Adding my support for The Thing.
Just watched Dead Snow and I thought I'd add what I think are the essential zombie movies that you
have to watch. (Not adding support for Dead Snow though, although it was a pretty cool film.)
(I still haven't got a copy of Re-Animator or the Evil Dead series as I am lazy and I like buying things.)
Brain Dead/Dead Alive: Peter Jackson's greatest film and quite possibly my favourite zombie movie of all time. Zombie babies, kung fu priests and hot lawn mower on zombie action, it's got everything a great zombie movie needs.
A bit hard to find a copy here in Australia, rented the VHS from the ACMI. No idea about other areas.
Dawn of the Dead (Romero's 1978 version.): The sequel to Night of the Living Dead, survivors haul up in a mall during a zombie apocalypse, awesome shit goes down.
Shaun of the Dead: DON'T STOP ME NOOOOOOOOOOOOW! CAUSE I'M HAVIN' A GOOD TIME! HAVIN' A GOOD TIIIIIIIME! From the braaains of Shaun Pegg and Edgar Wright comes this sort of spoof, sort of homage, completely awesome and completely bloody hilarious "romantic zombie comedy" that makes cricket and vinyl cool. Really, you should have seen this by now and if you haven't...geez man.
Versus: The yakuza takes on a forest filled with reanimating corpses in a war that spans worlds in some sort of contest to become ruler of the universe...or something. The plot is bat shit crazy and the characters are just plain awesome with a guy who seems to have an infinite number of guns stored in his pants and a zombie who can scuttle around like The Fear.
Kung fu action, katanas, guns and a complete disregard for physics. This is how you entertain people.
(Totally worth checking out the films from the same director like Godzilla: Final Wars and Aragami)