old dark house

2012-01-22T11:35:00.000-08:00

It's been a couple of decades since I've seen this low budget Paramount potboiler, and over the years I remembered it as being pretty deranged...but until a revisit I didn't realize just how brilliant the damned thing really is. Say, if Quentin Tarantino had directed a movie in 1941, it might look something like this genre-bending lollapalooza.

Ostensibly an early-noir courtroom melodrama (with the heroine detailing her abduction into white slavery and ruination), things go literally ape-shit at the halfway mark when mad scientist George Zucco steps in (narratively, from out of nowhere) and...

...transplants her freshly-executed brother's brain into a gorilla's skull!

Also, keep an eye out for imagery towards the end of the clip that makes this seem as if it were ripped from a Ministry video (circa "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste"). Even the soundtrack fits...and dig that crazy transition to the accordion player!

The thing is, while definitely tongue-in-cheek, the movie still plays its absurd premise straight. Which is probably the reason for its general obscurity* The degradation of its protagonists (Capra-esque wholesomeness being sucked into pre-code seediness) must have been perplexing to the moviegoing public at the time. And although it doesn't overtly dwell on the prostitution aspect, the inherent tone still surprises me that the film made it past the Hays Code scissors.

And to a contemporary audience, it's easy to miss the deliberate proto-camp intent of the filmmaker and dismiss it as something akin to PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.

Formerly an editor, this was director Stuart Heisler's second film (after the 1936 obscurity STRAIGHT FROM THE SHOULDER), although he also served as second unit director on John Ford's THE HURRICANE in the interim.

1941 was a pivotal year for Heisler, with the psychological horror of AMONG THE LIVING arriving soon after and an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's THE GLASS KEY following in 1942, establishing him as one of the earliest pioneers of film noir.

Heisler's direction here is assured and even meta at times, but the arch send-ups of established genres of the period also reflects the giddiness of a filmmaker still searching for his voice.

*The movie saw a VHS release as part of the Universal Horror series back in the 90s, but I'm assuming poor sales derailed any hope for a DVD.

Here's THE THING...

2011-07-15T12:48:00.000-07:00

Now, I absolutely love Carpenter's The Thing. I'm happy to say that I saw it opening weekend back in 1982 and it stands as one of my favorite theater-going experiences. Not to mention that if you get a bunch of horror geeks in the same room arguing over what the greatest horror film ever made is, The Thing just might win. Well, at least most of the time.

Personally, I rate it as the second greatest horror film in the history of history. And no...The Shining isn't the first.

But it seems that there's a bit of a ruckus over Universal's upcoming prequel (due October 14th). Imagine that. A lot of folks have taken to the message boards to air their personal outrage over the studio's audacity in trying to reinfranchise their original investment.

They're howling that Hollywood needs to quit remaking existing properties and invest in new and creative visions. And I usually agree. I can count off on one hand all the successful remakes of great horror films and still have a middle finger left over to acknowledge the rest. But the last time Universal gave someone the funding to create an exciting new monster mythos was...

...well, damn. John Carpenter and The Thing. Ouch.

The Thing is, the movie originally tanked at the box office...three million opening weekend. Yeah, weird to think that most folks seemed to hate the movie when it came out.

But here's why I'm not disturbed by this move. Universal has been sitting on this property (let's just step back and admit that Universal is a business, first and foremost) for near thirty years.

But over the years, their investment has been re-evaluated by critics and the public and has become one solid property for building a franchise on (now sit back and imagine where solid writers could go with the mythos by The Thing IV).

So it’s kind of reassuring that they’ve held off as long as they have. But here we go...

Rolling into this, they had four options:

1. Remake.
2. Make a sequel.
3. Do a prequel.
4. Throw away more money on another attempt at rebooting The Wolfman.

We won’t talk about the fourth option.

I sort of cringe over the first option, and I’m glad more level-minded folks at Universal felt the same way. Not saying that the studio would have went the Platinum Dunes route (and to Universal's credit they did deliver with the remake of Dawn of the Dead), but Carpenter’s The Thing was lightning in a bottle. Trying to rehash the same material is setting out with failure as the best case scenario.

As for a sequel...seriously, does anyone that loves Carpenter’s movie really want to be told what happened between Mac and Childs? It’s a great ending (although admittedly probably a big reason for its initial failure...that and all the doggy abuse). And a sequel means you have to top everything from the original.

So a prequel is the best option, for the fans and for the studio. It can exist as its own entity while leaving Carpenter and writer Bill Lancaster's vision untouched. Essentially, it’s playing around in the same mythos, but doesn’t touch the iconic characters. And if it’s a success, a franchise can be built that continues on without co-opting the Carpenter/Lancaster narrative.

Call me naive, but I’m trusting Universal on this one (despite The Wolfman, which at least was a noble failure). Their track record hasn’t been all that great lately, but I get the vibe that they’re traditionalists. Which is welcome. I'm pretty sure that they're doing everything they can to avoid alienating the fanbase on this one.

And as someone that cut their horror teeth on the Universal monster movies of the black n’ white era, that means some- thing to at least me. I'm not saying that it's going to be better than Carpenter's version. Because it won't. It won't even be as good.

But at least I get the impression that everyone involved in this project seems to respect the material they're working with. So if it's only half as good as Carpenter's, then it'll be better than most studio horror films. And that right there is something to be excited about.

Sad, I know.

But The Thing is...

...there's still a lot of traditionalists that would argue that Hawks' version of John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" is still the best. Go figure.

SUCKER PUNCH (2011)

2011-04-07T07:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, straight up? On the face of it, Sucker Punch is mostly indefensible. If you want to take it on the surface.

Not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily. I have no problem with strippers packing big guns being used as exclamation points between explosions. I’m still breathing, right? Especially since this doesn’t pretend (too much) to be high art…this is Zack Snyder being given millions of dollars just to unleash his id on the screen.

And apparently, Snyder’s lowbrow id is influenced by a lot of cinematic influences and genres that I happen to enjoy. There isn’t too much story involved here. Just enough to serve as cutscenes that link the video game mayhem that took to calling itself Sucker Punch.

So let’s go back in time for the faux noir 1950s. What we have here is a thinly veiled Sailor Moon character (called Baby Doll, because what’s the point of unleashing your id if you’re just gonna try and disguise what makes it tick?) committed to the "Institution For Criminally Insane Girls in Short Skirts and Fishnet" by her evil stepfather, so that he can get his grubbies on her inheritance. And make her take the fall for his pervy deeds which led to the death of her naïf sister.

All this setup is played out in an opening gambit that is an ambitious exercise in highly stylized melodrama. It plays it well, setting the tone and backstory in broadstrokes that left me curious how the project would have looked if played entirely that way.

And then…

Well, things happen. Under the threat of impending lobotomy, Baby Doll accesses a part of her brain that allows her to set off in an epic quest to score four items (and an ambiguous fifth) in order to accomplish her mission. Let’s call that mission Freedom. Which serves as an excuse to get Baby Doll and her leggy posse to jump around in all sorts of visually-stunning set-pieces that span time and genre.

So we’ve got some giant stone samurai. A dragon and a B-25 bomber engaged in a dogfight. A trainload of killer robots. Zombie Kraut steampunk soldiers. Exploding zeppelins. And asskicking girls highwire-dancing through fireballs and hails of bullets. And other stuff.

Lots of other stuff.

Yeah, it’s cosplay wrapped in an 82 million dollar budget, borderline femslash. If you don’t know what cosplay or femslash is, then you probably won’t get Sucker Punch. Maybe. Maybe it doesn't matter. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. But it is what it is. This is auteur theory at its most outlandish, one man’s last dip in the slowly draining Hollywood dream pool. No art is created in a vacuum, and Snyder lets all his influences hang out here.

On one level, it can seem like pretty subversive stuff, albeit subverting the subversive. The bevy of beauties are dressed up in fetish fear and put through empowerment moves. It's not entirely clear exactly what Snyder's intent is...on one hand, we get hot chicks lapdancing to his Svengali cackle. On the other, we have Snyder wrapping up his heavy-breathing narrative in such a way that can be read as a two-fisted fuckfinger salute thrown in the face of Hollywood convention. This is one happy ending that takes some serious thought to wrap the head around. If you want to put that much thought into it.

Visually, it taps into the neo-retro stylings of Sin City and Sky Captain and the narrative affectations of Moulin Rouge. If this sounds like it’d make for a confusing stew, it does. If you give what’s happening onscreen too much thought. If you do want to think about it, there's plenty of subtext to play around with. It's just not neatly wrapped. Scantily wrapped, to be sure, but with deceptive layers of cartoon paper and strings that lead to weird places.

But mostly, it’s two hours of letting yourself be strapped to the theatre seat, eyelids pinned back as Herr Doctor Snyder pokes at your lizard brain with a sharp stick. If that sounds sexy, then you can get your money’s worth here.

The One I Might Have Saved...

2010-04-20T21:31:00.000-07:00

While I've always wanted to contribute to Arbogast's "The One You Might Have Saved", I never got around to it because of the sheer volume of the ones I wanted to save.

See, I walk into pretty much every horror film and immediately put my money on the dark horse. Not because I'm fool enough to think that any one of these brunettes will actually make it to the final frames, but because they're the ones I'd like to. They're the ones with moxie, but... sigh.

FWIW, I'd love to see the redhead make it to sunrise, but she is probably more likely to get it first than the brother. There's fool betting, and then there's damn-fool betting.

But for some reason, as a rule the makers of horror films like to play safe and make as the obligatory final girl your bubble-headed-bleach-blonde. One look at that feathered hair and you see a bedroom replete with teddy bears and unicorns and plenty of pink slathering all over her bedroom walls to indicate just who she is.

"Keep your hands off, Buster, and keep the conversation light."

Y'know, the kind of bedroom that the average horror fan wouldn't be allowed in to in the first place (even if they wanted). Well, back in the Eighties. Now, that twinkie probably has Rotten.com bookmarked on her iPad.

What?

Um... yeah. Where were we? Oh..."The One I Might Have Saved."

Let's go in blind (trust me), with what is easily my favorite moment in an otherwise forgettable horror film:

Okay, then.

I'll cop here... my two favorite movies have always been It's a Wonderful Life and Night of the Living Dead. Seriously. The two kill me every time, in entirely different ways. They're like bookends to what I love about film. Really... it's a race between the two as to which one is darker.

So, back in '92 when I caught Jim Wynorski's 976-EVIL 2... let's just say that the above bit just killed me just as well. But it was sort of a bummer, also.

Poor, poor Paula (Leslie Ryan). Who after a lot of thought is The One I Might Have Saved.

As a horror film fan back in the day when meeting a nice girl with similar un-nice interests was nigh impossible, Paula getting whacked was insult to injury while watching an otherwise interminable slasher film. Not to mention that she was way hotter than the vanilla final girl. So to hell with that popcorn-wielding Barbie, let's shake things up and have this brunette make it to the final stretch!

Oh.

*Tears up ticket*

But, hey... it would have made the film more interesting.

Oh, Snap...

2010-03-27T02:59:00.000-07:00

Going back to the strange fundamentalist aspect of The Mist (strange in that as the Fundie caricature Mrs. Carmody rants about everyone mocking the fundamentalists, the film sets about doing exactly that), I was watching the black-n-white version and caught this moment...

Dude goes riding out to meet the Beast, forkin' the Devil's Horns.

Okay, then.

THE WOLFMAN (2010)

2010-02-19T11:51:00.000-08:00

"Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright."

Evoking the classic line from the 1941 Lon Chaney, Jr. vehicle The Wolf Man, Universal attempts to jumpstart another franchise from its early 20th century monster stable.

Unfortunately, while the attempt to resurrect the Goth beauty of the old school Universal output is welcome, the end result is a flat-looking mess, handicapped by 21st century ADD writing and bad pop psychology.

Interrupting his run as Hamlet on the international stage, 19th century prodigal son Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro) returns home to the English familial estate after his brother's gruesome death, to find the marble floors adrift with dead leaves and the staircase all cobwebby.

Spooky, right?

Almost as spooky as Sir Anthony Hopkins waddling down the stairs with a double-barreled shotgun to welcome his son home. "Welcome" being subjective, seeing how it's Hopkins and even when he's playing a nice guy, Hopkins is always packing a secret. Due to clumsy foreshadowing, it's pretty obvious early on what his secret is (believe it or not, it involves Gollum).

Papa Talbot also has a righthand man, a Sikh cleverly named Singh. In addition to being a pisspoor handyman (seeing that he only gets called to duty once a month, would it kill him to rake the floors or dust the bannisters?), Singh's only narrative purpose is to pull a Scatman Crothers and provide some weaponry for the third act before he dies. He's also pretty sad with the aphorisms:

"Sometimes you chase the monster...

...sometimes the monster chases you."

Eventually (a fairly long eventually) Larry gets bit by a werewolf and starts loping around the foggy moors ripping villager’s lungs out. Blood-spattered Jane Austin posturing for the Emily the Strange crowd ensues. It's supposed to be a pretty basic story, right? Unfortunately, here the basic is spread out to make things complicated for no other reason to make things complicated, but without the narrative chops to make the complications add up reasonably.

At times, it seems like the money shots for the trailer were written first, with the rest of the script thrown in as an afterthought. Any potential twist is telegraphed clumsily. Tone-deaf (and often laughable) dialogue is spouted by a dead-eyed cast that seems more eager to hit the craft table than to show any craft in front of the camera. An extended dream sequence is straight out of "Horror Filmmaking for Hacks." Plot threads are introduced abruptly, then left dangling. In this run at the mythos, the gypsies serve no other purpose than to run around screaming and dying during the first werewolf attack. Eventually, Maleva shows up to offer some obvious advice, but nothing useful. Although I do get the vibe that the old gypsy was Larry's grandmother. But if so, it's another complication that got lost in the revisions and that's pretty much it for the Gypsies.

Then an abrupt detour to London is thrown in for no other reason than to have an American werewolf in London ride a gargoyle. Wait a minute... they've got gargoyles in London? No matter, 'cause after tearing up some CGI London, it's a long walk for Larry back to the estate for a Hulka-mania WWF climax that reads WTF rather than thrilling. Even the werewolf's howl is sad and pathetic, seemingly provided by some intern imitating Warren Zevon.

But, hey... del Toro's hair is perfect.

Part of the disassociation also comes from the lack of empathy del Toro evokes. The brooding bundle of resentment doesn't come across as pure in heart from the moment he rolls into the picture. He's lusting after his dead brother's fiancée Gwen (Emily Blunt) almost from the get-go... and the implication is that it's because she looks like his dead mother.

Okay, then.

Meanwhile, after being bitten Larry spends a month in a coma so's not to interrupt the proceedings with something as boring as showing why Larry and Gwen actually fall in love with each other. Or at least in like enough to explain how he knows where she lives in London. As it is, Larry just spends the course of the movie looking only like he's torn between wanting to fuck her or eat her. Like I said, they try to make it more complicated than it needs to be, while losing the tragedy of the original:

“Even a man who is pure in heart…”

The prosthetic effects and bloody mayhem is solid, though. Credit master monster maker Rick Baker there. But not solid enough to sit through the movie to experience, although there’s an unintentional camp aspect to the mayhem, at odds with the retro tone of the rest of the movie. Aside from Baker's effects work, there is absolutely nothing to recommend this generally boring misfire.

It's a wannabe Tim Burton period piece without the Goth feyness, attention to detail or even a noticeable understanding of the source material.

Y'know... I Love This Photo

2010-01-27T21:26:00.001-08:00

When dealing with the 'net, I have hundreds of graphics thrown at me daily in a never-ending cycle. I see more goddamned cats from behind my desk than I do on the streets.

But a few times a year, I'm impressed enough with an image that jumps up in my face that I have to drop it into my own personal gallery. This is my first of the year:

Well, yeah... she's hot. I'll cop, that's generally a recurring motif with the grabs I save. But there's also the lack of context... who is she? What was the project or event? When?

Without context, the anonymous graphic invites creating the context. Whoever she is seems to be looking at the director, (in whatever context that may be) and her mouth, her hands seem to be saying, "I can't believe I'm doing this..."

But her eye, so vivid and alive, seems to be saying, "... but I love you."

THE BOOK OF ELI (2010)

2010-01-27T18:00:00.001-08:00

The world is having a bad day. It’s been having the same bad day since nigh on 30 years before, when some folks got into an argument about religion. One thing led to another, the sky was opened and the sun was let in at maximum volume. Now America looks like an Aussie post-apocalyptic movie from the 80s, just with more money tossed at it. And a li'l Segio Leone thrown in for spice.

It’s like The Road, but with more warm ’n’ fuzzy. Which ain’t saying much. Motorcycle gangs are still raping and murdering for entertainment, and some folks are eating other folks. Others occupy their time maintaining battlewagons bristling with ghetto armor. No one rides a bicycle. Even in the post-apocalypse, everyone seems to think that bikes are silly. Silly America. So everyone else just huddles in the doorways of ruined buildings looking miserable.

Like this review, The Book of Eli takes way too much time getting around to the story. The story here is that we've got ourselves some desert despot who wants some wandering dude’s Bible. Dude’s name is Eli, and he doesn’t want to hand it over. It’s his Bible. Granted, after the war everyone left who wasn’t blinded by the sun gathered up all the Bibles and burned them, so Eli’s Bible is the only one left. Seems pretty selfish to keep the only copy of The Word to oneself and not spread it, but that’s just the kind of guy Eli is. He’s also the kind of guy who can filet a room full of hard cases with only his bad-assed self and one nasty-looking sword.

He’s a polite sort, though, when he’s not killing people over his Bible. Eli’s played by Denzel Washington, so you know he’s a nice guy at heart. And the despot is played by Gary Oldman, who's introduced reading a biography of Mussolini, just so you know what he's all about. Which means plenty of scenery chewing until he gets his hands on that Bible. And being Oldman, his plans aren’t nice.

But mostly Eli walks. Walks, walks and walks. It takes fifteen minutes for Eli just to wander up to the story, moving in slow motion and with high-end music soaring. After the story gets rolling, sometimes people get in his way and asses get kicked. Despite that, there isn't any real conflict. Sure, people keep trying to take Eli's book away from him and he keeps messing their shit up for trying, but... it's a book. Yeah, a very rare one, and with some amount of power. But it's a book. And as the big, goofy reveal shows...

HEY, SPOILER:

... not one worth dying over. Actually, since he had it memorized all along, it was really, really stupid to die over it. And the bit about him actually being blind entered everything into unnecessary silliness. Served absolutely no purpose. Didn't mesh with what came before, either. Not very New Testament either, when you get down to it. No turning the other cheek and blessed peacemakers in Eli's book.

SPOILER OVER, OKAY?

... and then the story is over, too. Well, sorta. After that the movie keeps wandering along with a voiceover that explains everything to the slower members of the audience.

It’s a nice-looking picture, though. In an aggressively ugly sort of way. Sort of like a spaghetti western with too much sauce. The movie almost seems to be embarrassed to be revolving around a pedestrian Mad Max with a Bible. Or maybe the directors were trying to make the padding look good.

What with the big reveal at the end, and trimmed down to an hour, the film'd feel right at home as one of those old hour-long episodes of The Twilight Zone.

DAYBREAKERS (2009)

2010-01-25T19:54:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the world of 2019, where the day-to-day has become the night-to-night after a vampire plague has turned most of humanity into vampires. The good news is that oil doesn't seem all that important anymore. The bad news is that human blood is the new oil, with fresh supplies dwindling rapidly. But a dour, chain-smoking Hematologist (Ethan Hawke) is on the game, looking for an alternative for a multinational blood chain. Thing is, he's looking into a cure, and that's not in the interest of the corporation's bottom line. Sociopolitical satire and sporadic action sequences ensue.

Which is all well and fine, but as such Daybreakers falls into the inherent weakness of the vampire genre. Too much time spent with the monster morosely waxing existential. Not much joy de morte. Too much telling, not showing. The moments when Willem Dafoe shows up to chew the scenery infuses a li'l hot blood into the proceedings, but feels like they belong in another picture. Like he wandered in off a D2DVD sequel to John Carpenter's Vampires.

Daybreakers never really settles on exactly what kind of horror film it wants to be. Is it a dark comedy, a bloody actioner or heavy-handed sociopolitical allegory? Even Romero can't pull off the latter anymore, and he's an old hand. And while Tarantino may pull off mash-ups, he's spent an inordinate amount of time getting it down. The brothers Spierigs are pups, and don't have the chops yet to try and tackle such a difficult stunt.

What I enjoyed most about the Brothers Spierig's debut zombie slapstick debut Undead was their obvious exhilaration in making a movie without any money, a roll-up-the-sleeves and bark-the-knuckles in a Aussie "get-er-done" delirium. None of that energy seems to be on display with Daybreakers, as if being handed a real budget has sapped their creative spunk. Or worse, exacerbated the creativity to the point that they try to pack two or three movies worth of ideas into one, without having the discipline (yet) to make it cohesive.

Ultimately I found Daybreakers to be no fun. It was sloppily written, a barely connected series of vignettes rather than a cohesive narrative. Subplots are introduced and left mostly unexplored, or resolved abruptly. What should be left as subtext is made overt through dialogue.

But it's not a horrible entry, and the political cartoon aspect might be fun for budding anarchists. And I do respect that it's more ambitious than most American genre multiplex filler.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2009)

2009-11-11T12:01:00.000-08:00

Like The Blair Witch Project before it, the dark horrors of Paranormal Activity comes packaged with way too much hype to live up to. And by the same measure, if you didn't like the former, you probably won't like the latter. If there wasn't already a Blair Witch 2, the video vérité Paranormal Activity would comfortably serve as a long-delayed sequel.

Substituting a nice, upscale apartment for the boonies, here we join a young couple as they try to cope with an escalating amount of the eponymous problem. Setting up a video cam to record their bedroom at night, on reviewing the footage each morning they are disturbed to find that the uglies being bumped in the room aren't typical of your average bedroom... that is, any bedroom north of Hell. Occasionally, someone drops by to tell them to get out. They don't, of course.

Unfortunately, Paranormal Activity doesn't deliver on much more than its creepy premise. There's a whole lot of daytime jibber jabber recorded with the shaky-cam, interspersed with brief moments of nighttime goosebumps. Rinse, lather. repeat. Despite the ballyhoo, it's not all that and it's short a bag of chips, ending just when things start to get interesting. Fortunately, if you don't like the ending, there's a couple of other choices available online.

That said, I prefer the theatrical ending over the other options:

SPOILER:

Don't know if it was the filmmakers' intent, but I liked the suspicion that the girl was out there looking for a new boyfriend... and that there might be some ex'd out exes in her past.

Oddly enough, also was wondering if she had a preference for Jewish boyfriends, and that if she were to settle down with a nice Christian goy, that her demon might lighten up.

That's sort of a joke. But still... the bloody cross implied Christian-based demon.

END SPOILER

Not saying that it's bad, just that the movie seems like it would be more effective on home viewing, on the couch with someone you've been dating only a short time, curled up under a blanket with nothing on except the television as the dark house creaks ominously.

It's too small a movie to fit on the big screen. Still, while I wasn't all that satisfied with the movie, I'm still 100% stoked that a li'l $11,000 movie kicked the SAW franchise in the nuts. Go Team DIY!

COLIN (2008)

2009-11-07T14:01:00.000-08:00

In the eternal debate on Shamblers versus Sprinters, it’s nice to see a new zombie film take the side of the Shamblers and put up one damned fine pro argument. Although the Brit DIY entry Colin starts off on a slo-burn, about a half-hour in it kicks into an extended set-piece involving a zombie attack on what seems to be a sorority house that proves that although they’re all slow and messed up, the sheer numbers of the Shamblers are what’s gonna get you in the end. And front. And whatever piece of flesh they can latch on to and sink their teeth into.

While there are plenty of other reasons to recommend Colin, this setpiece is probably one of the most well-crafted portrayals of zombie mass attack in recent memory. There’s a 70s vibe to the scene, with a grainy, near-fetish aspect to the girls (and a couple of dorky dudes) putting up their last stand, armed only with pots and pans, an umbrella and whatever else solid is on hand.

The five-minute setpiece taps into the creeping dread that used to be the benchmark of the genre, the futility of fighting off the undead masses only to inevitably sink beneath their weight, to be torn apart slowly… slowly… slowly. The scene seems to go on forever, in a good way. It’s refreshing to find a filmmaker that still cares about the potential of the genre, as with the main- streaming of zombies we end up with Hollywood churning out buddy movies clad in zombie rags.

Rewind.

If you’ve heard of Marc Price’s 2009 Cannes sensation (now on DVD), it probably came hag-ridden with the hype that it was the zombie flick that was shot on video for £45 (US$75). Ultimately, the ballyhoo does Price’s film more than a disservice than just serving as good publicity. Because seriously, how many non-filmmakers are gonna be tempted to buy or rent a DIY project that they hear cost less than a keg of Guinness to shoot? Putting aside that, Colin is a solid entry in the genre that should be approached with what it has to offer, rather than how much it cost to make.

Taking up the POV of the eponymous character, we follow Colin as he drops by friend Damien’s flat to wash off some blood. Outside, the zombie apocalypse rages, the popcorn rattle of a pitched battle as unseen forces try to put down the uprising. Colin’s bad day gets worse as he’s jumped by the erstwhile friend and has to put Damien down.

Unfortunately, Colin’s bleeding out himself… and soon wakes up dead. And so it goes, as the living dead boy shambles to Point A to B to see what’s on the London streets for him to eat. Like I mentioned, the first half-hour takes some investment to immerse oneself in. Shot on a handheld Panasonic NV GS250, the motion sickness-inducing cinematography might be a chore for anyone that can’t abide the shaky-cam ethos. But the fact that Price pulled a solid-looking shoot out of a $1,300 consumer cam (and edited the material on Adobe Premiere) is pretty damned impressive in itself… but it’s what he does with the material that is outstanding.

The performances are surprisingly subdued for the material, and assayed by actors that evoke an instant empathy from the viewer. Which is an accomplishment in itself, and necessary. The living only get a few moments here, and for the material to work we need to be pulling for them the moment they step into the frame. The actors pull it off.

There’s a lot of thought on display in Colin, playing almost like a Hal Hartley take on the genre. It approaches the scenario on a more existential level, keeping an eye out for the more mundane aspects of life among the dead. One survivor takes momentary refuge in her bedroom, the walls lined with DVDs. One assumes that the bulk of them are horror, gauging from the ironic mien of the girl. Her back to the door, it begins to rattle.

“They’re coming to get you, Barbra.”

Throughout, the British stiff upper lip is on display as the living acclimate to dodging the Shamblers. It’s obviously a losing battle, but they’re not going down without a fight. Not having access to the arms caches like their American counterparts, bricks and clubs, pipebombs and even slingshots are used to put down the dead. It’s ugly and generally futile, as Colin (and the other Zeds) abide.

Even most of the deaths ring realistic, as one-by-one the living are inexorably tracked down and cornered, dying with clumsy flailing, whines and moans in lieu of a Wilhelm scream.

But Colin isn't all grim nihilism and grody gore effects... also apparent is the British appreciation for absurdity. While not as overt as Shaun of the Dead, there's still some chuckles to be found here, even after death. Fortunately (for the tone of the piece), the humor is situational and not at the expense of the zombies... no Romero-esque clowns staggering around, here. Ironically, while there's plenty of nods to Romero on display, Colin feels more like a Romero film than the man himself has managed of late.

It's one very working class zombie film, evoking Romero in his Martin period.

Not to say that the DIY aspect doesn’t show its duct tape on occasion. There’s one set-piece involving the sole survivor of sorority death row that is so dark, it’s hard to make heads or tails of exactly what the hell is going down until it’s done.

But otherwise there’s so much loving detail that even the weaknesses seem organic, and enough grace notes that it’d be a crime if Colin doesn’t find its audience down the road. Right now it’s only available on DVD in Britain, but hopefully an American distributor picks it up Stateside.

Zombieland

2009-10-14T14:47:00.000-07:00

I suppose Zombieland is okay for a pilot for TV series that somehow made it to the big screen. Unfortunately, the flick never outgrows its made for TV birth and grows into a real movie. Not really a zomedy, it's more a cookiecutter road movie with zombie sprinkles.

Set a couple of months after the inevitable zombie apocalypse, we’re helpfully kept up with what’s happening onscreen by the interminable voiceover of a chuckleheaded teen (a low-budget Michael Cera). Short of a film noir parody, I doubt that there has ever been a movie with more voiceover than Zombieland. Our chatterbox is soon joined by Woody Harrelson (played by Woody Harrelson) and a mercenary pair of sisters (some raccoon-eyed brunette and that kid from Little Miss Sunshine). For some reason, they get it into their tiny little minds that an amusement park 3000 miles away is clear of the undead, and off they go. Along the way they talk, shop and argue. Sometimes, a zombie shambles into the picture and they kill it by way of a set of rules lifted (unattributed) from Max Brooks’ zombie satire, The Zombie Survival Guide. Pausing frequently to set up product placement for Hostess and General Motors, they arrive in LA and drop in on a fading A-lister to give him a handjob (a useless cameo that only serves to stop the movie deader in its tracks).

It’s never made clear how these rocket scientists manage to last as long as they do in a zombie apocalypse, what with leaving doors and gates open and lighting up big neon signs that flash "Eat Here!" for miles around. A whole, wide world of unlocked gunstores and auto dealerships, and these folks can only scrape up enough brain cell activity to either stumble across supplies or steal from other survivors. Maybe it’s weak metaphor, but it doesn’t feel that way.

If Zombieland was a li'l more cartoonish, it might have been something interesting. Unfortunately, most of the creative zombie kills promised in the trailer were featured in the trailer (and in the movie, mostly featured in the opening credits), with the rest of the running time padded out with tone-deaf jibber jabber. The weakest link is trying too hard to be a zombie movie for folks that don't like zombie movies, with too much of the sitcom warm-n-fuzzy hung around its neck. As such, it’s not clever and it’s not suspenseful; one never gets the vibe that any of the leads might not make it to the end credits.

Even worse, it doesn't even bother to try to overcome its sit-com roots. One gets the vibe that the third act of the script was cobbled together in a hurry to get away from the open end a pilot would have left. And not cobbled very well...here the third act completely betrays the two female characters by having them do something so out of character that it only works so that the two boneheaded males can come in and clean up the mess after them. Ah, stupid chicks. What can you do?

Shaun of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead and Dead/Alive are secure as the only zomedies that matter.

Gotta be trippin'....

2009-06-28T23:58:00.001-07:00

So... the word burbling up is that Jacko went out on Demerol. Mmmmm... Demerol. I can dig it. And with his face falling off the way it was, completely understandable.

Like... me and Demerol? We dated briefly.

In a reassuring tone laced with an undercurrent of you-deserve-everything-you're-getting, an emergency room doctor once told me that pancreatitis is the closest a man can come to knowing what it's like to give birth. If that's the case I cannot even begin to figure out why a woman would decide to have a second child. On the other hand, I tried the pancreatitis thing a couple of times myself, so I suppose it all boils down to the same thing ... making the same mistakes all over again just means you're crazy.

Demerol burns as it makes its way up the vein. Not a bad burn, just a disconcerting one. Sorta sexy, if you're into that sorta thing. The pain doesn't go away, but it soon becomes insignificant as other things catch your attention ... like how perception of the hospital room shifts and suddenly the bed seems to be aligned against the wall. Sorta cool, but you don't want to sit up suddenly... you might tumble off the bed and smack your face against the wall. Which is now the floor.

That morning, I had woke up with what seemed to be the nastiest hangover. Not being prone to them, I figured it was just something that was long overdue. It was... just not in the way I thought. A pints-o'-Guinness diet chased with Jägermeister shots (and no food) is not a diet. As the morning wore on, cold sweat settled in and the abdominal pain began to build. And build. Jack-knifing my torso in a futile attempt to ease the agony, I took a cab to the hospital.

Rewind to the ER doc. And a nurse. And an IV drip. Mmmmm... Demerol. Did I mention that Demerol is a blast?

It is ... at first.

Motionless in my bed as the room slowly tumbled, I kept my attention on the television. Vampire hunters were taking on undead hookers with supersoakers filled with holy water. It was very wet-looking and sounding, although not as much so as my roommate's dying gasps. An older gent, it sounded as if he were drowning in his own blood.

Unfortunately for him, he was on an HMO that had decided that he was more expensive than what had been signed off on their terms of agreement, and soon the staff was wheeling him out of the room to presumably dump him out on the street.

More on the street later.

I was on the government's dime, so again they obligingly paused during the course of his evacuation and asked if I "needed" more Demerol. Why the hell not? I was having fun.

Mmmmm... Demerol.

The fun ended early in the morning. I didn't see them at first, but I could sense the ghosts of the patients-past moving in. If you're going to be haunted, an old dark hospital is probably not the best place to be. Soon I began to catch glimpses of them, a hollow-eyed little girl darting peeks over the foot of my bed. Not good, and even worse than that was the shadow lurking ... waiting ... behind the curtain that separated the room. Whispering rustled from intangible throats.

As they say... fuck that noise.

I ripped the IV from the crook of my arm and quickly got dressed. Easing the door closed behind me as I stepped out of the room, the hospital seemed deserted. Almost. A German shepherd padded slowly down the hallway. It looked up at me with dull eyes and I hit the stairwell, winnowing down through the levels until I reached the street.

Well, hell...

The dead were waiting for me. Over the last couple of hundred years a lot of folks have died at that hospital, and I suppose some of them had nothing better to do than to while away the countdown to the End of Days. Loitering near where they drew their last breath. The streets were choked with them, and they had a malevolent mien. I gave them wide berth. Their empty eyes turned to watch as I stumbled by, the only movement they made toward me. I made for my home, zigging occasionally as a specter loomed in my path, zagging away as another turned towards me.

As I made it further from the hospital, the haunts began to taper off. A bloody little boy here at what I assumed was a deadly intersection, a bag lady there where she probably crawled into the bushes one night to sleep off life.

They were finally gone by the time I began to cross the campus. Dawn was near. In the place of mere haunts, the crisp air was filled with the dull thuds of something being torn asunder. I spied colossal trolls, trying to tear the roof off of a nearby auditorium with giant sledgehammers.

"Damn," I realized ... "I'm trippin'."

For What it's Worth...

2009-05-28T23:58:00.000-07:00

Been AWOL awhile, you betcha. Thing is, I got tagged last July to run a late night theatre company... which means that my time's been filled scramblin' to get things done. Doesn't leave alot of time to absorb and comment on other folks work.

Anyway, this has (hopefully) culminated in getting ready to get my own film done. Details going on over at The Deadly Penguins.

For anyone that drops by on occasion to see if there's been any new posts... thanks for the faith. I miss it, but just don't have the juice. At some point, I'll get back in the groove. Just not happenin' until I get this done.

ZOMBIES (Online Comic)

2008-12-27T15:30:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Kung Fu Monkey for the heads up on howitshouldhaveended.com's episodic online comic Zombies...

... it's still early in the game, but looks like it'll be a ball.

ALIEN RAIDERS (2008)

2008-12-27T10:25:00.000-08:00

Okay... the title is horrible. And the DVD cover, while adequate, still isn't exactly something that jumps off the shelf and chases you around the video store...

... but this D2DVD sleeper had me at the opening credits (with ironic use of the Siouxsie track, "Into a Swan") and kept me smiling through the final line.

Granted, I smile at weird things, but...

One of the worst things about the Christmas season is the damned music that sparkles from every public music system. But in a supermarket in podunk Buck Lake, the music becomes the last thing on the shoppers' minds as a vanload of paramilitary toughs roll in and start capping some folks in the aisles...

... but just some folks.

Things can't get any worse, and then they do as the flick shifts into The Thing Hidden in the Mist. Shot on HD (and looking pretty damn' swell), Alien Raiders is a surprisingly entertaining throwback to the early eighties creature features. There's some sly black humor at work, but the emphasis is on keeping the suspense and intermittent mayhem sustained.

Director Ben Rock (part of the original Blair Witch posse) doesn't seem to have had much of a budget to work with here, but delivers more than satisfactorily with what he had on hand. The creature effects are old school prosthetics, with a minimum of CGI wankery.

And with a cast of relatively unfamiliar faces that hit their marks as well (if not better) than the Albas and Gellars that are polluting mainstream horror films, there's no public image getting in the way of characterization. Not to mention that this puppy doesn't let itself get bogged down with needless backstory...

... it hits the ground running and doesn't stop until it rolls through the exit.

Although I'm not saying that it's a new classic. The momentum gets a little slack towards the end, and the "twist" is pretty obvious once our heroes start going all Bush Administration metaphor to figure out who's with us or who's with them...

... although the poignancy of the final line does work to offset that minor weakness. Ultimately, there's a certain Shane Black snap to the dialogue that makes this one stand out.

But hell... I woulda been happy goin' crosstown and paying to see this in the theatre. If more D2DVD entries were this polished, I'd be even more happy staying home and letting the movie come to me.

Images swiped from the flick's MySpace (heh) page.

Just think...

2008-12-05T22:06:00.000-08:00

... if there is an afterlife, there was an e-ticket waiting at the gate for Uncle Forry, to make a beeline towards the table seated with Vinnie, Boris, Lon, Jr., Bela, Lorre, Cushing, Rathbone, Atwill, Wray, Agar...

Um, well... you get the point.

... to keep going 'til he got to Lon Chaney, Sr.

Huzzah!

Personally, I woulda skidded to a halt right at Wray, but that's just me.

There's been a hell of a mad monster party waiting for the old man, and he richly deserves it.

Axed For It, even.

QUARANTINE: Not [REC]ommended

2008-10-17T11:50:00.000-07:00

What the hell is up with Hollywood, anyway? Take a pretty damned good (but still very basic) horror film, set out to do a shot-by-shot remake... and still choose some schmuck who could fuck up someone else’s wet dream to totally screw the pooch.

Last year’s cult phenom [REC] was that rare bird, a genuinely scary horror flick. Maybe at this point it's hard to live up to the buzz, but I was lucky enough to catch it early enough that I was without seriously elevated expectations. In some regards, [REC] shouldn't have worked for me. I knew all along where it was going and where the jolts were going to be... but damn, they still worked. Mostly I think it was because of the foley work (keep the viewer disoriented enough, someone could just say "Boo!" and it'd get a jump)...

... and the perfectly adorable lead Manuela Velasco. You knew she was screwed, but kept hoping otherwise.

But mostly [REC] worked as a down n' dirty li'l horror film that did exactly what it set out to do, poke the lizard part of the brain until it squirmed. No plot or backstory to get in the way, looking like it was shot over a weekend on a Canon XL2 and some pocket change, it fits my theory of what a contemporary horror film should be to a T.

Of course, since it was a Spanish movie it couldn’t be sold to American audiences because … well, subtitles and all that. So Hollywood remade it. Pretty much shot-for-shot… except for some leaden padding thrown in to bring the flick up from a perfectly efficient 80 minutes to a wearisome 90.

Plus...

"Say... why don't we use the final shot of the film in our ad campaign?"

Right.

Biting-on-tinfoil, sorority girl-cum-TV reporter Angela (Jennifer Carpenter of Dexter) and her cameraman tag along with the crew of a fire station as they go about their typical shift, until the typical goes all FUBAR when a routine call suddenly involves neo-zombies infesting an apartment complex. Well, rabies-crazed gut crunchers shrieking out of dark shadows and the naught, but same thing. And apparently the authorities have a zombie contingency plan, ’cause before you know it, the place is sealed off with everyone inside being picked off one-by-one by the frothing critters and then jumping up to join in on the mayhem.

As a remake, Quarantine misses what made [REC] so effective. Part of the problem is Carpenter, whose character is such a snotty twit that within five minutes you want something really fucking bad to jump out of the shadows and make her STFU already. A bigger part of the FAIL is the director. One has to wonder what was going up the Sony suits noses as they handed over the reins to John Dowdle, whose The Poughkeepsie Tapes (another found footage riff, this time about camera-happy serial killers) had been freshly laughed off the screen at audience previews.

And give the idiot (and his brother) a screenplay credit for... what? Paying someone to translate the original script? Of course, what's to be expected. I mean, there's a reason why The Poughkeepsie Tapes hasn't hit the screens like promised, right? Quarantine shows why. Buggering up the whole video verité approach, this feels about as real as a SNL sketch. And you have to realize we're getting into a interesting set of affairs when Euro actors can act Hollywood cosplayers beneath the table.

I bought the game in [REC]. I didn't buy one second of Quarantine... the actors didn't sell it, and the director didn't pimp it.

But then, I'm of the school that thinks that if you throw too much money at a horror film, the focus shifts to making the money back rather than delivering the goods (that is, aiming for the shallow expectations of a mass market rather than the niche market with higher expectations).

The sad thing is that I was actually sorta looking forward to the remake... in all reality; the original is only accessible to a very narrow market (subs and all). Business-wise (admittedly, countering myself here) it makes perfect sense to do a shot-by-shot remake...

... provided that the director sits down and deconstructs what made the source material work. I didn't get the vibe that Mr. Poughkeepsie was that savvy. Or that maybe his horror headspace is with serial killers, and not zombies.

Too bad, really. [REC] had some minor problems of its own that could have been tweaked for the better in the remake. The third act gets a little silly, what with some Vatican cover-up providing a tenuous source for the outbreak, recounted by a magic reel-to-reel tape deck that manages to work without a power source. But [REC] pulls up to recover nicely in the final stretch with a perfectly ghastly night-vision reveal of Patient Zero.

Admittedly, by alluding to a doomsday cult instead of quasi-demonic possession, Quarantine grounds the Why of the matter a little more satisfactorily. Unfortunately, that’s the only finessing that comes off favorable. And they keep the magic tape deck... although the device gives out absolutely zero information this time.

"Say... what am I doing in this attic, and how'd I get here?"

But I suppose the biggest weakness of [REC] is the ubiquitous Shaky-Cam. Usually, the conceit doesn’t bother me. It goes with the territory of the mis en scene of video verité.

But with Quarantine, Mr. Poughkeepsie takes the Shaky-Cam to a whole 'nother level… or down to, as if his cameraman was taping the proceedings duct-taped to the back of a bucking gimp. Seriously, it’s hard to swallow that the character behind the camera would even qualify to be a volunteer at a public access station, let alone being on a payroll as some supposedly hot-shot camera jockey.

In addition to the epileptic framing, we also get the new-and-improved Blurro-Cam, with a picture that swims in-n-out of focus constantly… except in the flick’s most ludicrous scene, where the cameraman pounds in the face of one of the infected with the business end of his camera, and the equipment suddenly decides that it has a deep focus setting... the blood on the lens as crisp as the mayhem being inflicted. Not to mention that that must be one badass camera to take that kind of abuse.

Actually, that was the deal breaker right there. One really, really stupid moment that sums up the project itself…

… in deep focus.

HAPPY 40th Z-DAY!

2008-10-01T08:07:00.000-07:00

Night of the Living Dead made its debut on October 1st of 1968... and forever changed what was on the ol' undead menu. No more shambling around, following someone else's orders... the zombie subgenre was given a new life, so to speak. And for that matter, changed the rules on what you were getting in for when you walked (or drove) into a theater to watch a silly ol' horror film.

Being six or seven when I saw it on a drive-in screen back in the twilight of the Summer of Love, I'm sure the flick did its share of hardwiring on my impressionable li'l brain...

... so many thanks to George Romero, John Russo, Russell Streiner, Judith O'Dea, Bill Hinzman, Marilyn Eastman, Judith Ridley, Kyra Schon, Rudy Ricci, Chilly Billy, George Kosana...

... and a special deep red rose in memory of Duane Jones, Karl Hardman and Keith Wayne.

TWILIGHT OF THE DEAD

2008-06-09T00:33:00.000-07:00

October 1st will mark the 40th anniversary of when George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead began to flicker across drive-in and grindhouse screens across America, irrevocably breaking the musty template of horror and replacing it with a grittier, nastier new one.

With the 1968 release of the ground-breaking (ahem) film, Romero not only redefined the zombie film, but with the film’s unheard of (until then) nihilistic ending, immediately altered the game plan of the entire horror genre. Suddenly, it was possible – even expected – that everyone would die in the end. But in the context of its time, that ending can never be topped… the audience took a bullet in the head along with doomed Ben.

It also opened up the horror film as a vehicle for metaphor, as critics gradually approached the film as a take on the civil rights movement and the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family. Whether or not that was intentional on Romero’s part is debatable, but with 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, the satiric element was firmly in place as the zombies shambled about a shopping mall in the drop-dead threads of the ultimate consumers.

In the ensuing years, Romero’s zombie mythos also evolved into being an inadvertent snapshot of the era in which they were released, developing not so much on the satire but by the technique and general definition of each entry. The newsreel vérité of Night, the disco candy colors of Dawn, the early-eighties military industrial gloss (and the emphasis of effects over content) of Day of the Dead.

And in a way, as each film is a mirror held to the era in which it was made, they're also a snapshot of where Romero was at in the same period.

By 1985, Romero was a captive of his fanbase, one that seemed defined by the more vocal gorehounds who declared in no uncertain terms that a Romero film slapped with an R-rating instead of Unrated was not a Romero film worth seeing. Which in these days of the studio fondness for PG-13 horror films seems like another case of not knowing when you’re having it good.

By the time he reached the nineties, Romero seemed to be spinning his wheels as he fell in line with the rest of the entertainment industry and succumbed to what seemed to be the easy currency found in a remake of Night.

It took twenty years before Romero seemed to realize that a handful of rabid letters (in the days before mass rabid posts on message boards) to magazines with such silly names as Fangoria shouldn’t define his oeuvre, and so he took The Suits’ money to deliver an R-rated zombie film, 2005’s Land of the Dead.

But after a twenty year absence, the zombie film he delivered had become more self-aware and obvious, the filmmaker’s message wielded like a sledge to the detriment of the film being successful as a horror film. It didn't help that he had apparently succumbed to a cinematic Stockholm Syndrome, obviously empathizing more with the lurching dead than with his breathing protagonists.

While admittedly the relatively large budget provided by Universal (ironically enough, kicked down after the multiplex success of the 2004 remake of Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead) allowed him to deliver a more polished entry, with name actors and plenty of CGI to quicken the filmmaking process. But the fourth entry in his mythos seemed a shadow of what the man had achieved before. The comfort of a relatively big budget leeched the innate hunger of the low-budget process that conversely adds to the desperation and fear of failure that plays itself on the screen. The fans weren’t happy and they were vocal about it… and in an era of the immediate communication of the internet and text messages, that unhappiness had a hotline that essentially closed the film on opening night.

The sting of that rejection comes through loud and clear with last year’s fifth Dead film, Diary of the Dead, which hit the shelves on DVD after mostly bypassing the multiplex circuit.

Here Romero returns to his roots, grabbing the single camera and hitting the ground running in the independent fashion he started out from back in the twilight of the Sixties.

A prequel of sorts to the first entry, and shot in the video vérité style of The Blair Witch Project, the film purports to be the found footage of a team of young filmmakers that find that while they’re shooting a monster movie as a student project in rural Pennsylvania, a zombie apocalypse is suddenly unreeling everywhere where one person can bite another. They jump into their Winnebago and hit the road, documenting the chaos and human element as they roll along.

As a zombie film it doesn’t match the roll-up-the-sleeves hunger of Romero’s early films, and in a lot of ways the subgenre he single-handedly created has left him faceless in the shambling masses of the knockoffs. But as its own entity, Diary is a more than adequate part of the mythos.

For the first time since Night the shambling dead actually look menacing, as opposed to the arms-outstretched cartoons caught in their day job uniforms that has been the Romero signature since Dawn. While the satire (this time around casting a weary eye on the explosion of the “Look at Me!” media) is admittedly as heavy-handed as in Land, Romero softens the delivery with an almost bemused approach. While not exactly a comedy, Diary still acknowledges the underlying absurdity of the situation...

... of both a zombie apocalypse, and of his role in the mythos he spawned.

It is his most humor-driven entry of the series... and when you step back and look at everything after Night, all of them can be taken as pitch-black comedies. No new news there, of course. Dawn and Day had their comedy, but humor was more stealth... a balance maintained in order to please the fanbase. But in the years that separated Day and Land, I think (armchair psychology, here) that Romero became more comfortable with his situation... that he had hit a home run with his first swing, and no matter how much he wanted to play another metaphor, everyone put him back in his place.

He made a monster movie to get noticed, and he got noticed like nothing else. And a very special place was reserved for him...

... making zombie movies.

Not just zombie movies, but by the demands of his fanbase unrated ones that trapped him into not really making them the way he wanted. The implication seeming to be that Romero's narratives were superfluous, that his professional purpose was to serve as a conduit to showcase Tom Savini's gore effects, to top what had topped the entries before. It must have been frustrating. He had things to say, observations on the world around him... that he was only allowed to really say through the lowliest form of subgenres, the zombie flick.

There's a certain absurdity to his situation, and I think that he's more at ease with letting the absurdism come out in his forays, these days. There was a lot of stealth comedy in Land, such things as the zombie cop taking a chunk of a looter's arm, or "a bite out of crime.”

Diary is the next step towards Romero just saying screw all and making a flat-out zombie comedy. Maybe it'll be perceived as a case of biting the hand that feeds him, but where he's at in his life, I don't think he's all that hungry anymore.

So... Diary of the Dead is what it is. A zombie movie made by someone that hasn't been able to really escape that niche for the last forty years. He's the Zombie Dude, but (like how the Ramones never really seemed able to capitalize on the movement they spawned) he's never really reaped the bennies for the mythos he created.

So at this point, it comes across as if he's making the zombie flicks he wants to make. And laughing at the absurdity of it all.

More power to him.

Out of the House Right Now...

2007-12-26T21:26:00.000-08:00

For what it's worth, I've been catching up on other things. One of them I kicked off today, a serial novel I'll be posting a chapter a day from as I edit it into something readable.

Introducing HOMETOWN SECURITY. It's a Red State Lampoon. Read at your own risk of irritation, depending on your headspace.

I'm calling it a lampoon instead of satire because, well... the humor is sort of cheap and mean-spirited. But hopefully still amusing. Its roots are more Thomas Nast than Jonathan Swift.

Not that (as far as I recall) that Nast was mean-spirited. He created the face of Santa Claus. And Uncle Sam. But... he was primarily a political cartoonist. And political cartoons are lazy satire. Damnably effective, but a minimalist like Tom Toles can crank out a Pulitzer Prize-winning one in fifteen minutes.

Anyway...

As for the tone, I'm from Ohio... which means I'm a bit conflicted about the whole Red State/Blue State thing. But as I grew up closer to Cleveland than to Cincinnati, I lean towards the Blue.

But like a lot of folks from where I grew up, I've got some of that ol' Warren G. Harding Republican blood pounding through my veins. I can admit that dubious connection now with some sort of pride, seeing that he's no longer considered the worst President in the history of the United States.

So... that pretty much means I'll be taking potshots at both sides. And to keep it simple, it's set in Wyoming, not Ohio. Actually, it just boils down to that there's less people to piss off in Wyoming, so there you go.

If you join me, feel free to point out typos and places where I didn't convincingly fake knowing what the hell I was going on about.

The way it looks, at a chapter a day, this should wrap up by the end of January.

THE MIST... Chapter and Reverse

2007-12-04T17:40:00.000-08:00

Y'know, I found a way to bump THE MIST up to a 100% in the personal satisfaction ranking... in that if you approach THE MIST in a Ms. Carmody kind of headspace, the ending of the film actually makes a whole lot more sense, and doesn't feel like just a cheap shot on Darabont's part.

Just get all Old Testament on its ass.

Of course, this also needs to take into account that the God of the Old Testament seemed to have a weird sense of humor, and didn't exactly come across as logical to begin with; what with such things as demanding that Abraham sacrifice his son to prove how faithful the man was, and that whole bet with Satan over how much grief Job would put up with.

And He seemed to like throwing plagues around just for the hell of it. Among other things.

So taking as fact (well, within the context of the film) that a vengeful God truly exists, that He has allowed man to inadvertently unleash the End of Days and annoited Ms. Carmody His small town messiah (remember how that bug crawls up her blouse, looks her in the eyes and then flies off?).

What if Carmody wasn't actually crazy... say, any crazier than the firey-eyed biblical prophets from the days when Giants walked the Earth and plagues descended on a vengeful God's whim?

That after offering up the young soldier as a blood sacrifice, the supermarket then lies in a state of grace... until another sacrifice is required?

But by martyring the Voice of God and leaving the supermarket, in his hubris Drayton incurs the displeasure of that vengeful God. Sort of an Abraham that sacrifices Issac because God just decides to allow the angels arrive too late.

And as the Army rolls by in the end, no one goes to him, acknowledges him except for the mother (that he refused to play The Samaritan to) who in passing looks down at him accusingly... as if she sees into his heart and senses the betrayal he has wrought. And as the sole remaining infidel, he has become an Outcast.

Um. Of course, that would make God the Antagonist of the piece. Whoops.

Hey... it's no sillier than interpreting the original KING KONG to be an allegory about the difficulty of then-contemporary black males to mainstream in 30's society.

THE MIST Opportunity

2007-12-02T11:04:00.000-08:00

As we know, Sturgeon’s Law dictates that 90% of everything is crud. Generally, that’s applied in a broad overview, and not applied to individual cases.

But here, Frank Darabont’s long-awaited adaptation of Stephen King’s novella is 90% the perfect horror film.

And so it goes (arguably) as to what the other 10% is.

While it seems churlish to complain about something that comes so close to succeeding spectacularly in a genre where most entries crash and burn in the first reel and then keep rolling along in a slow motion fireball of idiocy, I’ll have to admit that complaining about what doesn’t work (as opposed to lauding what does) is my nature. I’m just drawn that way.

And of course, nothing is ever absolutely so.

But what does work here is so good n’ plenty that it seems such a damnable shame when everything just falls apart in the end. Especially since what is apparent was the perfect ending arrives and Darabont feels obligated to just keep plowing along until things just become ludicrous.

I’ll just pull on my tattered fanboy t-shirt and sulk that King’s original ending was perfect.

It took me twenty-seven years to realize that, but not until I saw Darabont’s idea on how it should all end (not with a whimper, but a *BANG*BANG*BANG*BANG*CLICK!). When I first read “The Mist”, I’ll admit that I wasn’t exactly happy with the resolution... or lack of. Like the protagonist’s mother, I’m not a big fan of ambiguity when it comes to my entertainment, and King’s novella was about as ambiguous as you could get.

And incongruously enough, Drew Struzan's poster art for John Carpenter's THE THING (a movie infamous for having the courage to go with an ambiguous, downbeat ending) is given a prime opening reel cameo.

But ending aside, as Stephen King adaptations go, I’d say that tentacles down this is the best of a sorry lot. With only a few minor alterations, Darabont assays the proceedings with admirable fidelity.

After an atypical storm knocks out the power in a small Nor’ Eastern town, the residents head to the local supermarket to pick up some supplies to bide them over until repairs are made.

Muzak pipes and secondary characters make their entrances... and soon after, so does the eponymous mist. And with the mournful, chilling wail of the town’s air raid siren, THE MIST shifts gears and rolls up its sleeves. And the minute that sucker went off, I got chills. Sort of interesting though, in that I don't know how much power that wail will have with audiences born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But from that moment on, my heart was pounding, my leg jittering. Occasionally, I jumped. Squeaked even... but in a manly way, not like a little girl. If monster movies are your bag of popcorn, then I'd recommend seeing this in a theater.

As the preternatural mist rolls in, it cloaks and isolates the market. Inside, the consumers trolling the aisles for supplies abruptly find themselves to be the consumables as a man bursts in through the front doors and screams that there's something out there, and it's weird and pissed off. Don't be afraid of the mist... just what's in it. Soon, barely glimpsed beasties tap against the fragile plate glass wall that separates them from sudden and grisly death.

"Cleanup on Aisle 5..."

It doesn’t help matters much that within their group is a bible-shouter that is slowly gathering together a cabal of recruits who think that offering up a blood sacrifice to an angry God is the only way out.

Sooooo...

Man, this is gonna be one bitter pill for any touchy Christians in the audience. I'm no fan of the more extreme of the bunch myself, but Darabont lays it on with the perceived bashing pretty thick here. More time was spent setting up the loopy Ol' Testament gal and her growing band of bloodthirsty followers than was on the external threat. Seriously... the film is called THE MIST, not THE CRUCIBLE GOES SHOPPING.

The Devil is in the subtext, and here Darabont seems to be having problems with what exactly he's trying to imply.

Overtly it seems pretty obvious, and the tagline says it all: "Fear Changes Everything." As Our Lady of Perpetual Gloom and Doom fires up her band of fear-fueled zealots, their first true blood sacrifice is a soldier only a couple of weeks away from being sent to Iraq.

I sort of get the vibe that Darabont doesn't think that we're fighting a war just over oil. Trouble is, the underlying point he seems to be playing with throughout the narrative doesn't make it all the way to the resolution.

Ah... the ending. As it is, the coda is a either a mean-spirited sucker punch, a muddled metaphor or in its way a validation of the bible-shouter's belief system. In some regards, the ending feels so unearned and Old Testament in its own right that it feels out of place and context with what preceded it.

I suppose it’s not so much that I had a problem with how Darabont ended it, just how he executed it. Not because I'm opposed to downbeat endings (NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD has a perfect ending), but because I felt that it didn't earn it. It just seemed too overwrought to me (not the characters’ head space, but the execution).

And then it just kept going... and going...

After showing admirable restraint throughout the movie, Darabont just completely lost it and went with the overt manipulation. He tries so hard not to fall into the Spielberg trap of blowing a perfectly fine movie by getting all hamfisted and manipulative in the final stretch that he goes so far around the bend that he falls into Spielberg's tracks.

One example was the Dead Can Dance song. Now, I happen to like Dead Can Dance. But the minute Lisa Gerrard started her caterwauling, the power of THE MIST literally began to dissipate. As the rest of the film had almost no music bed, to throw in something so joltingly out of context and on the nose ripped me from the narrative.

Maybe Darabont didn't think that he could get away with cranking up Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" and cutting to black.

And because of that I was reminded that all I was seeing was smoke and mirrors, and that as the characters met their fate it just seemed like a narrative choice (and so a cheap shot), not an organic conclusion.

Of course, when the beast finally arrives on DVD, there’s always the chance that Darabont will throw the natterers like me a bone, and toss in the ever-popular Alternative Ending that King envisioned. If so, hopefully that one will be sans Gerrard and the soundtrack emphasis will be on the spooky sounds that accompany our doomed passengers along their final trek through the mist.

I Rant... Therefore I AM LEGEND

2007-11-30T09:59:00.000-08:00

Recently it was announced that director Francis Lawrence was back at work on the Will Smith version of I AM LEGEND, doing a reshoot on the ending. According to CHUD, the Suits weren’t happy with the ending. They wanted something more positive.

Having read the shooting script by über-hack Akiva Goldsman, I was perplexed: How in the hell could they make the ending more positive than what was in the shooting script?

Take the most grating ending you can imagine, slam your head against the wall and rethink that ending, and you might come close to imagining how poorly (considering the entire point of the source material) it was tied up. Well, if you're imagining a gathering of multi-cultural children holding hands and singing “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” ala that Coke® commercial from the Seventies, you hit your head too hard... but it's close.

[SPOILER]

After besting the lead mutant in a fistfight (as the other mutants obligingly just stand around) the next day Neville and his new family load up a truck to rendezvous with another human outpost.

And the dog is cured. Actually, everyone is cured because just in time, friggin' Neville finally figured out the secret recipe.

CUE: Sunshine and rainbows.

[/SPOILER]

I mean, Jeebus... how are they going to top that for an upbeat ending? Hand everyone a puppy as they leave the theater?

But then, in my outrageously humble fucking opinion, the entire script was buggered from the start. An early sign things were going amiss was the relocation of the setting from the outskirts of Los Angeles (at the time of the novel’s writing, a middling sized city) to New York.

Yeah, New York. Because if everyone in the world suddenly turned into vampires (or zombies… or zompires), you'd want to keep refuge in what is one of the biggest metropolitan areas of the world.

The script starts off like biting on tinfoil...

... it's three pages of an extended com- mercial on the sheer macho exuberance of driving a '08 Shelby GT500. Although to be charitable, it also seems to be a nod towards the opening of THE OMEGA MAN.

But that begs the question: why not just call the film that and go from there?

Then it's thirty pages of Neville and his dog puttering about the empty city before we get around to some (brief) mutant action. And, well... generally the rest of the script plays like Goldsman has a pretty high level of disdain for the material, or that he's solidly aiming for the 13-year-olds in the audience. He blithely disregards maintaining any sort of adherence to his own internal logic, and pretty much defangs any sense of dread as to Neville's plight... the piece is more focused on the loneliness of the last man on Earth rather than any threat that exists at night.

In the script, it comes across that despite three years of being the only human left in New York, the millions of mutants that prowl the night have never been able to pinpoint his brownstone refuge. Or even seem to be looking for him. Actually, aside from about three set pieces, there's really no mutant action at all, just Neville talking to himself, his dog, and... well, a kid.

Actually, I didn't have too much of a problem with adding a kid to the mix, although traditionally you're supposed to wait until the sequel to pull that stunt. And that as applied here, it just seems like an excuse for Goldsman to just retype two pages from the screenplay for SHREK. Verbatim. Maybe he just was dying to field test the dual dialogue option in his Final Draft screenwriting software.

My issue was how they introduced the kid character and his escort, with a plot device so anathema to the internal logic of the world that Will Smith's character would have been perfectly justified in stepping back, looking up and saying, "Ah Hell no, tell me you didn't just do that!"

There’s so much deus ex machina hovering around the script that it probably needed its own airport.

Also, I can see where producer/writer Goldsman might have some problems selling the subtext of the source material in this day and age; Matheson was basically saying that there is no help from God and that evolution rules.

Whoops... That might alienate half your multiplex crowd right there. Which also brings about casting issues: on the page, Anna is implied to be British... but as the film gets cast, she ends up being played by a Brazilian. I suppose the Suits figured that Middle America couldn't bear the sight of Smith macking on a white chick.

Cripes, under the premise, can't the filmmakers take the opportunity to cross that color line? I mean, Chuck Heston got it on with Rosalind Cash…

... but thirty-five years after THE OMEGA MAN, we still can’t handle something as innocuous as some black dude kissing a white chick on a wide screen? Does pandering to the delicate sensibilities of the crackers hold more sway than just getting with the 21st century?

Sheesh.

But then, there is also some intentionally bizarre subtext action going on... the weirdest one was having the introduction to the mutants as having taken refuge in the United Nations building. Um. It's not inadvertent, because Goldsman throws in an aside about the traditional ineffectiveness of the UN.

I find it hard to imagine why the film is still called I AM LEGEND... any subtext attached to that title has been removed to the point that it'd be like maintaining the title of THE SCARLET LETTER after doing an adaptation that removes any mention of adultery. Yeah, the Demi Moore vehicle came close, but still didn’t go that far.

There comes a point where you have to wonder why they even bother to option the original book, when it really has nothing to do with the source material... other than making sure no one else attempts to mount a faithful production.

Although to be fair, there comes a point where the source material becomes irrelevant. This is not an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend”. It’s a Will Smith vehicle that shares the same name. It’s almost like being a huge fan of James Herbert’s “The Fog” and getting upset that John Carpenter’s THE FOG had nothing to do with the story.

Um… sort of. Although now that I think about it, Herbert’s novel would still make for one hell of an apocalyptic movie.

But then, the screenplay for I AM LEGEND just doesn’t even hold up in its own small way. Although, most of the things that aggravated me about the script were the same kind of things that have people rolling their eyes at me and saying, "Sheesh... it's just a movie."

This script was written for those people.

I AM LEGEND

2007-11-17T19:38:00.000-08:00

What is it about Richard Matheson’s seemingly adaptation-friendly novella I Am Legend that makes producers want to make it into something that it isn’t? At what point did some Suit decide that it would make for a boffo Will Smith action movie?

Although while it does have its action moments, it is by no means an action driven narrative.

It’s a fairly meditative piece with a straight-forward story arc, with some flashbacks to fill in the backstory. But in the 50-odd years since its debut, why hasn't there ever been -- or will be -- a proper adaptation?

The novella picks up with the lonely plight of Robert Neville, a man of the Los Angeles suburbs who has watched his wife and child succumb to a deadly bacterium that has also swept his city and the world, leaving him literally the last living man on earth. But not the last man, as a side-effect of the plague causes the victims to return from the grave as bloodthirsty ghouls. Sort of like vampires, but without the table manners.

By day he tracks down the creatures and disposes of those he finds sheltered from the sun with a stake through the heart, and by night he barricades himself in his fortified ranch-style home, bulbs of garlic serving as a moat and mirrors propped to dissuade the approach of the foul-minded trespassers.

The work has been adapted twice already since its publication in 1954, by the Italians in 1964 as the Vincent Price vehicle THE LAST MAN ON EARTH and again as the Charlton Heston camp classic THE OMEGA MAN in 1971.

It was also the acknowledged inspiration for George A. Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and by extension the catalyst for the entire zombie subgenre as we know it.

But in all three adaptations (including the upcoming Will Smith version), everything that made the story compelling, made it something more than just some proto-bunker horror story -- was jettisoned.

Although if nothing else, Smith's I AM LEGEND makes THE LAST MAN ON EARTH look lavishly faithful to the material.

In some cases, I can understand why they didn't want to take all the perceived baggage on board. There's a nifty streak of satire running through the story, and Christianity for one doesn't come out looking too good. Obviously, that's not exactly a demographic you want to alienate from filing in to see the latest Will Smith vehicle (as in movie, not the extended commercial for the 2008 Mustang Shelby GT500 that he maneuvers through the empty streets in the opening of the film).

But the most intriguing aspect of the novella is that it took the old fashioned vampire template and worked out a scientific rationalization for the mythos. But with THE OMEGA MAN and I AM LEGEND, the vampires have been reduced to garden variety mutants, rendering the source material's raison d' etre moot. And with that goes one of the more powerful moments of the novella, as Neville's wife... well, read the book.

Even worse... they change the ending. Long story short, not all those Neville staked during the day were vampires. Some victims of the plague didn't fully succumb but still were forced to sleep by day, seemingly just more of the vampire ilk. Among those folks -- the next step in the progression of human evolution -- he was viewed as a literal boogeyman.

Pardon my fucking French, but that's the whole fucking point of the fucking title.

Our wiggy hero has become to the next race as the vampires once were to man. The good guy turns out to be really the bad guy, if you're willing to step back from your bias. Neat stuff.

Too bad that no one who has adapted it seems to get the punchline.

Actually, there's always the book and nothing Hollywood can do will change that. But that still doesn't make the process any less confounding.

One of the odd things about the creative process in Hollywood is how much fidelity the movie makers abide by when adapting works of utter and complete dross that has been met with critical disdain but taken up adoringly by the public (as with THE DA VINCI CODE). But when approaching works that have critical and popular cred within the speculative fiction realm, these producers feel no qualms about alienating the core audience that made the work timeless in order to pander to what they figure the perceived cud-chewing masses demand.

The Will Smith vehicle I, ROBOT, as an example, showed how contrary to the source material The Suits are willing to go, ultimately delivering a debasement of the mythos that Asimov had created, filming an alternate universe where hordes of robots scheme to destroy mankind. Or some such nonsense.

One could venture that it's a cultural knee-jerk reaction in the century-old East versus West Coast pissing contest in pursuit of popular entertainment dominance.

Books versus films, y'know?

The damnable thing is that as the story plays out on the page, it would make for one nifty low budget film. The problem is, everyone wants to throw too much money at it... which in turn, forces the project to become something that it's not.

Another Night in THE ASYLUM

2007-11-16T20:39:00.000-08:00

You gotta admire Grade Z.5 genre distributor The Asylum. In keeping up with that fine ol’ Roger Corman tradition, they've made a name throwing out the cinematic knockoffs to suck up some of the ballyhoo floating around whatever Hollywood big-budget success is set to rake it in.

Infamous for such D2DVD efforts as PIRATES OF TREASURE ISLAND and THE DA VINCI TREASURE, The Asylum actually might have made a better profit off of mockbusters SNAKES ON A TRAIN and INVASION OF THE POD PEOPLE than their big studio counterparts did with the real deal.

In the process, they've also more than likely confused some of those... ahem, slower folks that kept waiting in vain for Johnny Depp or Tom Hanks to show up in their bottom shelf rental. Gotcha, Sucka!

And coming hot on the heels of this summer's amazing colossal TRANSMORPHERS, now we get…

Instead of Will Smith, we get some guy by the name of Mark Dacascos. From what I hear, some people know the name. If so, most of the budget probably went into his pocket.

After some unexplained plague wipes out most of humanity, Dacascos idles about his remote cabin up in the hills over Los Angeles. It can’t be too long after the apocalypse, because a heavy haze still hangs above the deserted streets of the city. He passes his time popping pills, moping over his dead wife and kid and getting pissed off at alarm clocks.

Sometimes he goes out for a drive and places timebombs at the base of poles that say No Smoking or No Digging. It seems that the man has authority issues. Or he might just be cranky about being stuck in the post-apocalypse with the world’s most annoying laptop.

If Apple got coerced into paying for product placement here, it wasn’t a good investment… Dacascos’ laptop sounds like some mid-sixties mainframe as it chatters and beeps at him. I know it was bad foley work, but it still in some absurd way makes me hesitant about switching from my PC to a G5. It’s those little things, you know?

But the point of the flick is the mutants.

Unlike THE OMEGA MAN, the mutants here don’t wear black cowls. They do wear rubber suits, but you’re not supposed to notice that they're suits... but the whole suspension of disbelief thing ain't happening here. The suits are pretty bad.

Anyway, anytime the mutants come sniffing around his cabin, Dacascos takes a time out from trippin’ and steps outside to kick their asses. He’s good at kicking their asses. He’s got the moves down and knows how to swing a nasty nunchuck… that’s probably why some people have heard of him.

Of course, it’s a little easier for him to kick their asses because the damned things are slowed down by their silly rubber suits. What the hell is up with that? Most micro- budget filmmakers go with a zombie or vampire flick because it’s less FX intensive. Throw some gray make-up on your extras, douse them with fake blood and have them lurch around: zombies. Or throw a pair of fangs in their mouths and have them make catfaces at each other: vampires.

Can’t get more budget efficient than that, short of just having them get naked and fake having sex. For what it's worth, there’s no sex in I AM OMEGA, fake or otherwise.

Instead, here they sank what was left of the budget into rubber CHUD suits. So much so that the filmmaker had to resort to photocopying sheets of paper to scotch tape to any surface that demanded a No Smoking or No Digging legend.

It also doesn’t help matters any that the mutants don’t give a whit whether it’s day or night, so you get plenty of full daylight opportunities to see latex flaking from the suits.

Okay, I'm done with the damned rubber suits.

Meanwhile, back at the noisy computer…

It’s the end of the world, and the poor dude still has his dinner interrupted by a telemarketer. Well, not a tele- marketer… but somehow, some stranger that's a dead ringer for his dead wife manages to find a way to set up a live video feed to contact him. Mutants have eaten the rest of her traveling companions, and she needs his help to get out of the city. How she got his number isn't something to give much thought to, because scripter Geoff Meed sure as hell didn't. Oddly enough, she's tech savvy enough to link up with him, but not common sense savvy enough to just jump into a car and hightail it.

He blows her off. Why? It’s not clear. But over the course of the first half of the movie the guy has been getting loopier and loopier, so I suppose it fits within the character.

I suppose.

Maybe he just didn’t want to risk complicating the title of the film. Not that it matters, because not too long after that a couple of road warriors show up in a beater van from nearby Antioch. One of them is played by the screenwriter, which probably explains why some points of the narrative don't exactly, um... make sense. Spreading himself a little thin, y'know? They want Dacascos to join them to rescue the chick, who is immune from the plague.

“Help us, Obi Wan Dacascos… you’re our only hope.”

He still ain’t having it and -- the road warriors having left the Holy Hand Grenade back in Antioch -- one of them uses the Holy Bazooka to blow up Dacascos' house. It being pretty damned pointless to argue with that one, he agrees to join them. Civilization being dead and all, you’d figure folks would find less complicated ways of going about things…

… like just driving into the city instead of deciding to scuttle along through the dank sewer tunnels beneath the streets, where any ol’ CHUD could be lurking in the shadows.

Fortunately, the mutants have retained some sense of play nice and wait until Dacascos has rolled in to rescue the girl before they try to peel the flimsy sheets of plywood from her barricade. Or maybe they held off because KEEP OUT was spray-painted across the sheets… but once Dacascos winnows through a gap, they decide that they not gonna play that game anymore.

Even better, as the damsel in distressed jeans, Jennifer Lee Wiggins is cute and engaging, and so the movie immediately picks up. Even better-er, now that he has someone who knows how to act to play off of, Dacascos’ acting doesn’t seem half bad itself.

Finally.

With Dacascos no longer having to carry the flick muttering to himself and generally acting wiggy, the last act is actually pretty entertaining. Mutants finally show up in more than groups of two and there’s ticking bombs in the background.

While it’s no THE OMEGA MAN (which itself was no THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, which was no I Am Legend, which the upcoming I AM LEGEND seriously won’t be) I AM OMEGA is still not without its pleasures. There's a sly sense of humor about itself at work and referential touches that are are surprisingly understated.

Technically, it’s a lot better than one would expect from D2DVD… although a little more attention to small details like internal logic and less obsession with rubber suits would have helped immensely.

Of Gods and FAMOUS MONSTERS

2007-11-15T09:57:00.000-08:00

Recently, Arbogast posted an image of the 100th issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland. The cover elicited an unexpected wave of nostalgia, a recollection of the August day back in 1973 when the 11-year-ol’ me was able to scrap meager resources together (a whole buck-twenty- five!) and finally buy an issue of the mag.

Up until then, I’d seen it on the shelves of the quaint country store near where I was being brought up, but could only thumb through the magazine and inhale the pulpy newsprint as my mother went about her shopping, reluctantly putting it back on the rack as we prepared to exit.

But then the day came with the 100th issue, and I was finally allowed to take one home with me and devour it at my leisure. Heeding the advice that it was a Collector’s Issue, I tried to keep the magazine in optimum collector’s shape, but repeated returns to the pages inevitably took its toll. By the time the magazine (and the ensuing issues) and I parted ways, it was one sorry lot of pages struggling to stay hooked to the staples.

The nostalgia had a bittersweet taste, a recollection of the quaintly-sated desires of youth and of a month (or two or three) of anticipation finally fulfilled. The store would only stock a couple of issues, so if my timing was off, I was out of luck and had to wait through the cycle until the next issue came out. But if my timing was good, my stomach would lurch happily at the sight of the freshly printed magazine nestled between such incongruous companions as Field & Stream and Hot Rod Magazine.

Snatch, “Mine!”

In the days before the growing popularity of Stephen King made horror -- while not entirely respectable -- at least tolerated as something other than a mark of possible deviance, Famous Monsters of Filmland became a textbook.

And the ubiquitous Forrest J. Ackerman became the mentor.

Serving the function of all good childless uncles, Uncle Forry slipped us forbidden goods while the parents’ attention was elsewhere. Long before the advent of the internet existed to assure an off-center Ohio farm boy that there existed others with the same perplexing obsession, Famous Monsters provided a lifeline. In its pages were letters from other young boys (long before Anne Rice created her gateway for the girls to join the gang) swearing fidelity. Those names would over the years move on from the back of the horror magazine and gain a currency of their own; on the dust jackets of novels, at the bottom of film posters and in the credits of the movies themselves.

Never being a letter writer, my name never graced the pages. But the continued ministrations of Uncle Forry nurtured me through the dark times of pre-adolescence and darker obsessions. Of course, all tutelages come with a price and to this day I cannot shake my predilection for bad puns.

But in all familial dynamics inevitably comes the breach, the point where the son recoils from the shared ritual with father as he strikes out to indulge in his own personality. With the advent of STAR WARS, the covers and pages of Famous Monsters began to exhibit an unhealthy (at least to me) obsession with same. It was called Famous Monsters, for Cripe's sake. My dedication with the magazine waned and ultimately was seduced away by the slicker promises of Fangoria. And while Uncle Bob was fun for a brief period, ultimately he proved to be no Uncle Forry.

But once the contact is broken, the rift -- while not irreparable -- is never the same again.

It’s been near twenty-five years since I snatched that hundredth Collectors Issue from the magazine rack, and November 24th marks the 91st anniversary of the birth of Forrest J. Ackerman. 91 years since a boy was born, to become a toddler and to rise up to become the first fanboy.

The boy to be the man who walked amongst gods and monsters.

The Ackermonster’s influence on the horror and science fiction scene is incalculable. In the decades before the genres became actual commodities, he moved among the monsters and their makers and provided a link between the unholy celluloid sciences and the hungry fanboys.

Before Stephen King changed the face (and value) of horror, he interned with the rest of us by studying the black-n-white pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland through his adolescence before turning to his own blank pages, to fill them with shared nightmares and dreamscapes.

Joining him would be such names that graced the letter pages as Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, Peter Jackson, Rick Baker, George Lucas and… well, pretty much any other name of a certain generation (or two) who continue to make their own contributions to the rich, dark tapestry.

A little early, but Happy Birthday, Uncle Forry. And… thank you. I axed for it, and I got it.

4E 4-Ever.

In The Old Dark Doghouse

2007-11-14T19:01:00.000-08:00

Say… it’s been a month already with no posts. Mea culpa, or in frat boy: my bad.

Time’s fun when you’re having flies and I was off on my periodic quest to spin words together to form another screenplay.

A tribute to the Old Dark House genre, naturally. Albeit with supernatural trappings, so the Scooby Doo purist will sneer. Twist the lip away, cartoon boy… it’s my damned screenplay and I’ll do what I want with it.

Oddly enough, as I typed FADE OUT and read back what I had written, an unexpected subtext slowly emerged… it was one quiet screenplay. People gasped instead of screaming, and the deaths were deliberately off screen. I was writing with the no-budget spec market in mind, but I also realized that my sudden coyness was deliberate…

… seems that in my middle age, I’m losing my taste for over-the-top carnage.

In a way it makes sense. The rise and decline of torture porn was part of it, serving up two hours of simulated torture with no nutritional value. But also, anyone who has watched a horror film made in the last few years might agree that the offerings are generally noisy, disjointed and stocked to the brim with tired clichés and hamfistedly applied tropes.

I was reminded of the old bumper sticker sentiment, "If It's Too Loud, You're Too Fucking Old." And admittedly, as a cranky middle-aged dude who has seen too many horror films in the last 40-odd years, I'm obviously not part of the target demographic.

But even back in the day as a young Headbanger, or Punk, or Goth, or whatever phase I was going through at the time, I also knew on some fundamental level that being too loud was (generally speaking) the musicians' attempt to drown out the fact that they just plain didn't know what the hell they were doing.

And it would seem that the same applies to your stock Hollywood horror film cranked out for the cud-chewing mall rats these days. Here I'm putting aside the whole remake debate, because personally I can see the point: As someone who suffered the ‘80s as they unfolded, why should the younger generation have to sit through a film made in that period? You can only take the Sins of the Fathers aspect so far.

Part One of the problem is that Hollywood operates on the assumption that fans of the genre are unsophisticated, if not just plain outright stupid. I'm talking the long-abiding (and long-suffering) faithful, not the cellphone-wielding rabble that -- not being old enough to gain legal entry to nightclubs -- use the cinema as a social gathering, the movie unreeling as background noise.

So here is where they fall back on the tropes. The rule of thumb seems to be that if you throw a cat through the window with an accompanying musical sting (provided by the ubiquitous Graeme Revell) your audience is happy, especially if you spend half the budget on a former cast member or two from Dawson's Creek or The O.C. and throw in plenty of gore effects (or shoot for the PG-13, ‘cause the teenyboppers will pay to see anything that's supposed to be scary).

Hey! Get off of my yard!

Problem Part Two is that the fans of the genre aren't as stupid and callow as Hollywood thinks they are. Um... to a large degree.

So, what to do? If a filmmaker acknowledges that and works with that in mind, the project is already on its way to being an acceptable addition to the genre. The fans know the tropes and clichés, so find ways to subvert expectations.

The horror template is stale (isolate the pretty kill bait and pick them off one by one), so invert or reinvent the template. The tropes are a good reference point, because just by the nature of being tropes, that means that they were effective at one point, and with a little tweaking, can be effective again.

Sit down and actually think about the psychology of the human animal, and figure out what would make an audience jump out of their seats (without resorting to Mr. Revell slamming his fists down on the keyboard at regular intervals).

Empathy is built by reaction of the characters to the situation, not by some clumsy backstory. Every character is a human, not a gear to move the story forward. Eliminate empathy from the equation and all you are left with is faux-snuff vignettes... although gauging by the continued popularity of the SAW franchise, maybe I'm just being too old again.

DAWN OF THE DEAD-ish (2004)

2007-10-16T23:47:00.000-07:00

Going back to James Gunn, the writer probably thought that it was a privilege and an honor when he was tabbed to rewrite George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD, an opportunity to do right by the undisputed King of the Dead.

Of course, he didn’t factor in the legion of Deadheads who would set about gnashing their clothes and rending their teeth that the dude behind the Scooby Doo adaptations was set on reimaging the holiest of holies. Who would think that some folks would get so upset over a 25-year-old zombie flick? Hell, some of the nattering nabobs weren’t even born when the original DAWN OF THE DEAD first hit the screens of the mall multiplex.

I recall that internet death threats were involved at points, because dude… people are that stupid, and inevitably stupid people say and do stupid things over stupid things.

Of course, these are the same folks that didn’t bother to support Romero when LAND OF THE DEAD came out because they heard it wasn’t all that good. They’d wait until the DVD came out, they typed as the intertubes crackled with betrayal. Romero had let them down, the bastard. Six months later they probably typed the name of the movie into a P2P and downloaded it. Way to show the support.

But then, the trailer hit the screens. As it unreeled, it was interesting enough. Tantalizingly ominous, but on the whole nothing special. But then as the trailer ended with a girl blacking out the screen with a can of spray paint, the film reel burned away to leave blank screen... a momentary blank screen, as the shadows of the dead lurched up from behind and began to paw at the fabric.

Now that was a fucking trailer. And with that small but decidedly awesome stroke of creativity, the remake suddenly seemed in good hands. Promising, even.

And for the most part, that promise was kept.

Not so much a remake as an homage to the genre, DAWN OF THE DEAD 2.0 opens with a tepid bit of character development that explodes into one of the most satisfying ten minutes of pre-opening credits in horror, as seemingly overnight the world dies. And then gets back up and starts gnawing on those that missed the first round of dying. And of course, when there is no more room in Hell and the dead walk the Earth, the survivors hit the mall. Because that’s where the goodies were in 1978 and still were in 2004.

That’s pretty much where the remake ends. After that it’s a well-executed zombie thriller that just happens to take place in a mall.

The bad news is the relative weakness of what follows the first ten minutes and a fantastic credits sequence featuring Johnny Cash's sepulchral voice. Granted, a very hard act to follow. Although a lot could have happened between the first draft Gunn turned in, then the one Michael Tolkin handed over to Scott Frank to doctor up and hand to director Zack Snyder. But James Gunn got sole writer credit for the final result, which means that he gets all the blame for everything script-related. Although Tolkin wrote the plodding DEEP IMPACT and Frank was responsible for the plothole-driven MINORITY REPORT, so there you go...

Doesn’t being a screenwriter sound like fun?

Most of the narrative drift involves plot holes one could drive a city bus through and random contrivances that threaten to derail the whole project. One has to admire Snyder's ability to keep things cracking at a pace that demands that the viewer not notice the complete lack of internal logic until after leaving the theater.

However, the frightened mall rats here are a loosely sketched lot of stereotypes: the feisty heroine, the taciturn black cop, the nice guy, blah, blah, blah.

In other words, almost no one here inspires empathy, thus serving as nothing more than zombie fodder. Almost… because Gunn also throws a wholly unexpected character into the mix called CJ (played by Michael Kelly).

At first, CJ comes across as yet another stereotype in a morass of stereotypes. Yet another swaggerin’ baseball- capped redneck with a mustache, a slow-talkin’ peckerwood wearing the loser badge of mall security… and using that small authority suddenly writ large to play God when the shit hits the fan.

The thing is, the damned asshole grows on you. And even better, the character rewards the warmth by confounding expectations. Weirdly enough, the ostensible villain of the piece is the only character who is actually given an character arc. Bloody brilliant.

Admittedly, while replacing the social satire of the original with the equivalent of dead-baby jokes (both figuratively and literally); the script does manage to maintain the uneasy balance of being both scary and funny at the same time.

But as an immediate horror show experience, it does its job and does it rather well. Any weaknesses are more than adequately balanced by several well-crafted setpieces, and the occasional sly bits of irony. My favorite being the survivors on the roof of the mall being ignored by a military helicopter flying over... a helicopter that looks suspiciously like the one parked on the front lawn of the White House during the opening credits.

And then the DVD hit the shelves and… holy shit.

Of course we know that she made it out of the bus unbitten... as we learned from LAND OF THE DEAD, the belly-button ring is the first thing the zombies go for.

The DVD of DAWN OF THE DEAD is exactly what I expect a DVD to be but rarely ever see. Of course the gore was juiced up. That’s to be expected in a sane and rational world.

But what I didn’t expect is to get two short films that expand on the premise of the feature. One of them is rudimentary, but still packing a small wallop of its own. It's a video diary of the last days of doomed gunstore owner Andy, trapped across the block and starving to death, separated by a sea of dead, pissed-off flesh from the other survivors.

Of course, doomed is a relative term in a world where most deaths are rewarded by living death.

The second bonus feature is the most rewarding, a as-it- happens live feed from a local news desk as the world slowly decays outside the barred studio doors. It’s cracker-jack apocalyptic stuff that transcends the obvious breadcrumb budget, a taste of what we zombiphiles have frequently been promised but have never received… a fullscale epic account of the world dying and then slowly shambling to its collective feet.

Now, if all three pieces were all edited together and tweaked a little…

"You Don't See That Everyday"... SLITHER

2007-10-11T23:33:00.000-07:00

If you have an affinity for those mid-'80s splatter- zomedies such as RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, DEAD/ALIVE, or NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, you might wanna drop in on this one if you haven't already. For some reason, despite being the highest ranking genre film of 2006 on Rotten Tomatoes, a lot of folks didn't. In my book, it was easily the most perplexing tanking in recent box office memory.
It was funny, it was scary... it was very lonely in the movie theater. Theaters are way overrated anymore, anyway.

What writer/director James Gunn (scripter of the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake) has pulled off here is a step beyond the current Hollywood trend of auto-cannibalizing every classic (and even not-so-classic) horror film in the vaults. Here, he remakes an entire sub-genre as one Whitman's Sampler of dark, drippy treats.

Some of us have seen it all before: On the eve of a hoedown celebrating the start of deer-hunting season, a meteor crashes to Earth on the outskirts of some grubby little redneck town. Soon after, in the course of a late-night tryst, one of the locals stumbles across it and becomes infected by the blobby menace from outer space. Rapidly mutating into a voracious, tentacled slime creature, the redundantly monikered Grant Grant (a game Michael Rooker) takes a break from feasting on neighborhood pets to indulge in inseminating the town mattress. And before you can say, "Well, you don't see that everyday," phallic little slugs are darting into the townies' mouths and turning them into shambling zombies with a hive mentality and (natch) a taste for human flesh.

It's then up to the sheriff (an agreeably deadpan Nathan Fillion), Grant's plucky schoolteacher wife (Elizabeth Banks) and the foul-mouthed Mayor MacReady (Gregg Henry) to stop the menace before the inherent threat of Air Supply's "Every Woman in the World" is consummated.

Borrowing heavily from David Cronenberg's venereal horror classic SHIVERS (aka: THEY CAME FROM WITHIN) for his narrative framework, Gunn peppers the proceedings with samples from everything from 1958's THE BLOB up to the wretched DEAD & BREAKFAST. In regards to the latter, he raises the bar by showing empathy for his down-south folks by presenting them as viable characters, not just as stereotypical inbred caricatures.

And unlike D&B, none of his zombies break out in a rap or bust a move cribbed from the THRILLER video. Maybe that's why SLITHER didn't go over so well... it didn't pander to the lowest common denominator.

The key to the success of Gunn's script is his affinity for each of his characters (even the ostensible villain of the piece maintains aspects of his humanity), dryly delivered irony, and the indulgence of some immensely quotable lines that rely on understatement instead of ham-fisted mugging.

Ultimately, Gunn reveals the thematic focus of SLITHER to be the triumph of finally requited love by closing the proceedings with "The New Kid" from the Old 97's.

Indulge in listening to the song through the closing credits for a bonus.

28 Days Leads to Weeks Later...

2007-10-09T23:01:00.000-07:00

Horror — like comedy — is entirely subjective. What some folks may find terrifying others find silly. And, of course, the reverse can be true. As horror film tropes go, nothing has the potential to descend into utter ridiculousness more than the zombie film. And before the keyboard battalion of internet Cliff Clavens chime in with "You know, that's not entirely accurate — 28 DAYS LATER isn't exactly a zombie film..."

Yeah, I get it... the Ragers in the two films aren't exactly zombies. But like zombies, they're weird and pissed off and don't remember how to play nice. That's close enough for a game of hand grenades and horseshoes.

But 28 DAYS LATER... and 28 WEEKS LATER... don't play around. This is deadly serious business here and, as a white-knuckle ride into primal horror, more than welcome entries into the admittedly weak zombie canon.

The first film dealt with the set-up:

A bunch of ALF types busts into a Brit animal research lab, bent on liberating the research animals. Unfortunately, they liberate a bit more than they bargained for when an ungrateful chimpanzee promptly bites the hand that freed it, setting off a chain of infection. Seems the gub'mint has been working on a viral form of rage. Nasty stuff, it seems. Once infected, a poor sap goes from happy-smiley to wild-eyed and frothing-at-the-mouth in seconds flat.

Twenty-eight days later some nekkid bicycle delivery guy called Jim wakes up in a hospital bed to find that the city of Big Ben is half past dead. After mucking about for a while in the ruins, he finally hooks up with some other folks, which is good, because there are some severely messed-up people still roaming the streets — we're talking the tweaker version of a George Romero convention here. The infected are fueled by an all-consuming rage that blinds them to anything, save for spreading the disease (not unlike Rush Limbaugh listeners, but only slightly less open to reason).

Although 28 DAYS LATER isn't the most attractive film to watch (although shot with tricked-out Canon XL-1s, it is admittedly an inspiration to DIY digital moviemakers), it does maintain a serious level of dread. Well, to a point. After our hero and his new friends head out to the boonies to look for a promised bastion of civilization, things tend to lag a little. Just a little, because things get a little loopy when they finally do hook up with civilization.

The only issue I have here is how derivative the film is. Anyone who remembers DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS is gonna go, "Hey, wait a minute...."

We're talking very casual riffing here: substitute deranged, bloodthirsty feral folk for the bloodthirsty broccoli of the original. Add to that various "tributes" to the Romero trilogy and ensuing knock-offs, and ol' Danny Boy's doing a whole lot of borrowing here. But then, I'm far enough along in this game where I'm a little tired of homages and just want to see what the directors have to say for themselves.

Actually, a couple more issues...

It's best not to give much thought to the implication that Jim spent three unmolested weeks in an unsecured hospital bed as all bloody hell broke loose around him. Because after that comes the wondering about how he spent so long a time unmolested in his hospital bed as the city went to hell, how he went near a month without an IV refill, and how he manages to wander about a Rager-packed London all day before he finally encounters some just before nightfall.

But if you can get past that, then you'll be able to swallow anything that happens in the sequel.

28 WEEKS LATER... picks up ... well, six months later.

London has been re-secured by the United States military and the infected starved out. Civilians are being brought in to reseed the Isle of Dogs, a London peninsula and obviously some prime real estate.

But due to an unfortunate lack of intuition on the part of an Army doctor overseeing the project, all hell breaks loose again and the Yanks are up to their armpits in Iraq allegory.

Some viewers had issues with how inept the military came across in the film. I didn't have a problem with them being presented as being a little off their game in this, because I spent four years in the military... so I've seen that if there's a possibility for the brass to find a way to screw things up and then exacerbate (heh) the situation, they'll find it.

There's a reason the acronyms SNAFU and FUBAR came from the military.

Also at issue was the handheld camera approach that was used during the attack scenes. Some folks hate the shaky-cam, I don't mind it if there is a point behind it. Here, I thought that it was an interesting choice on the director's part... a lot of tight close ups during the conversational points, and a lack of cover shots during the chaos to try to put the audience in the scene as almost (as close as you could get) being a participant, rather than a casual observer to the narrative.

The film was near pitch-perfect in delivering what I want out of a horror flick (aside from one sort of silly bit that was already touched on in a few weeks before with the release of GRINDHOUSE). In the first movie, the infected just ran around in a rage attacking the uninfected; here, subtext is added to underscore what fuels that rage.

The movie also works better than its antecedent as far as acting. While Cillian Murphy's Jim in the first entry was a bit of a cypher, here we're offered some incredible nuance in the performances of Robert Carlyle and Catherine McCormack. We're talking an almost imperceptible tick of the lips, a twitch of the eye that conveys a lot more shadings to what the character is feeling that may not be picked up on a television screen.

Let's put it this way: Even being a horror junkie of the old school, I was curled up in a ball in my seat for the last hour. And I'll cop... there was one point where I actually sobbed, the dusty waterworks spilling open for the first time since...

...um...

... Bambi's mother got shot?

This was the best white-knuckle horror film I've seen in years. It's not as meditative as the first one, but it sure is a lot more primal.

And in its essence, isn't that what a good horror film is supposed to be?

All I Know About Living, I Learned From the Living Dead...

2007-10-09T00:49:00.000-07:00

Exposed to a drive-in showing of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD before I was old enough to go to school, I was primed at an early age in the ABCs of social interaction from late night Creature Feature players reacting under the ultimate stress... of having to cope with the dead noshing on the living.

Those ABC's of Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse would follow:

Aim For The Head!

Working your way to an obvious solution wastes precious time. Just do it before someone else yells at you to do it.

Beware The Others

There are always the coyotes that want to steal your hard-earned goodies. Don't leave the shiny objects lying about... and keep your guard up. They can smell your goodies.

That's why they're called The Others.

Cultivate a Team

Know who you want to be fighting alongside and who'll have your back before things go bad... after the shit hits the fan is way too late to start putting together a roster.

Don't Get Noticed

Metaphorically speaking, flying your helicopter around the roof of a mall that you've barricaded yourself in is going to draw the wrong kind of attention.

Literally speaking it's an even worse idea. Just keep your head down and let some other group of survivors draw the attention.

Eliminate The Dead Wood

That goldbricking, whiny yuppie/hippie/whatever is always the one that ends up letting the menace over the threshold.

Cut to the chase and send him packing... or just throw him to the zombies and use the distraction to make a break for a more secure location.

Fortify!

Speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Although it also means barricading the house before getting into a debate over whether the basement or the ground floor is the best place to weather the zombie attack.

Although any fool knows that the second floor is a much more secure refuge...

Greed Kills

If you have everything you require to get by on, going out for more is just a bad idea. There's more to life than dying over something you don't need.

Help Is Not Coming

The Man doesn't give a flying rat's ass about you, he's got his own concerns to administer to. Besides, if you finally do get his attention he'll probably mistake you for one of them...

... and shoot you in the head.

It Is What It Is

Bad things happen... wasting time trying to figure out the why of the situation just gets in the way of finding a way out of the mess.

Just assume that it was of The Man's doing, and move on.

Japanese Are Weird

Their zombies can fly. Understand that your culture may not translate, and prepare for the unexpected. Especially since their zombie chicks are kind of hot.

Know Your Exits

All safe avenues inevitably come to an end... know when to recognize the right exit when it presents itself. And no... air ducts are not to be considered as an escape route. Take it from me... they won't hold your weight.

Really.

Loyalty only goes so far

Or love for that matter. Leave the infected behind, or for their own good just put them down right away.

They're just going to die anyways, and then get up and bite you in the end.

Malls Are SO Not a Good Idea

Everybody knows that the Mall is where the goodies are... even the dead. Think outside the big box store.

No Such Thing As “No Such Thing”

Try telling a zombie gnawing on your arm that he doesn’t exist (or she… but in that case it may only be a Goth Chick).

Just because there hasn’t been a documented case of the walking dead doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened…

... perhaps the documentarians were the first to get eaten.
Open Your Eyes

Someone has to be the first to raise the alarm… just make sure that you’re also the first to hit the gun store before the looting begins.

On the other hand, also make sure that it’s not just some scabby-faced tweaker mewling for change or a smoke, or no one will believe you when they really need to.

Pie Fights Are Fun

And they’re good for alleviating the tension… unless you invite the dead. They don’t get slapstick.

Inflicting humor on the humorless is never a good idea.

Quit Yer Squabbling

Infighting distracts from the overall menace. That is, until it’s too late to put aside the differences and start working together. End of argument.

Race Doesn’t Matter

It doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, Hispanic, or Asian… your flesh tastes the same to them. Unless you’re some big black dude with paramilitary training… then you have an edge.

Stay Out Of The Graveyard

If the shit is hitting the fan, don’t run towards the fan.

They ARE Out To Get You

It’s not paranoia… the shambling masses are mindless and building in numbers. And they want you to join them…

But at least you can always fake being one of them until a break opens up.

Understand Why Taboos Are Taboo

Invoking a antediluvian spell to raise the dead for enter- tainment value is generally not a good idea. Especially if that spell is contained in a book bound in human flesh.

Why even risk it? Just stay home, rent a movie and order a pizza.

Vanity Is Deadly

If a zombie has you by the hair and is about to impale your eye on a broken shard of wood, hair loss is definitely a preferable choice.

When All Else Fails... Wing It!

If a gun isn’t available, a lawnmower can do in a pinch.

X Is Not An Option

Nor booze or any other distraction. Just because it makes you feel better doesn’t mean the situation has improved.

You Are Going To Die No Matter What

Well… it’s best not to think about that one.

Zombies Are Not Your Family

They may look like a former loved one, but once they have turned, there is no reasoning with them. Leave them to shamble on with The Others...

... You can catch up with them later.

The Grapes of Death (1978)

2007-10-03T20:47:00.000-07:00

Leave it to a Frenchman to incorporate "grapes" into the title of a horror film. Or for that matter, "raisins".

While discussing the auteurs of horror, French writer/director Jean Rollin is usually disregarded as one of the lesser names, dangerously close to being considered the Andy Milligan of Goth.

His oeuvre is primarily populated by winsome vampires barely out of their adolescence, and usually mostly out of their clothes. With a background in more adult entertainment, his genre films however display a visual flair that is immediately recognizable, a distinct eye for the baroque that transcends his modest budgets. Although languidly paced, with a minimal amount of dialogue and an emphasis on the erotic, the films are usually grounded by an unexpected air of the melancholy. And usually with a Grand Guignol flare for gory mayhem.

If his name is known at all to the casual horror fan, it is in association with Rob Zombie’s “The Living Dead Girl”, a hillbilly-industrial track ostensibly based on the English retitling of Rollin’s 1982 film, LA MORT VIVANTE. While not his first entry into zombie territory, THE LIVING DEAD GIRL hews closer to his vampire mythos than his earlier effort, 1978’s THE GRAPES OF DEATH (aka: LES RAISINS DE LE MORT, aka: PESTICIDE).

It’s not exactly a zombie flick, but that is the closest genre you could categorize LES RAISINS DE LE MORT. If there would be an antecedent, it would be George Romero’s THE CRAZIES.

The film follows the trials of Elizabeth, a young woman traveling by rail across the French countryside. She’s en route to meet with her fiancé, who runs a winery. Before she reaches her destination however, she encounters a homicidal man who has just murdered her traveling companion, and whose face disintegrates before her horrified eyes as he chases her off the train.

Lost in the rural expanse, the woman encounters various peasants who seem to have become trapped between life and death, driven mad by the pain of decaying alive, and more than eager to throttle her and visit various abuses upon her body (implied by the fact that any uninfected individual she comes across in her adventure inevitably takes the proverbial bullet for her - by pitchfork, hatchet, or whatever lethal tool the living 'dead' have at hand at the moment).

Finally, it is revealed that her fiancé has been pimping out wine tainted by pesticides, which has been consumed en masse earlier at a festival by the unfortunate villagers (talk about becoming dead drunk).

This is easily one of Rollin's most accessible films, but may not be to the tastes of anyone weaned on Empty-Vee styled horror flicks. But to those with a discriminating palate and eyes welcoming to subtitles, this is definitely recommended neo-zombie fare -- leisurely paced, atmospheric, and with liberal dollops of gore and mayhem to boot, this is late 70's horror at its best.

The title was near impossible to locate up until a few years ago (aside from crappy greymarket dupes), at which point Synapse Films released a lovingly mastered DVD, in a transfer digitally enhanced for widescreen television. With a commendable attention to detail, this disc is a keeper.

Resident Evil: Extinction

2007-10-02T17:02:00.000-07:00

Now, I wasn't expecting this to be good. But I did really like the first RESIDENT EVIL, which when removed from the eponymous video game it was based on was a stylish bit of zombie headbanger fun. And if nothing else, Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez were easy to look at. There was even a cute German zombie with big, sad eyes.

And while the second one was bad, it did have its moments. Unfortunately, the moments consisted of absurd disregard for internal logic, such as having an airborne virus reanimate a graveyard full of desiccated corpses (not to mention having the living characters -- caught in a mass resurrection of the dead -- take a unclear-on-the-concept shortcut through said graveyard).

RE: III takes the muttonheaded moments of the latter and makes them shine in retrospect. This is one piss-poor excuse for a zombie flick. Mostly because zombies have almost nothing to do with the narrative. The living dead on display here serve mostly as background as unconnected vignettes unfold in the foreground.

Oh, wait... rewind. Did I say narrative?

The only sign of a story here is a low-rent MAD MAX convoy driving around the desert in circles, in a futile attempt to find some sort of a plotline to follow.

Seems that when the deadly T-virus that causes the living to go dead and come back all bitey exploded from the bowels of the Umbrella Corporation research labs, it also inexplicably caused all the water on the surface of the planet to dissipate. And since Aussie director Russell "Highlander" Mulcahy is at the helm, that means that the Australian post-apocalyptic mode is in effect: a spaghetti western featuring SUVs loaded with junkyard armor, roaring back and forth across a dustswept outback.

The sad thing is, they didn't even bother to erase the tire tracks from the previous takes, so that the vehicles seem to be following their own trail. An apt metaphor, I suppose.

Meanwhile, some mad scientist (you know right away that he's mad because he looks like a button-down version of David St. Hubbins from SPINAL TAP) under the employ of the ubiquitously evil corporation is cribbing scenes from George Romero's DAY OF THE DEAD as he trains zombies how to answer cellphones. Failing that, he trains them to be zombie berserkers. Because having damn near everyone in the world already zombified isn't enough for evil corporations.

While all that nonsense is unraveling, our Mad Maxine (Milla Jovovich) is back in her fetish gear, tricked-out this time for the desert. After periodic set-pieces that serve no narrative function, she joins the vagabonds to see if they've found a plotline to follow. They haven't, so she helps them fend off a flock of badly-rendered CGI zombie crows instead.

Unfortunately, if a digital zombie crow attack looks as primitive as the super-imposed analog from 1963's THE BIRDS, all that shows is that no one is even really trying.

Then it's back to driving around the desert again, although this time (about halfway into the 95 minute movie) they decide to go to a CGI version of Las Vegas.

Yay! Something's bound to happen in Vegas!

Um, no... Vegas is empty. Apparently whatever happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas. Seems that the zombie crows ate everyone left there, which is the biggest disappointment here... if you're going to have a zombie post-apocalypse set in Las Vegas, then you damn well better kick down with some zombie showgirls and a zombie Elvis or two. And a zombie Wayne Newton, damn it!

But no, none of that. So since there's no zombies in town, Dr. St. Hubbins loads up a cargo car full of hyper zombies and has a helicopter drop it down in the middle of our road worriers. Why? Damned if I know. I suppose since there's no plot, everyone has to resort to their own initiative... even if it doesn't make a lick of sense.

So Milla walks up to the cargo container, sticks her ear up against the door... and then the door drops down, unleashing a swarm of sprinting zombie clowns. Well... not really zombie clowns. But the amount of zombies that spills out of the container reminded me of the infinite number of clowns that jump out of a tiny car at the circus. Although they seemed more like timewarped zombies from NIGHTMARE CITY than what you'd expect to encounter in the Resident Evil series.

During this big zombie attack things almost get exciting, but unfortunately every damn one of the zombies in this flick are sporting so much latex and facial prosthetics that they sort of look like Halloween bobbleheads. It's hard to maintain the creeping dread with zombies that look like they're ready to bust a move from the THRILLER video. They could have saved on the budget by buying zombie masks off of eBay. All in all, it would've looked about the same. Actually, probably better... the makeup was pretty silly looking.

It doesn't help matters any that all the blood effects are done with really unconvincing CGI. You just don't do CGI blood in a zombie flick... it's just plain wrong.

But then, this is one CGI-happy movie. Even Milla's face gets the CGI treatment when they go to a close-up... she looks so airbrushed that her face should be on the side of a cruisin' van, not a movie screen. Every detail and contour is so washed out that it looks like her eyes, nose, and lips are floating in a placid pool of translucent skintone.

Finally, Milla gets fed up because the movie is almost over and they still haven't stumbled across a plotline, so she sends off what's left of the vagabonds to Alaska to see if there's one up there.

And then things get really silly, but then movie is almost over so it doesn't really matter. But if there's another sequel, the writer really has their work cut out for them.

Double damn.

The Hell of Bruno Mattei

2007-10-01T23:50:00.000-07:00

In late May, Italian horror filmmaker Bruno Mattei succumbed at age 75 in a Rome hospital after a short illness. Scornfully referred to throughout the 80s and 90s as the next Ed Wood, the evocation of his name within genre circles to indicate bottom-of-the-barrel filmmaking has only recently been usurped by German video game adapter and gutter savant Uwe Boll. Notable for fringe explorations of cannibals, zombies, caged women and mutant rats, with Mattei's death comes the obligatory call for a revisionist approach to his oeuvre. A good starting point would be his seminal and most maligned effort, the 1981 genre mashup...

Notable if not only for being the film with perhaps the most alternative titlings (aka: ZOMBIE CREEPING FLESH, aka: VIRUS, aka: CANNIBAL VIRUS, aka: NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES, aka: ZOMBIE INFERNO, aka: ZOMBIE OF THE SAVANNAH, aka: ZOMBI 2: ULTIMATE NIGHTMARE), the ubiquitously derided effort also stands as a cinematic meta-joke that most genre cinephiles were unfortunately too savvy to grasp at the time of its release.

Launched in response to the success of fellow Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci's ZOMBI (itself riding the international box office play of George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD), the narrative follows a Jeep full of soldiers sent deep into the heart of Papua New Guinea to investigate an outbreak of cannibalistic murders following a chemical leak at a research facility codenamed Hope. Joining a female investigative reporter and her cameraman, they find that the leak has killed all those exposed and reanimated them as murder-happy characters.

As they trek deeper into the heart of darkness, the film becomes a delirious amalgamation of the exploitation tropes popular in Italian genre cinema of the era.

Upon release(s) audiences were perplexed by the seeming overuse of stock footage, the haphazard use of themes and the overt cannibalization of the soundtrack of Romero's film.

They missed the point.

As such, the movie overtly follows the template of any other zombie flick release before and after. What distinguishes Mattei's entry is a droll sense of absurdity about the genre and even the filmmaking process in itself. With the use of allegory, recurring motif and underlying subtext, Mattei's perception would be that the military/industrial complex views the indigenous peoples of the island as superfluous to the experiments that they are conducting in their midst, and when they become a problem, seek to dispose of them out of hand rather than attempt to remedy the situation in a humane fashion.

Further emphasizing the disregard held for these citizens is the absurd attempt to contain the problem -- the aforementioned Jeep full of disposable grunts sent out to eliminate evidence of malfeasance, implying the low regard held for both the aboriginals and of the military industrial spear carriers they have sent to certain death.

At times critics have facetiously evoked Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal" as being the screenwriter's inspiration, seemingly without seriously considering that that may have indeed been the scribe's influence, and that elements of the film could have intentionally been satirical, if not ironic. Even Italian horror-meisters may know their Swift, and Mattei's point stands as a metaphor for the perils of irresponsible conduct at the fringe of the dystopian Global Village, as the sins of the industrialized nations are soon to be revisited upon their own citizens.

One can view HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD as being almost performance art, a film about cannibalism that wholeheartedly indulges in creative cannibalism at every turn: from over-the-top appropriation of conventions and themes from every sub-genre of Italian horror, to the cannibalizing of Goblin's score from DAWN OF THE DEAD, and on to the reliance on stock footage. However, in one case the use of the stock footage of an aboriginal tribe dancing counterparts with the protagonist's shedding of her clothing before entering the village, representing the shedding of her outsider skin. Which is also served as a nod to his professional dispatch to the outer circles of cinematic hell, a cockeyed roman á clef, if you will.

The often derided stock footage itself deserves special note, in that while it is dismissed as padding to bulk up the film's running time, the over-all benefit in that regard would be negligible. Rather, the recurring motif of this transitional technique should be admired as a cost-efficient way of utilizing montage to establish the mise en scène in a manner that imbues a certain cinéma vérité aspect to the proceedings... although it also could be argued that the device is Mattei's homage to Romero's own fondness for utilizing library tracks within the framework of the first two Dead films.

Also of note is Mattei's fondness for situational neo-surrealism that borders on crypto-farce, such as the nonsensical juxtaposition of the top hat and tutu-clad soldier whose swan song is literally "Swanee River" and in essence an evocation the Pantalone stock character of Commedia dell'arte. Absurdities exist on many levels within the film (such as the "cat-gut" visual gag on to the eventual fate of the "media puppet" character), although to claim that some (if not most) were intentional would be to prick the balloon of smugness found hovering over some critics of the film.

And while no one would argue that Mattei didn't deserve the designation as an auteur of the awful, to dismiss him as solely that would be missing the director's underlying recognition and ultimate recantation of the meta-aspects of his oeuvre, and with his death comes the obligation to realign the condescension towards his cinematic signature.