TV GUIDE: Weekend TV: The Walking Dead Puts a Scare into Sundays
Oct 12, 2012
by Matt Roush
"See that?" shrieks one of the band of zombie-slaughtering survivors in AMC's The Walking Dead, eyes wide and wild in bloodthirsty pride as we bear graphic witness to a new way of dispatching a "walker" — this one tricked out in riot-gear armor, befitting the new season's prison setting. Yes, of course we see. It's not as if we can look away, much as we might want to at times. Granted, we might need to look twice, because in the tradition of the greatest horror-movie thrill rides, we're sometimes watching through our fingers as we climb the back of our chairs and sofas in revulsed shock and awe.
As if to answer last year's impatient cries among fans and some critics that there were too many contemplative lulls between the explosions of grisly carnage, Walking Dead kicks off its third season (Sunday, 9/8c) with full-on action, only occasionally stopping for breath — or possibly to sing a campfire song to soothe the beastly impulses of the savage zombie warrior. There is no respite in this march of death, no time for a picnic among this group of weary, filthy travelers. "We got to push a little bit harder," urges grizzled leader Rick (Andrew Lincoln) as he continues to deflect the attentions of his piteously guilt-ridden, self-loathing, very pregnant wife Laurie (Sarah Wayne Callies).
Rick is like a stoic, resolute Gary Cooper in a warped Western from some existential hell on earth. And the sprawling West Georgia Correctional Facility, where much of the season's first two episodes take place, is a wonderfully creepy metaphor for the prison of their unearthly existence among the relentless undead in a civilization beyond repair. This is a haunted chamber of horrors for sure, where the potential for gruesome hand-to-hand combat lurks around every dark corner and within every eerie cell. It's also a veritable shooting gallery where they all get plenty of target practice to take down the lurching walkers, in one gut-wrenching encounter after another, as the heroes seek safe harbor within these forbidding walls. It's not much of a spoiler to say Sunday's premiere ends on one of the show's most ghastly and upsetting sequences to date, giving even Rick pause in his gore-soaked zeal to do the right thing by those he's pledged to protect.
If you can handle it, The Walking Dead is grade-A terror ...
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