The coolest of the bunch, though, are the dead prison wardens. Naturally, for zombies wearing riot gear, they're not easy to kill.
Dispatching of this smorgasbord of decay is an innovative affair. If they don't fade into obscurity they're shot, impaled, beheaded and crushed - and either the good guys are desensitised or they don't mind the smell. Then again, it might not make for good TV if all the acting was overtaken by expressions of constant disgust.
The reason for the riot zombies? The crew broke into a prison, which in itself was a clever twist. Life is so fraught with danger, they're desperate to go to jail. Cue a visually striking scene where the group walked through a barbed wire tunnel protecting them from the feeding frenzy outside.
But is this game of hide-and-seek what you'd call edge-of-the-seat stuff? It might be if you didn't see the monsters coming, as in Jaws or The Blair Witch Project. Sure, the occasional few stagger out of the dark.
But zombies aren't scary for precisely the reason that you can see them in their entirety, not to mention that a few minutes before they flourished into the glorious beings they are, they were mowing the lawn or picking their noses at the traffic lights.
Judging by the earnestness of the characters in The Walking Dead - the heroic ex-cop Rick and his estranged wife Lori, the old man voice-of-reason Hershel, the tough chicks who stick the enemy through the brain - I'm not convinced that comedy is a zombie's sole purpose, either. Maybe you just have to be an action-head to truly appreciate the zombie, as escaping from them is mostly a physical affair.
That's not to say the show lacks emotional drama. Lori is heavily pregnant and besides worrying where she'll deliver and if her baby will have a killer scream, there's the small problem of whether her husband hates her. (However well the costume department did on those zombies, they forgot to spend time creating a baby bump that doesn't look like a box.) There's also the prospect of whether the group will be able to trust the group of convicts they've just discovered.
And, of course, there's the classic zombie issue of what to do when a friend gets bitten. Love 'em and leave 'em? Or grab the closest axe and chop off their infected limb before the extreme gangrene hits?
As Rick took to Hershel's leg like Gordon Ramsay to a chicken in that gruesome final scene, I felt so weak I wondered if I was becoming a zombie. Turns out I'd rather eat cake.
* What do you think of The Walking Dead? Post your comments below.
