New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

At some point, Phil Dunphy went a bit screwy.

In between the release of Dawn of the Dead and now, Ty Burrell made the leap from being a memorable supporting actor in movies to becoming one of the breakout stars of ABC's Modern Family. As a result, I now think of him almost solely as Phil Dunphy and his performance in Dawn of the Dead, whilst one of the best things about the film, was distracting for me in a way that it never was before. In order to account for the disparity between how Burrell acted in the film and how I think of him, I started to play a game in which the aim was to explain how "Phil" wound up as the acerbic comic relief in a zombie apocalypse. Warning: The following contains spoilers for the fictional Sixth Season of Modern Family.

So, after one well-intentioned screw-up too many, Claire got divorced from Phil and got custody of the kids. This sent Phil off the deep end, he started drinking and his goofy sense of humour curdled into a caustic, misanthropic defense mechanism. Then Claire died in a freak skiing accident (in a bid to improve flagging ratings, producers made the ill-advised decision to make the cast wear skis for the first 13 episodes of the season) before changing her will, so the now bitter and twisted Phil inherits a sizable amount. He buys a boat, starts hanging out with topless women, then accidentally wanders into an undead maelstrom.

Other plotlines in Modern Family Season Six: Jay gets a head transplant so that, from then onwards, his face is played by Ed O'Neill but his body is played by an uncredited Gerard Butler; Hayley starts taking advice from a psychic bluejay that only she can see; and Lily kills Manny with an iron. (OMG it's sooooo shocking! And a cliffhanger ending, too!)

Always watch the credits. ALWAYS watch the credits...

The first time I watched Dawn of the Dead was on TV late at night a few years ago, and as soon as the credits started I changed the channel. This time around, I was with friends, so I didn't have the option to turn the TV off and as a result wound up catching the end credits for the first time ever. For anyone who hasn't seen the film already, a series of Cloverfield-style home videos shot by the surviving characters play out over the credits which show their attempts to get to an island where they think they will be safe from the zombie hordes. Needless to say, they're wrong, and it's one of the rare instances in which what happens after the movie ends completely reverses the actual ending of the film. It's as if, during the credits for Seven, Gwyneth Paltrow had arrived in a cab and said, "I've been at my sister's for a few days, what's going on? Why is there a plaster cast of my head in that box?"

Continued:       1       2