in the grip of a modern day ice-age.
The landscape of the whole planet resembles the North and South Pole. Cities are buried under tons of ice and snow, and civilization is no more. Those that have managed to survive the worldwide freezing do so in huge underground installations where life is bleak, food is scarce, and a deadly form of flu is on the loose. Everyday is a fight for survival and things are getting grimmer by the hour.
The Colony begins in what is termed Colony 7, where Briggs, Mason, and Sam live—the latter with his girlfriend, Kai, played by actress Charlotte Sullivan. After the group receives a distress call from another group of survivors—also deep underground, at what is termed Colony 5—Briggs decides that someone must go and check out what’s afoot and why Colony 5 is now not just in trouble, but has subsequently gone completely silent, too. When Briggs asks for volunteers to accompany him, Sam and a teenage boy named Graydon (actor Atticus Dean Mitchell) are quick to accept the challenge. Mason, meanwhile, plots behind the scenes to try and take control over Colony 7.
After an arduous and hazardous trek through arctic weather and a ruined, snow-covered city, the three finally make it to Colony 5 and descend into its underground depths. Not only is the colony quiet, it’s downright too quiet. And when the trio finally stumbles upon a solitary, terrified colonist, they know something bad has gone down. Exactly how bad, soon becomes apparent. Colony 5 has been invaded by a band of psychotic cannibals. Whereas those that live underground have retained their humanity, those who still live topside have descended into states of definitive savagery. To the horror of Briggs, Sam, and Graydon, the colonists have been killed. The three find this out in graphic fashion when they stumble on the flesh-eaters slicing up body upon body, all being prepared for dinner.
Although the cannibals are not of the dead kind, they’re not just regular, but desperate people, either. Their teeth are like fangs and they scream, howl, and roar rather than talk. In many respects they come across not unlike a combination of the infected of 28 Days Later and the animalistic vampires of the 2007 movie, 30 Days of Night—which, incidentally, is also set around a snowbound background. The three men make a run for it, with the hungry hordes in hot pursuit. Unfortunately, Graydon doesn’t make it. There’s equally bad luck too: Briggs sacrifices himself to prevent the cannibals from finding out where he and Sam live, namely Colony 7. It’s to no avail, however. The people-eaters manage to follow Sam’s footprints and, in no time, break in to the colony, where a life or death battle begins—one which culminates in a fiery explosion as Mason kills himself and countless invaders. And it’s finally up to Sam to take on the leader of the cannibals—something that ends triumphantly for the dwindling band.
The Colony ends on a positive note when Sam, Kai, and the few who are left head for new pastures, a place where, reportedly, the icy environment has been reversed and blue skies and green terrain are once again the norm. The end of the human race just might not be in the cards, after all.
Columbia, Space Shuttle
When the space shuttle Columbia was catastrophically torn to pieces during its reentry on February 1, 2003, in addition to the astronauts who died in the explosion, nearly ninety on-board science experiments were lost as what was left of Columbia plummeted to the ground. Three weeks later, however, it was revealed that Texas State University-San Marcos biologist Robert McLean had managed to save something completely unanticipated from the widely spread debris: namely, a strain of slow-growing bacteria that had survived the crash. It was a discovery that may have significant implications for the concept of panspermia, which is the scenario of life—perhaps even viruses—“hitchhiking” on rocks ejected from meteorite impacts on one world, and that could travel through space and seed other worlds with life under favorable conditions.
Examination of the debris from the space shuttle Columbia disaster showed that bacteria could survive being in space and even the high-temperature process of reentry into the atmosphere.
Notably, found within the wreckage of Columbia was a bacteria called Microbispora: a slow-growing organism, normally found in soil, that McLean determined had probably contaminated the experiment prior to launch. “This organism appears to have survived an atmospheric passage, with the heat and the force of impact,” McLean said. “That’s only about a fifth of the speed that something on a real meteorite would have to survive, but it is at least five or six times faster than what’s been tested before. This is important for panspermia, because if something survives space travel, it eventually has to get down to the Earth and survive passage through the atmosphere and impact. This doesn’t prove
