My favourite zombie flick I guess must be Braindead or Dead Alive to you guys in the states. My guess is it's gotten quite popular post Lord of the Rings since it's a Peter Jackson flick, but my relationship with it goes back to the early 90s.
It's a horribly gory film - by far the goriest I've ever seen, but it's also a comedy and that makes the gore more tolerable. However, when I watched it as a kid in 1993, it was absolutely gruesome. I didn't get the humour, all I could see was an orgy of bloodspill with bodies being chopped up and torn apart, cannibalism and other typical zombie stuffs. I guess you'd just have to imagine what that film can do to a kid who's first language is not english .. I guess that's part why I didn't understand it was a comedy. Either way, it really stripped my soul of quite a lot of innocence. I remember I could feel something had changed in me after seeing it.
Anyways, later in the 90s I picked it up again and I
did get the jokes and I'd also seen Frighteners which I liked and Bad Taste of course and I became a bit of a Peter Jackson fan or at least appreciator. Braindead is one of the sickest and most twisted popular movies out there and it's brilliant fun, but don't show it to your kids.
I've seen a lot of other zombie films - I too have been a bit of a zombie buff and since then, I've finally concluded that most zombie flicks by far are formulaic, predictable and often overrated. Still, there's something about the first two Re-animator flicks that I like quite a lot. They are based on Lovecraft characters and stories about doctor Herbert West who has found a cure against death .. but he needs to do more research which includes fresh bodies to test his serum on.
Although Dr. West is the only character which appears in all films, the main character in the two first films is West's assistant who, although he feels what they do is morally wrong and horrific, somehow gets talked into it - over and over and over again ..
The zombies are a little original as they are reawakened humans rather than zombies. Depending on how long the brain was dead for, the stupider they are as zombies. One in particular, the head on the cover, is quite clever.
All in all, the cure, the setting, the motives, the zombies - everything about these makes at least the first Re-animator film more original than many other zombie flicks out there like 28 days later, Return of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead or the Dead Next Door. Also more entertaining, I'd say!