DISAPPOINTED in George Romero’s latest? Rolling your eyes at the trailer for the new Resident Evil sequel? The best zombie movie this summer may be a music video, one from Campbell’s own breakout band, the Limousines.
With “Internet Killed the Video Star,” their follow-up to last year’s minor hit “Very Busy People,” going into heavy rotation at the Bay Area’s alternative stations Channel 92.3 and Live 105, vocalist-lyricist Eric Victorino and beat architect Giovanni Giusti have released a video—really more of a short film—to promote it, putting a trippy twist on the zombie mythos.
Because, really, we all love zombies, but what’s left to do with these poor undead freaks? We’ve seen ’em slow and fast, injected, infected, supernatural, space-made, man-made, Nazi-engineered, shopping after death, gutmunching, battling sharks, turned into supersoldiers, domesticated and obliterated. But the Limousines’ “Internet Killed the Video Star” clip turns the World War Z scenario into a dark fairy tale. Kids? Taking on zombies? With confetti guns?
Victorino says the short film, which he wrote the story for, came out of an IM conversation he and Giusti were having about how both kids and zombies look cool in videos. This quickly morphed into an idea for the song.
“In five minutes, we had the story line,” says Victorino.
They spent two weeks calling around to stores asking for used toilet paper rolls, which they then made into the kiddie arsenal. They hooked up with director David Dutton and Bay Area special effects pro Ed Martinez. Martinez’s zombies in the video are top-notch; the Limos, for their part, only had a couple of specific requests. Victorino remembers his instructions as: “We need some fat zombie running at us, and we need some slow-motion titties, and we’ll be set.”
Coming from Strata, on a major-label, Victorino was used to video shoots that might ring up a few thousand bucks just for catering. And yet they were able to shoot this video for under $1,000, with $500 of that going to buy the car that the kids commandeer.
“We bought it off some hippie kid in Santa Cruz,” says Victorino.
The whole thing was done on a two-day shoot, with friends and family making up the cast, on property owned by the parents of Dredg’s bass player Drew Roulette. The end result mixes a retro, high-contrast grindhouse look with the ironic humor of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and the fantasy style of Guillermo Del Toro. The abundance of postmodern reference and self-reference have left fans with a lot of questions about the symbolism—do the kids represent the band? Are they really shooting confetti, or is that just a way their brains have dreamed up to deal with the blood-and-guts unpleasantness of a zombie apocalypse?
Victorino won’t say, but as the film gets passed around—it got 8,000 views its first day up at www.thelimousines.com, 30,000 by the next—he does say the experience of making it was one of the best times he’s had in his music career, ever. The Limos plan to tour later this year to promote their new album, Get Sharp, and play Sept. 3 at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco.
