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Saturday, May 24, 2008Voodoo Island
Release Year: 1957
Country: USA Starring: Boris Karloff, Beverly Tyler, Murvin Vye, Elisha Cooke Jr., Rhodes Reason, Jean Engstrom, Friedrich von Ledebur, Glenn Dixon Writer: Richard H. Landau Director: Reginald Le Borg Alternate Title: Silent Death I think most of us realize that American films have done a pretty poor job of depicting voodoo over the years. The thing is, I think we usually think of the depiction as being poor because of its (pervading) undertones of racism, if not explicit prejudice and a sense of cultural and moral superiority. And, yeah, that's out there. But there's more. For what I guess are a variety of reasons, voodoo in particular suffered a scattering, diasporic treatment by Hollywood. Until George Romero and company gave the zombie a new home and a conceptual transformation in the late 1960s, zombies and their parent religion always had an uneasy relationship with cinematic geography. Haiti, where voodoo or vodoun/vodun is still widely practiced, was in the public eye in the 1920s and 30s, due to the American occupation there. William Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929) is generally credited as America's first exposure to the zombie phenomenon--a phenomenon which he insisted was very real, in contrast to other Haitian legends which he dismissed as fairy tales--and it was the inspiration for Bela Lugosi's outing in White Zombie (1932). However, I guess producers felt that American audiences only had so much patience in watching a film set in Haiti, because four years later zombies somehow became Cambodian in the 1936 film Revolt of the Zombies. There are two particularly significant things about that film. First, zombies no longer had to be dead--they could simply be living people under the supernatural or hypnotic control of another person (yes, they allowed for this in White Zombie, but only for the female lead, probably because corpses are generally viewed as unsexy). Second, zombies became nomads, thereafter doomed to settings pretty much anywhere the writer or director wanted to set them up, as long as it was a tropical setting that was preferably set on some unknown island. Sure, uncharted islands are great for adventure and horror films, as were the ambivalently-received imagistic power of thick, impenetrable jungle and surly, spear-wielding natives. But although vampires, for instance, were not always placed in Transylvania in any given movie, it was sort of understood that they had a homeland. Zombies and voodoo, by contrast, could be made to inhere in the culture of any dark-skinned group of island dwellers that the writer or director wanted to concoct. I know Keith is skeptical of a lot of the scholarly inquiry into films, but I think there are some pretty real implications of the power relations involved in that treatment of what remains a poorly-understood and very real religion which is to this day racialized in the public eye, and I think there's a lot to be said about it. ...but instead, in this space I'm just observing it, because the focus is another stop on the zombie's pre-Romero peregrinations: Voodoo Island, an uncharted island somewhere in the tropical Pacific which is owned by the filthy rich Howard Carlton, who plans to open a hotel and resort there. Googling the movie will obviate my need to tell you that it kind of sucks. Karloff, the obvious star of the film, seems to have been doing mostly TV work around this time, and I've seen at least one person claim that this film marked his return to film. For all the failings of the movie, I think it's not a terrible return; he turns in an impressive performance, especially given the very limited power of the script, and manages to make a somewhat abrasive character charismatic. Not much can be said for the other actors, though Rhodes Reason appears to have had the looks and voice of a classic leading man, and Beverly Tyler seems to have been a talented (and lovely) young woman; ascribe it to the script. Because more than the movie, the script really sucks. And yet, despite that, I find a number of redeeming features in this film, though judging by the reviews I've seen out there, I stand nearly alone in caring to say so. After an opening credit sequence focused on a shitty-looking wooden doll with some kind of needle stuck through its head, we see an equally pathetic-looking model hotel in a miniature landscape. Go ahead and get a chuckle out of it, but the joke's on you, because in a rare moment of cleverness for this film, the credits end and the camera pulls back to reveal that it is, in fact, a model of the hotel which Howard Carlton wants to build on his private, unexplored island. However, he sent a four-man team to survey the location, of which Mitchell was the only returnee. Mitchell is now permanently stupefied; he stares blankly and unblinkingly at nothing all of the time, more or less comatose unless someone leads him to a new place to sit. The doctor is baffled by the symptoms, so Carlton hires Phillip Knight, renowned debunker of supernatural and paranormal phenomena who apparently has several popular books and a television show. Knight is a stolid "realist" who assumes that supernatural phenomena and native religions, as well as belief in monsters, etc., are all means by which the unscrupulous can take advantage of ignorant laymen and make a quick buck. Even though this is not a particularly eye-opening concept, and in the 1950s at the height of faith in science it may have seemed a very easy perspective to agree with, Knight is such a skeptic that he risks being unsympathetic. If Karloff were not able to use his talents, as he does, to make Knight a very charismatic and charming jerk, this movie would be numbered amongst the films so mediocre that they can make a grown man cry blood. (If you don't know what I mean by that, then I'm happy for you. Don't try to find out.) So Knight is convinced that the whole thing, like everything else he's ever come across, is a huge publicity scam. "The public loves to be frightened," he explains to Carlton. Knight agrees to investigate the phenomenon, accompanied by Carlton's employees, his own assistant, and... the comatose Mitchell. To the latter's inclusion, the doctor protests, and when Carlton's assistant Finch explains over the phone that Mitchell will be the sixth and final member of the exploration party, the line goes dead, caged parakeets start flapping around, and a plant for some reason growing on the miniature landscape of the model hotel wilts and then bleeds. We will soon see scenes introducing the other characters, the most remarkable here are the two women. Adams (Beverly Tyler) is Knight's beautiful but very reserved assistant, who is academically skilled but socially cold; Winters is Carlton's decorator or somesuch, and she unsuccessfully attempts to convince Adams to have a preflight martini or two with her. So begins what is by far the most interesting character dynamic in this film--Winters is pretty clearly intended to be a lesbian, and for the era, at least, her attempts to get under Adams' skirt are relatively overt. Given the apparent budget, the genre, and the time period, I found this not-exactly-latent homosexuality rather surprising, and much more impressive than most of its attempts at horror. Or any of the rest of its romantic depictions, which are more awkward than teenagers getting drunk and making out for the first time. The next day, the group departs by plane for a stopover island. They're buffeted by a storm and unable to make radio contact... but on the destination island, the radiomen can hear them loud and clear and are unable to make themselves heard in reply, and they can't detect any evidence of weather disturbances at all. The plane lands without incident nonetheless. In the following scene, the same phenomenon occurs--they are able to be heard via radio, but don't realize this because they can't hear the replies--and there are a lot of mostly-silent closeups of people sitting around until Mitchell becomes animated for the first time, taking several steps toward Adams before collapsing and suffering a drop in blood pressure. As Adams insists that he was trying to say something (it looked more like he was having too much trouble just trying to walk, but that's me), his blood pressure returns to normal and the group finally is able to hear a reply from the Wake Island radio station. That's a relief, I guess. So, after that string of good luck, the group has no qualms departing the next day for another island. Just before takeoff, some guy who may or may not be a native porter finds a split-faced ragdoll under the landing gear which looks like the same doll that some native girl was sewing up before the group's first departure. We'll return to that doll, sort of, in a bit. Arrival at the next island brings Finch and Knight into conversation with down-on-his-luck hotel owner Schuyler and his ship's captain, Gunn. Yes, pretty much every character is known on a last-name basis here. Gunn might best be summed up as a poor man's precursor to Han Solo; he makes wisecracks, sports a devil-may-care attitude beneath which lies a caring individual, and he's a pilot (of a ship). Schuyler might best be summed up as a wiener. Not a cock, not a jerkoff, but a wiener. His basic role is to be wide-eyed and quick to protest, but also easily bought off with the promise of future riches by cooperating with Carlton. True to that theme, Schuyler's initial protests of his inclusion in the party and Mitchell's presence on his island are both quelled with a few piles of greenbacks. "This is just a small down payment," Finch assures him. Schuyler then agrees to let the group use his boat to get to Carlton's island and figure out what happened to Mitchell and his three missing companions. That night, Winters really makes her orientation clear. She approaches Adams as the latter is gazing out into the night, and under the guise of discussing her attire and makeup techniques, makes statements such as, "I could make you come alive." Adams gets flustered and storms off, and Gunn attempts to convince Winters that since he's a man, she might want to give it up to him. She explains that her "club" is exclusive and very private, and he's not going to become a member. Again, this seems pretty ballsy (honestly not a backhanded pun) for the times, and a lot more ambitious thematically than most of the rest of the film. The next day, before launch, Mitchell wanders off on his own and drops dead on the dock, his arms pointed toward Voodoo Island. When the group returns to the spot to launch, they find designs on the ground drawn in white powder, at the center of which is an "ouanga" bag filled with "death wishes" written out on strips of paper or leather or something, one for every member of the party. Knight smiles at this and pitches the death wishes into the sea, and the group embarks... only to find that the boat's engine inexplicably stops working after the island comes into view. They're forced to let the tide take them to shore, which takes all night. It's from here on out that the movie comes about as close to "coming into its own" as it ever will... Although I previously linked it to other voodoo and zombie films, it's worth also linking it to the tradition of monster films set in island locations where it takes forever--eternity being manifested in irritating and patently false dialogue regarding tepid-at-best bickering and other crude and ass-backwards attempts at creating character development or something--to finally see what turn out to be underwhelming monsters with a dearth of screen time (Navy vs. the Night Monsters, The Mushroom People, I'm looking at you). So you can gauge it, we're already more than halfway through the movie before it actually kicks into gear. If you can call it that. The group stumbles upon surveying equipment perfectly aligned to lead them to Mitchell and co.'s quondam campsite. While the men return to the boat only to find that their food supplies are now filled with maggots, Winters unsuccessfully acts the temptress only to decide, around the time that the men return with the bad news, that she'll go skinny dipping in a nearby lagoon. Call her an overzealous pioneer, or a lesbian being punished by a horror film unable to free itself from the conservatism of its era, but she's the first to find out that the plants of the island eat people... by getting tangled up in the inflated leaves of some kind of lake plant with cephalopod-looking suckers all over them. Winters thus becomes the first martyr to the cause of the group's enlightenment. Knight incredulously exclaims that the plant which killed her (by drowning, I guess?) is a "throwback" to the Cretaceous or earlier... as far as I know, dinosaurs were not eaten by giant carnivorous plants, but I guess if you don't care whether voodoo is Haitian or Hawaiian, you're not likely to care about palaeobotanical reality, either. Not long after, the group learns that there's another, more dangerous, "more carnivorous" (Knight's term, not mine, whatever the fuck it means) plant living on land. Adams is saved by some quick machete work from being the next victim. That night, perhaps awakened by Winters' death, Adams proclaims her ardent feelings for Gunn, and the two embrace for an embarrassingly-scripted fireside kiss. Finch, the next morning, decides for some reason to move away from the fire and attempt to get more sleep under the shelter of the nearby undergrowth. I understand that sometimes we all experience a bit of slow-mindedness in the morning, but given the imminent sense of danger likely shared by the group, and Finch's consistent protests against further exploration ever since the first discovery of carnivorous plants, this move seems less a demonstration of his fallibility as a character and more a convenient and really stupid plot device. The device operates curiously; when he's nearly eaten by carnivorous plants, rather than running back to the fire where there's a safe clearing, he runs... into the jungle. Like an asshole. Because of his stupid flight, he's then able to witness two native girls at play, one of whom steps into the newest type of carnivorous plant, whose immense leaves curl up around the victim as it presumably digests her. In some ways, this is one of the more effective scenes in the film, as this very innocent girl is subjected to lethal incarceration. In other ways, the ridiculously stupid and random setup really undercuts that effectiveness, because I don't see how this girl, young as she is, was raised in this jungle but never learned about this dangerous, snare-like plant, and yet Finch the wandering jackass somehow stumbled through a great deal of thick growth without getting attacked by anything. Finch doesn't return, and the group awakens surrounded by painted, spear-wielding, lai-wearing natives, who then guide them to their chief. Knight cautions everyone to go along with them; first, because the natives outnumber them and could slaughter them easily, and second, because it's clear to him that someone has been watching them the whole time, guiding them to the abandoned campsite, and that people have only been killed or menaced by the plants when they were foolish enough to wander off, away from the guided trails. So who's the mastermind of that whole plan, the point of which still escapes me? A white guy. Friedrich von Ledebur plays the role of the "native chief," who offers up some kind of narrative of having to island-hop to avoid the persecution of white people until his people were able to get to the center of this island of deadly plants, thus being protected from the outside world and rendered invisible. He explains all of this in what's clearly a German accent, which I guess in 1957 must've passed as an indigenous South Pacific accent. This is another legacy of racism which long haunted cinematic depictions of voodoo; behind every voodoo scheme, at least before the 1970s, was a white person who somehow had power over any darker-skinned practitioners. The case of Voodoo Island is unique in that sense, I guess, because the actor is white but they're trying to pass him off as native (kind of like that scene in Death Curse of Tartu where they try to pass twelve noon off as nighttime simply by acting like they're not sitting in broad daylight). Still, this might be the most jarringly absurd moment in the movie, because I could put war paint on my freckled, Irish-looking skin and pass as a Zulu warrior before von Ledebur could pass for a Pacific Islander chief. From there, the movie winds down. I mean, I guess the climax is still up ahead, but I'd argue that there's less of a climax than... well, the movie is basically an uneven plateau, full of minor ups and downs, which concludes by just kind of ending in mid-air, with you still wondering if anything is really going to happen. But if you're not cynical about it, the climax comes shortly after the discussion with the chief. Knight works his magic in persuading the chief that he'll keep the islanders' secret safe from the public, but Schuyler then protests because Knight promised him riches and fame, damnit! Consequently, the group gets tied up, and when they awaken the next morning, Schuyler has been replaced with a new voodoo doll. Soon after, Knight finds Schuyler behaving strangely on a bridge, and when Schuyler looks down, he sees the ghostly image of his own voodoo doll in the wooden planks and then flings himself off the bridge, dropping a fatal couple of yards into water that's probably as deep as he is tall. Knight, persuaded by whatever the fuck exactly happened, admits to Chief Friedrich that he lied the other day, but is now convinced that the voodoo powers of these natives are real, and so this time, he'll respect the agreement that last night he intended to renege on. This is somehow persuasive to these people whose oral history seems to focus on perpetual attempts to escape white persecution and treachery before accepting the dangers of an island filled with maneating plants in exchange for total isolation. The end. The movie is really not better than it sounds, although it's not absolutely horrible. It skirts around toxic levels of mediocrity, of that dangerous sort alluded to before. But as I said, I found some redeeming features in it. If you're going to bother tracking it down for any reason, I guess they'd be as follows: 1) Zombies. Zombies have at least some redemptive power most movies, although there are even less zombies in this film than Zombie Holocaust, and barely more than in the zombieless Zombie Island Massacre. Although Mitchell is repeatedly described as being like a dead man, he later actually dies... "zombie" here means mind control, and the mind control isn't really exercised for any particular purpose. Traditionally, zombies provided slave labor. Other mind-control zombie films of this era offered zombies as guards, assassins, or soldiers. This film... just kinda has them. Like in Zombie Holocaust, they're just there, and most of the danger is other tropical stuff like carnivorous plants. Zombies aren't really a redeeming feature here, but I thought I'd point that out more specifically because their inclusion at all makes this a "zombie film," which is exactly why I, for one, bothered to watch it at all. 2) The lesbian tensions between Winters and Adams are significant enough that I'd imagine some people might want to track it down. If the script ever comes close to not sucking, it's in Winters' exchanges with Adams and, separately, with Gunn. Unfortunately, the third side of that triangle, Gunn's exchanges with Adams, are extremely trite heteronormative crap, in which wisecracking and mutual loathing give way to passionate embraces and nighttime cliched confessions. 3) Karloff turns in, as stated, a very charismatic performance. Despite that Knight isn't particularly likable, Karloff makes him seem likable. As another online reviewer put it, it's not hard to see how Karloff's Knight could have become famous. His rational realist reductions of anything the least bit enigmatic today seem dated and arrogant, perhaps even more than they did in the 50s, but they still allow Karloff to make him an interesting character, all the more when he's paired with his assistant Adams. Beverly Tyler isn't given much to work with here, as she plays a pretty but cold assistant who's in love with Knight's rationalism and analytical acumen, but this does create an interesting relationship between the very charismatic and effervescently skeptical Knight, and his un-charismatic and "robot-like" assistant... though this relationship is later compromised, again, by Adams' being broken out of her shell by Gunn, who rescinds his assessment of her as a "push-button robot" only as she shrugs off the characteristics that inspired it. 4) The irrationality of the film is in some ways before its time. I think this is part of its ultimate failure; the writers clearly wanted to create a sense of un-reality at a time when there weren't many films whose lead they might follow. Bleeding plants, the voodoo ragdoll which serves no apparent purpose, the "death wishes" based on real magic (so goes the conclusion of the film) which don't end up being lethal, the trouble with the radio, etc.... These have been criticized elsewhere as loose ends of a script that never had a final draft. I'll throw out the possibility that, in fact, they were more deliberate attempts to undermine Knight's stolid positivism because--and I'm not trying to be cute here--there was no unity to their disunity. Knight and co. are about to enter a world where rationality defers to "black magic" and the unlikelihood of an entire island of maneating plants which apparently evolutionarily predate mankind by millenia upon millenia. The scattered phenomena really undermine the power of science: radios which stop working, doctors at a loss to explain Mitchell's condition (much less offer a cure), ship engines which fail, storms which exist only subjectively for the individuals inside one airplane, and plants which bleed... But wait, isn't that what any supernatural horror film does? Yeah, kinda, usually, but remember, this film is all about the conversion of a skeptic: for the first time in his life, Knight is led to admit that there's no rational, man-behind-the-curtain, damn-you-meddling-kids explanation for the phenomena the group has experienced. Each phenomenon builds up to that climax, forcing Knight to assume an ever-greater orchestration of a bigger and bigger hoax, until finally the hoax becomes too vast to be a hoax at all. This adds up to an attempt, I think, to achieve the same sort of unreality which Fulci, for instance, attempted. The attempt is just very ham-handed and lacks the subtlety and completeness which would have made the writers' intentions clearer, and their vision more evocative. ...of course, if they'd actually had more vision, this would be a better movie. It's never clear what causes the wind to pick up, and supernatural storms to appear, and radios not to work. Is someone specifically practicing voodoo magic? Is it just the magical power of the island? Probably the former, but we never learn any properties of that magic, and so the island becomes a metonym for voodoo, which itself is basically reduced to a symbol of the limitations of science. Unfortunately, when the symbol is more important to the writers than its manifestation in the story, it ends up falling flat and lifeless, and being confusing to boot. The overarching point is, I guess, that regardless of its shortcomings and weaknesses, this film does exist. I'd recommend it to you only if one of the four above points really strikes your fancy. If you just want to see Karloff in a zombie movie, I would strongly suggest The Snake People instead; it has more zombies, and a crazed dwarf. But if you're interested in the history of zombie films in America, as I've tried to note above, this film embodies all at once a number of the distinctive features of the zombie's meandering geographic basis and conceptual identity before Romero established a new model which wasn't limited to the exclusionary category of "exotica". White guys in power behind the dark-skinned natives, transplantation across tropical locales, a lack of differentiation between voodoo and any other tropical island religions, and a very selective definition of the zombie... these things are all there. So if that's your deal, then like I said, this movie... exists. Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Zombies, Year: 1957 posted by Ryan at 3:51 AM | 0 Comments Tuesday, October 30, 2007Grapes of Death Release Year: 1978Country: France Starring: Marie-Georges Pascal, Felix Marten, Serge Marquand, Mirella Rancelot, Patrice Valota, Patricia Cartier, Michel Herval, Brigitte Lahaie. Writer: Christian Meunier and Jean Rollin Director: Jean Rollin Cinematographer: Claude Becognee Producer: Claude Guedj Music: Philippe Sissman Original Title: Les Raisins de la mort Alternate Titles: Pesticide Availability: Buy it from Amazon  ."Dreams and life -- it's the same thing, or else it's not worth living." -- Baptiste, Jean Rollin's Les Enfants du Paradis From time to time, I notice there are certain directors whose films I undeniably love yet always preface a positive review of with some manner of disclaimer along the lines of "not for everyone" or "you have to be in the right mind." More times than not, the director to which I'm referring is Jess Franco. However, this largely reflexive defensiveness could just as easily find itself employed in the shielding French director Jean Rollin. But I'm not going to fall back on any of that today, or any other day from here on out until I forget that I've just made this proclamation. I'm a big boy, after all, and its time to embrace my love of Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, and any other thoroughly cockeyed Eurocult director without any caveats or attempts to justify my love out of some ill-conceived sense of guilt that, because of some glowing review I might write of Blue Rita or La Vampire Nue, someone is going to go out and watch those movie and then wonder what the hell is going on. But really, that's not something of which I should be ashamed of or feel guilty over, is it? Because if more people were watching Diamonds of Kilimanjaro or Shivers of the Vampire, then that's a step in the right direction, isn't it? Provided you think the right direction is mod Euro starlets constantly taking off their clothes during psychedelic stripteases performed to crazy jazz music in some club decorated with pop art sensibilities on overdrive -- and you all know that's my vision of a perfect world. Also, I would be able to fly and turn invisible, and anything I carry is also invisible if I want it to be. And I am immortal. I went through a couple decades and then some having never even heard of Jean Rollin. It wasn't until Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs' book Immoral Tales that I heard mention of Rollin's name. While the description of Rollin's films seemed interesting, it was the smattering of stills that really entranced me, and not just because they were frequently of unclothed women. They were also of unclothed men. Because, you know, the French and all. Unfortunately, my new knowledge of Jean Rollin was not accompanied by an ability to actually see any of the movies about which I was reading. At the time, pretty much the only source for Jean Rollin films was Video Search of Miami, and having once ordered a video from them, I knew to never do it again. But then I noticed whilst browsing the videos at a local establishment that they had a couple Rollin films of dubious legality and questionable reproduction quality, but whatever. It only cost a buck-fifty for the rental, so I picked up a little something called Raisins de la Mort. Raisins of Death? That didn't sound too scary, even if the California Raisins sort of creeped me out. But it was also a zombie film, and up until very recently, when a long line of horrible shot on video zombie films did me in, I could never pass up a zombie film.
Then came the DVD explosion, and thanks to Redemption Video, a whole slew of Rollin films found their way into my collection and, it goes without saying, into my heart. Because, you know, the French and passion and all that. I learned a few things about Rollin, chief among them that the first of his films that I'd seen was not really typical of his output, which often revolved around vacant-eyed vampire girls in mod mini-dresses, when they had anything on at all. By comparison, Raisins de la Mort was almost an actual film. Most of the time, Rollin shot his films with the intent of achieving a surreal, logic-defying atmosphere. He also tended to shoot with almost no money, only amateur actors, and usually no script. The end results were often...complex...to digest. Rollin's first film, La Viol du Vampire, was made more or less on a whim by Rollin and a group of enthusiastic horror film fans. It was never meant to be much more than a fan film, and Rollin's goal was to pack a small theater with friends and friends of friends and have a fun night. As fate would have it, France happened to be in the middle of a slew of crazy demonstrations and riots, meaning that Rollin's little homemade experimental art-horror film was one of the only new films theater owners could get their hands on. And thus, Rollin found himself with an actual release on his hands -- albeit a poorly received release. Parisians may have been looking for a revolution in 1968, but not the one Rollin's film offered them. But Jean Rollin continued unphased. After all, he never intended for his film to be embraced by a wide audience. Rollin had been raised by artist and, as a child, surrounded by luminaries and lunatics from the fringe of the art world, including a number of Surrealists. Their vision of art obviously informed Rollin's eventual work, and his repertoire is comprised largely of films that concentrate heavily on dreamy imagery, hallucinatory surrealism, and general weirdness. Sacrificed in the fray were things like logic, scripts, plot -- little things like that. European cult film directors have often been criticized for shuffling these things to the back burner, just as they've been praised for their ability to create amazing imagery and mood. I'm torn, since on the one hand, I like scripts and plots and feel that film is a medium in which so many aspects of art -- imagery, music, writing -- must come together. On the other hand, I really like a lot of these relatively plotless movies, and I have a tremendous capacity for extracting meaning from apparent meaningless. That's what you learn, kids, if you take film classes and work as a journalist who interviews both politicians and movie stars.
But that's a discussion for a different Rollin film, because we're here today to discuss one of his more accessible films, though it certainly has its fair share of Rollin's signature oddity. Compared to most of his work, though, Grapes of Death, as it is known this week, is positively comprehensible and well-planned. For many of the cult film fans who might be familiar with Jean Rollin without being Jean Rollin fans, it's probably because of his infamous zombie film, Zombie Lake. The Internet certainly doesn't lack for coverage of this masterpiece of complete and utter incompetence, and lord knows I've done my part. The big difference between Rollin's usual bizarre output and Zombie Lake is that Zombie Lake is pretty much indefensible. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Zombie Lake. I might even watch it again tonight, but the incompetence on display there is purely born of a complete and total lack of interest in making a good movie, and not from some desire to make a weird, arty film. Given the reputation of Zombie Lake, which in turn has informed the opinion of many people who don't know Rollin for anything but Zombie Lake, delving once again into the rich, creamy lather of a Jean Rollin directed zombie film would seem...well, about as enticing as doing anything involving rich, creamy lather other than getting a good shave with a straight razor and dollop of heated shaving cream.
And while Grapes of Death may not be quite as satisfying as a good shave delivered by a talented barber who smells of menthol blended with spices and lower woodsy notes, it's still a heck of a lot better than Zombie Lake, and just as Rollin doesn't deserve to be judged purely on the "merits" of Zombie Lake, neither does Grapes of Death deserve to be off-handedly dismissed and placed at the same low level as that green-faced Nazi zombie opus. Grapes of Death is an episodic series of events following Elizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal), who finds herself on the run after she and her friend are attacked on a train by a young man who seems well on the way to having his face fall off. It turns out, we learn, that an experimental pesticide has contaminated the grapes used to make wine, thus turning much of France into -- well, not exactly zombies, but close enough, especially in this post 28 Days Later era when the definition of zombie has been somewhat blurred. Rollin's zombies showcase certain obvious characteristics of zombies as defined by the George Romero movies that have become more or less the de facto zombie rule handbook. Some of them shamble aimlessly about with their arms in awkward positions. They like to bite people. And their bodies and faces tend to decay and fester with oozing boils. But they also like to stab people with pitchforks, brandish torches, travel at a relaxed jog, and prepare dinner. Depending on the state of the infection, some people seem completely gone into a flesh-hungry zombie state, and some are still able to talk and even feel guilt and remorse over what they are being compelled by the infection to do.
Elizabeth wanders a bleak French countryside, encountering infected people from time to time and screaming in fear. Occasionally, she also meets uninfected people, but she still usually finds reason to scream in fear, since those people often end up on the wrong end of some bladed farm implement wielded by a grinning ghoul. Grapes of Death takes the unique approach of eschewing the standard "hunker down in a house and argue with each other as the living dead amass outside" for a much more freewheeling and wide open approach. Elizabeth spends most of her time outdoors in wide-open spaces. She is, at these times, relatively safe. It is only when she ventures into the closed quarters of homes or walled medieval style farm towns that the trouble begins, and the confined spaces always work against her. She eventually meet two uninfected farmers who avoided the infection because, although it is very un-French of them, they prefer beer over wine. Elizabeth's fortunes seem to change once she meets up with these blue collar salts of the earth, but a rather large coincidence brings her into contact with her boyfriend (who we've never seen until he shows up at the end of the movie), and since things never end well for people in a zombie film...well, you get the picture. In a crowded field of zombie films that tend to be largely identical to one another, few stand out. Those that do either accomplish this because they invented or are so good at executing the well-worn formula, or they have found some way to provide a unique twist on expectations while still conforming to certain expectations. Grapes of Death falls into the latter category. It is basically a zombie film, but it's not like other zombie films. It's open instead of confined; the zombies are cognoscente of their descent into murderous bloodlust, even if they are helpless to stop it; and although the film has plenty of gore (and gratuitous nudity), the scares come not from any sort of visceral punch but rather from the eerie atmosphere Rollin creates. The desolate French countryside Rollin uses as his location is at once familiar and strangely alien. What we expect of idyllic rolling hills and quaint old villages is subverted as soon as the oozy-foreheaded crazies start prowling about. Similarly, Rollin keeps seasoned viewers of zombie films off balance by delivering something other than what you expect, at least some of the time. And where as many zombie films, especially recent ones, rely on pumped up adrenaline and action, Grapes of Death meanders aimlessly across the French countryside at the same pace as its confused protagonist.
Coming out in 1978, Rollin's pseudo-zombie dream was one of the earliest European attempts to mimic George Romero's hugely influential Dawn of the Dead, though in tone and approach, Grapes of Dead has more in common with Jorge Grau's oft short-changed 1974 zombie film Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. Both films share a pastoral rural setting turned sinister with experimental pest control methods being the culprit behind the madness. But Grau's zombies are most definitely the living dead, where as Rollin's zombies have more in common with creations from another George Romero film, 1973's The Crazies. In fact, if I had to pick one film that was the most likely influence on Grapes of Death, it would be The Crazies, which is the tale of a small town that becomes infected with a virus that turns people into murderous nutjobs. Where Grapes of Death differs significantly from Romero's film is in the mood. Romero, a former director of industrial and instructional films, has always been a largely clinical director, injecting a sense of matter of fact reason into fantastic events through his reserved direction. Rollin, on the other hand, allows the bizarre events of his film to dictate the atmosphere. Thus, while both films take place in somewhat foreboding, winterly rural locations, Rollin's looks much more like something out of a fevered nightmare. In addition to the ragged countryside, punctuated by strangely shaped rock formations and mist, Rollin makes excellent use of crumbling old walled towns. Everywhere is a palpable sense of decay. Both The Crazies and Grapes of Death inform the basic premise of more current films, like 28 Days Later, though whether or not those films played much role in influencing 28 Days Later is something I do not know. And of course, that movie takes yet another very different approach to the same basic premise.
Then there's the trance-like electronic music score, minimalist and reminiscent of Tangerine Dream. Composer Phillipe Sissman only has this and one other work to his credit, and even here he doesn't contribute much more than one weird synth theme that is used to remarkably good effect. It clashes with the natural setting around it, and with the decrepit, lived-in look of the film's overgrown villages, but it works perfectly with the hypnotic mood of the film. It helps communicate the idea that something is not quite right. Rollin's film depends largely on young Marie-Georges Pascal, who like many of Rollin's actors, was minimally experienced at the time. She appeared in a number of erotic films with titles like I Am Frigid...Why? and Hot and Naked. Although Grapes of Death is a great leap forward for her, nothing really ever came of it. In 1985, with her film career having gone nowhere, she committed suicide. Her eventual fate lends an additional level of melancholy to the film, especially given the downhearted ending. It's obvious she has some talent, though, as she manages to create an interesting character even though she (like everyone else) has minimal dialog and spends an inordinate amount of time screaming as she witnesses one horror or another. It's the simple everyman (or everywoman) quality that endears her to the viewer. Plus, she rarely does things that are completely and incomprehensibly stupid just so she can move the plot along. I guess that's one of the benefits of not having much of a plot.
Supporting her are a cast largely unrecognizable to me, as like most Americans, if it isn't Gerard Depardieu being flustered or Jean Reno punching someone, I don't know many French actors. Some of them, like the two beer-loving guys who come to Elizabeth's rescue, are experienced actors. But the only real familiar face to me is Brigitte Lahaie, the French porn star turned Jean Rollin muse. She appeared in many of his films and acted as sort of a muse, in much the same way Soledad Miranda (and later Lina Romay) did for Jess Franco. She has a small part here, as a woman who befriends Elizabeth (or so it would seem) and gives her protection from a town full of crazies. Of course, I'd always like to see more of her, but that's what films like Fascination are for. She did star in one more of Rollin's variations on the zombie theme, 1980's strange Night of the Hunted, in which France is afflicted with mass memory loss and hysteria, causing Brigitte to have to wander around nude a lot for some reason I've never fully comprehended but am never the less happy to accept.
Grapes of Death may not be exactly what people expect from a zombie film, and even if it is Rollin's most accessible and straightforward narrative, that doesn't mean that it doesn't rely heavily on weirdness and surrealism. I personally find it thoroughly hypnotic and imaginative. Especially after watching so many poorly-made carbon copy zombie films of late, it's refreshing to return to something this unique. A year later, Lucio Fulci's Zombie would come out and pretty much define the European (by then, almost exclusively Italian) zombie film for the next...well, to this very day. Fulci works in much the same way as Rollin and considers many of the same things important -- the creepy atmosphere; the construction of striking, haunting imagery; the sense of decay generated by moody locations; and of course the disregard for strong scriptwriting. But Rollin is much more lyrical in his approach, and even though Grapes of Death has plenty of goo and gore (it was one of the very first -- possibly the very first -- French gore film), there is something decidedly different about it. If Lucio Fulci is the Chang Cheh of zombie films -- all visceral punches and testosterone -- then Jean Rollin's Grapes of Death is like something from Chu Yuan. Poetic, dreamy, perhaps feminine in a way, even when naked women are being beheaded or run through with pitchforks. It's a shame that Zombie Lake, the movie that was too crappy even for Jess Franco, remains the best known Jean Rollin film. Most of his movies remained unseen for years, and even their initial releases played to scarcely more than a smattering of people. Grapes of Death is one of my favorite zombie films, or whatever those sort-of zombie, crazy bleeding people are called. I can, and often do, watch this and many other Rollin films over and over. Sometimes I may only half pay attention to them, like albums playing in the background, but keeping them in the corner of your eye or at the periphery of your consciousness suits them well. Of course, I also like sitting down and paying attention to them, as I think many (but not all) of his films are quite rewarding. If you are as tired as I am of movies where a group of strangers board up the windows and yell at each other for 75 minutes until the zombies bust in and eat everyone, Grapes of Death might be the remedy you're looking for. I recommend you view it with a nice, fruity Cabernet Sauvignon. Labels: B-Masters Roundtable, Country: France, Director: Jean Rollin, Horror: Zombies, Year: 1978 posted by Keith at 12:43 AM | 6 Comments Friday, November 03, 2006Hide and Creep
2004, United States. Starring Melissa Bush, Chris Hartsell, Chuck Hartsell, Kyle Holman, Barry Austin, Mia Frost, Chris Garrison, Kenn McCracken, Eric McGinty, Michael Shelton, John Walker. Directed by Chuck Hartsell, Chance Shirley. Written by Chance Shirley. Buy it now from Amazon.com
 .I'm getting pretty tired of "wink wink" horror films that cloak themselves in what they assume to be the criticism-proof armor of "it's supposed to be bad!" I'm equally tired of the would-be critics who swallow that defense time and time again, and I assume most of them are relatively young and thus haven't spent the last three decades watching these types of films -- otherwise they would realize that, 1) a movie can be self-referential and satirical and still be a good genre entry (witness Shaun of the Dead and Return of the Living Dead), 2) movies that are intentionally campy or spoofy are not anything new, and 3) there should be a moratorium on people who review such movies and employ phrases like, "People who don't like it just don't get it," or "what people don't get is that it's supposed to be bad!" or any other variation of those tired old excuses for bad movies. The no-budget zombie comedy Hide and Creep has been the frequent benefactor of these types of comments and reviews, the likes of which are usually reserved for the collective works of Troma. I almost always tote a grudge against a film that relies on the "it's bad on purpose" excuse for shoddy filmmaking, so it's lucky for Hide and Creep (yeah, I'm sure they were worried about what I thought) that I knew absolutely nothing about the movie other than it was about zombies and the Southern dude on the cover looked like one of my relatives. I ended up watching Hide and Creep simply because I decided one day to search for and add every micro-budget zombie film I could find to my Netflix queue, and this one happened to pop up. I didn't read any of the comments and reviews until after I'd watched the movie, and that turned out to work pretty well in the movie's favor. Because Hide and Creep isn't a great film. It's not an accomplished entry into the zombie canon. And it does play the "wink wink" card, but the difference is that it does so in a way that seems so good-natured, so innocent, and so amicable, rather than condescending or smarmy, that although the film stumbles, I found its friendly attitude enough to make it an all right viewing experienced. It also helps that it's one of the few low-budget horror-comedies where some of the jokes are actually funny and don't have to do with poop and farts. The set-up is nothing original: a small town in Alabama suddenly finds itself infested with the living dead, who eat the living and can only be killed by a shot to the head, and a ragtag band of the living must fight for survival. As I've mentioned both in the old review of the Korean action film Shiri and the more recent review of the micro horror film Death Factory, there's nothing wrong with dealing in cliche as long as you either deal the hand well or make up for it in some other way. Hide and Creep is a good example of this, because while the scenario is well-worn and tired, the movie doesn't rely on the scenario. Instead, it relies on a cast of characters who are at times funny and engaging and manage to work in some gags that got a chuckle out of me. Hide and Creep is built around three different groups. The least interesting and least funny is that of the small-town reverend who gets bitten by a zombie, and uses his final minute son earth to berate the people who are only coming to church now that there's something sinister happening. The second group is a trio of gun enthusiasts (the leader of which is named Keith). The final group is a random assembly consisting of cynical video store clerk Chuck, harried police secretary Barbara, her ex-boyfriend Chris, and a naked guy named Michael who apparently had his pants stolen by aliens. I will warn you now, though the film does feature a couple gratuitous nude shots of women, carrying the bulk of the nudity rests on the beefy shoulders of Michael -- and he isn't shy. Plenty about the film doesn't work. It's poorly paced, for one, with some slow spots. The zombies are a minimal presence, and there's only a couple gore effects, so if that's your bag, then you are going to be disappointed. The zombie make-up is awful and looks like very little effort was put into it. The story doesn't seem to have a whole lot of focus, and the ending is less of an ending than it is the point at which they simply had to wrap things up for the sake of running time and money. Some of the jokes are tired, such as the video store clerk talking on the phone about zombie movies -- we get it, already. You've seen zombie movies, and you know what letterboxing is. I didn't need to see these jokes again. On the other hand, certain things work to the movie's advantage. The acting is bad, but it's bad in such a way that it actually becomes pretty entertaining. It's not that flat, listless sort of bad acting one expects from such films. It's more -- I don't know. Not so much bad as it is confused, like everyone involved didn't quite know what was going on with the whole making of the movie. For some characters -- burn-out Chuck and poor, confused, naked Michael, it makes the performances pretty good in a very off-kilter way. And Kyle Holman, who plays gun enthusiast Keith, turns in what is actually a pretty endearing performance, if for no other reason that I know so many guys who look, act, and speak exactly like him. He also has one of the two funniest scenes in the movie. After arming his teenage daughter and little girl, he goes out for some zombie stomping. The girls are of course attacked and dispatch the zombies. When Keith returns, his youngest daughter runs up to him and says, "Daddy! I've been killing zombies all day!" to which he replies, in that fawning tone parents have, "You sure have, haven't you!" I don't know. It was funny to me, as was the throwaway line from one of Keith's friends upon their initial discovery of the zombies out in the woods: "Zombies! I knew it, just like they said on Coast to Coast A.M.!" Which is probably only funny if you are a trucker or someone else who drives during the wee small hours of the morning. There are some other gags that worked OK for me to. When he visits a friend at the local strip club only to find it full of zombies, Keith raises his gun to dispatch them, but keeps getting distracted from the task at hand as he watching a couple of topless stripper zombies writhe about with one another. The "you have an RC problem - No, we had a Pepsi problem earlier" bit was good for a larf, as is Chuck's accidental debut on the news as a zombie expert when all he wanted to do was to tell them to quit pre-empting the Alabama-Auburn football game for emergency bulletins. All comedies are hit or miss, and that goes doubly so for micro-budget horror comedies, which tend to rely too heavily on the Troma style of throwing out the most mundane, predictable, and humorless jokes and hoping that the audience is too stupid or too new to the scene to realize how lame it all is. So it's a pleasant surprise when a movie the likes of Hide and Creep manages to squeeze in a lot of lines that got an honest laugh out of me. And most of those jokes are topical or cultural, rather than the usual toilet humor on which so many micro-budget films rely. Even the visual gag revolving around Michael's spending half the movie wandering around naked is pretty funny, especially since actor Michael Shelton delivers his line with such confused earnestness. You will believe he is a guy who honestly has no idea where his pants are. I think what warms me most to the characters in this film is that they are Southern, sort of goofy, but not in any mean-spirited sort of way. After decades of films that revel in trashing Southerners, I'm happy when a film like Hide and Creep plays things a little friendlier. There are plenty of stupid characters, but they're not stupid because they're Southern; they're just stupid because they are characters in a horror film. And they are Southerners not because the filmmakers thought it would be funny to make them Southern. They are Southern because the film was made in the South, by people from the South, who probably mostly knew other people from the South and got them to be in the movie. The direction is competent but unspectacular, working as most micro-budget films do around actual locations with limitations on what you can do with camera angles and lighting. It was co-directed by Chuck Hartsell (who also appears as Chuck the video store clerk in the movie) and Chance Shirley. Although I've savaged a number of micro-budget horror films in the past, I am impressed by the level of technical prowess possessed by many of the directors. There plenty of micro-budget horror films during the 80s and 90s, and almost all of them were wretchedly directed and recorded. Not all of this is attributable to the archaic nature of the equipment when compared to what the modern-day would-be director has at their disposal, though equipment plays a part. The big difference seems to be that we've moved from the realm of teenagers with no idea what they are doing to slightly older directors who are making earnest efforts to learn their craft. The dedication shows -- it's just too bad that similar dedication doesn't seem to get applied to acting and writing. Speaking of which, Hide and Creep was written by the directors, and their skill at penning a script seems about on par with their direction in that it's just about getting good. They do, as I said, deliver a lot of solid bits. The task now is to simply weave them all together into a more consistent whole. Still, when you've suffered through multiple Brad Sykes films (yes, I kick him every chance I get -- but just so he doesn't feel bad, I still watch all of his movies) where neither the writing, acting, or directing ever seems to get better no matter how many movies he makes, it's nice to see a couple of guys who look like they are at a good starting point and will improve with each subsequent effort. So while I may have said that plenty about the film doesn't quite work, and even that as a movie, it doesn't quite work, that doesn't mean it didn't work for me. I had a blast watching this movie, and the bad is definitely outweighed considerably by the good. Hide and Creep joins the ranks of films like The Stink of Flesh and Enter...Zombie King in that it makes me think that there might be hope yet for micro-budget horror film makers. Hide and Creep doesn't do everything right, but it shouldn't do everything right. What it should do, and what it does, is showcase some writing and talent that is just this close to getting it right. It's a movie with a lot of good and funny ideas and the ability to pull most of them off. Its missteps are forgivable, and though this is obviously a movie made by people who were having fun making a movie, it doesn't have to rely on, "they sure had fun making this movie" to be its only redeeming feature. It shows promise. And it made me laugh. Not at how bad the movie was, but at how funny some of the gags were. Hide and Creep is the sort of movie I really wish was better than it is, because there are plenty of individual pieces worth watching. They just fail to come together into a cohesive film of the same quality. The subplot with the reverend could be trimmed entirely from the movie, and I don't think anyone would miss it. It contributes very little and seems ultimately to little more than padding. The characters in that story just aren't interesting or funny, and there the bad acting is just bad acting. It's the Tom Bombadil chapter of Hide and Creep. And yes, I know some people swear up and down that the Tom Bombadil chapter is their favorite part of The Lord of the Rings. Whenever someone says this, they are almost always just trying to be smart-ass and contrary. So look them square in the eye and ask them if Tom Bombadil is really their favorite part of The Lord of the Rings, then ask them to explain why. Then just haul off and let 'em have it with a good one to the jaw, because Tom Bombadil sucks. Still, my feelings regarding Tom Bombadil aside, and the missteps of this film taken in consideration, I would heartily thrust thumb into the air and say, "Hell yeah!" Hide and Creep may not be a perfect endeavor, but it's solid never the less, and a worthy way to waste a bit of time. Seriously, though. Fuck Tom Bombadil. Labels: Horror: Microbudget, Horror: Zombies, Year: 2004 posted by Keith at 4:04 PM | 3 Comments Monday, October 30, 2006The Stink of Flesh
2005, United States. Starring Kurly Tlapoyawa, Ross Kelly, Diva, Billy Garberina, Kristin Hansen, Devin O'Leary, Andrew Vellenoweth, Bryan Gallegos, Dickie Collins, Liz Johnson, Tanith Fiedler, Alan Cordova, Bob Vardeman. Written and directed by Scott Phillips. Buy it now from Amazon.com
 .Given equipment and modest funds, the aspiring micro-budget horror film director is going to make one of three types of horror movie. The two likeliest candidates are either a killer in the woods film or a zombie film. Running a distant third are the directors who set out to make a mopey goth-industrial vampire film, which are rarer owing to the fact that, unless the director is already friends with a lot of gothy types, he's going to have to spend a lot of money on frilly Renaissance Faire shirts and long leather trenchcoats that have been cinched in at the waist. Of the two leading candidates, I almost always prefer the zombie films, not just because I like zombies more than slashers, but also because…no, it's just because I like zombies more than slashers, and as such, find bad, boring zombie films to be more tolerable than bad, boring slasher films. of course, good zombie films are even better. Well, sometimes. Is there really anything better than Zombie III? And if, like me, you are a friend of bad, boring zombie films, than this is truly a belle epoque for you. The rise of digital video filmmaking has seen a dramatic increase in the number of microbudget zombie films that get made, and the rise of cheap distribution through DVD and online rental shops that are more open to stocking any damn thing that comes their way means that there has, since the dawn of the new millennium, been a massive increase in the number of homemade zombie films being made. This is a good thing, provided you value the quantity of readily available zombie films over the quality, because most of the movies are still pretty bad. They may boast better editing and film quality than we enjoyed in the old shot-on-VHS days of Zombie Bloodbath, but very often the advances stop there, and we still get phenomenally awful acting, pacing, and scripting. Recently, however, more filmmakers seem to be realizing that the standard Night of the Living Dead formula -- barricade a group of people inside a house and watch them argue and die for the next eighty minutes -- has very little to offer beyond what's already been done. So they try to come up with something new that still operates within the confines of the traditional definition of the zombie film. Shatter Dead, despite sundry flaws, was one of the first movies I remember that made an earnest attempt to place a different spin on the zombie film. I, Zombie was another one, but I seem to remember what that movie did differently was prove how phenomenally boring a zombie could be. Since then, we've seen a fair degree of "variation on a theme." It doesn't always work -- in fact, it rarely works, but hey, at least the effort is being made to come up with some new ideas. Microbudget zombie film The Stink of Flesh is one of the movies that tries to come up with a different spin on the age-old story of the dead returning to mash pig entrails and raw meat against their face for the camera. Based on the title, you may think that this is a film about zombie hygiene, which I freely admit is a topic that goes largely unexplored. This is probably because there are few actors who can work with lines like, "Braaaaains...and Pert!" And yes, I assume zombies use Pert, because being reduced to the basest utilitarian instincts, a zombie is going to recognize the efficiency of having the shampoo and conditioner combined into a single product. Or maybe I'm confusing zombies with Germans. Anyway, it doesn't matter, because this is not a movie about zombie skin care. What it is, however, is a unique take on the zombie scenario: what are a couple of swingers to do when a zombie crisis continuously dwindles the available supply of potential sex partners? The idea is as promising as it is absurd, but my initial fear was that it would be an exercise in tedium as I was forced to sit through countless scenes of some chintzy goth type expounding on some sex and death philosophy of sensuality that would sound like it was conceived, well, by some pretentious teenage goth rocker. I got enough of that when I was a pretentious teenage punk rocker with pretentious teenage goth rocker friends, and that was back when being a goth was a lot simpler and more affordable than it is today. All you needed back then was a Joy division t-shirt and a willingness to sit through the extended version of Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead." I don't know when Klingon boots and leather trenchcoats and big, ugly nose rings like cows have got thrown into the mix. Of course, the person I knew who rambled on endlessly about "the sensuality of death" didn't look like those cute goth girls you see in movies or on Suicide Girls these days. She was a little more like...well, it wasn't the same. Let's just leave it at that. Much to my delight and, I will admit, surprise, The Stink of Flesh steers clear of that sort of ponderous dialogue and manages to deliver a film that is actually pretty good, and certainly miles better than its micro-budget ilk. The writing is actually accomplished, the characters are developed (well, most of them), and it strikes a good balance between blood-spurting action and plot development. After wading through so many bad films, I was just about ready to give up hope that the micro-budget horror scene would ever produce a movie I wouldn't get grumpy about. And just as email was starting to come in telling that if I didn't like these movies, I shouldn't watch them and make fun of them, along rambles this one and proves my point: it's not that I don't like micro-budget horror films; I just didn't like your micro-budget horror film. Not that I warmed to The Stink of Flesh right away. I was going in with a chip on my shoulder and the assumption mentioned above that I was going to have to suffer through lots of cut-rate philosophizing about sex and death. The introduction of our hero didn't help matters, purely because his name is Matool, and I think the hoary old act of naming the characters in your horror film after famous horror directors or stars -- or in this instance, locations -- is played out. Everyone's already done it, so lay off, man. Despite the name, however, my opinion started to change quickly once we learn a little about the man who his Matool and the world in which he lives. There has been, needless to say, a zombie outbreak. No explanation is given, and honestly at this point, do we even need one? The drawn-out process of explaining the outbreak of zombies always strikes me as wasted time since it usually just ends up being, "meteors" or "toxic waste," which isn't an explanation worth spending much of a movie on. No, here we're dropped into the thick of things and expected to already get it. After all, who but zombie film fans will even bother watching this movie in the first place? Matool (Kurly Tlapoyawa, who you won't recognize from anything), having nothing better to do, cruises the backwaters of America and starts fist fights with zombies. For some reason, I really like that. Sure, he usually seals the deal by driving a big nail into the zombie's skull, but he spends the bulk of his zombie encounters engaged in fisticuffs. He's like a zombie bully. He's also craving a little companionship, if you get my drift, which I think is a perfectly legitimate urge to explore even though it's been ignored by most other zombie films (Day of the Dead touches on it in a tangential sort of way). When he rescues a woman (Tanith Fiedler) from a zombie attack, one of his first thoughts after getting her to the relative safety of a creepy old pedophile's cabin (the pedo won't be interested in her, after all) is to try and get a little action. It may seem a callous misstep by Matool or the script, but think for a brief moment about the situation. If you live every day expecting that you could be killed in a horrific fashion at any moment, then just about every sensation becomes hyper intensified, and this usually includes the sex drive, especially if you haven't gotten to use it in a long time. I'm reminded by a scene from Babylon Five where Garibaldi hooks up with an infantrywoman right before she's being shipped out to a big battle where high casualties are a foregone conclusion. When he tried to pull the sensitive guy "we should take this slow" card, she gets irritated and basically responds by saying she's most likely going to be dead by this time tomorrow, and she doesn't want a loving relationship built on a solid foundation of caring and understanding. She just wants to fool around and feel alive one more time before she gets gunned down. I don't think The Stink of Flesh communicates the sentiment quite as effectively (but then, Babylon 5 did it by just having a character spell it out), but as a man possessed of profound insight as well as ample experience with the heightened sense of life and passion that comes from a life of constant danger and adventure, I understand what's going on. Of course, the girl doesn't really share Matool's sentiments, and before to long her attempts to get away from Matool's clumsy advances and the creepy pedophile (Bob Vardeman) with his two young wards result in zombies crashing the party and having a gory chow-down. Only Matool and one of the kids (Bryan Gallegos) escape, but no sooner are they outside and on the run than Matool finds himself nailed in the head by the door of the pick-up truck. So it is that he finds himself in the company of swingers Nathan (Ross Kelly), and Dexy (whose credited name, Diva, sounds even more like a character name than her character's name). Matool's job is to get it on with Dexy while Nathan peeks. In return, Matool gets to relax for once and enjoy a steady stream of free food and safety. All in all, he's not too upset with the arrangement, even when Dexy's weird sister Sassy shows up to whack him on the ass and talk about her horrid little conjoined twin (not really the best realized special effect). Things get complicated, however, when a group of soldiers show up. One of them has been bitten, and all of them are happy to take turns with Dexy, who hasn't had this many playthings in years. Unfortunately, Nathan has had about enough of things, and we learn he's not as decent a guy as we think he is (something to do with a murder and a naked zombie chick he keeps chained up in his shed). Folks start fighting over who "gets" Dexy, and the soldiers drag Matool into the bickering even though his reaction is basically, "Dude, I don't really care. I'll split. This is a weird scene anyway." Once again, internal breakdown results in a zombie stampede. What The Stink of Flesh does right is be cleverer than most other zombie films, especially most other micro0budget zombie films. Other reviews have played up the sex angle of the story and tagged the film as a softcore porn romp with some zombies thrown in,. They must have watched a different movie than me. Although we're served up a gratuitous lesbian kiss and boob shot, and one naked zombie chick, the rest of the film's meager amount of nudity is presented in the form of Matool's bare ass, and guys bare asses are like a dime a dozen. You're lucky we ever even put the thing away. Although sex is an important part of the plot, it hardly burns up very much screen time, and you get much more nudity from the average Italian zombie film than you get here. Parts of the film are somewhat dialogue heavy, but it never got especially tedious for me, usually because there was a zombie run-in waiting in the wings to spice things up. Plus, the characters are all actually pretty well developed. Matool is the rough and tumble average Joe who finds himself stuck in between the weird scene of a zombie plague and the weirder scene of a couple of swingers in the midst of a breakdown. Nathan starts out as a genuinely likable guy with a simple sexual kink, but we quickly discover there a lot more evil to him than we suspected. Rather than dwell on "isn't all kinky," the swinging aspect of the relationship between Nathan and Dexy is presented as being a relatively normal thing. After all, most everyone has their own weird kinks, and they only pretend not to be into something a little freaky. Witness: pretty much anyone on a morals-based committee in Congress. For our purposes here, Nathan is just a regular dude (well, at least he seems so at first), and Dexy is normal, too. Oh yeah -- Dexy, played by Diva (should anyone really be allowed to name themselves "Diva?" I don't think so), also turns in a fair performance as a woman who seems to be using her sexual kink not even so much as a means of enjoying herself as it is a way to forget the horror of what's going on outside. In fact, this is ultimately less an examination of sex than it is simply a look at people desperately trying to cling to some recognizable vestige of their lives when everything has been turned upside down. in that sense, it shares a common theme with both Dawn of the Dead and to an even greater degree Land of the Dead. Although the set-up of trying to be a swinger when everyone else is dead sound humorous, the end effect is more chilling, as it becomes a look at people desperately clinging to something, anything, that will make them feel like at least some tiny corner of the world hasn't gone completely insane. This often comes, unfortunately, at the price of vigilance, as one gets so obsessed with the minutiae of creating a false sense of "regular life" that one tends to forget that there are still zombies out there, and not everyone has Matool hanging around in the den, ready to punch zombies in the face and hammer nails into their skulls.. The soldiers are even decent guys rather than the usual foaming mad psychopaths with which zombie films usually present us. And then there's the little kid, who doesn't do much acting but steals the film with his creepy grin for the final shot of the film. His role may be a largely silent one, but the plot ends up hinging on his actions in a way I really didn't expect. The acting is uneven but never all that bad. As Matool, Kurly Tlapoyawa is understated but totally believable as the sort of Ultimate Fighting championship watching Hispanic guys I used to sit in the parking lot with, drinking corona and talking lucha libre. He strikes a nice balance between being energized by picking fights with zombies and just being tired of the whole zombie thing. He's also the inventor of a new scale of judging the attractiveness of women with the implementation of the "she'd be hot if there a zombie outbreak" classification. The rest of the cast surrounding Tlapoyawa aren't accomplished thespians, but they're decent actors inhabiting believably real characters who actually behave in a way that reflects how real people might behave, rather than the often illogical and idiotic way characters in a horror film behave because the scriptwriter was bad. Speaking of the script, it's pretty good. It manages to be a variation on a theme. We still have a group of survivors holed up in a farmhouse and proving they are more dangerous to each other than the zombies amazing outside, but it does enough things a little differently that it doesn't feel like a tired old retread of previous, better films. And the film's exploration of sexuality in extreme conditions is well-executed and never becomes tiresome or domineering of the film's action. There are some plot points that are introduced and don't seem to go anywhere -- specifically the mention of fast-moving "hyper zombies" that seem thrown in simply to explain how a group of soldiers could be overcome and wounded by them -- but these prove to relatively minor missteps in a script that, for the most part, stays on course and focused. I'd rather have a couple dangling threads left over than sit through a movie with no plot at all, comprised of nothing but 90 minutes of people running through the woods. It's obvious that writer-director Scott Phillips put some effort into the script, and for that I almost want to collapse prostrate before him and thank him endlessly. You see, micro-budget horror film makers? You see what can happen if you put some genuine effort into your story instead of dashing off a script in ten minutes because you are excited to get out into the woods and film people in gore make-up mashing pig innards against their faces? You get a movie that is actually good is what you get. Phillips' script may be clumsy in spots, but big deal. He has a script! He came up with an interesting hook, then made it work in a way that is actually intelligent. He worked on it, put thought into it, and has some talent for writing. Phillips also has some previous experience with writing a script. In 1997, he penned the script for a modest little action film called Drive, starring Mark Dacascos (China Strike Force and Iron Chef America for some reason) and directed by effects wiz Steve Wang (Kungfu Rascals and those live-action Guyver films that thought it would be a good idea to have a jive-talking Jimmy walker in them). Drive remains largely ignored in the United States (it was unavailable on VHS or DVD for years), which is a shame because it was a damn good film. Since then, Phillips has worked primarily in the direct-to-DVD micro-budget horror ghetto, but frankly, he's a welcome member of the population, because he shows what is achievable if only you put a little work into the writing. All this talk of plots, characters, and explorations of what to do with your sexual urges when most of the world has turned into unattractive zombies may make you think, as I feared before watching the film, that you're going to have to sit through something ponderous and talky. But Phillips also delivers the grue zombie film fans have come to expect from their beloved shambling mounds of rotting flesh. Kurly Tlapoyawa handles action scenes well, and there is plenty of spurting blood, oozing goo, and dangling gut stuff to remind you that this is still a zombie film. They are, for the most part, the same sort of practical effects we've been getting in low-budget zombie films for years now, but it's amazing how much better these effects are when they are surrounded by a good movie. Finally, the music is pretty damn good. It seems we have exited the era of the metalhead dude zombie film director (fare the well and Godspeed you, Todd Sheets), and entered the era of the rockabilly dude zombie film director. I honestly have no idea if Scott Phillips is a rockabilly, but he certainly packs his film with plenty of garage rock meets dusty border town twang, which is a welcome respite from generic thrash metal. If rockabillies have become the stewards of the zombie film (another mcirobudget feature, Enter...Zombie King relies on a similar mix of garage rock and south of the border-tinged surf guitar, and need I even mention the rock 'n' roll zombies of Wild Zero?) and this is an example of the results, then the future looks bright. Well, brighter. You had your chance, metal dudes, and you blew it. I don't know how much my glowing praise for The Stink of Flesh comes from the film itself and how much of it comes from the fact that, after sitting through so many awful and awfully boring films, finding one that is pretty good sends me into fits of hysterical glee. It's probably a mix of both, but all that matters at the end of the day is I finished watching The Stink of Flesh and was pleasantly surprised. Dawn of the Dead? No, not really, but even George Romero himself can't seem to match that one. The Stink of Flesh proves that being a micro-budget horror film is no excuse for being a bad film. And while I can sit here, in one review after the other, and harp on this fact, The Stink of Flesh does me one better and leads by example. Labels: Horror: Microbudget, Horror: Zombies, Year: 2005 posted by Keith at 1:34 PM | 1 Comments Thursday, October 26, 2006Death Factory
2002, United States. Starring Tiffany Shepis, Lisa Jay, Karla Zamudio, Jeff Ryan, David Kalamus, Rhoda Jordan, Jason Flowers, Alyson Beal, Michael O'Karma. Written and directed by Brad Sykes. Buy it now from Amazon.com
 .Time once again to visit the fertile crescent of microbudget horror film making that is the imagination of Brad Sykes. And by "fertile," I largely mean "spread over with manure." Sykes directed two films that were touched on in brief during our recent spat of micro-reviews, but this is the first time I'm giving the full treatment to one of his feature film endeavors. I figure if he took the time to make a feature-length film, then I should take the time to write a feature-length article about it. The previous films mentioned here, Goth and Bloody Tease, represent the state of Sykes' filmmaking talent as of 2003 and 2005 respectively. If nothing else, comparing the two films shows at least some sort of progression in that Bloody Tease wasn't as completely boring and illogical as Goth. Plus, Bloody Tease was about vampire strippers, which is always an improvement over a film about pretentious Goth rockers named Goth who can't stop talking about what it means to be a true Goth. As well all know, anyway, being a true Goth means you wear furs, carry a big-ass battleaxe, and sacked Rome. And no one in that film sacked Rome, while some of the vampire strippers in Bloody Tease at least stripped their tops off. Death Factory is a 2002 effort, which means it is potentially even worse than Goth provided that a filmmaker gets better with each round of experience. This is obviously never the case, not with microbudget filmmakers making movies with their friends, for their friends, and not with Francis Ford Coppola. Good for Death Factory and bad for Goth, Brad Sykes follows in the footsteps of Francis Ford Coppola (Sykes, if you ever read this, I agree to let you use the quote, "Follows in the footsteps of Francis Ford Coppola" in any promotional material you might generate) by having an older film that is much better than more recent efforts. Death Factory is still a phenomenally stupid movie thanks to -- and let's say this all together, to make sure we learn -- a bad script, but at least this is a bad script in which things continually happen and the microbudget film-sinking tendency to indulge in endless, badly acted dialogue is kept to a relative minimum. Plus, you have Tiffany Shepis, one of my favorite microbudget horror stars, flailing about in metal fangs, a thong, and a loose-fitting tank top, and that's gotta count for something. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I can't call Tiffany a close friend, but she is a friend. She engaged in immoral activities with Enrique Camacho, who is is a close friend, right before he got his head chopped off. In the case of Death Factory, however, I don't think my acquaintance with her is going to color the review much, since her primary job is to make rolling-eye monster faces and rip open chests.
At this point, I think you should assume that a shot-on-video horror film's script is poorly written and the story horrendously derivative and predictable unless otherwise stated. And I'm not statin' anything otherwise for this movie. We open with the "two pointless characters get killed" prologue, and Sykes clues us in that, while he may not have the money for good mutant make-up or a convincing location, at least he paid enough money to get some chick to show her boobs in the first couple minutes of the film. Since another chick shows her boobs later on, I will assume this is where pretty much all of Death factory's budget went, and while I would have liked to have seen it spread about a little more liberally to non-boob-showing causes, I'm also not going to be one to fault a guy for throwing a little extra cash someone's way in exchange for some gratuitous nudity. What we establish in the prologue, besides the presence of bare breasts, is that there is an abandoned factory on the edge of town, and people go in there to fool around but usually just wind up dead. I've made out in some strange places, and I've snuck into my share of abandoned buildings, but even I have to stop and declare that "the old abandoned biochemical plant where people keep getting murdered" is a little hard to swallow as a nookie spot -- and this is coming from someone who once made out in the high school vocational school auto garage. I snuck with a girlfriend into an abandoned, haunted tuberculosis hospital in Valley Station, outside of Kentucky (Waverly Hill -- you can see it on an episode of Ghost Hunters if you watch that sort of thing), but that's a Louisville teen tradition (I did it, my sister did it, and our parents did it before us) and we didn’t combine the sneaking with snogging, mostly because the insides of abandoned, haunted buildings are a tad squalid. Not to mention, you know, mostly empty. Also, we were scared -- of ghosts, of cops, and of the rumored gun-toting mercenary night watchman who prowled the grounds looking for teenagers sneaking into the place.
But then, I'm willing to give the factory a pass because, though I may have stuck primarily to fooling around in the back seat of a car (unfortunately, not a Camaro or a GTO or a boss custom van, but a white Olds with red vinyl interior -- kind of chilly on frosty autumn nights) the way proper American males are supposed to, I also worked for a summer as a movie theater usher and once busted a couple teens getting it on in the front row of King Ralph. Yes, I know. I, like some of you, did some fondling in a movie theater back in the day (including while employed as an usher), but I was smart enough to 1) pick the movie no one wanted to see, and 2) sit in the back corner seats). Who goes to the second-run dollar theater on a Saturday night and sits in the front row of King Ralph, a movie that was, at the time, packed with nothing but dads and their ten-year-old sons looking for some good fart jokes and scenes in which John Goodman teaches stuffy British royals how to lighten up and have a little fun! And it's not like they were exhibitionists; they were just stupid kids, and they were totally shocked and embarrassed when, after a couple complaints, I had to wander down and tell them to knock it off. They got so embarrassed, in fact, that they soon packed up, slunk out of the auditorium and, I assume, found themselves a nearby abandoned chemical factory to finish what they'd started. So yeah, I guess teens will do it just about anywhere, especially if they're surrounded by arousing conditions, such as grimy old factories haunted by buxom mutants or with a giant 35mm projection of John Goodman singing "Good Golly, Miss Molly" in front of them.
Luckily, the abandoned biochemical factory of this movie is not only relatively clean as far as these places go, it also comes fully stocked with old couches (miraculously bug-infestation free) and even a goddamned four-post bed with clean linens. And there are no cops or grounds watchmen, and really, considering that the place was once a bio-weapons factory, very little in the way of locks and other obstructions to free entrance. With our two pointless prologue victims handily dispatched, we get to meet our core cast of players, and yes, this will be yet another "group of kids go to an isolated location and are preyed upon by a killer" movie. This time around, we have the virginal good girl, her noble and hunky boyfriend who is somewhere between a prep and a nerd, the smart-alec tough girl, the metal and/or punk dude, and the black couple. As is often the case with these groups of people, there's no real logical reason why they would be friends with each other. Why does the fun-loving black dude hang out with the wet blanket white dude? Why is the virginal mousy girl friends with the obnoxious dyke? Oh well, friendships aren't always easy to explain. They have big plans for the last day of their first year of college, and those plans involve going over to the black guy's parents' house and having a party. Except that his parents end up not leaving town, which is big of them considering how expensive it is to cancel or reschedule airline tickets these days (eventually, screenwriters are going to have to face financial reality and stop using "Oh no! My parents canceled their trip/came back early" as a plot point). And so our intrepid group of young heroes come up with the next best thing: let's all go to the abandoned factory on the edge of town, which is supposedly haunted, where people get killed, where there was a massive chemical disaster, so on and so forth.
Now, let's review. They're in college, but not a single one of them has their own apartment yet? Lame, man. And when one location falls through, their immediate option B is the abandoned factory? Not someone else's house? Not a bar or a club? Hell, they could just go to the park. Nope, it's straight to the abandoned factory, which would even be acceptable if they were just looking to goof off and do some property damage and spraypaint "Ozzy' on some crumbling walls. But their chief reason for getting together is to fool around and drink beer. Hell, if it was just drinking beer, even that I could understand. It's fun to break into places and drink beer. But the fooling around? In a factory? A DEATH factory, no less! Oh well -- at least the stupidity of our cast has been established early, so we won't be surprised later when they do things like split up and explore the dark hallways after they know a killer is hunting them down. Inside the factory, pretty much exactly what you'd expect to happen, happens. Couples go to fool around, and they die. People "split up" to explore the factory and find a way out, and they die (and rightfully so -- if people are still pulling that "let's split up" jive at this point, they deserve to be picked off, one by one). The metal dude uses his special metal mental powers that give him total recall of all events having to do with mayhem, death, the occult, government cover-ups, and what Eddie was doing on the cover of each Iron Maiden album and fills everyone in on the history of the factory. The monster turns out to be a mutated former worker, and you can add child labor law violations to the long list of grievances against the factory, because if she was working there years ago, then she must have been all of fourteen on the first day of her employ. Some mutants get green pustules all over. Some grow extra limbs and slobber gelatinous goo. The monster here, played by the aforementioned Tiffany Shepis, apparently got splashed with a chemical that makes you wear a thong, metal claws, thigh-high black stockings, and a loose, side-boob revealing t-shirt. What kind of factory was this, again? The mutation also makes her crave human blood, which accounts for all the throat and chest ripping that goes on. Death Factory delivers on the blood, but once you've splashed a fair amount of it about, what's the point in doing it again and again? After the first couple ripped throats and slashed chests, seeing a couple more ripped and slashed in exactly the same fashion isn't all that interesting. Still, at least Brad Sykes throw some gore on screen fairly often. While death factory be derivative and unimaginative and feature an abandoned factory where a couple finds a fully-made four-post bed in one of the rooms, but at least once the scenario is established, we don't waste a whole lot of time. We waste some time, but in terms of the average micro horror film, at least Sykes seems to have trimmed much of the fat. The end result is like micro horror McDonalds. It's not good, you know exactly what's going to happen, but at least it doesn't beat about the bush. I think we've established the shortcomings of the set, which seem to be a recurring theme for Sykes' films (Bloody Tease featured a strip club that looked suspiciously like someone's basement with some sheets hanging up and a coupe rows of metal folding chairs). The building could certainly pass for abandoned, but not for an abandoned factory, as it lacks any and all factory stuff. Instead, there are drywalled rooms with couches and beds and some broken chairs strewn about the place. And it's not like these are industrial couches or chairs or beds. They're wooden and look like they came from someone's grandparents' house. And the doors aren't metal; they're flimsy wood (or cardboard -- I can hardly tell). I guess, as I reasoned earlier, Sykes spent all his money on fake blood, gratuitous boob shots, and a completely inexplicable cameo by Ron Jeremy as a homeless dude who wanders in at random and gets killed. Thus, he had no money left for proper and convincing set dressing.
As if often the case with this type of film, acting is wildly inconsistent. Shepis has demonstrated previously that she's a decent performer. Here, however, she has no lines other than gurgling and snarling, and her role consists mostly of flashing a steel-fanged grin (what the hell kind of mutation is this, again?) and doing that sort of writhing gait I can only call "goblin stride." If you've ever seen the way goblins caper about in fantasy films, then you know the walk to which I refer. The rest of the cast is pretty forgettable. None of them are so egregiously awful that they stick out as being something special. They're just blandly "somewhat incompetent." Likewise, Sykes' direction could be called "blandly competent." He doesn't really have much to offer beyond pointing the camera at the scene and filming it, which is OK. Better than over-direction, anyway. It does leave one with little to criticize or commend, so the direction is succinctly summed up by saying that things are staged for the movie, and Brad Sykes successfully records these things. Special effects consist mostly of the usual spurting blood and fake entrails, both of which are delivered in generous quantities but, as I said, never in a way that makes their presence all that special or imaginative. There is a pretty good eye gouging scene, though. The editing is better than we see in most micro films, and while some tedium and overlong moments still exist, death factory is mercifully trimmed of much of the padding and fat that makes other micro horror films so intolerable. All in all, it's an all right effort. The biggest problem facing Death Factory is that, while it executes the tired old formula in a fairly energetic manner, it's still executing tired old formula with nothing new to offer. There's nothing wrong with trafficking in cliche; you just have to make sure you do it better than other people who are doing the same thing, and on that count, Brad Sykes both does and doesn't deliver. He delivers better than a lot of the other micro-budget horror films, but not against other films in general -- and this is a point on which budgetary constraints don't matter as much, so no free pass there. I can watch plenty of other "group of people gets hunted down and killed" movies that are better. There are plenty that are worse, too, but mediocrity isn't really something to which a film should strive. But that's what Death Factory achieves. The third-act revelation might explain why at least one member of the cast was anxious to go to the factory, but it's hardly an unexpected twist (in fact, I'd just seen the exact same twist a couple films earlier in another micro-budget horror film, Blood Oath -- though it was more of twist there, not to mention more nonsensical in terms of the plot -- and I'll take "happily nonsensical" over "pointlessly predicatble" any day). The characters are the usual bunch, and to their credit, while they are all so cliche that they could have been summoned straight from the mind of Jon Triton in order to fool Ol' Scratch (if you don't get that reference, you really should), at least they aren't completely unlikeable. In fact, the "black couple" seemed like they'd be sort of fun to hang out with, though I still wonder why not a single one them had their own apartment or knew anyone with their own apartment. Compared to the other Brad Sykes films I've seen, and compared to the bulk of micro horror films floating around, Death Factory is pretty good. But that's relative to the likes of Goth and Blood Gnome, mind you. If you have a soft spot for micro-budget horror films, or if you are simply in the mood for something that is predictable but still gory and adequate, Death Factory stands up all right. I can't imagine anyone getting overly enthusiastic about the movie -- I'm certainly not -- but I can't imagine anyone getting completely vitriolic about it, either. It just sort of exists, does some things well, does a lot of things poorly, and is sort of like, to steal a description from a friend, eating oatmeal. It's not really something to get excited about, and it's not something to which you look forward, but it's OK while going down. Labels: Director: Brad Sykes, Horror: Microbudget, Horror: Zombies, Year: 2002 posted by Keith at 3:05 PM | 2 Comments Monday, September 04, 2006Mortuary
Tobe Hooper. The name strikes in me an emotional response that I might best term "neutrambivalence"... He's brought us fun work the likes of Lifeforce and Salem's Lot; he's brought us classics such as Return of the Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Poltergeist; and then, like many horror directors, he also seems to have directed a lot of mediocre-to-lousy crap. He also, apparently, did some kind of remake of The Toolbox Murders, which I haven't seen but conceptually support; if you're going to remake something, you ought to make significant changes, and if you're going to do that, then the film might as well be one that no one really cared about to begin with. Y'know, it's like taking lead and making... well, if not gold, at least burnished lead or maybe some kind of low-grade copper.
So overall, my reaction to Hooper goes through stages kind of like those of grieving or healing: first pleasure, then confusion, then repulsion, then irritation, then neutrality. Neutrality with more than a hint of cynicism, actually... For instance, after seeing the changes he wrought from John Russo's original concept for Return of the Living Dead, it's hard to take him too seriously, even if a faithful adaptation of the wretched book would never have been even a tenth as successful. Mortuary is an interesting work which sort of produced a microcosm of my feelings about the director... I felt variously interested, irritated, disappointed, amused, and ultimately some strange amalgam of ambivalent and disinterested. And just like Hooper's career (in my eyes, and my opinion is more humble than my words might make it sound), the film has some great high points, some dismal low points, and a lot of general decent-to-mediocre stuff in between. The idea for this movie is simple--and, one might object, also predictable--but I also think it's good. I mean, it gets too easy to start complaining about predictability in movies. Sometimes it's nice to have a film that continually surprises you or changes your thinking, but other times it's nice to know that when you're renting a zombie film, somewhere along the lines it'll really have zombies in it (Zombie Island Massacre and others of your ilk, I'm glaring in your direction). The point of a movie--as far as I can tell, which might not be all that far--isn't always to astonish you with what you weren't expecting, but just to tell a story and tell it right. The setting is an actual old house in Pomona with an old graveyard in it which--according to the cast and crew in the DVD's featurette--is supposed to be haunted. Either way, the house looks great for a horror film. It's dilapidated and old, and the surrounding area is suitably desolate. In the film, it has recently been purchased by the Doyle family (consisting of a single mother and two kids) because the mother, Leslie, wants to start a career as a mortician, and moreover a new life, hence the drive across the country (from somewhere 26 hours away). Upon arrival, they find that the septic tank backed up from recent rainfall, flooding the yard with sewage, stale water, and whatever chemicals and waste were drained from the mortuary area years ago. This on one hand seems cliched and maybe over-the-top; on the other hand, it also foregrounds the very palpable, visceral tone which zombies epitomize. So overall, I'm for it. The downstairs is still filled with coffins, the lights hardly work, the house was never cleaned by a prison crew as the 'realtor' (a local politican) promised because the prisoners weren't allowed to be exposed to the chemicals, and to top it all off, there are rumors in circulation that the deformed and deranged son of the former inhabitants of the house (who themselves were brutally killed) is still alive somewhere on the premises. You might say, "Well, I'd never let anyone I loved live in a place like that, new career or not." Well... yeah. That's kind of a pitfall here. Yet Leslie Doyle is clearly meant to be obsessed with her chance for a Fresh Clean Start (tm), and is also perhaps a bit irresponsible, as we can see when she's sorting utensils out of a moving box: "Hm... Embalming... Kitchen... Embalming... Definitely kitchen... Ooh, embalming..." Her teenaged son Jonathan is at an awkward enough age without being thrown into a small town hundreds of miles from his previous school and having to live in the local haunted house where his mother cuts up dead bodies. Hm... though sadly enough, that sort of situation might have made me less awkward in high school. His sister is, essentially, just a kid, sometimes scared, sometimes exuberant, and always quite admirably portrayed by Stephanie Patton, who's a much better child actress than most films of this sort can ever obtain. There are competing strands of horrific narrative in this film, some regarding the history of the house and its Boo Radley-like rumored occupant, and then some strange sort of CGI fungus/sludge that appears to love the taste of blood and propagate through fluid transmission. At a more or less appropriate time, zombies also enter the mix, sometimes articulate and Pet Sematary-like, sometimes shambling and sort of Fulci-esque, but always undead and that's hard not to appreciate. I'm fine with irrational characters, sometimes. It's kind of ridiculous to imagine any remotely sympathetic mother letting her kids live in a place loaded with mortuary contaminants and bad wiring, but the movie sells it well enough that I'll buy it. However, I don't buy so freaking many people constantly walking into very dark, secluded parts of an old and falling-apart house with either 1) no lighting device of any kind, or 2) just a lighter if there are flashlights downstairs. That's not even a matter of avoiding monsters, it's just a matter of what the hell are you doing if you can't see anything in an old house filled with sharp, rusted objects and floorboards that might well be rotted through? I make allowances insofar as I can, but frankly, the characters in Mortuary are hard to believe sometimes, although in general they're more sympathetic than I expected them to be. The CGI fungus looks unnatural (not preternatural or supernatural), not to mention stultifying. And the zombies... well, as I said, they're uneven and often hiding conveniently behind easy-to-close doors sort of as if this were a Scooby-Doo cartoon. In fact, Scooby Doo might provide the right visual images if you want to imagine some of the action sequences, too, which I wouldn't exactly call "well-choreographed." And to round off my main complaints... the ending is terrible. I won't explain, just so you can see for yourself, but... it's one of those cheap endings that makes a bad horror flick that much worse. As I always say, if you're as rabid a zombie movie watcher as I am, there's no point in giving you any pronouncements as to whether or not you should see this. And unlike some "zombie" films, it actually has some zombies in it. In the end, I guess that's the best recommendation I can give this film. "It has zombies in it." Watch at your own risk. Labels: Horror: Zombies posted by Ryan at 11:35 AM | 6 Comments Tuesday, February 28, 2006The Dark Power
1985, United States. Starring Lash LaRue, Anna Lane Tatum, Cynthia Bailey, Mary Dalton, Paul Holman, Cynthia Farbman, Marc Matney, Tony Shaw, Robert Bushyhead, Suzie Martin, Dean Jones, Steve Templeton, Page Elizabeth Ray, Eric Mikesall, Tony Elwood. Written by Phil Smoot. Directed by Phil Smoot.
If there's one Western film genre above all others with which I'm unfamiliar, it is, and I mean no pun by it, that of Westerns. I've watched precious few Westerns--though I now own one or two starring Cuneyt Arkin which I haven't yet watched--and most of the ones I have seen have been recently-made low-budget horror flicks, or complete oddballs like El Topo, which I suspect is about as typical a Western as, say, Brazil is a science fiction film. Mind you, The Dark Power isn't a science fiction film. But its main claim to fame, and very likely the only reason that it was ever made, is that it features a B-Western star known as Lash LaRue. I'll try to steer clear of value judgments on this one, mainly because they're kind of beside the point. Writer/director Phil Smoot wrote and directed one other feature after this, Alien Outlaw (also starring LaRue), and thereafter worked only as a production manager or "miscellaneous crew" member, according to IMDB. This script appears to have been his first (at least professionally), and he states on the DVD that he wrote it in four days. And it was clearly written around Lash LaRue almost the same way that Ed Wood nearly did backflips (of course, that guy was an adept acrobat of logic anyway) just to work Lugosi footage indispensably into Plan 9. LaRue played some bit parts in a couple of films about, respectively, Nazis and a circus. But he got his big break through a bit of prevarication, pretending that he was an expert with a whip so that he could play a black-clad villain who would have a change of heart before the end of Song of Old Wyoming. In the process of learning to use the whip, he cut himself up pretty badly--he even contended that some of those scars never went away. The producer, however, was amused, and so they found a professional to train him to use a whip more effectively. It turned out to be a good career move. His whip-wielding character, The Cheyenne Kid, was so popular in Song of Old Wyoming that LaRue got fanmail from people who didn't even remember his name, addressed to "The Cheyenne Kid" or "That guy in black." It wasn't too long after that he took the name "Lash." Thus began a career that stretched from the late 40s to the early 70s wherein he starred in countless Westerns, some of which were, in B- tradition, so strapped for cash that they re-used footage from earlier films to pad out their running time. The general consensus is that his best film was 1950's King of the Bullwhip, praised for unique camerawork and imaginative fight choreography (both the hero and the villain used whips), and when I finally obtain and watch that film, I'm likely to post my thoughts here. I haven't found much in terms of detailed non-cinematic biographical information on Lash, but it seems that his life outside of film was a bit rocky. He had a staggering number of failed marriages, and developed a drinking problem that he finally cleaned up sometime between the 70s and the 80s. I gather that he was a bit low on money in the 80s, which may explain why he ended up as a warden in the '84 film Chain Gang. Phil Smoot was a camera operator on the same film, and did what almost any aspiring filmmaker would want to do: he talked to the former star and found a way to put him in a picture. I don't suppose it was hard to talk Lash into it. He may have had his troubles in life, but by all accounts he was very friendly and gracious with his fans. He sounds almost like the David Warbeck of the Western circuit. Plus, the gaffer from The Dark Power has a comment on IMDB stating that, when nothing else was going on, Lash used to be able to idly whip individual squares of toilet paper off of a roll with just a flick of his wrist; and frankly, that's hard not to admire in and of itself. Smoot's film with Lash was apparently a pretty big deal; locally, it made headline and front-page news, it seems. It seems that people really liked the guy. I've even read that Lash was part of the inspiration for Indiana Jones. So far I haven't read anything to confirm that, but obviously that inspiration would have come from a film made earlier than The Dark Power. Honestly, I don't see much of his talent in The Dark Power that's inspiring so much as suggestive of inspiration... and so I guess the one gripe I will make about the film here is that they could have showcased their star more effectively. To be fair, that would have been pretty tough on their budget. Smoot avers that when Lash cracked a bullwhip, the sheer power and resonation of the sound was incredible, and like nothing that their sound equipment could come close to capturing. Of course, some better camera angles might have at least captured the form more evocatively; the first segment of the film shows some chunky kid being chased down by a pack of seemingly feral dogs just patrolling the woods before Ranger Girard (Lash) cracks his whip about a million times in the air and scares them off. The problem is that each camera angle feels like part of a mosaic; you can see bits and pieces of what's going on, but mostly it's frustrating and disorienting, kind of like a college art film. You see the tip of a whip cracking, then part of a dog's head, then a hand with a whip handle, then a couple of canine shoulderblades, then that kid's face in the dirt, then Lash thrusting forward, ad nauseam (and that doesn't take long with this camerawork), all while constant whip cracks play on the soundtrack. I guess it was meant to be sort of a slow, building tribute, but it's mostly grating and confusing. Anyway, I'd just as soon not dissect The Dark Power. However, since, upon review, this post was a bit too light on anything even resembling summary, I'll throw in something. An old Native American man, John Cody, dies in the beginning of the film during the last stages of a local news focus on living wills, unfortunately before he's ever able to dictate that will. The reporter, Mary Dalton (whose actual name is Mary Dalton and in real life had worked as a reporter), decides to focus on some of Cody's beliefs. It turns out that he had ancestral claim to all of the land that he owned, but didn't claim it until the people who were buying it up refused to obey his strange directives in cleansing the land. Basically, it transpires that Cody believed that four ancient Toltec sorcerors, who practiced some kind of blood-drinking black magic not unlike that of Amando Ossorio's Knights Templar, somehow peregrinated their way up into the Carolinas. They believed that by being buried alive, they would somehow become immortal (obviously, they didn't have much influence on Poe). The rest of the plot involves Cody's son leasing out the land to a bunch of college girls. One of them is racist, and another whom the other girls invite is black, so the racist brings her brother in, which enables the film to have one of those "bad college kid" parties which consist of he and his drunken redneck friends drinking something that's probably like Natty Light, yelling derogatory terms at the black girl, and listening to crappy 80s music. Anyone who gets naked, almost gets naked, uses any racist language, gets needlessly violent, or otherwise does something which one can construe as being "bad" ends up dying, reinforcing that whole argument relating to punitive character-killing in horror films. Of course, they get killed by four Toltecs whose direction and makeup kind of reminds me of various Full Moon films, and those Toltecs in turn are destroyed by the surviving college girls and Lash LaRue, who ends up in what I guess is a King of the Bullwhip-esque whip duel with one of the Toltecs (as one reviewer commented elsewhere, "If you're going to duel with whips, don't challenge a guy named Lash"). Now, if you know anything about the Toltecs, or even Mesoamerican religion in general, then there are certain dubious aspects to this script. If you happen to know that in the time of the Toltecs, there were a couple of large and probably warlike civilizations in the Southern and Southeastern U.S., well, then it's even harder to believe that four sorcerors not strong enough to just survive persecution in Mexico ended up wandering for hundreds of miles just to bury themselves alive on the East Coast. Plus, the racial issues are treated in discomfiting ways here. Ranger Girard, for instance, apparently had a chip on his shoulder about Cody reclaiming ancestral lands until he learned that it was to keep evil sorcerors from crawling out of them. And y'know... in an age where the Western Shoshone are still struggling to maintain ownership of even a fraction of the vast tracts of land which technically unbroken treaties promised to them, well... I dunno, it's kind of hard to empathize with Ranger Girard. And while I'm sure that racism is a continuing problem to this day in southern college living, let alone the South at large, it's not really treated intelligently or compellingly here. It just kind of pops out of the script, and then it's stuck there until ancient evil happens by to clean the slate with the blood of the unworthy. Of course, there's also a scene in which Mary Dalton talks to a grad student she meets and talks about setting him up with one of the girls renting a room in John Cody's place. This happens near the middle of the film. After it, those characters never enter into the film again. So perhaps all of the insensitivity relates to Phil Smoot just trying to come up with character complexity on the fly as he scrabbled together something resembling a script in four days. Almost every word of this movie feels unfinished, like a block of wood that an artisan never quite transformed into his vision, or, if you will, a jpeg file that never quite finishes downloading, remaining forever blurred with just a hint of what it might have contained. Sure, it's got fun elements. But it's not a particularly great movie, even by the standards set by the genre of "something evil kills college co-eds." This film's not quite crazy enough to be, say, a Gymkata or a Strike Commando, and honestly, I'm unlikely to really want to watch it again anytime soon. So be it. At least the film has no pretensions and seems to move toward an express purpose, if not exactly unerringly. Regardless of its flaws, and they're legion even by B-movie standards, it's hard not to sympathize on some level with a film in which a bunch of locals made a movie with an old legend. Lash LaRue isn't just in this movie. He's the heart of this movie. And it's hard to go too far astray with that. Labels: Horror: Zombies, Year: 1985 posted by Ryan at 2:08 PM | 0 Comments Saturday, February 11, 2006House of the Dead 2
When reading one of several reviews of Land of the Dead on the IMDB, I found one in which someone said something like, "I enjoyed this movie but don't understand. Zombies are so ridiculous! Still I'm interested by these zombie movies." ...which, to some degree, kind of sums up most zombie movies for many of us who like 'em. Because let's face it--and I say this as a rabid collector of all things zombie--most zombie movies suck. It's not that they're always terrible so much as that they're rarely good; the vast majority of the zombie genre is condemned to that limbo of mediocrity which ultimately proves to be forgettable. Maybe kinda good, maybe kinda bad, but you probably won't even remember the title a week later.
In part, it's because most zombie movies are like most horror movies--they're basically rehashes of previous mistakes, reincarnations of ideas and devices that were never good to begin with. I guess this is a tangent (hm... but I guess this is Teleport City...), but I really hate a lot of the conventions of the horror genre. I've heard/read scholars present theories about the "meaning" of certain aspects of the horror genre before as though these conventions are ingenuous. People laugh about those "don't go in there!" moments where the protagonist decides against being intelligent and plunges headfirst into danger without any real motive, and about the way that anyone who has sex is going to die, and a million things like that--but I don't know anyone who really likes them. I've never heard anyone say anything about those sorts of cliches except for "Man, that was stupid!" If you there are reading this and you actually do enjoy that stuff, please tell me. I want to know. I kind of feel like all of those cliches are just parody that has become so mechanical that no one realizes it's parody and it's just the same idiocy that it once might have mocked. All of that, unfortunately, isn't entirely a tangent (this is, after all, Teleport City, even if I'm by no means its most eloquent or erudite citizen). It's not a tangent because if you're talking about idiocy and cliches, many of us ruefully know that it can somehow be connected to the House of the Dead films. A lot of people question the idea of making movies based on video games. As I've said before, I figure that if it works, it works. The problem isn't that such movies can't work. It's that they rarely do. Filmmakers seem to have an extremely low opinion of the videogame-playing world, which is odd, because I know a lot of very intelligent and discerning people who love very simple games like Geometry Wars. Part of the problem seems to be that these films are rarely based on the games. I mean, I side with J.L. Borges in that any translation or adaptation presents a plurality--it's not the same thing somewhere else but in reality an inevitable second item that can never be the first. So I'm okay with the fact that changes have to be made to make a movie out of a game, or a game out of a movie, and so on. The problem is when you change the story so much that the sequel to the movie can't possibly resemble the sequel to the game. We saw this with the Jurassic Park films. The first film was okay, though it left a lot out, but the seemingly arbitrary changes they made in it prevented the Lost World movie (which was execrable) from even minimally resembling the book (which was at least entertaining). When Jurassic Park 3 is a step up, you know you screwed up real bad somewhere. I'll stow my Resident Evil rant for another time, but I think most people who've played the game could agree that there's enough in that storyline to have made a movie based on the game. Which they didn't. Most games in the Final Fantasy series also had plenty of cinematic possibilities, but instead the makers of the Final Fantasy movie thought that it would be better to create something bizarre and shallow that had almost nothing to do with any of the games ever. Why someone later picked House of the Dead, I just don't understand, as it never had a very good plot, it had terrible dialogue, and the whole game consisted of shooting everything on screen. For those who aren't familiar, the original game began outside a huge mansion which the characters then had to explore, fighting various zombies and monsters every step of the way. Creaky, Gothic old mansions are always fun, and they provide great ambiance for zombies. Why the filmmakers abandoned the House part of the game and put their film on some rented island for a rave I just don't know. The only connection to the game that Mark Altman and Uwe Boll's HotD offered, besides those ridiculous clips of the game itself, was the fact that the guy who got off the island turned out to be named Curien, which was the name of the evil scientist who created the zombies in the game. Obviously, that was meant to spawn a sequel. In fact, the whole first movie could well have been the prequel to the game. So they sort of bypassed the whole Jurassic Park syndrome, having the capacity to actually create something related to the game. In the "making of" featurette on the HotD DVD, Altman seems disappointed. He explains that the film ended up becoming more of an action movie than he'd intended, and expresses his desire to make more of a horror film in the sequel. I took it to be ominous that that was apparently his biggest complaint about the film... but anyway, Altman seemed to feel that a sequel would be his chance to reinstate himself. It was partly for that reason that I wanted to see HotD2. Maybe it would turn out that Mark Altman was a cleverer screenwriter than I thought, or that he was capable of coming up with a much better story arc than he demonstrated in the first film. Maybe they'd actually, y'know, make a movie about a house full of the dead. Answer: Technically, yes, but the pheonix rising from the ashes of HotD is best assessed like Jurassic Park 3 vs. The Lost World; definitely better, but then, so is a kick to the crotch from a velociraptor. The first film had a giant rave and a bunch of unlikeable raver wannabes. The second film is instead set on a college campus, and it opens with a frat party with a bunch of irritating fratboys and sorostitutes. After a predictable "twist" and an assuredly tasteful and creative use of a guy whipping his dick out, a girl from the party gets intentionally run over by some professor, who stuffs her in the trunk. The professor has some kind of zombie locked away in his back room, and he effuses exposition (which amounts to "I want to bring the dead to life!") while injecting her dead body with some formula that eventually turns her into a zombie. A zombie who eats him, starting a chain-reactive rampage across the campus. Why the formula somehow becomes contagious I'm not really sure, but whatever. So be it. It should be noted that the idea of a search for eternal life gone awry is older than Tithonus himself, and in abstract I think it's a pretty serviceable reason for the creation of zombies--i.e. the formula or serum falls short of the mark and has unintended consequences. It's archetypal, it's plausible in a fantastic kind of way, and it's fairly understandable. The problem? The professor has developed his serum from the zombie in the back that he has locked up (and in a room, I might add, which very few professors could afford to construct without a lot more people having a much better idea of what they were doing in that laboratory, and then wanting to give them grant money to keep doing it). So this professor knows what the eternal life looks like; it's rotten and feral and doesn't resemble humanity. Yet he still somehow expects something different and better here. I just don't get it. There are three allusions in the first few minutes which seem worthy of mention, one because it's terrible, one because it's just kind of dumb, and the last because it's kind of fun. In the first, and worst, the professor, in a needlessly verbose and unconvincing monologue about his fears that the zombie (or eternal life or whatever he thinks he's creating) serum doesn't work and he's a hopeless failure, closes by talking to the zombie he has locked up: "You have the answers, but you can't tell me. I'm alone. I'm Alone in the Dark." Screenwriter, I hate you. They also had a more innocuous one during the opening credits. I'm not sure if it's actually Alice Drummond or not (they don't list a credit for this particular character), but in a scene reminiscent of Ghostbusters, a librarian is startled by a zombie who glares at her from the other side of the shelves. I kind of liked that allusion, even though I'm not sure that this movie was nearly good enough to want to remind people of a much better movie already in the opening credits. Then, after the montage of zombies attacking people on campus during the opening credits, we get a horizon with the superimposed "28 days later," which turns to 29 after a second. I guess maybe it's kind of cute, but... mostly it seems pretty lame to me. I mean, it's not even cleverly inserted. They put it in directly where the actual film 28 Days Later also uses that line. So what was the point? I don't understand. Anyway, why all of this about allusions? Because they kind of set the tone for the movie. The script is full of unnecessary and irritating posturing, and it follows a recent trend in American horror. To wit: the writers seem to want to create characters who come off as being intelligent and tough, particularly in ways which pre-empt the viewer's objections to their actions; for instance, they work in various kinds of self-referentialism which comment on the horror genre, and they try to establish both major and minor characters quickly by way of what they must view as witty repartee. As for self-referentialism, sure, it can be amusing, and it can be brilliant. It made the Scream movies a bit more watchable than they would have been otherwise, I guess--I think that's the first good thing I've ever said about Wes Craven, guarded as it may be--and it was put to good use in G.O.R.A. and SARS Wars, to name two fantastical comedies that I've seen somewhat recently. And as for quick establishment of characters, I think one of the most outstanding examples ever of such a thing is Aliens (a particularly apt example, as all of the main characters in this film are in the military or special ops). But this isn't a comedy, and it isn't Aliens. (I did like it much better than Scream, but then, zombies are a trump card for me.) If your repartee isn't witty, it'll usually end up being grating, and that will make the characters feel abrasive. And there's a difference between enlightening or even just clever self-referentialism, and self-referentialism where it seems like the writers are just launching pre-emptive strikes against whatever complaints they think might be forthcoming about the characters or the action that's about to ensue. This self-referentialism in HotD2 is more like a documentation of the writers' insecurity, or duct tape sloppily slapped over loose threads, than it is anything that enhances the movie. So. After we see an internet dinner date go awry, the female involved turns out to be in the profession of "killing zombies," and after the chef at the restaurant is bitten by a zombie, she heads out to HQ to find out that there's been a new outbreak and they want to find the Generation Zero zombie so that they can take a blood sample and create a cure. I'm not really sure why they need the Gen Zero zombie, but all right, whatever. That's fine. What I don't get is why there's an entire special ops branch of the military dedicated to killing zombies, and one that's been in place for some time at that. Where the hell have these zombies been coming from? The professor in this film created them based on one female zombie who herself came with her boyfriend from what seemed to be the only place on earth where zombies existed. So... I just don't understand. So our protagonists, Alex (female) and Ellis (male), are sent out by their special ops with a bunch of "military grunts." There's some tension between the groups as Alex and Ellis debate whether the grunts can handle the pressure of attacking zombies. Fair enough. I'll save you some suspense: for the most part, they don't. Even the new young female recruit, who seems like a military version of some spirited ingenue about to learn fast and prove her worth, ends up getting bitten and gunned down... I do give this film credit, though, as they're not afraid to kill people off and do it quickly after they're bitten. In the post-28-Days-Later age, moviemakers love to make zombie bites lethal and 'zombifying' in less than a minute, but at least it spares us the agony of putting up with some friend's or lover's agony over killing a bitten loved one. Whether they do or they don't, it's over in a few seconds. (Unless it happens to be a security guard at the college, but that's another irksome tale.) I should mention that this film pulls another trick out of the Crappy Horror Film Bag o' Techniques and tries renaming zombies. It's a good idea; outside of Haiti, the word "zombie" is hard to take seriously. Unfortunately, "hypersapien" is even harder to take seriously for a number of reasons. First, even if we accept it as the scientific name for zombies, it's unlikely that it would be used in common English. The military doesn't call humans "Homo sapiens," nor does anyone else outside of scientific literature. Second... "Hyper," of course, means "more" or "above"... it kind of speaks to excess as a Latin root. "Sapiens" refers to wisdom, hence the word "sapient" which means "wise." As Homo sapiens, we regard ourselves as the most intellectually advanced of hominids. So I'm not sure that it follows that "Extremely wise" is the right term to apply to a bunch of zombies. In fact, I'm trying to think of a worse one, and it's not coming to me. The film basically consists of us not knowing or liking most of the characters, and then seeing them gradually get killed off. Which, let's face it, describes a typical horror movie. Alex and Ellis become increasingly close, obviously falling in love, and they succeed in finding the Gen Zero zombie and getting the serum before a(n in)convenient plot device sets it up so that they have to go back and do it all again, with Ellis at one point smearing himself with zombie blood to "smell like one of them" and camouflage himself, somewhat reminiscent of Shaun of the Dead. The science of this movie is just kind of irritating. I mean, "hypersapiens" I already considered, but they also say something about DNA without making it very clear that these zombies are some kind of different species from humans, and somehow, in thirty days, without having had much contact with anyone outside of the campus, the zombies have begun to 'evolve' longer teeth to pierce anti-zombie body armor. It figures that just this morning I read on Discovery.com that cane toads in Australia are evolving longer legs at a remarkable rate, but even that took a few decades. In less than a month, some kind of selective pressure has created zombies which are adapted to defenses that they've never before encountered. Once again, I just don't understand. I dunno. The film isn't as terrible as the first. But it's also not good. It's good for some laughs, and maybe some tears if you take your zombie movies seriously, but overall... I think this one rests somewhere at the bottom of that zone of mediocrity... it won't be consigned to overall oblivion, but I've seen better zombie films, and I've seen worse ones that were also more fun. All that being said, I guess one could say that I'm a bit harsh on movies that hardly need any more aspersions cast upon them. The truth is, I'd just like people to be truly innovative once in a while in making zombie movies, instead of just coming up with crappy terms like "hypersapiens" and ideas like "maybe these zombies mutate really fast!" I felt like a step in the right direction might see House of the Dead 2 actually somehow remind one of the video game that the series took its name from. And frankly, when it comes right down to it, I'd much rather sit around playing the House of the Dead games with my friends than watch the movies. Labels: Director: Uwe Boll, Horror: Zombies posted by Ryan at 10:31 PM | 1 Comments Tuesday, January 17, 2006Maplewoods
I tried to like this film. I really did. In fact, I tried to like it through two viewings. And although I like the idea of the film (roughly), and I like some of the things it does or tries to do, overall it just irritates me through most of its running time.
When I bought it, it was being billed by some guy on eBay as "The way they should have done Resident Evil," and while I wasn't exactly gulled by that sort of description, I figured maybe it would be worth a look. And by "maybe," well, since it has zombies in it, I mean "I would sooner saw off a limb than never have watched this movie." (Thankfully, that choice has never really been necessary, except for Zombie Ninja Gangbangers, the watching of which almost did inspire gratuitous self-mutilation.) And in some ways, that description was sort of right. This is a movie about some old laboratory out in rural Pennsylvania--and hell, just about anything could get hidden in some parts of Pennsylvania--where some scientists were researching zombies for the military. Or more accurately, it's about the head scientist's son, who is part of the military and is sent in with a team of troops to neutralize the compound and destroy the evidence. Fair enough. I mean, I guess you can't just bomb a stronghold like that because of 1) the need for the certainty of thoroughness that comes from firsthand observation, and 2) the need for secrecy. There does arise the question of why one would go about researching zombies in the first place, as Keith has pointed out a few times in the past. They're not exactly useful bioweapons, since they're basically like a sharp, rusty sword with no handle. To this I can offer only two ideas. Well, or I have two off the top of my head, which is all I will offer right now. 1. Because the possibility exists, they need to be researched. I guess one could argue that desperate terrorists or fanatical warlords (and possibly Pat Robertson) might be tempted to use whatever substance it is that creates zombies, or at least threaten its use. However unlikely it might be, the possibility that it could break out, based on the reality of whatever thing it is that somehow makes zombies (whatever they actually are, chemically and physiologically), is probably enough reason to at least research it and understand what could be done about it. 2. In the video game Resident Evil, especially in the Gamecube remake, the creation of the zombies was only a stepping-stone to creating more dangerous monsters. So they could be kind of a by-product or first stage of research which is intended to develop something more useful. Neither of those options really seem to be explored in Maplewoods, which contents itself with just having a bunch of zombies in an underground bunker, and a bunch more in an open but fenced-in area; but then, I've contented myself with far less before. Bruno Mattei has given us zombies falling from the sky and hiding under bales of hay, and hey--who among us has any regrets about Zombi 3? Where Maplewoods fails is... well again, I've got two basic points: 1) Clichés abound, and boring ones at that. Ones that aren't even related to zombies. 2) It tries to accomplish too many things far beyond its means. See... even if we conclude that having some sort of semi-rural top-secret laboratory for zombie development isn't plausible, there are still plenty of us (like me) who'd still want to see it. But it's a pretty big stretch to make this a top-secret research project which actually uses an outdoor generator to power a crappy elevator down to a lab that seems to consist of one long hallway and then a room with a zombie strapped to a table and a time bomb under the table. Granted, the Resident Evil video games have some similarly dubious locations and devices, but we buy into them because they're stylistically chosen. Resident Evil is a brilliant synthesis of the conventions of mad scientists, government/corporate conspiracies, old haunted mansions, and so on. If there's a rickety, old-fashioned elevator that takes the character up to an opulently-furnished, and poorly-lit, room, you might be scared. Not so with a crappy grain elevator. I mean, it looks like this "top secret" project had a budget that was probably just slightly more than the budget for the movie. But of course, there's another problem. Resident Evil doesn't get incredibly carried away with the characters' military status. They're part of a special ops team. They're not necessarily that well-equipped, but then, that's part of the fun of the game. Maplewoods features an amateur cast--and there's nothing wrong with amateur actors per se--trying to pass themselves off as "the most elite military unit ever assembled." *Sigh* Why? First of all, why would you need the absolute 'best of the best' ever just to go into a compound and kill some zombies? Look, I'm one of those nerds who insists that people underestimate zombies when they say they're not scary, but that doesn't mean that if you've got over ten people and the military arming you, you still need to have the best-trained warriors in the world. Anyone with decent aim will do. Second, how the hell do you get amateur actors to seem like superelite soldiers? Especially when they're wearing uniforms that look neon white in the noonday sun. And when they're scripted to break down crying, to very quickly turn on each other before they've even seen a zombie for themselves, and to abandon all protocol pretty much as soon as they actually have to do something. And I don't mean they're renegades abandoning it because they're superior to procedure. I mean they seem like lost, bumbling idiots. I concede that I'm not well-versed in military protocol or training, but... I kind of get the impression that you're trained to 1) be loyal to your unit, and 2) act as rationally and intelligently in any given situation as you can. Y'know, so if someone gets shot, your reaction might be to do something to help, rather than just start crying and saying, "Oh, Captain, you're bleeding!" Even the characters in Night of the Living Dead did a better job of working together and thinking their way through situations. Third... since there's a time bomb ready to go off anyway, there was no reason to send these elite soldiers in. At least, no plausible one. The whole weird conspiracy thread in the film regarding a renegade CIA agent and that time bomb is pretty stupid, all told, and it's made worse by the fact that the traitorous character is about as deep as a tabletop, and that he has like four lines in the whole movie. Resident Evil has some ridiculous conspiracy stuff, but it's made enjoyable by the brooding Gothic ambience and the neo-Frankensteinian technology. Maplewoods lacks the depth to give us any reason to believe in, or even want to believe in, top-secret intrigues and far-reaching conspiracies. Finally, why did these elite soldiers have to turn out to be such substandard cinematic military stereotypes? The one guy who cracks from the stress and goes nuts... The heroic black guy who ends up getting killed... The untrustworthy government guy who always wears sunglasses and then betrays everyone... The guy who stands up (and prematurely, at that) and basically shouts, "Game over, man! Game over!"... the only character who's remotely inspired is the narrator of this movie and the leader of the troops, and he's only inspired when he's narrating, and not when we actually see him doing stuff. In a sense, Maplewoods is somewhat unambitious. It takes a pretty standard zombie story template and attempts to do a good rendition of it. I applaud it for that. There's nothing wrong with taking an old tale and just trying to do it right--hell, Homer and Shakespeare made careers out of that sort of thing. The problem is, you have to do it right. Really put thought into it. Figure out what's within your means and then try to execute it well. Instead, we've got a promising embryo that developed into an abortive monstrosity of a movie. It's not really fun, it's not at all frightening, it's not suspenseful... I mean, not much thought seems to have been given to pacing, to camera angles, to character development, to the possibilities of the landscape and buildings they filmed at, to... really, anything. Anything except the framing scenes where we hear the bits of narrative. And that's a damned shame. Because although this movie is conceptually closer to the Resident Evil video games, I actually enjoyed those awful Resident Evil movies more than I enjoyed Maplewoods. Labels: Horror: Microbudget, Horror: Zombies posted by Ryan at 10:36 PM | 1 Comments Wednesday, October 26, 2005Morbus
Since Keith was on a bit of a Spanish horror kick for a while, I ended up dusting off my copy of Morbus and putting it back into the vcr for the first time since the only other time I watched it about four years ago. Morbus apparently came out in 1983, and the only copy that I've ever seen available is a standard fourth-generation vhs dub with no subtitles. IMDB has less than five votes posted for it. So that said, I gather it's a relatively obscure zombie film--not that there aren't scores upon scores of those out there, I guess...
Oh, and I guess there are spoilers herein. So if you're worried about my ruining this incomprehensible and weird, but not entirely horrid, movie... well, skip this review. All told, Morbus is a weird movie. My Spanish isn't perfect, but I understood most of the dialogue--much of which is similar to the line, for instance, "¡Ahora, no estas desnuda!" [Now you're not naked!], which the one guy says after giving a naked girl a sweater... so if you don't speak any Spanish, it probably won't hurt your understanding of the movie in a particularly substantial way. The film begins with some hopelessly dark and grainy footage of some guy in a cemetery. The bushes rustle, the camera does the "I'm a zombie!" stagger, some bells for some reason start jingling to add to the suspense, and the guy does the old "Hm... Just looking over to my left... no reason to look anywhere but left... boy, it's sure enthralling to really scrutinize those rocks and that little plant--WaitohmyGodwhat'sthat?!?!?!?" schtick. Then we get an anchorman talking about recent attacks just before being attacked on camera. That's when the title screen comes up. "Morbus," if I'm not mistaken, means disease in Latin. I'm not really sure why they chose that title; of the two explanations for zombiism which I'm aware of in the film, neither has to do with disease. But hey, so be it. So then we get some guy with his back to the camera talking about how he can't go to the party because he has to work. It's a short, boring scene, and you're not likely to remember it later until the "surprise" ending, but it seems to be crucial to an understanding of the movie. Regrettably so, in fact. Then that same guy goes to a drug store to get a pill for his headache. The chemist there hooks him up with something, apparently sympathizing with the fact that he's an "intellectual," and then that same chemist soon leaves to finish working on some kind of formula, taking the plot with him. I really couldn't understand as much as I wanted to about the formula because the man speaks like a machine gun. I mean, I understand that Spanish is a relatively fast language. It takes some getting used to. But once in a while, you'll hear a Spanish speaker who doesn't seem to breathe. This guy... he just churns out his words faster than I can even catch them, let alone comprehend them. Given, however, that his lab is comprised of the standard-issue beakers-bubbling-over-with-colorful-liquids and a microscope, I'm pretty sure that I visually caught the gist of it all. Anyway, finally the formula is completed. I presume that it has something to do with raising the dead, but I never really picked up on any dialogue to support that idea. Nonetheless, he takes his sexy young female lab assistant down to the hospital to swipe the keys for the morgue. Liz of "And You Call Yourself A Scientist" would likely be particularly amused that the chemist's first plan is to unbutton the assistant's shirt and shorten her skirt to show more of her leg, hoping that she can charm her way into obtaining the keys. To assuage her, the man says, "Remember, it's for science! For science!" Her charms don't work on the desk worker, who it turns out is looking at a porn rag, but she steals the keys anyway, and then, also apparently "for science," gets a little nookie from an orderly who happens to come by carting a hospital patient. People have commented that the horror genre is very conservative; if you have sex, you're probably going to die. Chances are, if you're a character in a horror movie, you're going to die anyway, but I guess there's an element of truth to that idea of conservatism, particularly in the early 80s in a country that's overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. So the chemist never comes out of the morgue, but a homicidal zombie does and chokes the assistant and orderly both. And I guess that means that, ultimately, that girl was martyred for science. Then, suddenly, we're looking at damaged footage. Oh wait, no, we're seeing a stripper, and I guess the blurring is supposed to make it seem like her client is drunk? I dunno. But the stripper does her thing. Then we see other women ostensibly on dates and/or making out. I'm not really sure of the connection. Then three strippers are socializing with each other, something about how blondes are always skinny, and two of them take a call that turns out to be a guy who wants them to read a story to him in his car out in the woods. It's not sex per se, but they seemed to be ready to try it until he dissuaded them, and so zombies come and kill the man and one stripper. The other flees, and then gets hit by someone in the bushes and passes out. She wakes up naked in a strange bed. Some people might feel, I dunno, unnerved by that sort of thing, particularly women. But not this girl. She thinks about putting on a shawl, then thinks better of it, and just gets up and walks around to explore, still naked. It turns out that she's in the house of a famous horror writer who happens to have some weird, perpetually-giggling bald old lecher also living on the premises; the lecher is a handyman or something I guess, though he's mostly just a voyeur and weird giggler on the screen. The writer gives her his sweater (that's where the line I quoted comes in) and our heroine tells the writer about her tale, something like "I'm naked and alone here because we were attacked by zombies!" This tale of course, is to him preposterous, though he's working on (or has already written; I forget) a novel on the "living dead," ostensibly disdaining the very use of the word "zombi" despite that he himself uses it at least ten times before the movie's over. If it weren't for that last part, I'd be on his side on avoiding the word "zombi(e)"; in movies, unless it's referring to the original Afro-Caribbean legends, it's usually a word to avoid. It's no coincidence that Romero tries to avoid using it, nor that in Shawn of the Dead, the eponymous hero abjures the use of the word because "that's ridiculous!" In fact, as a general rule of thumb, the intelligent effort that went into composing the script is inversely proportional to the number of times a character says "zombie" (and each mention counts as five uses if it happens to be screamed with expletive backup at a risen corpse--see House of the Dead, for instance). I'm always pretty immediately skeptical of the whole "I'm a horror writer in a horror movie" idea. It can be done well. Frankly, I'm of the mind that anything can be done well. Whatever it is, it's possible to do it right. Humanly possible? Hm... maybe. Possible for an independent Spanish director with a low budget? Um... *cough*. I dunno. In this case, they're sort of walking the line of metacognition, or if you prefer, self-awareness. Y'know, characters treating their lives like the movie that we're actually watching. And... that's a tough line to walk. I'd say that if you include too much of it, it'll take a weird genius to pull it off. This movie... well, it takes what seems like an obvious metacognitive device and just kind of lets it sit there and go nowhere. Mind you, I didn't understand every single word of the dialogue. Let's say 70-80%. But other than vaguely irritating comments by our writer friend, nothing is really made of the fact that he's a writer. Oddly enough, he doesn't make use of that fact either, even when he could easily use the "I'm a writer and I just heard you say you love my work" card with the naked girl who appeared in the woods near his home. Instead, in a time-honored Spanish horror tradition which I've seen in at least one other movie (the bafflingly awful Horror of the Zombies by Amando Ossorio), he just kind of falls on her and makes as if to rape her, but seems content with licking her face and not really removing her clothes, while she protests halfheartedly and struggles kind of feebly. I know that writers can be sort of hermitlike and perhaps not socially adept, but... come on. Also part of that sexual assault tradition in Spanish horror seems to be the fact that after that scene takes place, no one mentions it again and it seems to have no ramifications for the rest of the movie. No trauma, no post-traumatic stress, no apparent hostility, nothing. Just "Hey, can I get naked again and use your shower?" "Sure, I'll just keep being a writer and stuff." Another cute touch: purported "sadomasochistic gear" adorning the writer's home. When asked why he has whips, blades, and other things hanging up on the walls, he responds "For inspiration. I'm writing a novel with sadomasochism in it." It's not so much what he says but how he says it. It makes it sound as though maybe he's just giving an excuse. And the girl seems to have that "maybe I believe you and maybe I don't" air when she says, "And has it kept you inspired?" You might expect that suggestiveness to go somewhere, somehow. It doesn't. There's no real point to it, except maybe some clumsy attempt at foreshadowing. It mostly seems like they just kind of wanted to put whips and the suggestion of chains in the movie. Like it's some obligatory part of making a horror film. The girl is forced to stay at the writer's house when his assistant, for whatever reason, sabotages the writer's car and he can't give her a ride back to town. Instead, they keep having the same "I was chased by zombies"--"But there's no such thing!" conversation over and over again, sometimes over breakfast and sometimes while walking through the woods. Somewhere in there, they also decide to just go ahead and get it on by the woodstove...and frankly, that's not a bad idea. What else are they going to do as just one man and one woman, mostly alone in the woods, with scant vestiges of actual plot to give them something else to do? Then the film sort of randomly changes gears, and we witness some manner of Satanic ritual where a girl is stripped and tied to a table, and then all of the men and women present strip, anoint the girl and each other with some sort of oil, and then have a mild orgy (wait, did I mean "wild?" Hm... No.). Eventually they all dress in burlap sacks and chant some incantation, and then suddenly zombies just kind of come upon the scene and start strangling and/or eating everyone. One girl escapes, just happening to run from the ramshackle church they were in to the writer's house. That whole episode is, I feel, a bit odd. First of all, it seems to offer a second reason for the zombie attacks. The conflicting explanations for the rising of the dead might remind you of such classics as Zombi 4: Afterdeath, and perhaps that's enough said already. Second, the characters are introduced and then removed again very abruptly, and the whole Satanic ritual thing seems kind of like the whips on the wall and the obligatory "No means yes" scene, in that I get the impression that it's just there as part of some inscrutable convention. Like no Spanish horror film of this period is complete without whips, not-quite-rape, and nude Satanic debauchery. And while I'm a bit skeptical of the exploitative use of rape in film, the rest of it's all in good fun as far as I'm concerned... it's just that it's pretty random fun. That randomness, the disjointedness, might be the key to understanding the movie. So that Satanist girl shows up at the writer's house. The creepy handyman comes in and offers her some clean clothes, and the girl says, "He's nice." The other woman, rather disturbingly, just says nothing at all, and then the handyman/assistant takes the girl to his quarters, where it turns out he ties her up naked and threatens to perform sadomasochistic acts on her; I say threatened because he mostly just brandishes things at her and doesn't really use them. He picks up a whip and then puts it down... He picks up needles or maybe incense and then puts them down... He picks up a burning candle, kind of rubs the holder against her body, and then puts it down... He picks up some sharp metal implement, rubs it along her legs, then puts it down... Then he lights a blowtorch and at that point the movie finally stops procrastinating and just gives him the comeuppance that he's been setting himself up for the whole time. Besides, anyone who's that boring a Satanic torturer deserves to die. So zombies converge upon the writer's house. The handyman decides to let them kill the girl he tied up (so he's a sadist only in a non-sexual sense?), but his self-satisfied tittering leads them back around to kill him. Then the tied-up girl's Satanist friend happens by and rescues her. Meanwhile, zombies are breaking windows and bashing down doors where the writer and the prostitute/stripper are. They retreat into other rooms, and eventually head outside to the woods, where they get separated after deciding that they love each other. He finds her later, dead, and as he cradles her dead body for what's clearly meant to be an ominously long time, she wakes up and chomps into his neck. At this point, the guy who couldn't attend the party awakens and turns around, revealing himself to be the writer in the dream. He is then called on by three strange figures in obvious masks; he himself is frightened, but they pull the masks up to reveal that they're three women from the movie. Then a new masked figure appears; he pulls off the mask to reveal that he's that weird housekeeper, whose grin is no less disturbing even when his character is ostensibly benign. So what I gather of all of this is that the strange, random nature of the movie is possibly meant to imitate the nonsense of nightmares. Fulci more successfully aspired to the same effect, and in literature Thomas Ligotti has perhaps mastered the technique. I think the opening scenes must be intended to represent the non-partygoer's writing, and then the ensuing movie is just a bunch of distorted dream nonsense resolved by the Wizard-of-Oz-style ending. Frankly, the film doesn't pull the effect off. So it's not the best zombie movie ever made, nor even the best one made in Spain. But it is a fair amount of fun, as long as you can enjoy the good things in life. How bad can anything be if it boasts zombies, random orgiastic Satanism, and almost as much nudity as a Jess Franco venture?* (*Note: It might be best not to answer that question. But although Morbus does get kind of dull sometimes, it's still a good time.) Labels: Horror: Zombies posted by Ryan at 12:09 AM | 0 Comments Thursday, July 28, 2005Night of Horror
I've known about Night of Horror for a couple of years now. I even managed to track down a legitimate copy with the box in good condition a year or so ago. So what calls it to my mind today isn't so much that I happened to just watch it, as that I've been involved in discussions recently revolving around bad movies, and inevitably someone invokes the notion of the Worst Movie Ever.
Those of us in the know--and it only takes a few of the right films to get there--well, we realize that there's no such thing. The first time I experienced Claudio Fragasso's directorial prowess in Zombi 4, I felt like I'd somehow descended beyond the last circle of Hell and into some region too horrible for words to even relate to it. Now I consider it to be... well, y'know, pretty terrible, but not stand-alone terrible--let's not forget [insert relevant or comparable titles here]. Some people will tell you that Plan 9 From Outer Space is the worst movie ever. Others will invoke Manos: The Hands of Fate. Zombie Lake comes up in these discussions a lot, as does Oasis of the Zombies (though frankly, I think Virgin Among the Living Dead is worse than the latter two combined). I'll tell you that there's no such thing, the whole notion of a worst movie is maybe fun if you're in good bad-movie company and drunk and just want to banter, but ultimately pretty frivolous. (Of course, it takes a lot to get me to even open my mouth about Zombie Ninja Gangbangers... But let's just pretend that it doesn't exist.) So if you want to talk "worst movies ever" it's all about the criteria. Within certain parameters, the notion makes sense again. Without such parameters, there are just too many films to choose from. But if I were to set the parameters to "Least inspiring, least inspired, most worthless viewing experience, most significant lack of any kind of plot or acting or art or even pretentions to such, most inexplicable legitimate video release as opposed to being a forgotten home movie, most incredibly unjustifiable endeavor on the part of the moviemakers, most unlikeable characters, etc.", then, as far as I've thus far been able to ascertain, Night of Horror is the best fit. That's probably a big part of why the film is for some reason so dear to me, even though I don't really like to, y'know, watch it. This being a blog, I guess I can't really go in-depth and discuss the intricacies of the film's failures. But the plot, in a nutshell, is as follows: "Dude, I can't be in the band anymore because we had to go bury a Confederate soldier's skull, and now I don't want to marry the woman I'm in love with because she's psychic and can talk to ghosts." Seriously. If you don't believe me and want to be sure (God help you, oh God help you), go ahead and track down a copy. But with a premise like that, how could anything possibly go right? And nothing does. Even in the first scene, the camera crew (possibly the director and some drunken cohort) demonstrate their incapacity to light a scene so that in the first seconds of the film, we get glare coming directly off of a door that someone opens. He enters a room where someone's basement seems to have been disguised as a bar with no bartender or other patrons, and possibly someone's pool table playing the bar itself. The light comes back, and seems to be trying to burn a hole through the back wall with its intensity, to such a degree that not only is it blindingly bright, but it actually reflects off of the adjoining wall, making it look like someone lit the scene with headlights. We presently learn that someone must be sitting on the boom mic, because you can't really hear anything that anyone's saying, which is kind of a problem because it's a ten minute scene and both characters have their backs to us. If you turn the volume up really high, you learn that they're basically just talking about nothing important, and then finally the whole thing turns out to be a frame to the actual meat of the movie, which is one character's reminisce about a trip he had where he and his friends held a seance to talk to some Confederate ghosts whose commander was desecrated by evil Union Yankee bastards whose backstabbing and barbaric cruelty played perfect foil to their own camaraderie and Southern pluck. Well, or something to that effect. It's hard to listen to much of it, because the ghost talks... liiike... thiiiiisss.... for fifteen minutes. And I mean fifteen minutes. Time it. If I'm off, it's by a couple minutes at the most. Most of that time, we just see a montage of ghosts' faces, and the actors sitting around the fire. It's interrupted by what's meant to be the ghost's own memory of the events which he's describing, but it turns out that it's just stock footage from some Civil War recreation that fills the screen during a six-minute awful folk song written by a guy who later starred in the same director's "Curse of the Cannibal Confederates." Basically, it's a whole movie full of long, boring, muffled scenes that each last from five to fifteen minutes. If anything starts happening, you can bet it'll be on screen for a good long while. And in the end, I find myself unsure just what story these people thought they were telling. Even something like Manos: The Hands of Fate was obviously going, albeit ineptly, for some kind of surreal quality that in some respects I guess you could say it almost kind of suggests. I really don't see anything in Night of Horror that I'd identify as something that could possibly make anyone, much less more than one person, say "All right! Let's make a movie! It'll be about, y'know, this, um... ghosts." Of course, there are tons of awful movies out there, and I'm sure there are plenty which I haven't seen, or perhaps ones I've seen but since blocked out from memory, which are at least pretty close to this one. All I know is that if you, like me, enjoy tracking down the worst movies in existence, you really should go out and find Night of Horror. Labels: Horror: Zombies posted by Ryan at 6:59 PM | 5 Comments Tuesday, July 26, 2005Zombie 3 Release Year: 1988Country: Italy Starring: Deran Sarafian, Beatrice Ring, Ottaviano Dell'Acqua, Massimo Vanni, Ulli Reinthaler, Marina Loi, Deborah Bergamini. Writer: Lucio Fulci and Claudio Fragasso Director: Lucio Fulci, Claudio Fragasso, and Bruno Mattei Cinematographer: Riccardo Grassetti Music: Stefano Mainetti Producer: Franco Gaudenzi Availability: Buy it from Amazon  1988, Italy. Starring Deran Sarafian, Beatrice Ring, Ottaviano Dell'Acqua, Massimo Vanni, Ulli Reinthaler, Marina Loi, Deborah Bergamini. Written by Lucio Fulci and Claudio Fragasso. Directed by Lucio Fulci, Bruno Mattei, and Claudio Fragasso. Many people will list Plan Nine from Outer Space as the undisputed king of movies considered so awful they're wonderful, and I'll give the devil his due. That's a damn fine film. But if I were to update things a bit, I wouldn't hesitate to install Zombie 3 as the new reigning king of bad film. Mere words fail to capture just how truly entertaining this horrid piece of tripe is. For those who don't know the story, Lucio Fulci raked in the big bucks with his tropical island romp Zombie, and like any decent director taking orders from a greedy producer figured why not cash in on the success and do a sequel. The proposed Zombie 3 was troubled from the get-go. Fulci was entering a particularly cranky stage in his life, a frame of mind that was only exasperated by his failing health. The script for Zombie 3 was thin, even by Fulci's standards, little more than a vague treatment which Fulci expected to hash out and make up on the spot. When it became apparent that Fulci's increasingly bad health and cantankerousness were going to conspire to make sure that wasn't going to happen, screenwriter Claudio Fragasso and director Bruno Mattei were called in to patch things up, which is sort of like calling in the Three Stooges to fix your leaky plumbing. Fulci turned in a film that was well under the minimum requirement for a feature length presentation, but he insisted that this was the complete film. Exactly what he shot and how much of it remains in what was eventually released is a source of constant contention. Some sources attribute as much as two-thirds of the film to Fulci while others claim scarcely more than fifteen minutes of his material was used in the final cut. In interviews, Fragasso has attempted to tidy up the record and give credit where credit is due, dissecting which scenes were written and filmed by Fulci and which were dreamed up by he and Mattei. In the end, it seems more of the film belongs to Fulci than was originally thought, but in terms of his commitment to the vision and the overall feel of the film, this is a Fragasso/Mattei affair.
"A Fragasso/Mattei affair" is probably the scariest thing about this movie. Both men are notorious and celebrated for working fast and cheap, churning out lowest common denominator grindhouse fodder with complete disregard for just about anything but getting the job done. Fulci, at least, had his artistic vision, however cracked it may have been. The directorial work of Bruno Mattei, on the other hand, lacks any distinguishable characteristic unless you count "intolerably awful." And while Fulci's films often sacrificed narrative cohesion and logic in favor of surreal spectacle, Claudio Fragasso's scripts lack the same qualities but simply because he was in a hurry. However misguided you may thing Fulci's artistic direction was, if indeed you think it was misguided at all, you can at least recognize that he had a vision when compared to someone like Fragasso, who was simply sloppy and inattentive. Not that that translates into his scripts, daft as they may be, being any less fun. He is Fulci stripped of artistic pretense and charged instead with giddy don't-give-a-damn pulp sensibilities. Being a patchwork film from three different people, it's no surprise that Zombie 3 has very little to hold it together. At times, it seems to switch from one film to an entirely different film as it wavers between the "soldiers running amok" action scenes shot by Fragasso and Mattei and the moody "pokin' around in the decay" scenes presumably shot by Fulci. Technically, it has nothing to tie it officially to Zombie other than Fulci's involvement, but it's not so hard to draw the films together. In Zombie, it was suspected that voodoo was the cause of all the living dead troubles, but Menard dismisses that as superstition and indeed we're really never given any reason to believe that there's not some natural or man-made reason for all the restless corpses. In Zombie 3 it's stated obviously in a hammy prologue full of helicopters and shouting and running about that all the zombie action is being caused by a biological weapon that was accidentally unleashed when a terrorist attempted to steal it. Personally, I've never quite understood the whole "zombie-ism as a weapon" thing even though it's been used as a way to explain where the zombies come from in countless films. What kind of weapon is a zombie or zombie virus? Sure you'll decimate your enemy's population, but then it will spread to the next country, and the next, et cetera. You can't control the zombies, and just because you drop them off in Iraq doesn't mean they'll stop at the Turkish border. There just seem like better ways of going about conquering people.
The film starts off on a tropical island, much like Zombie, although this is a different tropical island with more people. Some scientists are carting around a super deadly biological warfare cannister. Does it get stolen by a terrorist? But of course. And naturally, the terrorist drops it and it opens up, because all biohazard material is transported in thin glass vials. You ever notice these canisters of biotoxins and plagues seem to pop open easier than your average bottle of aspirin? Someone should teach the military about the virtues of "To open, push down and twist." Before too long, the terrorist -- who flees to a high profile luxury inn rather than trying to actually hide out or catch the first boat out of town -- is infecting people with the virus, which turns them into flesh-eating zombies. Yep, always with the flesh eating, aren't they? The military moves in to contain the outbreak but bungles the job. They burn the infected bodies, which releases the toxin into the air. Didn't these guys see Return of the Living Dead? The heat also makes the virus more powerful, much to the surprise of the scientists involved. Now, granted I haven't had a chemistry class since high school, and even back then I didn't do so hot, but it seems to be that of all the tests you can run on a substance, seeing what heat does to it is one of the most basic things you'd do. Wouldn't that be like the first test you run? Well, not these scientists. Pretty much everything surprises them, and like all horror movie scientists they spend the entire film yelling, "We need more time to find an antidote!"
The zombie plague gets out, and soon enough, you got zombies all over the place. A group of soldiers on leave team up with some sexy ladies in an RV and get attacked by infected birds. I guess this is one of the only films where something other than people gets affected by zombie-ism, and maybe it explains what might happen to that shark in the first film, although it still doesn't answer the question of if zombie humans only eat other humans, do zombie sharks only eat other sharks. Anyway, they load up their wounded, proclaim their need for immediate medical attention, and go to an abandoned hotel. Because when you think emergency medical attention, you think abandoned hotel. They take it one step further by leaving the wounded at the hotel and sending some healthy guy to get the doctor. Wouldn't it make more sense to put the wounded in the plush RV and drive them to the doctor instead of going to the hospital and bringing the doctor back? Never mind. People are getting wounded all over the place, and all the wounds fester and bubble the way we like it, causing one of our heroes to utter, "That's not pus. It's something much worse." While poking around the abandoned hotel, they find a crate of machine guns and flame throwers. Now this may seem silly until you remember that down in the tropics they are always having revolutions and coups, so I figure most places have a cache of automatic weapons. Finding the weapons makes one of the guys utter the line, "Good! We'll need those!" even though at this point they have absolutely no idea anything at all is going wrong other than some birds got ticked off at them. They have seen no zombies, and no one's even threatened them. But they still strut around wielding their newfound toys, and well, so would I.
And then the zombies come. Some of the zombies do the slow zombie shuffle we've come to expect. Some of them haul ass and use machetes. There's really no consistency among the living dead. Some of them moan and creep about, and others are able to hold down jobs as popular morning DJs. This is one of the only films where you'll see a zombie just haul off and kick someone's ass. None of that mindless groping and grasping. No, this guy assumes a boxing stance and whips out the right hooks and some aikido submission holds. You're a piss poor fighter if a zombie makes you tap out. Some of the other zombies hide in closets and on top of pillars. It makes for a dramatic entrance, but you gotta wonder what the hell these zombies were thinking. Was that zombie perched up on top of the pillar for hours and hours in hopes that someone might happen by so he could jump down on them? Did the zombie crawl in the kitchen cabinet of an old abandoned hut out in the jungle just giggling about that one day when someone might come and stand next to it? I won't even talk about the zombie hiding under the pregnant woman in the hospital. Oh sure I will. So they go to the hospital, and everyone has been evacuated except for one perfectly alive pregnant woman. For some reason, they left her behind. I guess no one wants to deliver a baby while running from zombies. That's just too television sit-com. And for some other reason, the zombies don't eat her. They just sort of hide around her, waiting for someone else to come in. That way, they can burst through her stomach for a big shock. Of course, it would be easier for the zombie to just get out from under the table or something, but what the hell? What fun is a zombie rolling around on the floor when he could pop up through a pregnant woman's stomach? I like to imagine him and his zombie chums laughing and going, "This is going to be so cool!" as they all squat down in their hiding places and wait for someone to happen along.
What else have we got? Why would you pull into an abandoned gas station, where rags are hanging from the sign and all the windows and doors are boarded up, then wander around inside, amid all the rubble and cobwebs, going "Is anybody here? Hello? We need help!" I mean, the place was boarded up! What about a boarded up building covered in trash and cobwebs makes you think someone might be in there hiding, refusing to acknowledge you until you recount to them your entire story up to that moment? When I see abandoned, boarded-up buildings, the first thing that pops into my mind isn't "Why I bet a helpful person is in there waiting to lend a hand to someone with a story like mine!" And then there's the flying zombie head in the refrigerator. No scene in any movie has ever made me loose my lunch, but I lost it during this scene. Not because it's gory; just because, well, a zombie head was sitting in the refrigerator and comes shooting out when someone opens it, and then it goes flying all over the damn place. I thought things like that only happened in Hong Kong horror films! Ironically, a number of Fulci fans have pointed to the sheer lunacy of that scene as proof that Fulci himself had very little to do with the film. After all, why would the maestro of moody gore put in such a ludicrous gag? It turns out that in interviews, Fulci himself claims responsibility for the flying zombie head, and not only does he claim responsibility for it, he's damn proud of it and seems to think it one of the best things he'd ever come up with. So it's not so much proof of his lack of complicity as it is proof of the fact that he was really out of his gourd when making this movie. This is all a pleasant climax to a scene in which a couple people leave the group to go look for food. Because you know, when you are in an abandoned hotel in the middle of the jungle, you never know when they might have some Vienna Sausages they forgot to take with them. So they get attacked by the zombie head, which reminded me of an episode of The Three Stooges where a skull falls on an owl and the owl goes flying all around, so there's this skull with little wings sticking out the ear holes fluttering all about and messing with Shemp. It really did crack me up back in the day. Anyway, six hours after they leave, no one ever bothers to question what might have become of the people who stepped into the next room, nor what all that shrieking and shooting might have been about.
Meanwhile, this one dude is still driving to the hospital. This island must be the size of South America. He leaves in broad daylight, and by dawn, the idiot is still driving to the hospital. Amid all this, some other soldiers are marching around in those biohazard suits, shooting anything and everything that moves. To Zombie 3's credit, it is action-packed. No scenes of people thinking about stuff or contemplating the end of the world. Nope, they're just out there shooting at the living dead and getting eaten. Zombie 3 is both one of the worst zombie films I've ever seen and one of my favorites. Rarely do the elements of incompetence come together so beautifully as they do in this gory masterpiece of ineptness. It may not make your top ten list, but I guarantee that you'll have one hell of a time watching it, that you'll watch it again, and that you'll make all your friends watch it.
The zombies and make-up effects are a real let-down after de Rossi set the bar incredibly high with his still-unmatched work in Zombie. Even Tom Savini's creations for Day of the Dead pale in comparison to Zombie's shambling mounds of flesh. Zombie 3, on the other hand, tends to go more with the "slap some red paint and oatmeal on them" style of effects, which fall dramatically short of being satisfactory, even by Z-grade film standards. The same goes for the acting, the dreary score, and just about everything else. There are a few scenes of moody interest, but they're quickly undercut by the stupidity of the script, which is, coincidentally, the only real thing this film has going for it. When Lucio Fulci came back from the hospital and saw what happened to the film, he screamed, tried to make them take his name off it, and then died a few years later. I don't know if that last one is actually related to this film, but I'm sure Zombie 3 didn't help. Personally, I don't see why Fulci would hate it so much. It's not much worse than some of that crap he made. I mean, dude, you made Murder Rock! Zombie 3 makes no sense, has bland characters, cheap zombies, lots of gore, and a plot that seems to have been assembled by third graders on crystal meth. I would think Fulci would have liked it. Labels: Director: Bruno Mattei, Director: Claudio Fragasso, Director: Lucio Fulci, Horror: Zombies, Italian Zombie Saga, Year: 1988 posted by Keith at 8:00 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, July 20, 2005Zombie
Oh, the evils that have been committed in the name of the Italian zombie movie. Vile and disgusting are many of them, completely devoid of social and cinematic value, totally disrespectful to the boundaries of good taste and good sense, utterly oblivious to the concepts of logic and cohesive narrative. These are, naturally, their good points. Among film fanatics, and especially among those who tend to dwell within the ranks of the less respectable end of the cinematic society, the worth of Italian horror films is a hotly contested debate. Italians do gory horror like no one else in the world. Coherence, quality acting, any semblance of a story, and even the slightest shred of logic or quality are less valuable than sheer spectacle, which I suppose is not an altogether rare attitude these days even outside the realm of what professionals in the film studies world refer to as Italian "gut munchers."
The Italian zombie films came largely in response to George Romero's knock-down drag-out zombie adventure epic Dawn of the Dead, itself partially financed by two of the best-known names in Italian horror cinema, director Dario Argento and his producer brother, Claudio. Though undoubtedly inspired by Romero's films, and while generally adhering to the laws of the living dead as set down in Romero's Night of the Living Dead (you must shoot them in the head to kill them, being bitten by a zombie turns you into a zombie, a group of strangers must band together to battle the zombies, et cetera), many of the Italian productions end their similarities there. Romero's films were equal parts horror and heavy handed social commentary, with society in general and the industrial-military complex in particular being the target of the filmmaker's disdain. In Italy, any social commentary that may be derived from such genre staples as the leaky radiation plant or a biological weapons experiment gone awry being responsible for the plague of zombies is purely window dressing, and the Italians are generally as likely to attribute the rising of the dead to voodoo and the supernatural as anything else. It doesn't matter really, so long as it gets the corpses out of the ground and shambling about in search of flesh and blood. At the forefront of the zombie movie explosion was another of the best-known name in Italian horror cinema: Lucio Fulci. Along with Argento, those two have undoubtedly sparked more vehement arguments about the merits of their work than any other directors in horror film history, with fans celebrating each man as a visionary genius or dismissing him as a talentless hack. The truth, obviously, lies somewhere in between, as it always does. Both men have had their flashes of brilliance and idiocy. And when it comes to Italian movies, one fan's idiocy is often another fan's work of art. What one mind poo-poos as slapdash nonsense another mind regards as surrealistic brilliance, and both sides of the argument are equally adept at shielding themselves from the criticisms of the other. It's best then, in my opinion, not to examine these films as being "good" or "bad," whatever that may mean, while pretending to attain some level of objectivity as if such malleable concepts could be scientifically measured and proven, but rather instead to surrender entirely to the subjectivity that governs all assessment of art, accept it as an integral lens through which we regard everything, and state simply whether or not we as individuals with individual biases and tastes, enjoyed the film. And while I may balk at pronouncing Lucio Fulci's films to be works of genius or buffoonery, and while what I consider to be good or bad in a film is tenuous at best, I can say without hesitation that, regardless of my feelings in any of these debates, I enjoy Italian zombie films. Like Romero, Lucio Fulci has what is often referred to as his zombie trilogy, consisting of Zombie, City of the Living Dead, and The Beyond. On a different road, however, we can see an Italian zombie film trilogy that consists of Zombie, Zombie 3, and Zombie 4: After Death with Bruno Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead trailing things as a possible addendum. This Italian zombie trilogy (plus one, if you want to be gracious to Mattei), while not being directly linked from film to film, encompasses a general narrative arc that focuses on the trouble with the living dead down in the tropics. All three films take place on tropical islands and feature vacationers and scientists versus the zombies. There is also a steady decline in quality from one movie to the next, though that doesn't necessarily equate to a decline in the enjoyment one can mine from them, depending on your particular state of mind. The fun begins with Zombie, probably the best known of Fulci's horror/splatter films and definitely his most coherent. In Italy, Dawn of the Dead was released as Zombi, and thus Zombie is also known as Zombi 2, which is why the trilogy skips from Zombie directly to Zombie 3. For our purposes here, we'll call this film Zombie, and you can just deal with the lapse in numerics. Although it suffers an attempt to unofficially link itself to Dawn of the Dead, comparing this film to that is ridiculous. Aside from having the living dead running amok, the films are completely different. Dawn of the Dead is as much a political and social film as it is a horror film, with as much scathing political and social criticism as gushing blood. Zombie is a film about zombies, and they want to eat people. And that's pretty much it. The trouble begins when a deserted boat floats into New York City's harbor area. Cops go to look around and are soon set upon by a morbidly obese zombie who then falls into the water. For some reason, the cops make no attempt to apprehend him after this point even though he should just be floating there like a cork in the Hudson River. Despite the fact that he is a cop killer, they are content to just let bygones be bygones and forget the whole affair. The boat belongs to the father of a young woman named Anne, played by Mia Farrow's less famous but seemingly more fun sister, Tisa. Anne happens to live in New York and had been wondering what happened to her dad ever since he mysteriously disappeared while doing some sort of research down in the tropics. It being a horror film, she decided to investigate the matter on her own. She's joined by the nosy and annoying reporter who seems to be a permanent fixture in all Fulci films, played here by British actor and Italian horror film stalwart Ian McCulloch. I hope that when the day comes that the world must be saved from the forces of hell, we can muster up better champions than an uppity woman and some boring reporter guy. Surely there are crusading knights and mystic types who are better equipped to handle this sort of thing. Small bump in the road to death is that they forgot to find out where the island, called Matoul, actually is. So they just sort of blindly strike out, and lucky for them they run into a couple down in the tropics who know where Matoul is, more or less. Actually, they don't, but searching for a lost island seems like a fun way to pass the time on a vacation. Lucky for us the female of the couple enjoys nude scuba diving. You can always count on Fulci for plenty of gratuitous sex and gore, and gratuitous is the way those things ought to be. They are only slightly phased by an underwater battle between a zombie and a shark. This is probably one of the most famous scenes in the movie (but the most famous is yet to come). It's also one of the silliest. I can accept the underwater zombie. Sure. But how the hell can human teeth bite giant chunks out of a shark? Especially rotten zombie teeth. Have you ever felt a shark? Their skin, much like Run DMC, is tougher than leather. Somehow, this zombie is able to kick shark ass, bite it, and who knows what else. A zombie outmaneuvering a shark underwater. Okay. And what happens to a shark when it gets bitten by a zombie? Does it become a zombie shark? Does that mean it stops eating other things and only attacks its own kind? If so, then I would think zombie sharks are actually pretty safe. Questions about inter-species zombism will have to be shelved, however, at least until Zombie 3. Upon arriving on the island where everyone is sweaty, they soon discover the place is just brimming over with the living dead, and one of the doctors, a man named Menard, is doing his darndest to kill them all, but just isn't having much luck. You get almost as many sweaty close-ups of this guy as you get of Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. The locals insist that it's all some sort of voodoo vengeance. The doctor insists that there is a logical explanation for it all. That old chesnut. Some of the dead people are ancient Conquistadors who are remarkably well held-together for being dead and buried in the moist tropics for so long. Whatever the case, there's nothing logical about it, Doc. So just accept the voodoo thing, pound some more booze, and get to killin'. Despite the fact that the island is under attack by scores of the living dead, the doctor leaves his wife home alone and then asks our heroes to go check on her. In turn, the wife decides that zombies are scary and all, but this is a Lucio Fulci movie, so she better strip down and take a shower. Shockingly enough, the zombies attack her in the shower, bursting through the window and delivering the most famous scene in the movie, and one of the most famous scenes in horror history: the gouging of the eye. It's a great effect, as the zombie squishes the woman's eye into a splinter of wood and lots of oozy stuff gushes out. It's a tad silly in the set-up, as the zombie seems to take his own sweet time in lining the eye up and everything. But whatever. The end results is a great gore effect, and you can't fault the zombie for wanting to turn his attacks into a sort of art. Having succeeded in their mission to see how the doctor's wife is doing (they discovered she was dead), the cast indulges in the official "mad running about" people always do in zombie films. They decide going back to their boat may be a pretty good idea at this point, but there are just too many corpses shambling about to make it easy. Thus begins the wild orgy of blood spurting, head shooting, pus dripping, worm squirming, and flesh chomping that makes us all love Lucio Fulci so dearly. He certainly doesn't hold back on the gore here. Every effect is dwelled upon in bloody glee, and for the most part, they are top notch even under scrutiny. One of the guys falls for that old thing where you see a loved one who has now become a zombie and you mutter their name and stare, hoping that they will remember you or something. And then they kill you. We'll discuss that in a bit, because that old trick has always irked me. Zombie is not a perfect film, not by any stretch of the imagination. The characters are wooden beyond belief, yet are among Fulci's most human creations, which isn't really saying a whole lot. But in what is a definite rarity in Italian horror, none of the main characters are assholes or particularly irritating. You may not care all that much about them, but this is one of the few films that at least attempts to portray them in a positive and sympathetic light. Later and lesser films would simply rely on everyone being obnoxious, hateful, and loud as a means of establishing a character. At least the script here doesn't fall back on that tried and true method of making sure you cheer for the special effects, and instead tries to engage you on some emotional level so that you might be mor einterested in what happens to the people you're watching. The story is more or less coherent but still full of the stupid behavior and decisions that plague all horror films. The acting is surprisingly good from most members of the cast. McCulloch and Richard Johnson as Menard are top notch, and Italian genre film staple Al Cliver as one half of the put-upon vacationing couple is his usual sort of dumb self. Tisa Farrow is the real weak link in the cast, and she often looks more dazed and confused than terrified or determined. Luckily, McCulloch and Menard get to carry the bulk of the dramatics, and they're up to the task. In the end, however, such things are of secondary consideration. The Italian horror film is all about the image and atmosphere, about creating a smothering, nightmarish landscape where logic and reason takes a back seat if it's even invited along for the ride at all. And when it comes to atmosphere, Fulci succeeds in spades. Though less surreal and poetic than his later zombie films, Zombie possesses a gritty, exhausting sense of desperation and decay. Once we get to the island, there's not a scene that doesn't overflow with death. Buildings are ramshackle and crumbling, streets are dusty and deserted. Everything is cluttered and broken and hopeless. You can feel the humidity. One of the most evocative shots is of a deserted village street, windswept and dusty, with a lone corpse shuffling along in the background. Other shots, such as ones of Menard's filthy hospital filled with corpses wrapped in white sheets, continue to prove that at least in a film like this, the individual parts are worth more than their sum total. In many films, viewers are frustrated by the characters' inability to outrun the much slower living dead. With Zombie, Fulci lets us feel frustration, but it is a more satisfying sense, as it comes from the fact that it's not so much that characters can't outrun the zombies as it is generated from the fact that there's nowhere to run to even if they could. The island is a prison, a tomb, and even though the film may lack the trappings of more traditional stories, it is an ace at communicating feeling. All of this is thanks in part to Fulci's commitment to the image, but nothing smaller than a great sum of the credit should be ascribed to cinematographer Sergio Salvati. Salvati is a master of composition and one of the most accomplished eyes in all of cinema. With a resume that reaches as far back as being an assistant cameraman on films like Hercules Unchained and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Salvati became the cinematographer of choice for Fulci and a host of other Italian thriller directors. It's arguable that much of the genius attributed to certain directors can, in fact, be traced back primarily to their decision to employ Salvati, who has the an unparalleled talent for making even the worst films look interesting. The zombies, which are the real attraction here, are great. I may like Romero's movies more, but no one does zombie make-up like Fulci and his crew, headed by special effects wizard Gianetto de Rossi. De Rossi, like Salvati, would become a Fulci film regular, and he only got better with each subsequent outing into the land of the living dead. After a shaky set-up in New York and a little too much steel drum music down in the Caribbean, the movie sets a quick pace, building to a pretty exciting climax. I always thought Fulci had a problem with pacing. His movies have lots of long, boring stretches in which nothing happens. Zombie manages to avoid that for the most part and moves along at a breathtaking little pace that doesn't see any reason to relent once it kicks things into high gear. Although the final showdown may not exactly be scary, it's certainly a white-knuckle example of "survival horror" at its finest. And speaking of the finest, that concept should be dropped entirely when discussing Fulci's half-baked, half-finished follow-up, Zombie 3. Labels: Director: Lucio Fulci, Horror: Zombies, Italian Zombie Saga posted by Keith at 7:56 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, July 17, 2005Zombie 4: After Death
1988, Italy. Starring Jeff Stryker, Candice Daly, Massimo Vanni, Jim Gaines, Don Wilson, Adrianne Joseph, Jim Moss, Nick Nicholson. Directed by Claudio Fragasso.
As jaw-droppingly awful as Zombie 3 was, it's still a hilarious good time to view. Less so is the film that pretends to be the third in the series. Zombi 4 has nothing to do with Zombie 3 or Zombie 2, which of course had nothing to do with each other or the first film to sport the Zombi moniker, Dawn of the Dead. In fact, the movie isn't called Zombi 4 at all. It's called After Death, but someone decided to tack the Zombi 4 thing on the end, just like they tacked the "2" onto the end of Zombi to make people think it was related to Dawn of the Dead, aka Zombi. Why exactly someone would want to "capitalize" on Zombie 3 is a bit of a mystery, but who am I to question the Italians? Zombi 4, which is actually After Death, at least has the good manners to totally rip off Zombie 3, which was basically ripping off Zombi 2. I don't know who really decided this was Zombi 4. Most of the prints only bill it as After Death, yet lots of people list it as Zombi 4. At least Zombie 3 really was a sequel of sorts, involving, at least before his health lapse, Lucio Fulci. It's enough to make your head spin, baby! After Death is set on a sparsely populated tropical island, where just about all Italian zombie films are set. Makes sense. The tropics are pretty nice, after all, though I don't know why shambling mounds of flesh would hang around in the hot, humid tropics that would accelerate their rate of decay. You'd think the living dead would high tail it to Canada or somewhere cool to retard the decay, but what the hell. I guess a short life as a beach-coming corpse is better than a few years as a chilly living dead popsicle. The action begins on this proverbial tropical island, where some guy is busily practicing voodoo. Some of the local research scientists decide to put an end to his mad ways. Seems the voodoo daddy is pissed because the scientists couldn't cure his daughter and prevent her death. So he turns his wife into a toothy zombie hellspawn and sets to killin'! Everyone gets the bite put on them except for one little girl, who escapes and then comes back 20 years later. Why? Because. You know, I was once mugged with a couple friends, and I never went back to the street corner where it happened. It just seemed good common sense. And that was just two guys with a gun. If I'd been set upon by a pus-gargling zombie, I'm willing to bet I'd be equally uninterested in returning to the scene. The movie tries to pass this off as some sort of selective amnesia. She can't seem to remember much about the island, but you still have to question the coincidence there. She is accompanied by the usual party animal bunch of mercenaries who always show up for these kinds of things. And of course, they bring women and beer! And facial hair! Italy must absolutely be crawling with hairy, beer-drinking mercenaries who all boast gold chains and gay cop mustaches and like wearing unzipped camo vests with nothing on underneath. Eventually, the incredibly stupid heroine remembers why the island is so familiar. Her revelation that, "Oh yeah, this island is a portal to hell and my parents and friends were all slaughtered," is met with the usual ho-hum bravado commonly exhibited by macho bands of hairy mercenaries who bring their girlfriends and a cooler of beer everywhere they go. Maybe I am mistaken and these guys aren't actual mercenaries, but are simply members of a band called "Mercenaries" or something. This movie would kick a lot more ass if, instead of mercenaries, it was Motorhead. Lemmy don't put up with that living dead crap. He'd just go, "Oy, that's a weird lot," and smash them with an empty bottle of Jack. The siren song of howls of damnation coming from the jungle prove too tempting for our intrepid group of adventurers. They dock the boat and start wandering aimlessly around in the jungle, bravely pointing their M-16s at the trees. Shockingly enough, they are soon set upon by scores and scores of flesh eating zombies! As was the case in Zombie 3, there is very little consistency among the living dead. Some of them stumble around slowly and moan. Others do kungfu. Still others deliver eloquent soliloquies and use automatic weapons. And just like the zombies in Zombie 3, they absolutely love to jump through the windows and perform other acrobatic feats not traditionally attributed to the living dead. And just like the zombies in the last film, some of these zombies must have been crouched in their little hiding spots for weeks, just praying for the off-chance that someone might walk by them for a cheap jolt despite the fact that they are in the middle of the jungle on a deserted island. Elsewhere on the island are some scientists trying to figure out what happened to the other scientists. They certainly waited long enough. This bunch of boneheads find the old voodoo site and naturally start reading the incantations that release even more zombies. Scientists of the world, if you learn anything, learn that you should not read hellish incantations while standing in a cave filled with corpses. One of the scientists is a buff gay dude with 1980s hair. Well, I don't know if he's gay. It's probably stereotyping for me to assume all muscular young men in tight jeans and their button-down shirt knotted up like Daisy Duke are gay. All our annoying humans eventually meet and hole up together to try and solve the mystery of the zombies, who can be held at bay with special voodoo candle circles that have a tendency to get knocked over or blown out from time to time. Another note: if you have a magic circle of voodoo candles that can keep the legions of the living dead at bay, then don't set them out in the middle of the floor in the room with the highest pedestrian traffic. And close the window! It's like these people set the candles up in front of a fan and then ran back and forth really fast across the room. And also, even if you don't buy into the whole candle bit, despite the fact that the zombies run after you when the candles are out but stand still when they are lit, don't blow the candles out. Look' they aren't hurting you, okay? So you might as well just let them go on burning. Don't blow them out and yell, "Buncha mumbo jumbo voodoo bullshit!" You get plenty of the usual zombie fare, like one buddy coming face to face with his previous buddy who is now a zombie. I always hate this. I mean, he's a zombie. He's spitting pus at you. The friendship is over, man! It's like those movies where the villain will transform himself into the hero's dead brother or something, and the hero will stand there and actually see the villain transform into his brother's likeness. But the hero still falls for it every time and is like, "Tommy? You're alive?" No! You just watched the villain transform, you idiot! My favorite example of this was in the movie Event Horizon. Lawrence Fishburn spends ten minutes explaining to everyone that the evil presence will take the form of loved ones and dead friends to fool you, so if your dead girlfriend is suddenly alive and has traveled through space to come kiss you, then it's the alien. And then a couple scenes later, he falls for it. Look, when you are fighting a monster with super mental and transforming abilities and you're in hell or a spaceship or some remote island, and someone you used to love or your dead brother suddenly walks up to you, then it's not your brother or your girlfriend. It's a monster, so shoot it. And if your friend is a zombie, don't try to reason with him or "bring him back" because he's just going to bite you. Learn these things, people! Our heroes spend a lot of time sort of sitting around while the zombies gather outside and wait for the next time some dumb-ass spills beer on the magic candles or kicks them over proclaiming his general disbelief for all this "mumbo jumbo voodoo bullshit!" They then decide to take a trip down to the catacombs where all the ancient evil was released from, thus setting us up for the usual last ditch battle and ultra super shocking ending, the likes of which we haven't seen in literally dozens of other equally super shocking surprise zombie film endings. No really! I swear. Zombi 4, er, I mean After Death, is not a good movie. But what the hell? You got stupid humans getting their throats and chests ripped open by decaying corpses. That is, after all, what we look for in Italian zombie films, and this one doesn't fail to deliver. I still like the mind-boggling Zombie 3 more than this one. But After Death certainly has its charm. Sometimes, the best movies are the worst ones, and this one is pretty bad. Being as bad as After Death is, means it gets my unqualified seal of approval. I had a blast, and I learned something. I learned something about zombies, about surviving, and you know -- I even learned a little something about myself. Sitting through Zombie 3 and 4 will make you appreciate how accomplished Zombie actually is, even if it's not a masterpiece by any stretch of the word's definition. Although possessed of illogical moments and half-baked notions, Zombie is, in reality, not that terribly written or paced, and the finale will really get you on the edge of your seats. Subsequent films bearing the word Zombie and various numerals behind them, on the other hand, dispense entirely with any notion of being "commercial art" as I regard some of Fulci's finer moments, that is, films made for commercial reasons but not devoid of artistic merit in some way or another. The patchwork Fragasso/Mattei Zombie 3 and the Fragasso tour-de-farce that is After Death only prove that even if you didn't like Fulci's art, at least there was some art behind it. If After Death was Claudio Fragasso's solo effort in the world of zombie films, it's worth noting that Bruno Mattei's own Hell of the Living Dead, though never connected in any legitimate or illegitimate way to the Fulci films, can almost be added to the trio as a sort of addendum or companion piece. If nothing else, it makes Zombie 3 and After Death seem accomplished by comparison. This time out, Mattei is in the director's seat while Fragasso still delivers the derivative, wholly uninspired, completely abysmal screenplay. In a way, you gotta love the guy. If you ever studied film in school and heard how insanely difficult it is to get a script sold, let alone made into a feature, you can hold Claudio Fragasso up as evidence to the contrary. He's really some great kind of hero, and the best thing about him is that in interviews, he's completely forthcoming about his work, basically admitting that it's pretty much total crap, but as long as it's fun, who really cares? Fragasso's script, which has been cobbled together along with the work of a Spanish screenwriter (it was a co-production between the two nations), follows the example of Zombie 3 in throwing everything it possibly can into the film. Mattei cites Dawn of the Dead as a major source of "inspiration" for the film, and it shows in his choice of music, much of which is Goblin's Dawn of the Dead score with a little bit of their work for Contamination thrown in for good measure. In addition, our primary cast of characters run around the jungle in SWAT-like duds similar to those in Dawn of the Dead. But besides those two similarities and the fact that there are zombies wandering about, there's not much reflection of Dawn in this film. Once again we're down on a tropical island where a terrible virus escapes and contaminates the locals. Seeing as how this is an earth-shattering outbreak with symptoms the likes of which have never been seen (unless you watched some of the other movies), a small group of guys get sent in to check things out. One would think that if the entire country of New Guinea suddenly turned into zombies, someone might get suspicious. They spend a lot of time driving around in a jeep trading bizarrely awkward quips and one liners and typical "Italian movie dub" tough-guy speak. "It's hot as a horse's ass at fly time, and I don't like the heat." It rarely makes any sense, but you have to admire their commitment to giggling insanely and cursing. They meet up with a Caucasian anthropologist type who likes to blend in with the natives by stripping down to nothing but a grass thong and painting squiggles on her boobs, which all things considered, are quite a nice pair of boobs. Together, they fend off zombies, act completely crazy, and end up investigating the plant where all this virus nonsense started. The special forces guy are crazier than usual. One has to expect that the military in these movies will be miles over the top, full of cigar-chomping grimacing, shouting, blustering, and craziness, but these guys overdo it even within the realm of zombie film crack squads. One of them even dons a tu-tu and dances around while crooning "Singing in the Rain" as zombies stumble around. Oh sure, every crew has to have the "guy on the edge," but this guy is just plain silly, made even weirder by the fact that he possesses an uncanny resemblance to time-tested cinematic crazy guy Klaus Kinski. There are also two Tom Beringers in this outfit, which must be confusing. Now, I'm not a huge fan of real-life violence, but I'm also not a dove. I don't mind seeing criticisms of the armed forces, police, what have you, but surely the military recruits something other than absolute gibbering madmen to be in their squads. While Hell of the Living Dead has plenty of great stuff to offer - most notably the loony dialogue and wild gore - it's not nearly as fun as it should be. Sure the gore effects are generally good, but the zombie make-up itself is slapdash, uninteresting, and cheap. There's way too much time spent with grating, idiotic human characters. And worst of all, there's way too much padding in the form of grainy stock footage from some other film. How many times can I watch elephants, kangaroo rats, and jumping monkeys? On safari, not nearly enough, but in a zombie movie, I'd gladly trade monkey and mondo footage for some gut munching. Of all the films in this odyssey of zombie cinema, this is the worst paced. There's no tension, and every "shock" is telegraphed from a mile away. Still, like most Italian zombie films, it possesses a certain goofy charm that makes it watchable even if you have to lean on the fast forward button to get through yet another volley of stock footage. As in Zombie 3, we also get some ham-fisted attempt to add "meaning" to the film via heavy-handed dialogue about how white nations use the third world as their dumping and testing ground. Honestly, though, anyone who tries to pass Mattei's work off as putting forth any sort of social or ecological agenda is missing the point, or rather, attempting to force a point in where one doesn't belong. Bruno Mattei did not sit up at all hours of the night worrying about the plight of indigenous peoples around the world, only to conclude that the best way he could crusade for them would be via a sleazy zombie movie full of gratuitous gore and boob shots. Ecological/social messages were simply en vogue for such films, thanks primarily to George Romero's honest passion for his various beliefs promoted in his zombie films. That any similar sort of social conscience sneaks into Mattei's film is purely an accident of imitation, and any attempt to inflate these messages into anything else is simply pompous posturing from people who have a strange urge to inject politics and morality into the most amoral, apolitical grindhouse works around. If Hell of the Living Dead works for you as social or political satire, then hey, that's all well and good, but honestly now, at the end of the day is this really a movie about the suffering inflicted upon third world nations by oblivious industrialized giants? If you want that stuff, George Romero is there for you with very real and very earnest philosophy to accompany his shocks and gore, or you can seek out Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, another film that seems to take it's social messages more importantly than the horrific goings-on. If on the other hand, you just want to see idiots and assholes get hounded by flesh-eating corpses, then Italy is the place to be and you'll see no finer example of the heady highs and laughable lows that Italian zombie cinema has to offer than by indulging yourself in this quartet of tropical island mayhem. Appreciating Italian exploitation cinema means knowing how to embrace the good and roll with the bad, even when they come bundled in the same package. From Fulci to Mattei, these movies may not set a high standard in cinematic excellence, but they certainly turn the phantasmagorical fun factor up to eleven, and like Bruno Mattei says, film is there to entertain you. Labels: Director: Claudio Fragasso, Horror: Zombies, Italian Zombie Saga, Year: 1988 posted by Keith at 11:15 PM | 0 Comments Friday, August 27, 2004Plague of the Zombies Release Year: 1966Country: England Starring: Andre Morell, Diane Clare, Brook Williams, Jacqueline Pearce, John Carson, Alexander Davion, Michael Ripper, Marcus Hammond, Dennis Chinnery, Roy Royston, Ben Aris. Writer: Peter Bryan Director: John Gilling Cinematographer: Arthur Grant Music: James Bernard Producer: Anthony Nelson Keys Alternate Title: The Zombies Availability: Buy it from Amazon  .Hammer beats George Romero to the zombie punch by a year, but needless to say their effort, though perfectly respectable, was overshadowed by Romero's groundbreaking classic. I went into this film with mixed feelings. On the one hand, all the stills I'd seen from it looked incredible. Very spooky and atmospheric. On the other hand, my most recent experience with Hammer studio director John Gilling was the dry as a mummy's shroud The Mummy's Shroud. But I'm a sucker for pretty much any and every Hammer film that's been released, and I figure it certainly can't be any worse than Zombie Lake. It turns out, in fact, that Plague of the Zombies not only isn't any worse than Zombie Lake; it's much, much better. Okay, maybe saying something is better than Zombie Lake isn't saying a whole lot, so let's revise the praise. Plague of the Zombies is a damn good film, maybe not the caliber of film that is Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead, but certainly on par with other great zombie films like Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and easily one of the best of Hammer's non-Dracula/Frankenstein films. Is that a mouthful? Along with Frankenstein Must be Destroyed, it's Hammer's best film of the 1960s. Dracula, Prince of Darkness runs close behind. And I guess I'd go ahead and put The Reptile on that list, too. Actually, there was a lot of good stuff from Hammer during that decade, but few are as consistently eerie and likeable as Plague of the Zombies. Although the film is, like most of Hammer's best films, slowly paced, it's not boring, and the sheer power of atmosphere keeps the film feeling brisk and yet another example of what I wish people today would learn, or remember, or whatever: a slower pace does not mean a boring movie, and sometimes "wall to wall 100% pure action" can be dull as three-day-old dishwater. Plague of the Zombies remembers what it is a horror film is supposed to: creep you out. It has very few startling moments, but the overall sense of mist-enshrouded dread is more than enough to keep a literate viewer on pins and needles.
We start off with the number one man on what some people refer to as Hammer's B-team - a team that people seem to assume consists of every single Hammer player except for Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The man in question is Andre Morrell as Sir James Forbes, and he's hardly B-team material. In fact, alongside Cushing, he was probably one of the studio's most solid and charismatic older leads. He exudes enlightened authority and invests every line, no matter how outlandish, with a sense of absolute conviction that makes you believe just as easily as you'd believe Peter Cushing. Did the two of them ever work together in a film? I would assume so, and if that's the case, I hope I come to that one soon. Oh wait. Idiot me. He was Dr. Watson to Cushing's Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles. I haven't seen that movie since I was a little one and had one of the single greatest and most memorable days of movie viewing in my entire life, including as it did a late-night triple feature that began with Darby O'Gill and the Little People (remember when children's films could still be sinister and not revolve around children being sassy and making calls on a cell phone? When they could feature drunks and ghosts and Sean Connery punching someone in the face?), continued with The Hound of the Baskervilles, and finally concluded with Vincent Price in Cry of the Banshee. Curiously, Cry of the Banshee didn't have an actual banshee in it, but Darby O'Gill and the Little People did, and it was one hell of a scary ghost, to boot. Darby O'Gill and the Little People also held up surprising well over the years, and I still get a kick out of it today. Cry of the Banshee less so, though childhood nostalgia has kept my opinion of that film kinder than most. As for The Hound of the Baskervilles, I'm thinking I might just bump that up a spell on my Netflix queue. Well, what I was meaning to say is that Andre Morrell is one of Hammer's finest "men of reason," and he's in one of his best roles here as the seasoned doctor who is called upon by a former pupil to help solve the mystery of a deadly plague that is ravaging a small Cornish town. He certainly deserves to be regarded with as much adoration as Cushing, and frankly, perhaps even a dash more than Lee, though you'd never hear me say that in public. It's just that Lee so often played it evil or mute. I do like that he's become something a legend reborn thanks to The Lord of the Rings, the series of films that finally gave him his wish of no longer being thought of only as Dracula. Now he'll always be remembered as Sauron. Sure, he was in those worthless new Star Wars movies too, but the less said about those heaps of rubbish, the better. By comparison, they almost make some of the hammier entries in Lee's resume seem respectable. And yeah - no matter how revered he has become and indeed deserves to be, a little piece of me will always remember things like, "Christopher Lee is Fu Manchu!" or "Christopher Lee battles Chuck Norris!" or even, "Christopher Lee stars in The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf!" Of course, the funny thing about Christopher Lee is that he's not even in Plague of the Zombies. Neither is Peter "Grand Moff Tarkin" Cushing for that matter. So why don't I just can it about those two guys and get on with things? After all, my point was that Andre Morrell, who starred in other Hammer productions like She, Vengeance of She, and The Mummy's Shroud and probably best known for playing Quatermass in the original TV series, deserves to be as big a name, though I guess I'd balk and reconsider saying "bigger that Christopher Lee." So okay, let's just leave him as the bright shining light of the Hammer B-team, the actor who brought A-team credentials to his roles thanks to also appearing in substantial roles in non-Hammer blockbusters like Ben Hur and The Bridge over the River Kwai. And just to make one more Cushing/Lee/Morrell link, though Morrell is the odd man out for appearing in Star Wars films, he was involved in The Lord of the Rings -- the maligned Ralph Bakshi animated version, that is, where he did the voice of Elrond. Morrell's Sir James Forbes travels to the village with his insistent daughter, played by a real Hammer beauty with some real acting chops, Diane Clare (most recognizable to classic horror fans for her role in The Haunting, still hands down one of the best horror films ever made). He immediately surmises that this is no ordinary plague, if such things as ordinary plagues exist. His pupil, now colleague, Dr. Thompson (Brook Williams, who later starred in the superb WWII adventure film Where Eagles Dare alongside Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton) has been stymied in his attempts to understand the sickness since the locals are a superstitious lot (aren't they always) and refuse to allow him to perform an autopsy. Forbes, ever the gentleman but never bound by a gentleman's behavior when it comes to confronting the horrors of disease, figures the best way to solve this dilemma is by sneaking out to dig up a freshly buried corpse so they can perform a clandestine autopsy on it. Unfortunately the grave they pick is empty, even though they themselves saw the body buried earlier that very day. In fact, the entire cemetery seems to be full of empty coffins. Complicating matters, because matters always have to be complicated, is the fact that Thompson's own wife seems to be coming down with the plague. A local band of fox-hunting aristocratic thugs under the leadership of local town squire Clive Hamilton (John Carson, who went on to Taste the Blood of Dracula if you will) seem to tie into matters as well. Eventually, Forbes come sot the conclusion that, despite the irrationality of it, someone in the town is practicing voodoo to infect villagers then resurrect them as shuffling zombies. Thompson can hardly believe such a fantastical tale, but Forbes is a more world-aware and open-minded man of science. Of course, when Thompson sees a zombie actually crawling up out of the grave, he has to admit that there might be something to the whole undead theory.
There's so much going for this film that I don't even know where to begin. I guess since I've already started in on Andre Morrell, I'll continue from there. He's superb, striking just the right balance of academic detachment and genuine warmth. He is inquisitive, caring, and when the time calls for it, intrepid. I know a fair number of doctors, but I can't really think of any I'd trust to competently spearhead a fight against the hordes of the living dead and the Victorian-era frat boys with a voodoo fixation who summoned them from beyond the grave. Forbes is probably one of Hammer's most likeable "men of reason." Cushing's Van Helsing was likeable but a bit impersonal, and while his Frankenstein was charismatic, you wouldn't necessarily want to be on his bad side. But Forbes is a class act from beginning to end, and as I said, Andre Morrell's belief in the role is contagious. In an era and a genre where mad scientists were and sometimes still are all the rage (thought they've been replaced more or less by the far less interesting "amoral greedy corporate madman"), it's nice to see a legitimately likeable scientist for a change. And hooray for a character whose chief heroic traits are a sharp mind and a belief that intelligence can prevail. While Brook Williams doesn't make as much of an impression as the supporting Dr. Thompson, he's still a pretty good guy as well. Likewise for the rest of the supporting cast, including Diane Clare as Forbes' demure yet determined daughter. She has some great scenes and emerges as one of Hammer's stronger supporting women, even if she, like most other women, eventually gets carried over a misty set by one of the monsters. John Carson's squire is an exquisitely reprehensible character who oozes charm even when we all know he's a total bastard. The rest of the cast and extras perform with what you should now, after several of these Hammer film reviews, recognize as typically solid Hammer professionalism. The script by Peter Bryan, who also wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles and the under-rated and under-seen Brides of Dracula for Hammer, is another of the film's strong points, and you know, it's always good when the story in your story is one of the story's strong points. Hammer specialized in making outrageous and sometimes downright absurd situations seem wholly reasonable, and Bryan hits this one out of the park. Despite whatever wild stuff gets paraded across the screen, Gilling's direction, the casts' performances, and Bryan's sincere script make it plausible, even intelligent. Bryan knows we all know the obnoxious rich guy who spent time in Haiti is the one responsible for the zombies, so he doesn't make the "whodunit" central to the plot. We know early on who the culprit is, and the script draws its energy from making us see how Forbes and his rag tag little group of weary doctors, cranky constables, and the small town vicar will triumph over this seemingly all-powerful man of privilege who also just so happens to command the dark undead forces of evil. Because Plague of the Zombies takes time out to make you like the central core of characters, you in turn care about the movie, even when it's taking a breather in between digging up graves and being menaced by shrieking ghouls on the dark moors. The story also continues a favorite theme of Hammer horror films, that of the enlightened "literate" class struggling to drag the masses into the light while combating the upper class forces that profit by keeping them there. Forbes is a man of sophistication and culture, but he's hardly upper class. By contrast, the wealthy Squire and his crew of hooligans behave like lunatics and revel in the exemption from suspicion granted them by their position of power. The masses are too brow-beaten by the caste system to think that maybe the elites aren't as cultured as they seem, and it takes a man who values reason and inquiry and free thought over outdated notions of class and social standings to pull back the curtain and reveal the ugliness. He's a kindred spirit of Frankenstein, only without the acidic bad temper and homicidal tendencies. And he's certainly more sexually liberated than the misogynistic Frankenstein. Heck, he even gives his daughter a break and does the dishes himself!
But ultimately, Bryan's biggest accomplishment with the screenplay is how perfectly structured it is. Everything that happens is essential, but nothing is thin. It's a very dense, literary work, and despite not being based on a classic novel, perfectly conjures captures the ideal of "Gothic horror." There is no throw-away scene, no filler, and that's what keeps the film moving ahead so skillfully. Something is always happening, and that doesn't mean "action is always happening and stuff be blowing up all the time." It means that plot is always happening, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing to behold, especially when it's so smartly constructed as this. Man, do you know how good it feels to be able to ramble on and on about how good the script for a horror film is -- or any film, given current standards? So forgive me if I over-indulge. I was just happy to have a plot that's really worthy of sinking into. And hey! Characters you actually like and care about! What a novel concept! The final ace in the film's hand is Gilling's clever direction. As I said in the beginning, I had misgivings about him after viewing The Mummy's Shroud, which came out the same year and also starred Andre Morrell. It just shows what a good script can do for a movie. The Mummy's Shroud was a lumbering bore. Here, Gilling turns in one of Hammer's most thoughtful, inventive, and flat out spooky movies. For this film, at the very least, Gilling proves himself the equal of Hammer's legendary Terence Fisher, and perhaps even the more visionary of the two a he indulges in surreal dream sequences and some utterly horrific imagery that will stick with you long after the film is over. Gilling fills every shot with a palpable sense of menace and creeping doom, even when someone is just having a nip of Scotch. His exteriors - foggy forests, windswept moors, mazelike little country villages, dilapidated old mining works - are the stuff of nightmares. Where as Fisher's films are possessed of a very British, very rational approach to direction, Gilling seems willing to indulge more experimental techniques, and ultimately Plague of the Zombies feels like a perfect blend of British perfectionism and continental European surrealism. It exists somewhere between Fisher and Mario Bava. The shots of the atrocious, white-eyed, gray-faced ghoul screaming insanely as it lumbers across rotting moors with a dead woman in its hand is as chilling as anything Hammer has ever filmed, up there and perhaps even more striking than the shots of Christopher Lee's cadaverous creature stumbling across the bleak country forest in Curse of Frankenstein. Likewise, the scene of the zombies besieging Dr. Thompson in the cemetery is incredible. Dark, unnerving, and thoroughly beautiful in a sinister, macabre way. The creatures themselves are haunting but ultimately play little role. They are more akin to the undead slaves of earlier films like White Zombie than the aggressive and independent (if not particularly bright) zombies of Night of the Living Dead. They follow a master and do only what he bids them to do - at least, naturally, until the fiery climax of the film. Still, they're quite ghoulish in their appearance, and used and shot as they are, they remain menacing and creepy. They represent the final hurrah for the old guard before George Romero changed everything. It's certainly a hell of a way to go out, or pass the torch, or whatever it is zombies do when they shift paradigms. Plague of the Zombies was originally filmed back-to-back with another Gilling film, The Reptile. Both were exceptional endeavors despite being meant as the B-side of a horror double feature. Plague of the Zombies was paired with the higher profile Dracula, Prince of Darkness, which celebrated the return of Christopher Lee to the role of the bloodthirsty undead count a full decade after he starred in the original. Plague of the Zombies got lost in the large shadow of Hammer's vampire juggernaut, but later fans have had a chance to go back and re-evaluate the film. The result has been that many people discovered what I discovered - one of the great ignored gems of the horror world. Labels: Horror: Zombies, Netflix Diary, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 6:36 PM | 2 Comments Wednesday, August 11, 2004Zombie Lake
1981, France. Starring Howard Vernon, Nadine Pascale, Pierre Escourrou, Annouchka, Antonio Mayans. Directed by Jean Rollin. Buy it from Amazon
 .Hey, someone once said that I review too many movies I liked, and that I should let myself loose on some films I hated and do the usual riffing and sniping expected in this post-MST3K world of movie websites. Well, sure, I figured, it's fun every now and again, but for the most part, I'd rather spend my time talking about films I enjoyed rather than ones that made me wretch with boredom. And yes, I do wretch with boredom from time to time. My whole thing about movies is that I don't care so much about what is and is not "good." All that matters to me is whether the film entertained and interested me, or at the very least, offered up some shred I could deem worthwhile. And since I am a moron easily amused by shiny baubles and trinkets, so it stands that there aren't that many movies I really find awful, and ones I suspect will be awful I generally avoid. I don't need to shove a toaster up my rear to know it hurts, and I don't need to watch Martin Lawrence movies to know I'll hate them. From time to time, however, something comes along that I feel obliged to view despite the knowledge that it's going to be dreadful. And nine times out of ten, this means I'm sitting down to a bottom-of-the-barrel zombie movie. And when it comes to the bottom-of-the-barrel, it's hard to sink down any deeper than Zombie Lake, a movie so pathetic that it will actually make you pine for the work of Bruno Mattei. The film was originally conceived as a vehicle for director Jess Franco, whose claim to fame is that he can make gratuitous and copious sex and violence more boring than you ever thought possible, and as such, the film strives to be as plodding, idiotic, and dull as it can. Franco, however, ended up not sitting in the director's seat, possibly because there was no scene in the film set in a psychedelic jazz club. Production studio Eurocine went fishing around for a new sucker willing to attach their name to the movie, and they managed to come up with daft but sometimes brilliant French art-horror director Jean Rollin.
Rollin is as controversial a name as many of the other "hack or genius" European horror directors that emerged in the 1970s. Rollin's specialty was in procuring some cloaks from the local Renaissance Faire, a handful of attractive yet weird looking women, and going out to film a quick erotic vampire tale, almost always without benefit of a script or, it often seems, even a basic idea of what his movie was going to be about. His artistic goal, if indeed you want to grant him the conceit of such a thing, was to create ethereal, dreamlike experiences that were not bound by classical notions of narrative or logic. At his very worst, he still managed to pack his films with dazzling imagery, even when his lead vampire was something of a wimp. Frilly shirts and nudity abound, of course. From time to time, Rollin would wander outside the realm of cheap but still strangely opulent gothy vampire movies and into other areas. His foray into the zombie film, The Grapes of Death, in which the inhabitants of the French countryside are transformed into ghouls by some poisoned wine, was quite a good film in my opinion. Very hypnotic, lyrical, and different from zombie movies that had come before it, most of which conformed to the George Romero scenario of holing your survivors up in a building and having them shout a lot. Rollin, by contrast, keeps most of his action in the rolling green fields and outdoor expanses of French farmland, and the film is all the better for it. So the promise of another Rollin zombie film, even if it was one not of his own design, isn't as scary to me as it might be to others who don't have as soft a spot in their heart for the cracked French director as have I. Unfortunately, Zombie Lake bears no resemblance to Grapes of Death, and frankly, hardly bears any resemblance to a movie in general. The premise is more or less stolen from another Euroshock film called Shock Waves, which incidentally gets a lot less attention than Zombie Lake but is infinitely better, not that it takes much to be infinitely better than Zombie Lake. Our film opens with one of the quickest descents into full frontal female nudity you're likely to see. I think scarcely a minute goes by before our nameless French beauty has slid out of her clothing and started sunbathing herself on the banks of a lovely pond. As one would expect from a movie of this caliber, the camera leers relentlessly over her naked form, and so to are we forced to stare at her. It is, in a way, the film's apology, as if it is saying to us, "Look, I suck, but at least I'm going to give you a lot of nudity." Eventually she goes for a swim, and the camera then takes full advantage of its ability to shoot low-angle, all-revealing crotch-shots as she paddles about. Eventually, some green-faced Nazi zombies grab her and pull her down into the murky depths. All right! What a way to start a film. This repeats itself a couple more times, and everyone delights when a whole vanload of volleyball-playing female basketball players (really, the incongruity in sporting events is going to be the least of the film's transgressions against common sense or basic script checking) strip down to nothingness and let the aquatic bottom-dwelling zombies stare at their various private parts for a while before they swim up and pull them all under as well. Although the women above-surface are shown standing in waist-deep water and having the giggling nude splash-fight in which we all know women engage every time men are not present, when we cut to the below-surface view, they're all treading water in which looks to be the deepest yet clearest pond in the world.
A survivor manages to inform the local mayor that he has a nest of undead zombie soldiers in the local nudie pond, and being a proper Frenchman, he declares a state of emergency and tells us, through a series of flashbacks, of how the Nazis came to be sitting at the bottom of the pond waiting for all Europe's nudists to come skinny-dip in its uninviting waters. Seems during World War II, the French Resistance had a big face-off with these Nazis and managed to kill them all, but not before one was taken in by a sympathetic village woman who had sex with him, watched him die, then died giving birth to their child nine months later. Now, it seems, the Nazi zombies are looking for revenge. Personally, if I was a zombie in a lake, I'd kill all the clothed swimmers and leave the naked ones around, you know, for beautification purposes, especially since no ugly naked people go swimming in this particular lake. Eventually, the zombies get around to stumbling into town to do some more killing, preferably of naked women bathing in fields. A little girl recognizes one of the flesh-gobblers as her Nazi father, which is stunning since the war must have happened decades ago judging by the cars and fashion on display, yet she is no more than nine years old. For that matter, when we see the mayor in flashbacks as a French Resistance fighter, he's the same age as he is during the film's present-day. With the help of the little girl, they devise a plan to kill the zombies, which all things considered, is pretty easy compared to all the trouble people in other movies have killing off their living dead adversaries. Make no bones about it this film is bad. I can valiantly sit through all the nudity, but in the stretches of film between such displays, Rollin manages to achieve a level of boredom I thought only possible in Hindi romantic comedies. These are some of the worst zombies ever. I mean, really. Undead Nazis? That should be good stuff. It was the basis of practically every issue of the old Weird War Tales comic book that used to creep me out so much with its multitudinous illustrations of terrified GIs hiding in some ditch or as ghoulish Nazi skeletons march through some mist-shrouded graveyard. We should have had good stuff like that. Not so. These zombies are awful. The make-up is just bright green face paint with some flesh wounds pasted on for good measure. Usually, the green paint stops at the neck, behind the ears, and on the arms above the cuff so you frequently see the regular person. And in some scenes, it seems to be flaking off entirely, which could be passed off as "nightmarish rotting chinks of flesh" if you didn't see the healthy pink flesh of the actor underneath it. The promise of a zombie Nazi knife-fight turns out to be as slow moving and tedious as everything else, looking less like a knife fight between undead soldiers than like two guys walking through their knife fight routine for the upcoming production of West Side Story.
The acting is non-existent, as obviously is the script. Nothing makes much sense, but where as previous Rollin films make no sense in a dreamlike fantasy sort of surreal way, this just makes no sense in the "You know, I really don't give a shit about this movie" way. And when in doubt, the movie just throws another naked woman on screen. That's about the only thing I can applaud in this film. It's obvious that Rollin was about as interested in making this film as I was in watching it. Several times I actually caught myself leaning forward and shouting, "Be over! Be over!" at the screen, and always the film taunted me by proving it could drag a boring scene out even longer if it had to. The fiery finale is especially wearisome, but by then you'll have been lulled into a state of numbness that makes the whole thing palatable. At least it's proof that the movie will eventually end. Questions remain, of course, like why, if it was so easy to kill the zombies (gee, didn't mean to spoil it for you), did they wait so long to do it? And why does the photographer determined to get some shots of these undead soldiers stand out in the middle of the street with zombies all around her when she could have gotten just as fine a shot from, say the low roof behind her or from behind one of the iron-barred windows in a building lining the street. You know, somewhere where you won't be surrounded and eaten by zombies as you struggle to rewind your film. And why do all humanoid monsters that live underwater have to do that thing where they stick one hand above the surface, make the claw hand, then slowly let it sink below? What can this possibly accomplish? And why is the lake brackish and overgrown on the surface but clear as a swimming pool underwater? I spent a lot of time as a kid swimming in brackish ponds, and I never noticed them to be remarkably clearer underwater. But then, I was usually wearing swimming in my underwear, not naked, and I was never attacked by Nazi zombies. A Snapping turtle, yeah once. And water moccasins chased my on occasion, but never ghouls. Then, I'm also not a beautiful naked French woman, at least not that I know of, and I tend to try and notice things like that. I guess there is a fair amount of gore, but not as much as there is nudity. It should also be noted that these aren't actually flesh-eating zombies either. They just like to bite people on the neck then move on to who ever else doesn't have clothes on, or at the very least has on a dress that can be hiked up during the attack. What gore is present, however, is shocking only in how fake an un-gory it is. It looks like the actors playing the zombies just press their lips against someone and drool out some fake blood. Horrifying bite wounds look like pieces or ragged cloth placed on the neck. If you are looking for cheap nudity, then this movie has you covered, or uncovered as it were. If you wanted gore or a story or anything else in addition to the nudity, you're going to be out of luck. This movie gets to the point where it's so trying that you can't even laugh at how bad it is. Naturally, an abomination this foul, this exploitive, this sleazy, and this completely lacking of any redeeming artistic or entertainment value whatsoever, gets our highest recommendation. Just don't say we weren't honest with you up front. Labels: Country: France, Director: Jean Rollin, Horror: Zombies, Netflix Diary, Year: 1981 posted by Keith at 6:03 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, May 12, 2004Zombie Holocaust
1979, Italy. Starring Ian McCulloch, Alexandra Delli Colli, Sherry Buchanan, Peter O'Neal, Donald O'Brien, Walter Patriarca, Linda Fumis, Roberto Resra. Directed by Marino Girolami. Available on DVD (Amazon).
One of the many things we try to do here in Teleport City is educate our readers on a variety of topics that might go otherwise ignored. For example, did you know the only reason Teddy Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore is because he was the personal favorite president of the guy who thought of the thing? See, I bet you thought he was up there because of the funny way he would exclaim, "Positively bully!" So here is a little travel tip from us to all of you who might be thinking about heading to the tropics soon: if Ian McCulloch is part of your group, don't go. Oh sure, he's a nice enough guy and all, but every single tropical island he goes to ends up being infested with flesh-eating zombies. It's a sure thing. I mean, if you were traveling to the tropics and Al Cliver was with you, sure you might risk it. After all, it's true that he did go to the island of Matool in Zombie, but he also went to another tropical island where he got to hang with ultra-sexy Annie Bell in Forever Emannuelle. In fact, Cliver shows up in a lot of Emannuelle films, but he also dies a lot in Lucio Fulci films. But his bad luck with tropical islands seems limited to Zombie, and I would wager that's because he was with Ian McCulloch. So with Al Cliver, you have at least as decent a chance of getting laid by some mind-blowingly gorgeous person (male or female), and it's up to you to judge if it's worth the risk. I can take a quick glance at Annie Bell and give you my answer. With Ian McCulloch, though, you're going to die. Plain and simple, unless you are lucky enough to be his female companion of choice. You might have to dance naked for some natives or something, but you have a pretty good chance of escaping the island alive as long as you stick with Ian. And you'd probably have to dance naked in front of natives in an Emannuelle film, too. Ian McCulloch stars here as his usual nosy self. Our action begins in New York City, where so many Italian horror films begin. They have really cool cities in Italy. I mean, come on -- Rome? What a cool city. But for some reason, they always come to New York. One of the local hospitals is having some trouble with organ theft, not as in someone is stealing Hammonds. One of the orderlies is busily yanking out hearts and livers and eyes and stuff, until he gets busted, which you'd think he'd figure on. You can only steal so many organs and leave the shredded-up, bloody corpses lying around for so long before they set up a sting operation. This allows us to set up the typical Italian horror film cast of the plucky female, the dull male tag-along (McCulloch), and the young couple thrown into the mix for no real reason other than to be eaten later on. The female, Lori, also happens to be an expert on this incredibly obscure tribe from some island out by the Philippines. Well, thank god the orderly doing these bizarre things is from that same tribe. And there are other members of the tribe in New York as well. They steal a ceremonial dagger from Lori, and this is reason enough for them to all load up and go investigate the island to see if anything crazy is happening there, like with zombies or cannibals or something. Their contact is a frontier doctor who lends them his and his boat to get to the island. But the doc is obviously up to something, as he does everything he can to keep them from getting to the island. When the boat breaks down, as they always do (sort of like punk rock tour vans), our cast puts to shore and is immediately set upon by the locals, who have reverted to the ancient ways of cannibalism and impressively clever but not overly practical booby trapping. Before you know it, Ian and his pals are in a desperate fight against a seemingly endless barrage of flesh-eating natives. "But wait," you might be saying, "I thought this was called Zombie Holocaust. So where are the zombies?" Yep, that's a pickle right there. I guess since Cannibal Holocaust was already taken, they had to go with the next most popular type of holocaust. So even though this movie is about cannibals for the most part, the ten minutes of zombie action in the end are used to justify calling it Zombie Holocaust. When it was edited and released in the United States, they called it Dr. Butcher, MD: Medical Deviate. While the US version was missing scenes (I think it is missing important scenes of people talking or walking down a beach or something), at least the title, coy though it was, was more accurate. To no one's great shock but Ian's and Lori's, the good doctor ends up being a raving lunatic who is using the natives as guinea pigs in his bizarre and brutal medical experiments, which seem to have something to do with brain transplants. He was the one who encouraged the locals to take up cannibalism, and now he's creating a race of very ugly living dead creatures who sort of shamble around the jungle looking menacing for a spell. They don't really do much else until the very end. All the work is left up to the cannibals. Ian confronts the doctor, who has come to the island, while the reporter gets captured by the cannibals. Rather than eat her like they do everyone else, they strip her down, tie her up, and perform elaborate rituals around her naked body. Well, at least this tribe got some things right. Modern society absolutely does not have enough lewd naked dancing rituals going on. Damn Christians. They ruin all the fun. During the course of things, Lori inevitably becomes their great white goddess, though this must have happened when I blinked. One minute they're tying her down, the next minute she's leading the cannibal forces into a final battle with the crazy doctor and his five or six zombies. And then the zombies end up turning on him anyway. It's so hard to find good help these days. Zombie Holocaust is going to disappoint anyone hoping for buckets of zombie action, since the zombies are sparse and don't play a big role in the film until the very end. Still, this is among the most fast-paced and enjoyable of the many Italian cannibal films. It lacks any of the political ramifications and absolute tastelessness of films like Cannibal Holocaust, and instead plays like an action/horror film. The gore is certainly there in abundance, and if that's what you are looking for, this movie is going to serve you up plenty of chest ripping, eye gouging, flesh biting, and other assorted goodies. You also get surgical gore, but considering you can get that in abundance on The Learning Channel, it's not that exciting anymore. Italian horror films will be in trouble if Discovery Channel starts airing cannibal documentaries with actual cannibalism in them. Even though this is more of a cannibal film than a zombie film, it still has plenty of wholesome goodness to offer. Good gore, people eating, a faster pace than most cannibal films have (it lacks that hour or so of people traipsing through the jungle watching animals kill each other that makes most other cannibal films so tedious). An apple a day may keep most doctors away, but try using that shit against Dr. Butcher and he'll just pull your vocal chords out and put your brain in a pan. Similarities to both Zombie and Cannibal Holocaust are obvious, but being derivative never stopped anything from being enjoyable. Well, it stopped some things, but not this. The big city set-up at least makes more sense than Umberto Lenzi's bizarre mafia lead-in to Cannibal Ferox. And while the coincidences that lead to our cast going to this island are a bit absurd, they're easy to overlook in light of all the flesh tearing that the film has in store for us. Zombie Holocaust is no masterpiece. It's just good, ol' fashioned gory fun. Labels: Horror: Zombies posted by Keith at 4:54 PM | 0 Comments Tuesday, May 11, 2004Wild Zero
2000, Japan. Starring Masashi Endo, Kwancharu Shitichai, Makoto Inamiya, Masao Sato, Shiro Namiki, Naruka Nakajo, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Guitar Wolf, Drum Wolf, Bass Wolf. Directed by Tetsuro Takeuchi. Available on DVD (Amazon).
I'm realistic. I am fully aware of the fact that I have seen quite a few "best films I have ever seen." They number in the dozens, if not more, and each and every one of them makes me happy. I live in fear of the day that I can say with any degree of certainty what my favorite movie is, because that means I will have gotten to the point where there is only one movie I can enjoy that much. Not very interesting, if you ask me. So it goes, then, that I have just seen the best film I have ever seen -- one of several, as I mentioned. The sort of film that makes you yell. The sort of film that makes you kick things over and want to set stuff on fire -- or is that just me? I have seen the sort of film that gives you, or at least me, everything I always want from a film: sexy gals, sexy guys, bucketloads of cool, guns, zombies, explosions, UFOs, and rock 'n' roll. Come on -- if your life had more of each of those things, wouldn't you be having a little bit more fun? The bast couple years have seen a number of Asian zombie films hit the scene, which has been refreshing since no one else, not even the Italians, seemed all that interesting in reviving the undead genre despite the popularity of games like Resident Evil. I thought for sure that was going to cause a minor resurgence in the number of shambling flesh-eaters we saw shuffling across the screen, but instead we just got more teen slasher films, a genre that impresses me with the fact that just when you think you have seen it reach its most annoying, insipid, and idiotic low, along comes the next movie and is even worse. Hong Kong's Bio-Zombie was a promising start, and things got better when Japan unleashed Junk, but both of those films had one major weakness: characters you either couldn't stand or simply did not care about. They must have picked that one up from the Italians. What was missing in Asia's slowly growing number of George Romero-inspired zombie funfests was any sense of caring or humanity in the characters. While a zombie still can and often does succeed on a purely visceral level even with characters you'd just as soon see eaten, there's something more engaging about a cast with charisma, a cast that includes people you actually don't grow to hate before the end of their first scene. In short, what they were missing was a film like Wild Zero, one of the greatest films ever made. Wild Zero is a shining example of everything Japan has that Hong Kong has lost. As I've said time and time again, Hong Kong desperately needs an underground in order to stay interesting, at least to me and the people out there who don't enjoy Coco Lee albums. They need a music underground and they need a film underground. They currently have very little of either. They also need pro wrestling and Mexican food, but that's a discussion for another time. Japan, on the other hand, not only has Mexican food and pro wrestling, they have one of the greatest underground and fringe scenes in the world. Chalk it up to how repressed the mainstream society is, then throw in a little something about the law of physics stating that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every uptight, by-the-books salaryman and stodgy old parent who looks at someone's financial reports before they look at the actual person in order to judge their worth as a potential date for their daughter, for every high-strung, addicted to protocol cog you have in mainstream society, there is a glorious opposite. Someone who doesn't bow down to the incredible pressures Japanese society puts on its citizens to conform and consume, someone who eschews the everyday and looks for something different. This has given Japan one of the most diverse and wild undergrounds anywhere. From noise music to heavy metal, punk rock to surf guitar, Japan isn't missing a beat. The face of the mainstream may be syrupy mass-market J-pop crap, but lurking not too far beneath the surface are a rowdy bunch of punks, rockers, and freaks who continue to shake things up. We salute them. It's a shame America can't rediscover a bit of that rebel attitude. I guess as we become a more "crazed consumer" society, as we continue to stop being people and continue to become commodities and resources, it'll rekindle a little of what the Japanese underground has been keeping watch over while we've all been too busy wallowing in self-indulgence. Underground film and music collide in Wild Zero as they only could in Japan. The movie stars, among others, now legendary lo-fi garage punk/rockabilly icons Guitar Wolf as themselves in roles that are not completely unlike what we saw KISS doing in KISS Meets the Phantom. The big difference is that while KISS seemed completely goofy in that movie, Guitar Wolf can't help but seem like the baddest ass bunch of guys on the planet. Rockabilly pompadours, black leather jackets, and "don't give a fuck" attitudes go a long way, and this movie uses them all perfectly. The story opens with Ace, a young rockabilly from some nowhere town in the Japanese countryside. Ace is on the verge of being cool but still has a ways to go before he'll be in the big leagues. He's got the hair and the jacket and the Link Wray albums, but there's still something naive and goofy about him. He'll quickly develop into one of the most likeable characters in any zombie movie. Ace is heading out on his none-too-cool motorbike to catch Guitar Wolf playing in a nearby equally no-name town. He also has plans to get himself known as a force to be reckoned with on the rockabilly/garage punk scene by confronting the manager of the club, who must be seen to be believed. He has Little Lord Fontleroy hair, a tennis sweater, and the absolute tightest, shortest shorts ever worn by man. I mean, these things are short and tight even by Japanese standards, and they are the people who gave us all those little kids in Godzilla and Gamera movies. This guy is wearing those same shorts, but he is an adult. All is not going well for Guitar Wolf, however. Despite the fact that they just put on a successful show featuring microphones that shoot jets of flame out the back, and despite the fact that the club owner grew up with Guitar Wolf, he doesn't want to give them anymore shows. He'd rather focus on sugary bubblegum pop, leaving behind Guitar Wolf's brand of retro rock and roll. "Rock and roll is dead!" the manager shouts. Ace, who happens to be lingering outside, hears this proclamation and is outraged. He busts into the office, assumes a cool rock and roll stance and yells, "Rock and roll will never die!" He's right, of course. You can have your hip hop and your metal hip hop and your trance and your techno and your electronica. Nothing can take the place of a loud, distorted guitar as far as I'm concerned. Ace's intrusion causes a shootout between the pistol-packing club owner and the members of Guitar Wolf. Wolf manages to get the better of the club owner, costing him a couple of fingers for his treachery. Ace is decked by a security guard, but after Guitar Wolf emerges victorious from the scuffle, lead guitarist and vocalist Guitar Wolf (the other guys in the band are Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf) slices open his own hand, slices open Ace's hand, and makes them "rock 'n' roll blood brothers." He then gives Ace a whistle and tells him to blow it should he ever find himself in a heap of danger, which of course, he soon will. The members of Guitar Wolf then ride off into the night in a muscle car and on a motorcycle that shoots jets of flame out the back. So already this is the coolest movie ever made. Obviously it's not taking itself seriously, but even with the wink and the nudge, it's still unbelievably cool. Maybe it's just me. I've always wanted to live in a rock and roll world where you could make things happen just by playing the guitar and snapping your fingers. I think part of what attracted me to punk rock in the first place was that, at least until it's corruption in the latter half of the 1990s, it believed in the rock 'n' roll myth, that rock 'n' roll could change the world, or that it could at least change your life. I know it changed mine. I still can't make things happen just by snapping my fingers, but I'm working on it. The next day, the story continues with a young cutie named Tobio getting dumped along the side of the road by some freaked out guy who is calling her a pervert. Why? Who knows? She's deadly cute and is keeping the faith by wearing a pair of Converse. She walks to a nearby gas station but can't seem to find anyone who works there. Likewise, a couple tow truck drivers stop by and are similarly baffled by the unlocked doors, fully operational pumps, and complete lack of employees. They all sort of mill about wondering what to do until a crazy-haired young punk busts in to rob the joint. He and his two friends -- a bickering boyfriend and girlfriend -- have driven out to the countryside to see a meteor that recently landed nearby, and this was the best thing they could think of to get traveling money. It doesn't go so well since no one who works at the gas station is around. The whole attempted robbery is foiled when Ace happens by on his way to a show in another town, opens the door, and bloodies the robber's nose by accident, sending him running and crying back to his car. Meanwhile, a couple yakuza types are driving out to a deserted area to meet with a crazy female arms dealer who is going to sell them some serious firepower for a coming gangland feud. They are stopped on their way by a bunch of people wandering around in the middle of the road. Seemingly not noticing that all these people are gray and covered with gory wounds, one of the yakuza gets out of the car to berate and threaten them, resulting in the first zombie attack of the movie. The zombies are decent, certainly better make-up than we saw in Bio-Zombie though still not quite up to the high standards established by guys like Tom Savini and Gianetto De Rossi. Back at the gas station, Ace and Tobio have become fast friends and developed immediate crushes on one another. Hey, they are two good lookin' young kids. Why the hell not? The movie reminds you not to take anything very seriously by shooting the whole "shy smile" exchange between the two through a pink heart-shaped cut-out. Awwww! Seriously, Ace and Tobio are easy to like, and it just goes to show you that it's not hard to make characters people will like. I don't know why so many other horror film creators can't get it right. All you have to do is not make them assholes. If they are decent people who are basically nice, there you go. People will like them. If they are selfish dickweeds who shout all the time, then obviously no one will like them. I guess horror writers want you to hate the human characters so you will root for the gore effects. That's fine the first few times you see a gore effect, but after years of them, you start to appreciate a few likeable characters in the mix. Tobio and Ace part ways at the gas station, with Ace, ever the cool cat, saying, "It would be nice to run into you again sometime." He then sets out on his dippy little motorcycle for the next town and the next rock 'n' roll show. Catching up with our sorry bunch of would-be gas station robbers, they've parked their van near a lake and are cooling off after their little foray into attempted crimes. No sooner do the boyfriend and girlfriend go off into the woods to argue some more than they are all set upon by a horde of zombies. At the same time, Ace stumbles upon the yakuza types serving as a bloody meal for some zombies while the crazy arms dealer woman finds her own home beseiged by the living dead. Suddenly these guys are everywhere, and as usual they are hungry for the flesh of the living. To make matters just that much more complicated, the vengeful club owner has discovered the whereabouts of Guitar Wolf and is heading off to even the score. Ace fights his way through the zombies in order to get back to Tobio, who is the first person he thinks of. The two of them hole up in what looks to be an abandoned school building or theater or something. Difficult to tell. As they spend time together, Ace is aware of the fact that he's falling in love fast and hard with Tobio, and she seems to feel the same way about him. Being attacked by zombies is just the sort of thing that will bring two people together, after all. After an awkward kiss, Ace bemoans the fact that he is a total uncool wannabe who only dreams of being as slick as Guitar Wolf. Tobio doesn't mind -- she likes Ace the way he is -- but when she reveals her big secret, the one that got her thrown out of that guy's car when we first met her -- it freaks Ace out so much that he scrambles for another room to get away from her. While Ace wrestles with his emotions, the apparition of Guitar Wolf appears before him, strikes a super-cool rock 'n' roll pose, and tells him that love has no boundaries or rules. Ace nods in understanding and goes in search of Tobio only to discover that zombies have overrun the building, and she is nowhere to be found. As Ace fights desperately against the zombies, he remembers the whistle. He blows on it, and like Goldar from the Space Giants, Guitar Wolf immediately senses that Ace in in danger. They mount up their flame-spewing vehicles and head off into the night to help their rock 'n' roll blood brother. And it's around this time that the UFOs start to show up. Did I forget to mention them? Along the way, Guitar Wolf picks up the boyfriend and girlfriend being chased by zombies. They arrive at the gas station and find it empty -- almost. Guitar Wolf bends down and finds Ace's comb. He shakes his head, realizing that Ace needs their help more than ever since he has such an uncool comb. No sooner does he make this decision than the crazy arms dealing woman pulls up in her armored vehicle with dozens upon dozens of flesh-hungry zombies hot on her trail. Guitar Wolf -- who, by the way, still has his guitar slung over his shoulder -- steps outside and dispatches the zombies in the best way possible: through the use of glowing magic guitar picks that whiz through the air like ninja shurikens and cause zombie heads to start exploding left and right! Oh yes, you heard me correctly. Don't worry though, because it gets even better! The group eventually finds Ace just in the nick of time, but Ace is just as happy to die for having betrayed Tobio and let her down. Guitar Wolf assumes another cool rock 'n' roll pose and yells at Ace to "Believe in yourself, Ace! Believe in rock 'n' roll!" Ace nods in comprehension and, using some guns supplied by the crazy arms dealing woman, sets out to find Tobio or die trying. Meanwhile, Guitar Wolf and their hangers-on are set upon by zombies attacking the crazy arms dealing woman's storage warehouse, where they've all holed up. As if enough wasn't going on, the club owner -- completely oblivious to the fact that zombies are everywhere and the sky is filled with UFOs -- finally corners Guitar Wolf for their big showdown, which includes grenades, pistols, and glowing magic powers of rock 'n' roll electricity. In just one of the film's seemingly endless parade of "greatest moments ever," The Captain shoots a grenade into the room where Guitar Wolf is hiding. Guitar Wolf leaps out of the window with bellowing fire around him, shouts "Rock 'n' roll!!!!" as he falls, then lands in a crouched position and immediately tunes his guitar. Drum Wolf and Bass Wolf finally settle matters with the application of a bazooka to the problem. After firing the bazooka and blowing a whole bunch of shit all to hell, they immediately return to drinking whiskey and combing their hair. Ace fights his way across town and ends up back at the gas station where he and Tobio first met. As fate would have it, she has returned there as well. He runs up to her and gives her a big hug and a kiss, proclaiming his love for her and promising to never leave her side -- he even swears on his leather jacket and rock 'n' roll that he will always be with her. They finally embrace while Guitar Wolf decides to deal with the UFOs once and for all. In one of the greatest scenes in movie history, he stands atop a building while a massive mothership flies overhead. Drawing a glowing samurai sword out of the neck of his guitar, he shouts, "Rock 'n' roll!!!"and proceeds to slice UFOs in half! By this point I didn't even know how to react. I was just sitting there with a huge smile on my face, perhaps with a bit of drool dripping from the corner of my mouth. Wild Zero had succeeded where so many other films failed: it had blown my mind. I was, in the greatest sense of the phrase, completely and utterly dumbfounded. The movie ends with Guitar Wolf parting ways with their rock and roll blood brother and his newfound true love. "You don't need this anymore," Guitar Wolf had said earlier, taking back the whistle when Ace found the courage to fight for Tobio. As they stand on the nighttime road, Guitar Wolf gives Ace the last gift he will need: a cooler comb. "After that night, I never saw Guitar Wolf again," Ace says in voice-over narration. "Courage and rock 'n' roll: that's what he taught me that night." And as Tobio and Ace ride off into the night, so ends the coolest fucking movie I've seen since the last Japanese biker/rockabilly movie I watched, Crazy Thunder Road. Man alive, I'd kill for a big-screen double feature with these two films. What can I really say about Wild Zero other than it's the greatest movie ever? I mean, it has Japanese rockabillies fighting zombies and UFOs while shouting "rock and roll!!!" It's nonstop energy, and even the slower scenes are fun. Ace and Tobio are two of the most likeable characters in any horror film, and that makes the whole thing much more engaging. The characters you don't like are killed quickly, and even some of them you don't like become more sympathetic as they grow through the course of the film's completely wild, over-the-top zombie action. And hell, you have leather-clad Guitar Wolf throwing magic glowing guitar picks and blowing zombie heads off with the greatest of ease as they tool around a plague-infested countryside on fire-spraying motorcycles. It goes without saying that if you want deadly seriousness, this is not the film for you. This is not the website for you, either. You know serious people make me want to dance naked on the lawn whilst playing the Pan flute. Well, they would if I had a lawn. And a Pan flute. So let's just say they make me want to dance naked in front of the window whilst playing the harmonica. So anyway, no seriousness, but you do get some actual social commentary that avoids being at all contrived or heavy-handed. It comes across as rock 'n' roll wisdom, and I for one will always take advice from mystical Japanese garage punk rockabilly guys. This movie has it all. Monsters, aliens, romance, and coolness! The acting is great. Ace and Tobio are engaging and charismatic, and of Guitar Wolf is there to ooze cool, which they do. Ace will have the ladies saying "awww" and Tobio is such a mind-blowing cutie that her big secret will freak out all sorts of the less open-minded people in the audience, which is reason alone to love this film. Everyone else is pretty good as well. And then there's the music. Incredible. Obviously you get a healthy dose of Guitar Wolf's growing ultra-distorted garage punk madness, but filling out the soundtrack are some of the greatest lo-fi garage acts Japan has to offer. Teengenerate, Charlie and the Hot Wheels, Bikini Kill, The Ramblin' Rose, Mad 3, The Vikings, Devil Dogs, Greg Oblivion and the Tip-Tops, and plenty more. With the plot, the characters, and the music, this movie is rock and roll, plain and simple. It's good to see (or hear) a movie where the soundtrack is more than a series of incidental songs with no real point within the context of the film. Wild Zero makes wonderful use of the music at hand in order to augment the movie, not just to augment record sales as is commonplace in the United States (and maybe elsewhere -- I don't really know). Guitar Wolf's music is obvious in its inclusion, but it's use well in both concert performance scenes and at key points int he action. Something seems that much wilder and cooler when it is accompanied by the sudden scream of "Invader Ace." Most effective after that are the handful of slower songs by Greg Oblivian that increase the power of certain moments tenfold. Tobio and Ace are cute with their shy first encounter at the gas station, but it's made even sweeter with Greg's "Twice As Deep" playing in the background. Using music effectively is something a lot of movies have forgotten. They either throw out completely disconnected pop songs in hopes of selling records rather than meaning anything within the film, or they just pipe in completely bland and predictable John Williams wannabe orchestration. Using music effectively seems to be a dying art, and I was happy to hear it used so amazingly well in Wild Zero. But then, what should I expect from a movie full of rockers? This isn't the goriest movie int he world, but it has plenty o' grue to keep the bloodhounds happy. Heads explode right and left, and there's the requisite number of throat rippings and intestine gobblings as are required by zombie films. But the gore is not front and center here as it is in weaker zombie films. The characters are the center of the story. Well, the characters and rock 'n' roll. They propel the action instead of the other way around, as it all too often is. See if it isn't more fun to sit through a movie where you actually hope the characters don't die. It makes everything a lot more tense and exciting. And you know that ultimately, I'm a sap, so the struggling romance between Tobio and Ace really serves as the icing on the cake. After all, it ain't rock 'n' roll if it doesn't have some romance, and it couldn't happen between two nicer people. The love story is what makes me really smile about this film, same way I did with Dead Alive. The scene where Greg Oblivian's strange but endearing "Bad Man on a Toy Piano" is playing while Ace fights zombies after realizing the error in spurning Tobio and Tobio wanders the desolate streets dejected and saddened, all done in slow motion, is one of the most effective and touching romantic moments in any film. And then you have Greg Oblivian again with the song "Twice as Deep" playing when the two finally find one another and Ace swears "on my leather jacket and on rock 'n' roll that I will always love you." I tell ya, not a dry rockabilly eye will be in the room. After all, rockers may be bad boys and girls, but there's an undeniable romanticism behind it all. Funny that my three favorite romantic films are now Wild Zero, Dead Alive, and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. You figure that one out. I really can't say enough good things about Wild Zero. It's an Ed "Big Daddy" Roth drawing come true. Monsters and zombies, rockabillies and romance. It's the most fun I've had at the movies in a long time. It represents everything I love about film and about life. Well, I don't love being chased by zombies, but I guess even that would be more fun if I had a glowing guitar samurai sword and ninja star guitar picks. If you are a fan of zombies, bikers, rock and roll music, action, or just damn good films, then this is the movie for you. After watching it, I wondered what it was I'd liked about other zombie movies so much. With the exception of Dawn of the Dead -- which incidentally was also highlighted by a strong cast of basically likeable characters -- they seem such distant trailers of a movie like this that just does everything right and remains a wild ride from beginning to end. I don't want to use the phrase "If you see only one movie," because as I said at the beginning of this review, I wouldn't want to watch just one film. So watch a lot of films, but make sure this is one of the first ones you grab. It's absolutely fantastic, and that's about as good as things can get. Labels: Country: Japan, Horror: Zombies, Rock and Roll, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 5:11 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, December 18, 2002Junk
1999, Japan. Directed by Atsushi Muroga. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
I don't know what happened, but somewhere along the way, people forgot to keep making zombie films. There for a while, they were going strong. George Romero was blowing people's minds with his films, and the Italian were blowing people's minds with graphic scenes of people having their minds blown out. When I was a wee sprout, I went from old Universal horror films directly into zombie films. No other horror category captured my attention the way zombie movies did. There was something overwhelmingly creepy about them. I remember the first time I watched Dawn of the Dead. It was pretty cool while I was watching it, but it wasn't until days later, when it had been tumbling about in my head, that I began to get really creeped out by the whole concept of being caught in a world populated by the dead. Fear of the dead has always interested me. When if comes right down to it, about the only people you can trust not to harm you are dead folk. It's the living people you really have to watch out for. And weirdly enough, despite turning that notion on its ear and unleashing a swarm of flesh-eating ghouls, even George Romero's films made the point that it's other living people who will do the most damage to you. In the 1980s, interest in zombie films tapered off. Maybe Day of the Dead had just been too damn grim for people. Maybe they simply wanted to go and have a good time watching teenagers get slaughtered in the fast growing slasher genre. Whatever the case, zombie films slowly faded into the mists, even in Italy. Despite the popularity of recent video games like Resident Evil, few people seem interested in reviving the corpse of the zombie film. Even though companies like Anchor Bay have rekindled interest in discussing the zombie films of old with new releases of films like Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and The Beyond, it hasn't been enough to stop film makers from churning out a billion new teen slasher films or goth rocker vampire movies. Oh please save me from vampire movies! Or at least make one about a blue collar vampire who doesn't wear Renaissance Festival shirts, write poetry, wear long leather overcoats, or any of that other crap. And don't give him a name like Asgoth or Mandrial. Call him Stu or Lenny. There have been a few here and there, but for the most part the zombie film has gone the way of that joke involving an overweight older man in a little sailor boy outfit with a cute hat and oversized lollipop. You just don't see it too much these days. In recent years it seems the only people with any vested interest in making zombie films are the one bunch of people who didn't really get into the zombie films the first time around: Asians. As discussed in our review of the Hong Kong film Bio-Zombie, Asian film makers are no strangers to their own particular brand of zombies which, like their vampires, bear little resemblance to their Western counterparts outside of their hatred for the living and the fact that they're dead. In some older Asian films, the zombies are actually far more in line with the zombie traditions from Haiti and other Caribbean nations. The Shaw Brothers produced Revenge of the Zombies stars Lo Lieh who uses the living dead as his own personal slaves and lackeys, controlling them through a variety of magic incantations and potions. This is quite similar to the "real-life" zombie of the islands, which was often a person who returned from the grave in a somnambulistic state only to be used as slave labor by the master. Actual accounts of zombie-ism in Haiti suggest that the "magic" powder used to create a zombie is a concoction that viciously attacks a person's brain, resulting in a comatose, death-like state followed by a "return from the dead" that leaves them without a will of their own. More times than not, however, the zombie in Asian films was just some dead guy come back full of supernatural kungfu badness, as we see in films like Kungfu Zombie. When most people these days think of "zombie films," they aren't thinking of plantation slaves or White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi. They're thinking of flesh-eating ghouls a la George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. It's his creation that molds modern-day concepts of the zombie far more than actual, traditional accounts. In much the same way that everything we know about vampires comes not from the ancient folklore of Eastern Europe, but instead from Bram Stoker's novel, and in much the same way just about every modern idea about Satan comes not from The Bible or any religious sermon, but from Milton's Paradise Lost, George Romero created the tradition and the mythology all over the moment he had a stumbling ghoul attack Barbara in the cemetery. Romero-esque zombies never really caught on in Asia, and until recently, the only Asian zombie film that was obviously inspired by the Romero mythos was the Japanese film Emergency: Living Dead in Tokyo Bay, which featured familiar flesh-eating ghouls, but also couldn't resist putting the darling Cutie Suzuki in some super-powered battle-armor and having her go to town sci-fi style. It wasn't until Resident Evil hit video game systems that Asia started dabbling more frequently in zombie territory. Hong Kong gave us the wildly uneven but generally enjoyable Bio-Zombie, and Japan stepped up to the plate again with the delightfully outrageous Junk. Like Bio-Zombie, Junk isn't a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination. The characters are all pretty annoying and childish, not to mention just plain uninteresting. What the Italians never understood, and what the Chinese and Japanese seem to be failing at as well, is that George Romero's films were so powerful because he gave you a handful of characters for whom you could root. You didn't want to see them die. He also gave you hope that they just might make it somehow, despite the odds. Both Junk and Bio-Zombie feature insipid characters for whom one can't drum up a bit of sympathy. With depth of character out of the way, there's not much left to do but sit back and hope for a wild ride. And this is where Junk delivers and Bio-Zombie tended to falter. The movie opens with two seemingly unrelated events that you know are going to get related really quick. The first involves a couple scientists doing some sort of experiment on a female corpse. If their goal was to bring it back to life as a blood-thirsty member of the undead, then they should get the Nobel Prize for "Reanimating Bloodthirsty Ghouls." There's a Nobel Prize for that, right? I figure if they give a Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger for bombing the shit out of Cambodia and giving the green light for the massacre of the Timorese people by Indonesian invasion forces, then they should give at least some small token to mad scientists who reanimate the dead as flesh-hungry maniacs. The woman zombie makes short work of the scientists, then dons a sexy mini skirt, which I did not know was standard equipment for a secret lab. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad it is, but while I expect a Jacob's Ladder and plasma ball, a miniskirt was new to me. Meanwhile, a group of young thieves are in the process of robbing a jewelry store. Each one of them is wearing a shirt that says "Future Zombie Chow" on it, or they might as well be. The robbery goes okay, although one of the guys get scared and shoots some counter help. Not fatally or anything, because while he is bad, he's not a murderer. "The wacky guy" -- you know he is wacky because he wears Hawaiian shirts -- also gets stabbed in the foot during the heist. So, all things considered, I guess it didn't go so well after all. But they got some jewels, so all in all, I guess it was sort of a lukewarm event for all involved. Once again, I have to wonder if any heist in a movie has ever gone according to plan. Seems like everything goes wrong despite the ridiculously complex and foolproof plan the robbers dream up. Just once, I'd like to see a heist film about the stupid people who try to rob banks. When Scott and I lived down in Gainesville, there were two guys who tried to rob a Barnett Bank then make their getaway on BMX bikes. Of course, once the paint bomb went off, the two guys wearing full camo, covered in bright blue paint, furiously peddling away from the bank with dollars trailing behind them made it sort of easy for the cops to nab them. While those guys are screwing up the heist, a scientist working with the American military realizes something has gone wrong with the secret lab where they were doing all that zombie research. It's a pretty safe bet that it has something to do with zombies. When they try to trigger the self-destruct mechanism that will obliterate the whole lab and everything in it, they find it's been disconnected and can only be triggered from inside the building. So not only are there zombies wandering about, but at least one of them is intelligent. The lab is hidden inside an old abandoned warehouse in the middle of nowhere. As fate would have it, guess where the gang of bank robbers are supposed to meet the fencer who will buy their stolen goods? It may seem like a mighty big coincidence, but remember that Japan isn't very big. Your chances of meeting your fence in the same building where the US military has a secret zombie making lab are much higher in Japan than they are in larger countries. En route to the rendezvous, we learn the female thief is trying to buy a fancy pants sports car. It may not seem like that big a deal right now, but they keep bringing the damn thing up. I had initial misgivings about the melding of horror and gangster films. Robert Rodriguez tried it with From Dusk To Dawn, a concept that should have been great but instead just ended up being completely lame. Okay, so there was the Selma Hayak stripper scene, which means the movie wasn't totally lame. Say what you will about Quentin Tarantino; he may be an annoying twerp, but he had the good sense to write a scene for himself where he has to lick Selma Hayak's leg. That's got to count for something. Personally, I'm working diligently on my new film script, The Day Selma Hayak and Suzanna Hoffs Pledged Their Eternal Lust to Me, but so far neither woman has expressed much interest. From Dusk til Dawn not withstanding, it would seem that a gangster film mixed with horror should be pretty cool, and luckily, Junk actually gets the formula right. The crime film opening is kept short, just there long enough to set up the concept of gangsters versus zombies that will please us for the bulk of the film. When the crooks try to exchange the goods for cash, the fence and his thugs decide just to kill our wacky bunch of thieves rather than pay them. Again, doesn't this always happen. How many movies have you see where some exchange had to take place? Right, and how many of those exchanges went off without a hitch? Not a damn one. Someone always tries to stab the other person in the back. The two gangs of criminals chase each other around the old factory just long enough for the zombies to get into the mix. Then, as one would expect, all hell breaks loose. Just to make matters more confused, the scientist and a detachment of soldiers all wearing the "zombie chow" t-shirt show up as well to trigger the self-destruct. In a curious turn of events, the guy who choppers the troops in is very adamant about the fact that he can only stay there for a certain length of time. There's really no reason at all for him to do this. It's not like he has anywhere else to go. No one is going to see him. It's a completely arbitrary thing he does just to be a dick. Well, actually, he does it to assure that the helicopter will not be present at the point it's most needed near the end of the film. The zombies look great, and the gut-munching gore is pretty good. It's not as wild and over the top as what Romero and Fulci did, but it should satisfy just about all gore fans. It's no surprise that the only two criminals who survive the onslaught of the walking dead are the girl and the wacky guy with the aloha shirts. The scientist makes his way to the control room, with just about all the soldiers getting ripped apart by zombies as they wander about, only to come face to face with the intelligent zombie who disconnected the destruct mechanism. We all know it's the girl from the beginning of the film, but what we learn here is that she is also the doc's former girlfriend who was killed in an accident and seems none too pleased to be reanimated as a flesh-hungry ghoul, though to her credit, she has maintained her nice complexion and overall sexiness. Plus, somewhere in the abandoned warehouse, she picked up a nice bob-haircut platinum blonde wig. What the hell kind of lab is this, anyway? Given the apparent abundance of tight-fitting little dresses and wigs, one expects Dr. Frank Furter to come prancing out at any moment. There's no real explanation for why all the zombies but her are shambling flesh-gobbling morons, but you'll quickly forget about that the minute she busts out with the super-powered zombie kungfu! Hell, they split her in half, and her torso keeps coming. Chop her head off, and the thing will just come shooting after you! It may not make much sense, but there's no denying this is one of the most insane zombie finales ever. In the end, the scientist sacrifices himself to destroy the lab and all the zombies, and the two thieves escape just in the nick of time. There's nothing overly original about the plot, although the hyperactive super-indestructable sexy zombie lady with kungfu from beyond the grave was a pleasant surprise regardless of how silly it may have been. Junk makes up for it's predictability with tons of wild action and a frantic pace that keeps you happy from beginning to end. The film's major weakness is that you don't really give a damn about any of the characters. After most of her friends have their throats ripped open and turn into zombies, the female thief laments that "Now I'll never get that sports car." I guess it's supposed to be some sort of character development, illustrating the fact that she has dreams and aspirations beyond petty a criminal, but it just makes her seem shallow and annoying. But shallow and annoying is par for the course in this film. None of the characters are there for anything more than the action and gore, and they have more personality than your average Lucio Fulci character. It was very much the same in Bio-Zombie, but unlike that film, this one doesn't take an hour to get going, and when it gets going, it never lets up. It's best not to examine the plot too carefully lest the basic flimsiness be dragged into the light. The super-powered kungfu zombie, the amazing string of coincidences that result in everyone being at the same zombie-infested factory, and other holes are more than compensated for by the sheer gut-level energy of the film. What it lacks in sophistication or quality writing it makes up for with gore and action. If you're looking for intellectual stimulation, then Junk probably isn't going to be your cup of tea. It's a dumb movie, make no mistake about it. But it's a damn good dumb movie. Sometimes, you can't ask for much more than that. Sometimes, you can ask for more than that, and what they give you is one of those movies about French guys smoking cigarettes and talking about the bleakness of existence. I may have years of formal film studies training under my belt, but no matter how much they try to turn me into one of those high falutin' academic film critics with a great appreciation for avant-garde French films about sad mimes and a young girl's discovery of her own sexuality, at the end of the day I'd rather just watch me some pro rasslin' and some wild Japanese zombies. You can call me low-brow, but you can also call me happy. You're watching French guys and I'm watching a cute super-powered zombie chick kungfu the shit out of people. Like I said, Junk isn't a perfect film, but it's a lot of fun, and given the rarity of zombie films these days, I'll take what I can get. It's very much in the spirit of the Italian zombie films inspired by George Romero's films. It lacks the social commentary and character development of Romero's films, and like it's Italian predecessors, features paper-thin characters that are forgettable zombie fodder at best and irksome twerps at their worst. However, like the Italian films, it's easy to overlook the lack of any real characters when the action is this delirious and non-stop. If you're in search of a simple-minded, gory good time full of flesh-eating ghouls, then Junk is the perfect way to get what you're looking for. Labels: Country: Japan, Horror: Zombies, Year: 1999 posted by Keith at 4:11 PM | 0 Comments Monday, May 27, 2002Bio Zombie
1998, Hong Kong. Starring Jordan Chan, Lee Chan-sam, Lok Dat-dut, Lai Suk-yin. Directed by Sip Wai-san. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
The world of Hong Kong horror films is a strange one, indeed. Even within the horror genre, which can be pretty damn weird much of the time, Hong Kong manages to make films that will cause even seasoned horror fans to scratch their head and proclaim it "some fucked up shit." Though they are never as extreme as, say, Ruggero Deodato films, Hong Kong films take the cake for the greatest degree of creativity with their tastelessness. This is the industry that gave us such genre classics as Untold Story, AKA Human Pork Buns, and the intense graphic, hard to stomach atrocity exhibition Men Behind the Sun. It's also the industry that gave us horror-fantasy wonders like Chinese Ghost Story, kungfu cannibal films like We Are Going to Eat You, and more hopping vampire films than you can shake a lucky Buddhist charm at. The sheer diversity of Hong Kong horror makes it a somewhat overwhelming, but endlessly exciting world to explore. It's not horror like we've come to know in the West. Though a foppish looking Dracula may swoop down from time to time in old kungfu horror films, Hong Kong tends to rely much more on an indigenous cast of ghouls. Hopping vampires are sort of the banner carriers of the genre, and no creature is more uniquely identified with Chinese horror than these bouncing demons. Comprising the rest of the parade are a curious cast of witches, devils, sexy ghosts, fetus eating freaks, and countless possessed people with eerie green lights shining on them. Conventional Western monsters are few and far between. Werewolves and Frankenstein monsters may have defined the genre in the 1930s, but you'd be hard pressed to find them in Hong Kong. And when you have the rich folk horror tradition of China and surrounding countries like Thailand from which to draw, why would you waste time ripping off wolfmen and vampires who wear frilly Renaissance garb even though it's 1999? The composition of Hong Kong horror is also unique. The films are almost always bizarre, often uneven blends of horror and gore, slapstick comedy, and much of the time, kungfu or sleazy softcore sex. All good stuff, obviously, but the Hong Kong films that actually make all the elements work together are rare. Your average Hong Kong horror film has a lot of "roll your eyes in boredom" sequences of people just sort of shouting and falling down. That's fine and all, but I can get it for free on Galavision. Of course, most American horror films are the same way. The real short-coming of Hong Kong's prolific but not entirely impressive horror industry is that horror simply works best outside the mainstream. Hong Kong has no independent cinema or music scene, so getting anything but big studio crap is more or less impossible. The films may be influenced by Evil Dead, but it will never make a movie like Evil Dead. Which is too bad, because the whacked creativity and willingness to skip happily down even the most tasteless of paths is present in spades. If someone in Hong Kong actually had the ability to work outside the studio system, the potential for an insanely great, totally wild horror film is staggering. Unfortunately, that's not happening any time soon. But then again, it's probably having to dance around studio censors and government madmen that has resulted in Hong Kong horror making up for outright gore with totally mind blowing weirdness. In the end, I eat my own words and go, "Why should Hong Kong horror be anything like Western horror? Western horror is already like Western horror." Thus, Hong Kong has a whole new batch of stuff ready to offer up people who have already seen all the Fulci and Deodato there is. I can count the number of Night of the Living Dead type zombie films from Hong Kong on, well, one finger. The United States, Japan, and especially Italy embraced the shuffling flesh-eaters, but even in Hong Kong films that make use of the term "zombie," one rarely encounters anything resembling the ghouls that have been more or less defined by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Bio-Zombie is the one of the only Romero-style zombie flicks to come from Hong Kong. The result is curious, to say the least. For the most part, it's uneven but definitely enjoyable. Although, predictably enough, it fails to effectively blend its horror with its slapstick comedy, the overall result is an energetic, bloody zombie romp that should satisfy fans of the genre. The goofy, charismatic Jordan Chan, who made a name for himself in the popular Young And Dangerous movies I love to make fun of (mainly because they were the catalyst for the whole annoying "young triad guy" movie trend), stars as a wannabe street tough named Woody Invincible, which is also a pretty good porno name. My friend Stacey tells me you can derive your porno name by taking the name of your last pet and the name of the street you grew up on. Her name was "Galaxy Green," which pretty much rocks. Mine, on the other hand, was "Stumpy Meadows." No one but me would ever rent a porno movie starring Stumpy Meadows. I wish my name had been Woody Invincible instead. Woody Invincible and his pal, Bee, work at a video game store in a mall that looks exactly like this mall down in Chinatown, only bigger. They spend their days goofing off, crossing the security guard, and flirting with a duo of mind blowingly cute flirty girls. Sometimes, they take time off from this busy schedule to bug the older wannabe gangster guy and his attractive wife. And there's also a nerdy guy who works in a sushi restaurant and lusts after one of the girls, which you can't blame him for. A botched underworld transfer results in an experimental virus leaking out and turning people into gooey, flesh-craving zombies. The zombie make-up is simple but effective. It's higher class than painting people blue a la Dawn of the Dead but is nowhere close to the master zombie make-up of films like Zombie and Day of the Dead. Still, it's not bad stuff for their first time out. In a turn of events that reflects a definite Dawn of the Dead influence without any of the harsh social commentary, the zombies start wandering around the mall looking for victims. Woody Invincible and his small band of cohorts are the only ones who can combat the growing legions of the living dead. Why? Because they are the main characters. When the zombies show up the action is fast and bloody, with all the requisite flesh eating you expect from a zombie movie. We're not talking Lucio Fulci buckets of blood here, but heads do roll and necks are chomped. Woody Invincible and a girl named Ruby face off with the living dead in the parking garage as they attempt to escape, only to discover that things are a lot worse than they thought. The final scene of the two battered youths pulling into a deserted gas station and seeing emergency bulletins on the television is superbly apocalyptic, and a fitting end to any type of zombie movie. We can't win, after all. Have the humans ever won in a zombie movie? And who would want them to? Bio-Zombie has youth, good looks, fast pacing, and inventive direction on its side. It's slick looking and technically well made, playing itself out like a Resident Evil video game. Unfortunately, nothing is perfect. The movie's first forty minutes lag as we are subjected to a long string of shouting and slapstick that isn't very engaging. Still, it's a lot less boring than Fulci's boring moments. At least something is going on. That's really the only major drawback. More zombie action sooner would have made this good movie great, but as it is, I'm hard pressed to complain about what I got. Ultimately, the weird humor of the film makes the bleak ending that much more effective. And some of the moments are pretty interesting, if not out of place. When Woody Invincible braves the hordes of zombies to try and reach a telephone, the movie goes into full Resident Evil mode, with little flashing icons and "Reload!" messages popping up on the screen. Like I said, sort of out of place, but interesting. John Woo did the same thing in his one foray into horror-comedy, To Hell with the Devil, in which a battle between heroes and demons takes on the scoreboard of an Atari game. And that video game was probably the biggest influence on this film. Once the zombies start showing up, it really gets to be a lot of fun. No heavy political messages or anything a la George Romero, but plenty of quality zombie action. Jordan Chan would seem an unlikely lead character, but once the shit hits the fan, he starts looking cooler and cooler. As an aside, this is probably the only zombie movie where you'll see a group of soccer playing zombies demand human sushi from a zombie suchi chef. So Hong Kong's first real attempt at "classic" zombie films is not perfect, but it's still quite a bit of fun. I hope they give it another shot sometime soon, as a sequel to this movie could be really cool. Jordan Chan and sexy sidekick wandering through a degenerating Hong Kong that is filling up with mindless zombies. Hmmm. Seems like there might be more to the social commentary side of this movie than I first thought. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Horror: Zombies, Stars: Jordan Chan, Year: 1998 posted by Keith at 12:14 AM | 0 Comments Tuesday, February 19, 2002Stacy
2001, Japan. Starring Natsuki Kato. Directed by Naoyuki Tomomatsu. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
I can count on one hand the number of times I've just given up on a movie and turned it off in the middle of viewing. Either I'm an especially determined person hell-bent on getting through something no matter how horrible, of I'm easy to please or just too damn lazy to get up and turn off the TV. I like to see things through to the bitter end once I'm committed to them, and this stance has resulted in my enduring more than a few films that any normal person would have abandoned fifteen minutes into the pain. To whittle things down to a more specific level, I don't think I've ever given up on a zombie film, not even on one of those abysmal shot on video homemade movies starring a bunch of stoned teenagers. Zombies are my favorite beasties in the world of horror cinema, and I can sit through pretty much anything as long as I know at some point, someone is going to mash some pig innards against their face in order to convey the eating of human entrails. I don't expect everything to be Dawn of the Dead. I don't even expect everything to be Zombi 3. When it comes to zombies, I don't demand much. Which is why Stacy is such a frustrating experience for me. The fact that I was unable to get through this relatively short film in one -- or ever four -- sittings without getting bored and annoyed amazed me. That had never happened to me, not during a zombie film, not even during Hell of the Living Dead or Zombie Bloodbath. On paper, Stacy should be one of the most goofily enjoyable zombie film ever made. It has so much going for it. For one, it's Japanese, and while being Japanese doesn't imply your inherently better at anything apart from being Japanese, Japan has boasted a pretty spectacular record when it comes to horror films in general the past few years, and zombie films in particular. With Italy and the United States laying off the ghouls despite the popularity of Resident Evil inspired zombie video games, Japan stepped forward to administer the property, giving us such wonders as Wild Zero and Versus, two films that respect the zombie genre while reinventing it (without destroying it) as a rock and roll fable and supernatural gangland fantasy respectively. Outside of the zombie subgenre, Japan has given the world everything from Ring to Uzumaki to Kairo. Japan has become the new global capitol of horror, and it's proven itself more than worthy of the responsibility. But Stacy, based on the novel of the same name by Ootsuki Keni, isn't just a zombie film. It's a cheap zombie film, and those are often the best kind. But wait! There's more. It's also a cheap zombie film about an ever-growing army of undead Japanese schoolgirls! First impressions, then, would make someone like me, someone with such poor taste and low expectations, that this might just be one of the best damn zombie films ever made, continuing in the vein of Wild Zero and Versus by delivering a film that isn't scary but sure is a hell of a lot of fun. But it isn't even close. It's not even close to the enjoyable but over-rated and fairly idiotic Junk. In fact, Stacy is probably one of the worst zombie films I've ever failed to sit though, and this comes from someone who has seen the bulk of work from Bruno Mattei and Todd Sheets. How a film can start off with such an amusing premise and then go so terribly wrong is a bit baffling. This sort of movie isn't difficult to make, after all. And it starts off promisingly, with some great low-budget gore effects that will make this, if nothing else, one of the goriest of all Japanese zombie films. Even that isn't enough to save the sinking ship, though, and misguided attempts at incredibly unsuccessful drama drag it straight to the bottom of the barrel. The plot is simple enough: a bizarre virus makes all teenage girls transform into flesh-hungry ghouls, dubbed Stacys after the first one to succumb, who flail and stumble about in the most ridiculously overblown, epileptic fashion. How they ever get anywhere is a miracle unto itself. The only people I can think of who would make slower progress on an average walk would be those ZZ Top girls who had to bounce and shake like Jell-O every step of the way, or maybe the gang from Fat Albert -- but at least they looked cool with their crazy walks. The government of Japan has mobilized specially trained "rekill" squads to deal with the girls who are not killed by their own family and loved ones. In true zombie film fashion, these specially trained squads are completely inept and look like they've had maybe three days worth of training, most of which was accomplished by playing video games based on Tom Clancy ideas. If I ever make a zombie movie, and lord knows I've been working on a particular idea long enough, I'm going to make the military somewhat harsh (as dictated by the bizarre circumstances) but otherwise effective in much of what they attempt. It's not like I'm some gung-ho type, but zombie film soldiers are really starting to bore me. Every director does the same thing -- just make them yell, curse, and shoot a lot. Most of them get away with having shaggy hair, too. I say give them boys a haircut and make them behave like soldiers! Okay, right away the safe bet would be on this movie being written by someone who had a lot of trouble getting dates in high school. The treatment of young girls is pretty vicious on first impression. And on second impression, for that matter, but frankly, anyone who could be offended by (or even bother looking for) social commentary in a trash film like this probably isn't going to be watching in the first place. If Japanese films, especially horror films, have proven anything it's that they are definitely not for those with weak hearts or moral sensitivity to, well, anything. So what do we have here? A savage critique of the mindless Kogal trend that turns young Japanese girls into greed-driven, shallow zombies who will trade sexual favors to rich old men in exchange for fancy clothes and accessories? Perhaps, but frankly, at this point Kogals are old news (I'm more interested in those crazy-ass girls who wrap themselves up in gauze like they just wandered our of the ER), and social commentary about them is as fresh and shocking as someone in America making a movie that exposes the fact that under the seemingly happy veneer of small-town life, there are often hidden passions, desires, and evils waiting to erupt. What's the next news flash? Pro wrestling is scripted? Religious zealots can sometimes be hypocrites? When will the shattering of my illusions end? The movie follows three different but equally uninteresting groups of people. There are the Romero kill squads (the in-jokes here come fast and frequent and are about as subtle as hitting a sack of wet mice with a sledge hammer) and a couple guys forced into service. There's a puppeteer and the seemingly crazy young schoolgirl who adopts him as her killer and spends the entire movie giggling in a most annoying fashion. And then there are the Drews, a group of young as-yet uninfected girls who dress up crazy, idolize Drew Barrymore, and earn money as vigilante zombie killers. I really wish describing these groups of people didn't make them sound in the least bit interesting. Pretty much all the Romeros and Drews do is yell at each other for no real reason. From time to time, someone will try to communicate the gravity of the situation by having a freak-out, collapsing on the floor and crying while screaming out about the horrible fate of the world and those poor girls. It's really bad. Worse than soap opera melodramatics. And if you're wondering if they trot out that hoariest of cheap horror film tricks to show fear and despair -- the head clutch -- rest assured that it is here in abundance. Working with the Romeros is the standard issue mad scientist working out of what all cheap horror films use in place of a real laboratory: a basement dressed up with an old computer and an operating table. The doctor's job is to talk to himself a lot about finding the cause of the affliction, and once the truth is out there, it isn't really all that interesting. Then there's the puppeteer and his crazy girl. They don't do anything at all but walk around while she squeaks and giggles in a fashion more shrill than even the most abrasive Melt Banana CD. I know some people consider this cute, but a real man like me (one who walks around in his underwear and eats Hot Pockets) prefers a deeper, sultrier voice. This guy seems to have attended the William Hurt school of acting, which urges you to show no emotion, speak in a single tone of voice, and always look vaguely stoned. Not to go off on a tangent, but how the hell does William Hurt continue to get jobs? I mean, Steven Segal can't act, but at least he pretends to beat people up and can probably do pretty good at that thing where you put a giant top hat over your head and upper torso and draw a big whistling face on your fat belly. William Hurt doesn't even have that, and perhaps has even less acting talent than Segal, yet people keep hiring him. It's safe to say that as bad as anything in Stacy might be, it's at least better than watching William Hurt. Pacing is the movie's primary problem. I can overlook threadbare sets and a budget that might one day be as lavish as what you might get for a rural community playhouse revival of "Flowers for Algernon," but what I can't overlook is the excruciating way in which this eighty minute movie seems to last for days. I have never stopped watching a zombie movie, but this one finally got the better of me. I turned it off about five different times, and it took me multiple tries throughout a week to actually finish the dreary thing. It has no purpose and no direction, and it feels like they're just making crap up as they go along - and not very good crap, at that. What should be resolved in seconds takes minutes, and those minutes seem like hours. There were scenes where I was on the verge of tears, begging the movie to just end the scene and move on. But it never would. Just as I thought I'd reached my breaking point and could tolerate "man falls to his knees and screams in the street" no longer, the film would deliver a solid body blow by continuing the scene another several minutes, repeating the same one or two lines of dialogue as the video camera wanders around, apparently as mind-numbingly bored by the proceedings as I was. On more than one occasion, it seems like cast members are just standing around doing nothing as if they've all forgotten what it is their supposed to be doing. It's the cinematic equivalent of that "What do you want for lunch?" "I don't know. What do you want?" ritual that grinds people down in the workplace every day. Playing fast and loose with a script, or a concept is one thing, and it works if all the other ingredients compensate for the slapdash nature of the plot, but here it's not even as if they're jumping from one goofy idea to the next. They're jumping from one lack of idea to the next. Hey, nothing's happening in this scene anymore, so let's stick with it for a few, then cut to the next scene, where there is also nothing happening. And I don't mean nothing as in it's just boring. I mean nothing. Actors stand around like they're waiting for cues that are never going to come. You're in big trouble when the most animated members of your cast are the living dead. And let's talk about the living dead for a moment. What's the deal with these girls? I know all zombies have to do the zombie shuffle with outstretched arms, but this is just too much. These zombies don't shamble or stumble everywhere so much as they electric boogaloo to and fro. It's really quite silly, especially when it's combined with "crazy eye rolling" the likes of which I've not seen since the last System of a Down music video. So no worthwhile characters. Okay, I can actually live with that. Italian zombie films have trained me well, and I can still enjoy on a visceral level a movie in which I give a damn about absolutely no one since everyone is so zero-dimensional. I mean, Junk had no likable characters, and Versus abandoned character development in favor of cool poses and punching holes through people's heads. I was able to overlook the lack of characters there since there was other stuff, primarily the pacing, that kept things hopping like a Chinese vampire. Not here, though. The film crawls. Not because it's trying to build atmosphere or anything, but simply because all the action that does take place is so dull and uninspired. At Ultraman Land in Tokyo, I saw an Ultraman stage show where they called a little kid up on stage who did nothing but pick her nose and cry as Ultraman Taro tried to get her into the spirit of things, and that show had better action than Stacy. I won't even call the fights choreographed, because that would be an insult to anyone who ever orchestrated a very poorly choreographed fight scene. From fists to guns, it's honestly barely above the level of someone's homemade horror film from high school. Presumably this movie had at least some budget, and yet it managed to never exceed the lofty standards of a home movie in any category save special effects. I expect bad writing from most movies, especially low budget, shot on video horror films. I suppose there are those out there who still think naming a character or organization after some famous horror film director is clever, or that dropping names like Bruce Campbell and George Romero is still witty. Personally, I find this self-referential style of humor exhausting. It's been done to death, but like a pesky zombie, simply will not retire. Year after year, a whole new crop of horror film makers name a character Romero or Dario and pat themselves on the back at what a slick in-joke they've written, unaware of the fact that a million before have done the same thing. It's the most obvious and tired of horror film cliches, even more so than a black character going to check what made that noise at the end of the long, dark corridor. I beg of all you future horror film writers: give the name game a rest. So what's the score? Horrible pacing, and characters who generate all the interest of a lump of mud. What's next? The budget? I almost never fault a film for lack of budget. There are some people out there who don't seem to fathom the concept that not all movies are multi-million dollar, state-of-the-art eye candy. Some cost a buck fifty and make due with pie tins. I always accept a film within it's budgetary restraints. I know some guy making a single-camera first feature can't afford to hire ILM for special effects, so I grade his accomplishments based on spirit and ingenuity. What's the point of watching someone's shot on video no-budget film and complaining about the lack of cool special effects? It's like going to Disney World and complaining about the long lines. As far as sets go, Stacy doesn't know when to reel itself in and live within its budget, and thus we get military installations that look like rec centers or high schools, and the aforementioned laboratory that looks like a laundry room. They didn't even spring for the Jacob's Ladder. What the hell kind of mad scientist doesn't own a Jacob's Ladder? Despite overreaching their means with locations, the movie acquits itself rather well in other departments. The gore effects are pretty phenomenal, and not just for a film of this budget. They pull off some great stuff, and they do it often. Too often, if fact. A film with this much gore, with this many exploding heads, severed limb, and gushing wounds, should be a lot more fun (well, for someone like me) than Stacy is, but that shouldn't take anything away from the fact that the effects crew pulls off some pretty dazzling tricks. It's too bad the other people involved in the film weren't as inspired to give it their all. And therein lies the ultimate problem with the film: no one seems to give a damn. The writing is lazy at best, with the only funny joke being the commercial for a chainsaw called "Bruce Campbell's Right Hand II." The rest of the gags fall flatter that the worst performance on an open mic comedy night. The drama is even worse and should have been left out entirely. Sometimes, if you can't do it, you shouldn't try. The acting ranges from William Hurt-esque somnambulism to Shatnerific histrionics but without the camp value of either one of those performances. The direction is plodding but competent. Like pretty much all direct to video, shot on video cult fare from Japan, it's dull and unimaginative but gets the job done. Something about the cheapness of video seems to make people just not try very hard when they are working with it. Ten years ago, with analog editing suites, you would have had an excuse for this. Not today, though. You have digital editing systems for super-cheap. Learn to use them, and hone your editing skills before you make another movie. The only guys who showed up ready to play were the special effects crew, but even their constant flood of brains and blood can't make this movie interesting. If I seem particularly spiteful in this review, it's only because I was really excited about the movie. It should have been a trashy, goofy blast. I read about it long before I saw it and thought the premise sounded promising. A Japanese schoolgirl zombie film, heavy on the gore and with lots of tongue in cheek references to other horror films? Seemed like a good idea, even if the whole "self referential" gag in horror films was played to death by the mid 1980s. I was expecting, well, not a lot, but at least something. Maybe something that was as poorly written but also as enjoyable as Dead Next Door. Maybe next time. I guess not every Japanese zombie movie can be a home run. They need their own Hell of the Living Dead. That I really wanted to like this movie, and that it in turn made it so hard for me to even finish, has probably amplified my dislike of it. Ultimately, it's stupid and boring but has some nice special effects. It's not as good as Junk, which I didn't think was that good to begin with but is the closest in terms of budget to Stacy. Don't even bother comparing it to Wild Zero or Versus. Even if you don't care for those films, they still outclass this movie by a country mile. Stacy never becomes the madcap roller coaster ride it should be and needs to be to make the approach and concept work. In fact, it barely even manages to become one of those lame mine car kiddie roller coasters. It's worth a look, and it might even please you if all you want is gore. If you want anything more from a film, then Stacy will try your patience and leave you wishing it had been a different, better movie. Labels: Country: Japan, Horror: Zombies, Year: 2001 posted by Keith at 4:52 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, January 20, 2002Versus
2000, Japan. Starring Tak Sakaguchi, Kenji Matsuda, Hideo Sakaki. Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
It's no big secret that horror films, while enjoying something of a mainstream revival, are looking pretty abysmal. Everything that gets made, at least here in the good ol' US of A, baby, consists of disturbingly similar looking young stars acting like utter buffoons while some seemingly indestructible slasher stalks and dispatches them in ludicrous and surprisingly bloodless fashion. Stop me if this sounds familiar. The big difference between the current slasher film trend and the original that started with films like Halloween and Friday the 13th is that the first batch at least contained a couple of the originators of the genre. The current bunch of yahoos are ripping off the rip-offs, and that's never a good sign. But while we're stuck enduring the likes of Valentine and Urban Legend: Final Cut, Japan has been quietly - and sometimes not so quietly - taking over the helm as the premiere home for horror. Whether it's by just doing the age-old traditions correctly or by creating something brand new, Japan has become a haven for people who want more from their horror films than carbon copy scripts, a hot new soundtrack of industrial/hip-hop/metal, and twenty-year-old clones all formed from strands of James Van Der Beek's and Jennifer Love Hewitt's DNA. Among the many aspects of horror of which the Japanese have become the caretakers is the zombie film. As we've lamented elsewhere, no one save the occasional deranged fan seems all that interested in making zombie movies anymore. There is something apparently unmarketable about the entire concept, even though all horror films these days seem to have a soundtrack containing at least one track by Rob Zombie. His last name and popularity has not, unfortunately, translated into similar success for the zombie film. On one hand, I suppose I should be thankful that I don't have to see my most beloved of horror subgenres done up as a film starring Denise Richards and any number of indistinguishable male leads from popular shows on the WB. On the other hand, it'd be nice if a few underground film makers remembered the genre, or at least some grumpy Italians. But if Japan has become the sole guardian of the zombie film, then at least they are in very good hands. With films like Junk, Wild Zero, and most recently Versus, Japan has been not just keeping the zombie film alive (or at least undead), it's been reinventing the whole concept without disrespecting the traditions we've come to know and love. The Japanese approach, influenced by everything from Resident Evil video games to Evil Dead, and of course George Romero's "Dead" trilogy, has been to approach the zombie subgenre as much as an action film as a horror film. While still maintaining the Romero style look and behavior of most zombies, they've also thrown in kungfu-powered super-zombies and Guitar Wolf flinging glowing guitar picks into the skulls of undead legions. The movies have proven that, while Japanese filmmakers know their material, they also know that they have to put a new twist on it to keep it fresh. Versus, a zombie masterpiece directed by first-timer Ryuhei Kitamura, will invariably be compared to Wild Zero, also made by a first time film director, Tetsuro Takeuchi. Both are completely over the top in ways no one else ever dreamed of going over the top. Both are possessed of a hyperactive insanity and relentless pace. Both are full of zombies, and both ooze with cool. But where Wild Zero draws its charm and energy from likeable characters, sweet romances, and rock and roll cool, Versus relies entirely on high style and complete bad-assness, making it an altogether different kind of movie in that sense, though no less successful and certainly no less enjoyable. The movie opens in feudal Japan with a battered samurai facing off against a gang of shambling, sword-wielding zombies. Immediately establishing a kinetic, Hong Kong style approach to the action, the samurai butchers his way through the undead only to come face to face with their apparent master, a wicked human priest. The samurai charges valiantly only to find himself sliced in two. If that's not a good way to start a film off, I don't know what is. Skip ahead a couple hundred years to the present. Two convicts are running through the woods after being sprung from prison. They soon meet up with their benefactors -- a gang of stylish young yakuza so utterly and completely cool that they punctuate most of their actions with frequent "cool yakuza" poses. Sometimes, movies are cool. Sometimes, movies try so hard to be cool that they look ludicrous. And sometimes, movies push their ludicrous cool so far over the edge that they become cool again. Mere words can't express just how bad-ass everything in this film ends up being. One of the cons is happy to see the young yakuza, who look like spoofs of the various characters from the Hong Kong Young and Dangerous films. The other con, prisoner KSC2-303, is more suspicious of their motivations. After all, he doesn't even know them. Why would they bust him out of prison? When he discovers that they also have a kidnapped girl in their car, he promptly breaks out in some amazingly cool kung-fury, resulting in him ending up with a gun, the girl, and a yakuza hostage. The choreography for the fights is pure Hong Kong madness. Anyone who has followed Japanese cinema knows that they have traditionally been fairly lackluster in their action choreography, never having become masters of it quite the way the folks in Hong Kong were. Well, all that's changing, and Versus is a perfect example of where it's being taken. Ultra-fast, acrobatic, brutal, and simply stunning to behold. As is wont to happen when people are pointing guns at one another out in the woods, two people end up dead: one yakuza and the other convict. Unfortunately for everyone else, they don't stay dead. Mere minutes after finding themselves with brand new bullets in their brains, they're back up and ready to do more damage to whoever is most convenient. Everyone is fairly startled, but no startled that they can't continue to pump the recently reanimated zombies full of lead while KSC2-303 and the girl make their escape into the forest. One yakuza, their resident kungfu bad-ass, pursues while the others mill about, make plans, and try to figure out what the hell just happened. No one has any names in this, so we'll just refer to them as the leader (ultracool guy in ugly lime shirt), the weasel (little guy who whimpers and panics a lot), and the smart guy. He may not actually be smart, but he has long hair and wears spectacles and a sweater. The first plan is to simply haul ass out of any forest where corpses suddenly spring back to life. The leader puts a damper on that plan by insisting that they must wait for the big leader, the guy who told them to free KSC2-303 and kidnap the girl in the first place. As the yakuza stand around hoping nothing more will happen, the weasel has the realization that they have just wandered into the forest meadow where they like to bury all their murder victims. Before you can say "uh-oh," dozens of zombie yakuza are bursting forth from their shallow graves. Like your traditional zombies, they are slow, decayed, and tend to moan and stagger a lot. Unlike your traditional zombies, these guys haven't forgotten how to use their guns! Why they would be buried with fully loaded weapons, and why those weapons would still work after being buried in the dirt for months, possibly even years, is a stupid question to ask in the context of this film. I mean, they're zombies! Rising from the grave with fully loaded, fully operational pistols should be the least of your reality concerns. The yakuza take to an ultra-gory battle with the zombies while KSC2-303 and the kungfu yakuza bash one another senseless not too far away. Their fight leads them back to the meadow, and everyone stops fighting each other long enough to fight the zombies. Then, of course, it's back to fighting each other. Elsewhere, two completely insane cops are hot on the trail of the escaped convicts. One of the cops, Officer, apparently lost his hand during the escape. The other, Fighter, is simply crazy as a shithouse bat and keeps ranting about his invincible kungfu while all the while seeming very much like Jeffery Combs at his most gloriously manic. Must be the hair. The cops aren't above indiscriminately murdering innocent bystanders, either, if it gets them a new car. As the madness continues, the leader yakuza finally finds the second group of yakuza, this one mostly ultra-sexy females predisposed to the same habit of striking super-slick poses for no particular reason other than looking incredibly cool. With them is the main leader, who we quickly recognize as the same guy playing the wizard from the beginning of the film. When he learns that KSC2-303 and the girl are both at large somewhere in the woods, he decides his first course of action will be to slaughter every single yakuza he brought with him, thus turning them into a legion of super-powered undead gangsters. Only one woman, an ultra bad-ass kungfu fighter, escapes his murderous frenzy. It is through him that we learn the woods are known in ancient legend as the Resurrection Forest for obvious reasons already illustrated. We also learn that he is indeed the self-same wizard from the opening of the film, a long-lived demon who has waited five-hundred years for his ancient samurai rival and his ancient princess to reincarnate at overlapping times. He needs the blood from both of them to open a portal to hell that will grant him some unspeakable power. KSC2-303, of course, is the reincarnation of the samurai hero, while the girl is the princess. They have no intention of going down without one of the goriest, most insane fights you'll ever see on film. Meanwhile, those nutty cops and the female kungfu bad-ass are still running wild as well. And that, my friends, is it. The plot is simple despite a few supernatural embellishments. The entire film is basically one very well-done, highly stylized action sequence after another, with a heavy peppering of spoofing throughout. KSC2-303 is the ultimate bad-ass anti-hero. In one of the film's best moments, he offs a gangster zombie, bends down, picks up a pair of sunglasses, then slides them on as bad-ass music plays. The girl then gives him a "what the hell are you doing?" look, and he promptly takes the glasses off. The film is full of clever touches like that, managing to provide ultra-slick action while lampooning it as well. Versus delights in poking fun at the stylish absurdities of every action film that was written as a rip-off of John Woo, but does so with such gusto and reckless abandon that it also manages to outdo them all in sheer style and suaveness. There was hardly any budget for this film, and what little there was went primarily to the special effects, which range from very good to mind-blowing (sometimes literally). A mixture of old-fashioned squibs, fake blood, and make-up effects combine with expertly done fight choreography and wire effects to cook up an endless parade of exploding heads and guts, buckets upon buckets of blood, and even homages to gore classics like the hole in the head from The Beyond and the shotgun hole through the gut from Cannibal Apocalypse. To free up as much money for effects as they could, the entire film is shot using relative unknowns and a single inexpensive location: the forest. The technical mastery and slickness of the film prevent it from looking cheap, however, and while it may be confined to a single primary location, it's a big location that provides for a fair amount of variation in scenery. Occasional flashbacks to the back story involving the wizard, the princess, and the samurai further allow the director to make the most of his one location so that by the end, you hardly even notice. Not that I would care much, anyway. Many of my favorite horror films -- Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead -- restrict themselves to no more than a few locations. Some truly gorgeous cinematography further allows the director to make the most the situation and avoid ending up with a movie that looks cheap. The acting really shines. No one has a name, as I said, which in itself is a wonderful spoof of horror films where characters are often completely forgettable and only have names as a matter of formality. The weakest link is the girl who plays the reincarnation of the princess, but she's still quite capable. Tak Sakaguchi as KSC2-303 plays a subtle, grim-faced cool that we haven't seen the likes of since Clint Eastwood hung up his six-shooter and started making movies for fans of the Lifetime network. The director claims he found Tak Sakaguchi on the streets in the middle of a real-life fist-fight with rival youth gangsters and realized he'd be perfect for the part! Wielding samurai swords, shotguns, and even a massive artillery cannon, he is so completely bad-ass that he's off the scale. The evil wizard exudes quiet cool as well. The cop Fighter is absolutely hilarious. Everyone else is there to get turned into zombies. Musically, the movies sounds like a video game. Lots of techno and instrumental drum-n-bass stuff, or whatever. I guess there are lots of different subgenres for that stuff, but I don't know any of them. While I wouldn't rush out and buy the soundtrack, it works amazingly well within the context of the movie, sort of like all the techno that was in Run Lola Run. It lends an even more surreal feel to the film, removing it that much further from any reality with which you or I might be familiar. Versus is a perfect example of "reinventing the legend." Too often, that term is used incorrectly by people who aren't reinventing anything. They are completely throwing out the old and making up their own nonsense. Versus, on the other hand, showcases a great knowledge of the zombie and action film lore that came before it and constantly tweaks it and pumps it full of adrenaline without ever showing disrespect. And it's nice to finally see a zombie film that doesn't involve people rushing to the nearest building and boarding themselves in. Clocking in at very near a full two hours with very little plot, many have said the film could use some editing, which it may well get when it finally sees full release. I don't agree with those who feel the movie needs trimming. Maybe I'm just more patient, but there wasn't a single time when I felt bored or wanted to move things along. The movie maintains a breakneck pace from start to finish, and at least in my opinion, it does not falter. There is a lot more crammed into the story and the action than is evident perhaps on the first viewing. A simple plot should not be mistaken for no plot or for a bad a plot. And the visual jokes are so plentiful that you have to keep going back again and again, not that I mind doing that. Versus is among the very few films I watched, then immediately watched again. As if all this complete and utter insanity wasn't enough, Versus also manages to be the first film in I can't remember how long that has a shock ending that is actually shocking as opposed to idiotic, that actually serves as a wonderfully appropriate and unexpected punctuation mark rather than seeming like some lame-brained after-thought tacked on to open the door for a potential sequel. The shock ending, of course, is a time-honored, or at least heavily abused, tradition of the horror film. Almost none of them make it work. Halloween pulled it off, but those since then have been few and far between. The Ring, though I don't know if I consider the end of that film to be a "shock" ending so much as it is just a creepy one. Most shock endings have no basis in reality at all, and are simply slapped on without complete disregard for logic and total contempt for the intelligence of the audience. Friday the 13th films provide us the most numerous examples (gee, is Jason gonna jump out of the lake for no reason again?), but my favorite recent example was Tim Burton's disastrous Planet of the Apes, which posses a shocking twist ending so mind-numbingly stupid that it'll almost make you look favorably on censorship so long as it is applied to Planet of the Apes. When asked about it, Tim Burton obviously had no explanation, which makes sense, as there is no explanation for it. It was a moronic ending. Being the director though, he couldn't say, "Yeah, it was stupid." So instead he got all pissy and complained that not everything could be explained, that some things are there to "make you think." Of course, what it does is make you think the director and the scriptwriters were complete dolts. But I digress. Versus comes up with the most ingenious way to spoof the shocking twist ending cliché: by making it work. As if the movie hadn't already given us so much, it ends things on an amazing note with one of the best twist endings in the last twenty years. It's really the cherry on top of the whipped cream on top of the melted fudge on top of the delicious clown sundae. I can't say I like Versus quite as much as Wild Zero. I prefer Wild Zero's developed and lovable characters and rock-n-roll lessons. Junk, another Japanese yakuza versus zombies film, was fun on its own terms, but it's really been outclassed by Wild Zero and Versus. But as I said, Versus is a very different type of movie despite being possessed of the same wild energy and anarchic spirit. It's really not fair to compare it to anything else, because frankly, nothing else compares, and no other movie quite like it has ever been made. Or rather, lots of movies like it have been made, but never crammed all together into one movie with this much total insanity running rampant. Fans of action and zombies will be delighted. Fans of low-budget filmmaking will marvel at how much this film delivers with so little money with which to work. And fans of spirited, no-holds-barred fun films will be overjoyed beyond the capacity for words. Labels: Country: Japan, Horror: Zombies, Year: 2000 posted by Keith at 3:09 PM | 0 Comments Tuesday, December 18, 2001Kungfu Zombie
1982, Hong Kong. Starring Billy Chong, Kwan Young Moon, Chaing Tao, Cheng Kay Ying, Chan Lau, Pak Sha Lik, Shum Yan Chi. Directed by Hwa I Hung.
Although I grew up on a steady diet of kungfu, Ultraman, and Godzilla (among other things) throughout most of my life, it wasn't until the late 1980s that I threw on a dapper looking fedora and headed out in search of material beyond that which was served up to me on Saturday afternoon via various themed "theaters" on television. It was a difficult road to travel at the time. These days, you can go pretty much anywhere and find a slew of cheap kungfu films for sale. But not so long ago, getting even the lamest fare from across the Pacific required months of searching and dealing with shady tape traders who kept asking about rape and bondage videos when all you wanted was a copy of the latest Jackie Chan film. When I moved down to Florida, I met a guy named Pat who shared my love for all things kungfu, both old and new. It was he who took me to what was, at the time, the holy grail of kungfu movie stores, a place on the outskirts of Gainesville that stocked shelves upon shelves of old school kungfu films, not to mention weird horror and black action films. It was one of those moments where your eyes fill with tears, and you simply want to fall to your knees and mutter "Amitabah!" as you gaze upon the glory. A couple years later, I would meet a girl (coincidentally named Patty) who worked at this same store. I'd like to think that she was impressed by the ferocity with which I devoured their entire stock of kungfu films that first brought us together, but I can't be entirely certain. Ours would be a wild and fun romance culminating in a disastrous move to Charlotte, North Carolina, which in turn lead to my moving to New York to chase fortune and glory. Truly great is the power of kungfu. In those first few carefree years in Florida, back before another particularly stormy relationship crushed much of my spirit for the bulk of a couple years, few things could bring a glow to my face quite like the nights Pat, myself, our friend Todd, and assorted others would gather around my massive 10-inch television, pop in the latest rental from the video store, and smile as we heard those familiar notes accompanying an animated seahorse flying through space while an announcer shouted "THIS is an Ocean Shores VIDEO presentation!" Ahh, yes my brothers and sisters, those were, as we say in the old country, the good ol' days. I had a tiny apartment with a worthless air conditioner, good friends, a video store full of dollar rental kungfu films, and a crush on the girl at the counter. That entire period in my life was overflowing with good friends and plenty of fun. We'd stay up til the wee small hours, packed ten in a small room, laughing, drinking, eating, and watching kungfu films. It's hard to separate this film from the circumstances under which I first watched Kungfu Zombie, but that doesn't matter since any way you slice it, this is damn good filmmaking. Kungfu Zombie was among our favorite rentals, along with War on Shaolin Temple, Young Taoism Fighter, and Jackie Chan's Police Story. Whenever it was our turn to entertain the troops, one of those movies would invariably find its way into the VCR, even if it had to chase away the copy of Black Devil Doll From Hell everyone wanted to see as well. Tons of top-notch kungfu action, comedy, ghosts and goblins, and pretty much everything in the world that I would want to see thrown together in one film is launched at me from the madness that is Kungfu Zombie. The only thing that could possibly make it better would have been if it was in 3D. Not that it's a flawless film by any stretch of the imagination. The writing leaves a considerable amount to be desired, and none of the characters are very likable people. You certainly wouldn't want any of them for friends, except perhaps the wizard who can resurrect you if you need such services. At the same time, it's not like people are renting a movie called Kungfu Zombie in hopes of seeing rapier-sharp wit and clever writing. More than likely, they are renting such a movie in hopes of watching some living kungfu people fighting some non-living kungfu people, and the movie certainly delivers that in spades. In a way, the movie is perfect despite its flaws, perhaps even because of them. The under-rated, should-have-been superstar, Billy Chong, stars as a snotty, rebellious kungfu student who constantly fights with his ailing dad. Well, he pretty much just constantly fights, period, and runs really fast. But those are things you can do when you learn kungfu. He's pretty much a jerk, which is something kungfu comedies love to do. They make the hero a total asshole. Sometimes, in the end, he has learned a valuable lesson about the value of humility and respect. More times than not, however, he would beat people up then fart, and that would be the end of the movie. While Billy doesn't do much farting in this, he does get to remain a jerk through the whole movie. Character-wise, there isn't much about the guy for which you can root. But he does kick a lot of ass, and he looks great doing it, so that makes him the hero. A gang of cut-throats have taken a disliking to the lad and his sidekick, who is named Hamster (he would be good friends with Young Rudy from Wolf Devil Woman). They employ the services of a black magic priest to resurrect some corpses to fight Chong. Granted, it seems a rather complex plan. Employ a priest to resurrect zombies that will, once given the cue, fly through the air and push Chong into a pit filled with spikes. A spike-filled pit seems a rather conventional culmination for a plan that involves resurrecting the dead, but then I'm not really a martial arts bandit, so I guess it's not my place to question their machinations. When your plan is so intricate that it requires a large number of flow charts, Vinn diagrams, and a priest who can summon the dead, things are bound to go awry. What the bad guys didn't figure on is that after making a rather impressive flying leap from a coffin, a moldy, crumbling corpse is a rather ineffective fighter. Chong dispatches them without much difficulty, not to mention the fact that he's rather unimpressed by the fact that he's being attacked by the living dead. I've watched a lot of zombie films, and a lot of things involving corpses, and despite the fact that I consider myself more or less desensitized to their appearance in movies, I'd probably still be taken aback a tad by the appearance of one in real life, especially if it was flying through the air and trying to punch me. For Chong, however, a gang of zombies is no different than any other gang. The evil leader guy, who sports a pair of rather sloppy muttonchop burns, accidentally gets pushed into the pit of spikes during the ensuing melee, being justly undone by his own treachery. Satisfied that the night of being attacked by creatures of the night returned from the grave for bloody revenge has ended, Chong heads off for the local tavern to make merry. Things don't go as well for the wizard, who is soon plagued by Muttonchop's ghost demanding resurrection services. Complications arise due to the fact that Muttonchop's body is badly mutilated after taking the tumble into the spike-filled pit. Let that be a lesson to you. If you are a treacherous villain bent on killing someone who tends to walk through the woods at night, don't employ a wizard to raise the dead in an attempt to push your mark into a spike-filled grave. Instead, just hide behind a bush and shoot him with an arrow or something as he saunters by. It's a lot less complicated, and you have a much slimmer chance of you yourself falling into the spikes. Just because you can summon the dead doesn't mean every plot you hatch has to involve the summoning of the dead. While Billy Chong may not be an ugly ghost adorned with mangy muttonchops, his life still isn't perfect, either. His family-which consists only of his father and the mysterious Hamster - is dysfunctional, and when a family is dysfunctional in a kungfu film that means all hey do is yell and try to kick each other. Just about every interaction between Billy and his dad consists of the following exchange: Father: "Ungrateful bastard!" Billy: "Go to hell, old man!" Which is then followed up by a few minutes of fighting that culminates in the father nearly dying of heart failure, muttering "You're killing me, you ungrateful son of a bitch!" which elicits a smirk from Billy, who will wave bye-bye and go out on the town with Hamster. As one may guess, there isn't a whole lot to like about either Billy or his father. They're both assholes. Even when the father isn't scolding Billy, he still talks to him in an angry, condescending manner. Billy responds by goading his father into having another heart attack, which is the source of much hilarity around their household. The mother probably died just to get some peace and quiet. The father soon reveals to Billy that he has been yelling at him so much because they come from a family of constables, and even as they speak, a blood enemy of the family is coming to seek revenge. It doesn't matter if he kills the father or Billy, so long as he kills someone. Billy sees this as little more than his father using his own son as protection against a bad guy, and the father pretty much responds with, "Yeah, so what? And you're a no-good little bastard, too." Then I think they fight, the dad has a heart attack, and Billy goes out gambling with Hamster. Meanwhile, Muttonchops is busy haunting the priest, and in his spare time, feeling up sexy ladies. Hey, if you were invisible, don't pretend like you wouldn't at least be tempted to cop a cheap feel off the local harlot. The priest eventually agrees, as the nightmarish haunting takes the form of things like the ghost pulling the priest's seat out from under him, constantly moving his wine out of reach, and other dastardly spooktacular shenanigans. Down at the local morgue, they find the freshly dead body of a powerful kungfu fighter who is obviously evil on account of his long hair and black cape. When the gang leader tries to inhabit the corpse of the super-baddie, they discover that the guy is, in fact, not quite dead. I guess he just likes sleeping in a coffin down at the local morgue. Awakened from his slumber, the villain makes a beeline toward Billy's home to extract a little revenge. The two fight for hours, and Hamster whiles away the time by constantly dumping buckets of water on Billy for no real reason other than it makes Billy's muscle glisten a bit more. It's all the reason you need, I guess. I know if I had muscles in place of the puny sticks occupying the position of arms on my body, I'd always have a guy named Hamster around to dump water on me. I'd also probably do that thing where when someone asks you the time, you check your watch and flex your bicep at the same time. Then I'd go down to the beach and kick sand in my former self's face. Chong is eventually victorious, killing the bad guy and collecting a sizable reward, which his father promptly takes for himself. Why does Billy even live with this guy? You know, filial piety only needs to goes so far. The wizard-priest and Muttonchops figure they can try to use the bad guy's body again for another resurrection attempt. Since they only get three tries before Muttonchops is condemned to roam the earth as an incorporeal spirit, 'Chops inspires confidence in the wizard by using the old encouragement tactic of slapping the wizard in the head and yelling, "You better get it right this time, you stupid bastard!" The wizard, who commands the all the vast powers of darkness, takes this abuse for some reason. I guess he and Billy are kindred spirits in a way, despite being on opposite sides of the law. But since the film isn't really interested in this as a plot device as much as it is interested in scenes of guys engaged in Moe-Larry type relationships, let's just drop the whole thing. They mess up again, discovering this time that the bad guy is simply too evil to be killed by normal means such as breaking his neck. The failed possession attempt also transforms the baddie into a super-invincible mega-bad zombie. He's not one of those slow Night of the Living Dead zombies either. He hauls ass and has invincible kungfu. We Westerners think that when the zombies come (and they will come), they will be slow and rotten and easy to kill simply by shooting them in the head or hitting them with a pipe. We're not ready for the eventuality that they might all be a bunch of buff, invincible masters of the martial arts. The zombie guy immediately sets out to kill Billy Chong. And meanwhile, the bumbling gang guy half-possesses Billy's dad, resulting in some weird behavior as the two fight for control of the body. Eventually, Chong has to face off against his possessed dad and the super invincible zombie guy. Luckily, a monk shows up out of nowhere to lend him some advice and holy relics just before the zombie's hands burst into fists of flame! Things just get wilder from there on out. On the surface of things, this is a pretty straightforward movie. When you dig a level deeper, however, what you discover is that there isn't a deeper level, and you should have stayed up on the surface level instead of ruining the floor by digging around. But not every movie has to be a deep reflection on the dark heart of man. Sometimes, a movie can just be about a loudmouth braggart kicking a zombie's ass, and that's the road Kungfu Zombie chooses for itself. The writing has just enough effort put into it to propel it from one supernatural fight scene to the next, and that's all it really needs. The fight scenes come fast and furious, and though some undercranking is obvious in spots, it doesn't detract from the overall quality of the kungfu. Billy Chong is a superb looking fighter, carrying himself with a lethal combination of grace, speed, and power. It's a wonder he didn't become a bigger star than he did, but from what I hear, he's quite the attraction these days down on Malaysian television. You can't complain about steady work, I guess. I'd certainly trade in my job to be a big star on Malaysian television. The final fight between Chong and his supernatural-powered nemesis is one of the top old-school fights out there, and while it doesn't come close to the pure frenetic genius of the Sammo Hung/Yuen Biao fight scenes contained in films like Prodigal Son, Magnificent Butcher, or Sammo's own supernatural kungfu farce Encounter of the Spooky Kind, it's still great stuff. The fights before that are all short but sweet as well, and while I would have preferred a few more minutes of kungfu in place of more malicious comedy, there's really no good reason to complain about a film with this much action in it. The comedy is hit or miss, and while it misses more than it hits, it doesn't miss in a way that would turn you off to the film. I'm guessing the relationship between Billy and his dad is played mostly for laughs, but after a while, it's not funny so much as it is like one of those times when you were a little kid over at a friend's house while the friends was getting yelled at by his parents. You just sort of sit there sheepishly and awkward, trying to pretend you don't notice your friend is getting spanked right in front of you. Looking back, at least you can be thankful that your friend and their parents were not kungfu aces who settled all their arguments by yelling "Bastard!" and proceeding to kungfu the crap out of one another for the next five minutes. On the plus side of the comedy is the guy who plays the wizard. He's superb as the not-entirely-evil priest who can't seem to catch a break, especially when he has to walk around town wearing a giant leaf hat in order to avoid the angry ghost whose resurrection he botched three times. A combination of wonderful facial expressions and perfect timing make him the standout performer in the film even up against Chong's impressive kungfu skill. The rest of the cast performs dutifully but without anything really spectacular to make them memorable. Muttonchops is just there to bellow and make the "angry surprised" face a lot. His accomplices fulfill the standard old school kungfu roles of "goofy fat guy" and "goofy skinny guy." If you are wondering about the inclusion of the giant fake wart with the single piece of super-thick hair coming out of it, don't worry. Hong Kong filmgoers seem to find that sight gag endlessly hilarious, and this movie isn't about to let them down. The guy who plays the actual kungfu zombie is pretty damn good in his role as well. Though the white trousers and cape with no shirt look probably doesn't work for everyone (I've tried it several times), he manages to pull it off. I guess it helps that he is one of the living dead, well nigh indestructible, and can make his feet and fists burst into flames of fury. That's not the sort of guy you generally go up to and sneer, "Nice outfit, buddy." Kungfu Zombie isn't an expensive film, and it does its best to cover the lack of funds by not aiming too high in the special effects department. Some eerie colored lighting, a few good and gross corpses, and a fog machine are all it needs to successfully create an inexpensive but interesting otherworldly feel. Since the movie is primarily about kungfu and secondarily about laughs, getting a good scare out of people isn't one of the top priorities. Still, the director manages some eerie shots, even if their eeriness is undercut by all the wacky goings-on. The movie is certainly put together a lot better than many of its contemporaries operating on a similar budget. Kungfu Zombie is probably a better film for seasoned old school vets or people just looking for a severely twisted and delightful little mindwarp of a film. In the greater scheme of things, Encounter of the Spooky Kind is a better movie all the way around, and if you are looking for an introduction into the wild world of supernatural kungfu hijinks, you'll be better served by either Spooky Kind or Mr. Vampire, both of which are more successful in their comedy and chills, have better performances from actors and fighters, and simply had more money and talent behind them. Not that it's an insult to say something isn't as good as one of those two films. Spooky Kind was directed by and starred Sammo Hung, and Mr. Vampire had the benefit of Hung as a producer. In the late 1970s, early 1980s, no one -- and I mean no one -- was better than Sammo Hung. He completely revolutionized the kungfu film, delivering a level of energy and action that had never been seen and has never been matched since then. So it's not so bad for Kungfu Zombie to be seen as sort of the plucky little brother of Sammo's better supernatural kungfu comedies. This movie was one of the defining elements of my journey toward being a kungfu film nutcase. It's crude and cheap, but it also has great energy behind it, not to mention some spectacular kungfu and a few creepy seconds scattered throughout the madcap zaniness. Although not the best example of the genre, Kungfu Zombie is a film I have a lot of fond memories of and still watch from time to time. Despite the loud performances and unlikable characters, the movie has charm and charisma. Watching it is like hanging out with old friends, even if you and your friends weren't the type to be resurrecting kungfu powered zombies to do your bidding. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Horror: Ghosts, Horror: Zombies, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 1982 posted by Keith at 4:24 PM | 1 Comments Thursday, November 22, 2001Demons 2
1986, Italy. Starring David Edwin Knight, Nancy Brilli, Coralina Cataldi Tassoni, Bobby Rhodes, Asia Argento, Virginia Bryant, Anita Bartolucci, Antonio Cantafora, Luisa Passega, Davide Marotta, Marco Vivio, Michele Mirabella, Lorenzo Gioielli, Lino Salemme, Maria Chiara Sasso. Directed by Lamberto Bava. Written by Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava. Available on DVD (Amazon).
Mmm, I've been looking forward to reviewing this one for quite some time. You know, some days I have to try and find serious, thoughtful comments to make about films. Other days, I get to reviews films like Zombie 3 and this little gem from the collective mind of Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento. Lamberto, of course, is the son of Italian horror legend Mario Bava, who gave the world some of the most acclaimed horror films of his day. And few horror fans need an introduction to Dario Argento, the man who revolutionized horror and suspense films, the man who directed such genre classics as Suspiria, Deep Red, and Terror at the Opera. Put these two together and you could only create something amazing, right? well, maybe. Unfortunately, Lamberto Bava is to Mario what Lon Chaney Jr. was to Lon Chaney Sr. The end result of the Bava - Argento collaboration is just like what happened when Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground teamed up with Kiss. You expect incredible things. You get The Elder. And yet, just like The Elder, no matter how bad the art gets, it remains strangely compelling and engrossing. There are days when I simply cannot stop listening to The Elder. And there are days when I absolutely cannot resist popping in either Demons or Demons II and indulging in some of the worst horror film making Italy has to offer. The original Demons offered up some terrible acting, a ridiculous plot, and plenty of nice special effects and gore. It was a mess that managed to entertain despite it's own incompetence. Having created such a delightful piece of garbage the first time out, Dario and Lamberto decided "What the hell?" and went at it again with this quickie sequel that lacks all the coherence and logic of the original. Yes indeed. Reviewing films like Demons 2 is what this site is all about, and it is with no small amount of glee that I sink my teeth into the strange and wonderful carcass before me. So let's begin, shall we? The action takes place, for the most part, in a super state of the art high rise apartment complex. I've never understood why, if you were rich enough to live in one of these fire hazards, you wouldn't use the money to buy yourself a nice house instead. But whatever. As if cramped quarters, artificial settings, and being a death trap in case of fire aren't enough to deter fools, then they should at least note that these places seem to be a favorite stomping ground of vengeful poltergeists and other things that go bump in the night. I try to warn them, but they never listen. But then, I guess the world is probably better off with a few less obnoxious rich yuppies. So move right on in, folks! These places are great! Anyway, since it is set in a building full of obnoxious rich yuppies, it's no big surprise that the main cast is a cast of obnoxious yuppies. Meat for the beast, as they say. You have the annoying rich girl and her equally annoying friends all together for a long night of whining and partying. You have "the good couple," who I suppose we're supposed to root for. Those are your main folks, but Bava peppers the show with assorted other characters, one of which is a young Asia Argento. Another is a gym full of shiny body builders and aerobics instructors. And there's this whole weird bit with some loud and wild punk rock types -- are they the same carload from the first film? Who can tell? Italian movie punks all look like Nicholas Cage from Valley Girl. I just don't think people should ever cast professional dancers as street toughs, but that's what they seem to do in Italy. The punks are my favorite part because a huge deal is made about them coming to the party. And then from time to time the movie cuts to scenes of them "on the way." Then they get there and wreck, and are okay, but that's that. shouldn't they do something? Like be a part of the movie? I don't know. You will learn not to ask questions about this film very quickly. The movie begins with allusions to part one and that time when demons erupted unto the plane of man. In what appears to be the NBC Sunday Night Mystery Movie, the film recounts via dramatic re-enactment how the area where the demons showed up was cordoned off and turned into a "forbidden zone." Only it's not so forbidden. The walls enclosing the no man's land are about eight feet high and lined with convenient stairs and ladders. There are no guards or anything. The wall to contain the ultimate evil of all time seems about as effective as your average chain link fence. It actually reminds me of the fence around this prison that was not too far from my home when I was growing up. It was the Luthor Lucket Correctional facility in LaGrange, Kentucky. My friend and I were wandering around in the woods, doing our usual bit of local exploration. We came upon an old fence that had collapsed in many places, and pretty much just rusted away. It took little more than a step over it to get by and continue our trekking. We came upon a field and could see, off in the distance a ways, a line of prisoners and guards. We realized then that the fence we'd stepped over was the perimeter of the prison. Anyway, some nosy types decide to go on a photo shoot in the forbidden zone. What is it with Italian photographers and places of eternal evil? Do you realize how many Italian horror films involve photographers and models trapped inside places of ancient evil? Don't these people have studios or something? Anyway, they wander around the wasteland a spell before finding a demon carcass. In a confusing twist, the entire series of events are on television and being watched by the rich girl having the party back in the fancy apartment complex. In fact, it seems like every single person in the building is watching this piece of shit movie. It would be like if I walked out into the hallway of my apartment building and everyone was sitting around watching DEMONS II. Or how I used to walk out of my room in the honors dorm and every single person would be watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. The movie, or documentary, or whatever it is, is narrated by the same guy that narrates all those old 1970s Bigfoot documentaries where they reinact coming down off the mountain to shake a trailer home and howl. A drop of blood resurrects the demon who makes short work of the trespassing photographers, then promptly turns around and leaps out of the television to possess the rich girl. Mmm-hmmm. We have to assume that the thing on television was a fictional movie, so this fictional representation of the real demons from the last film suddenly gets actual demon powers and leaps out of the television. But just the one television. The girl attacks all her party goers. So we have demons. The building, as must always be the case, becomes sealed up tight. Even the glass in the windows can't be broken. Demons are running wild and the only people who can fight them off are some yuppie with a pregnant wife and shitty taste in interior decoration, and a room full of greased up body builders. The movie is pretty much just people running up and down the halls or hanging out in the parking garage. In a strange sequence that is indicative of the whole film, little Asia Argento is hiding in a car while her dad (in the movie, not Dario) and the body builders try to kick some demon ass. The fight is so so, with the demons eventually winning. They sort of look at Asia in the car, and then they all go running away, giggling evilly. Huh? I kept rewinding it to see if I missed something. Then I realized if you worry about every time this film makes you go, "Wait a minute. What the hell just happened?" you'd be rewinding every scene. This film makes Lucio Fulci films seem like well thought-out studies in film logic. Nothing makes any sense at all. You can't interpret it. You can only enjoy it. Which I did. Make no mistake about it. This film sucks. I mean, it really sucks. even in the uneven world of Italian horror cinema, where fans are generally very forgiving, this film sucks. But it sucks in much the same way After Death and Zombie 3 suck. They're damn bad in such a wonderful way that you can't help buy enjoy every second of their staggering ineptitude. I mean, there's bad films, there's really bad films, and then there's Demons 2. To the film's credit, it does pack in the goo,slime, and gore you expect from a film of this calibre. Although there's nothing really different than what we saw in the first film, it's still competent stuff. And the pacing is good, although you're pacing yourself on a race straight toward a solid brick wall. This movie may do a lot of things, but it never bored me. It did confuse me, but so does physics and that's the most fundamental thing in the universe. What was with that carload of punks who seemed like they would be involved in the movie somehow? What about the fact that basically the film ends with two people getting out but all the demons still running wild? What the hell was going on with Asia Argento? What the hell was up with the demon coming out of a movie? And then it hit me. Amid all these testaments to the film's pathetic state, I realized what genius it was. You see, the movie totally blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. Yes, that's it. It is a film within a film, a film where in fact the demons may very well come out of your own television while you are watching them come out the television on the television. The complexity with which the overall structure is crafted is staggering. This is one deep, meaningful, and important film when you think about it. Just kidding. This movie is terrible. I loved it. Labels: Horror: Zombies, Year: 1986 posted by Keith at 6:17 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, March 14, 2001Twisted Issues
1988, United States. Directed by Charles Pinion.
Punk rockers like to make things, or at least they used to. Up until the mainstream consumption of the punk rock aesthetic, there was a little something called the DIY ethic which most punks held as something very important, an integral part of what it was to be a punk rocker. Do it yourself. Don't make music to become famous. Make music because you love to make music, and if you want to make a record for people to hear, why not do it all yourself? Or put together your own zine since none of the mainstream magazines have any interest in covering what you'd want to read about. Or how about making your own movie. Ahh, see, right there it gets a bit tricky. There are plenty of punk rock zines and punk rock bands, but there's only a handful of punk rock filmmakers. Oh sure, there have been movies made about punks, but those movies weren't made by punks, and the results were often something a little like SLC Punk, in which a very unoriginal, typical teen romantic comedy was dressed up in punk rock clothes in order to cash in on a growing fad. There were no punks in that movie. There were just actors dressed up as punks. It's about as authentic as when my friend Danielle and I dressed up as Mrs. Paul and the Gordon's Fisherman for Halloween one year back in high school. We may have looked like sea farin' peddlers of fish sticks, but you know what? It was all a sham. I have no idea how to make, package, and then successfully market a brand of delightfully scrumptious fish-based food products. There are some very practical reasons why there are a lot more DIY punk bands and writers than film makers. For one, it's a lot easier to make a zine or start a band than it is to make a film. Neither of those endeavors are particularly easy, but compared to making a movie, they're cheez whiz. Equipping yourself, getting film, developing film, editing, re-editing, converting to video, finding people to be in your movie, etc etc. etc. -- these are all labor and money intensive, far more so than putting out a record or scamming copies from Kinko's. The costs don't go away, either. When you buy your guitar, you have your guitar. It can last you for years. If you are doing a film project, however, you have a constant cost. You have to develop. You have to reshoot for things that come out fucked up. You have to develop again. And you have to get people, more people than you need for a band. You can only cast the same ten friends in so many roles before folks start to notice. For this reason, a lot of punk rock filmmakers stick to documentary films, which is where a lot of talent has really shone through. Making a documentary is still a complicated thing, but at least people don't have to be cast and learn their lines. Those who do venture into feature film making often do so via the cheapest possible method. After all, we're not talking "indy film" here with a budget of $500,000 and actors from the SAG. We're talkin' low to no budget, as in under a couple thousand dollars, possibly under a couple hundred dollars. We're talking equipment that can be purchased on the cheap or acquired for free. In short, we're talking about super 8 film or VHS video. Since super 8 is film, it can be difficult to work with. You have to learn what you are doing if you ever want to shoot anything beyond short films of your buddies showing their asses to cops or something. And up until recently, as in up until the widespread growth of the internet, super 8 film has been difficult for a lot of people outside of major cities to acquire and have developed. Thus, for much of the 1980s and early 1990s, VHS was the default medium of choice for people who were looking to make movies on budgets they'd amassed by eating only from Taco Bell's much missed 39-cent Fiesta menu. People will leap to the defense of just about any recording format. Super 8 of course has a fervent and growing following, and has even seen itself showing up in big budget features. 16mm and 35mm are industry standards of course. Digital video has a legion of supporters these days, and even Hi-8, SVHS, and 8mm video have tons of advocates. You'd be hard pressed, however, to find anyone that would leap to the defense of VHS as a medium for doing work. Of all the video formats available, NTSC VHS is the absolute bottom of the barrel. Naturally, it's the standard in America. In production classes you're taught that NTSC actually stands for "Never Twice the Same Color," because you have about one generation of copying you can do before your print gets severely distorted. Other than it's low cost, there is absolutely nothing good about VHS and the NTSC standard. VHS quality is low, and up until the advent of digital non-linear editing systems, working with VHS in post-production was an absolute nightmare. These days, thanks to things like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro, it's just a major disappointment instead of a nightmare. But still, for years it was all the no-budget filmmaker had. What could you do other than suck it up and chase your dreams, baby? Even if a lot of these people had been talented, working with VHS back in the analog days was more than enough to foil all but the very best. Because of the difficulties in editing, most shot-on-video feature films ended up overlong and full of long dull moments that should have been cut out. Of course, there are also those times when the whole movie is one long dull moment, but what can you do about those besides not watch them? And when people do venture into the realm of making feature films on video, more times than not it's a horror film. Why horror? Simple enough. for one, a lot of the people come from b-movie fan backgrounds, and that means they probably have at least some love of horror films. Horror film fans above all others seem the most prone to the desire to make their own movies, which I have always thought was one of the coolest aspects of the scene. Very few horror film fans sit back and simply enjoy the genre without feeling the desire to take an active part in it some way. Finally, horror films are easy to make -- relatively speaking. You don't need that many people. You don't need that much money. You generally don't need specific sets, and you can pull off decent effects for next to nothing if you know what you're doing. Having lived in Gainesville, Florida for the bulk of the 1990s, the shot-on-video splatterpunk oddity Twisted Issues has something of a special place in my heart -- the same place that any shot on video movie has in hearts. It's that place in your heart that thinks the movie is cool because, hey look! I know those people! Familiarity breeds tolerance when it comes to SOV films, and what seems not so bad to people who know people involved in the film may seem like a train wreck to those outside the circle. Twisted Issues did, however, get a fair amount of praise and positive reviews from those who were not involved with the makers of the film or Gainesville, Florida. I have to be honest and say that sort of baffles me. I guess judged by the standards of no-budget, shot-on-video feature-length films twisted Issues isn't all that bad. In fact, parts of it are quite good. But parts of it are also dreadfully slow, poorly lit, and ponderous. The film opens with flashes of interesting, if not totally successful surrealistic vision. All punk films have to have scenes of carnage and destruction from various news reports, preferably filmed directly off the TV screen for that cool fuzzed out distorted look, and of course, we get that here, intercut with scenes of some kids skateboarding over to their friend's house. The intro shows us the movie's big problem: it doesn't know when to be a film and when to be a music video. What should have been maybe a twenty-second segment goes on for several minutes so the song can finish. I know music is important in punk, and local music in Gainesville has always been fiercely creative and beloved by the locals, but I want to listen to music, not watch it. It might have been different if the skating was any good, but we're not talking Lance Mountain here. They pull off feats like going down the sidewalk, and turning 'round the corner. Basically, this is skating I could do, and if I can do it, then it's not very interesting. The pay-off for this lengthy and not terribly interesting intro is that they get to their friend's house, and he doesn't open the door. So they skate away. The end. I had to sit through five minutes of people rolling casually down the street just for that? I mean, sure nowadays it's cool to sit there and take in the scenery of Gainesville, but after the first minute the novelty of seeing "that one house" or "that 7-11 that changed its name to The Gate" wears off, and you are left with a seemingly endless scene of people skating to their friend's house, only to find out he's not there. Actually he is there, but he's still asleep since everyone in Gainesville wakes up between noon and six in the evening. Their friend is Charles, a creepy, psycho looking guy who bears a completely disturbing resemblance to Bruce McCulloch from The Kids in the Hall. It's uncanny, I tell ya! Both of them give me nightmares. Anyway, Charles is a strange one. He spends most of his day watching a weird dancing marionette on his television, or even weirder, he watches the actual events of the movie in which he has a part. It's a twisted sort of surreal thing, and shows some sparks of true warped imagination behind what could otherwise be considered just another goofy shot on video horror film. Charles has a cute girlfriend, and apparently, they have a tendency to inflict fatal wounds on one another, only they don't die. They just sort of bleed and suffer for a spell, then heal. I don't know. It's never really explained, but I guess it doesn't have to be. You know, that's the art portion. Anyway, among the things Charles watches are a couple of karate students sitting on the front porch. Maybe this is public access cable. One of the karate students is a young skate punk named Paul. He is of the straight edge persuasion, which means no drinking, smoking, or drugs. Yeah, there was that no casual sex thing also, but everyone seems to be pretending that's been forgotten. What can you do? People like booty. The karate students are discussing the essence of the peaceful warrior. Paul is committed to avoiding violence, though when his classmate hits him with with the scenario "What if a drunk pours beer on you and kicks your skateboard away?" Paul finds himself confused. Could he remain at peace when such a heinous crime had been committed? I guess we know that's going to happen at some point. One of the film's creepier segments is local hippie record store clerk Bill Perry as the "Say Yes" guy broadcast in close-up over a television. It's not particularly creepy unless you know Bill, and if you do, just about everyone has a disturbing story involving him. Ask someone about his package revealing microshorts. We're talking tighter and shorter than those worn even by young Japanese schoolboys in 1970s Godzilla movies. Still, you had to go buy records from the guy because he had the good sense to hire the employees with the best musical taste. It was probably the only hippie record store with a huge section devoted to AntiSeen. Paul later meets up with his cute skater girl friend, and they skate to a party. Yep, lots of skating, none of it interesting. Sort of like watching long scenes of someone casually riding a bike to the store. I know skateboards, like bikes, are fun to ride and a good, cheap mode of transportation, but that doesn't mean you want to watch lengthy scenes of people on them. If they are flipping all around and doing cool things, that's fine. But if you're just going down the street, then it's not fiery cinema. At least this time something happens. The carload of drunken rednecks -- the bane of every punk's existence -- happens by to yell insults. Well, I guess they are not really rednecks. They're ... something. People in bad shaggy wigs. Maybe people from the 1970s. I couldn't really tell. All that's important is that they are drunk and mean. Paul and his gal pal arrive at the party, where the film promptly turns into another music video. For several minutes we have to sit through a song and shot after shot of people standing there watching the band. It's funny for a while if you are from Gainesville because you can yell, "There's Bill! There's Var!" but once again, the novelty wears off really quickly. The song is by Gainesville's legendary Mutley Chix. Okay, maybe they weren't legendary, but they were one of the better bands from what I call the sludge phase of Gainesville music -- which quite frankly I didn't really care for. Sort of proto-grunge stuff, but of course, no one from Gainesville would get any credit because it all happened in Seattle, right? I dug the Mutley Chix as much as the next Gainesville punk, but that doesn't mean I want to sit and watch a very slow, droning song while the camera wanders around the crowd of bored looking bystanders (what kind of crowd doesn't have at least one guy who discovers he is on camera and promptly waggles his tongue and does the devil horns hand sign?), often going in and out of focus. It's the auto-focus feature, kids. It's not your friend. It has a mind all it's own, and like a crummy boyfriend or girlfriend, it'll fuck you over and ruin all your hard work. After the show, Paul hangs out on the front porch, a Gainesville past time, while his buddies smoke pot and do the obligatory "You want some? Oh, ha ha ha!" joke every straight edge kid must endure every single time their friends smoke pot, even if they smoked pot earlier in the same day and did the joke then, too. There's quite a bit of pot smoking in this movie, which is, of course, totally unrealistic. I lived in Gainesville for seven years, and I can hardly remember seeing anyone do illicit drugs. From what I recall, everyone was too busy going to church and doing volunteer work. I think that was it. No, wait. Oh hell, what can you do in a town where half the police force are former members of the University of Florida Surf Club? They are quick to confiscate drugs, not so quick to write them up, but pretty quick to check out the quality. I used to watch the mailman for my neighborhood lie in the backyard with his buddy, reclining on a full bag of mail while they smoked pot and laughed. Sometimes, I wouldn't get any mail for a week. I'll tell you right now one thing this movie does well: it makes me miss Gainesville. I live in the big city now, wearing a tuxedo everywhere and riding around in limos to posh $8,000 a plate dinners with Silicon Alley venture capitalists and luminaries. Sometimes, I feel like I've forgotten my roots. Watching Twisted Issues is sort of like watching a home video. It's not very interesting in spots, and if you weren't there it may very well be insufferable, but it does dredge up the memories. Man alive, do I miss lazy days sitting on the front porch, skating down to The Gate to buy some Moose Juice from Tom Walls, the crazy Libertarian guy who would give you a discount if you listened to him rant about guns and property rights for a few minutes. Huge, drooping trees, poorly maintained roads of cracked asphalt, weeds, and sand. Lush foliage everywhere. And a sense of community. That, more than anything else, is what I miss. And that sense of community is what allows a bunch of broke punk rockers to make their own movie just for the hell of it. Just because they felt like it. Twisted Issues is glorious in that it's an example of people simply making a movie because they thought it would be fun. They put a lot of thought into it, and despite the short-comings, most of which are in the editing and acting, it's a great success. Twisted Issues is the sort of movie everyone with the inkling to do so should be making. So, back to the movie. There's this other guy walking around looking a lot like Joeaquin Phoenix, which would have been suspicious since the Phoenix clan all lived around Gainesville. Unfortunately, Joaquin was just a young lad at the time, so this isn't him, and so my chances to get Twisted Issues on Before They Were Rock Stars goes out the window. I think he's going to get some beer for Charles, but he sure is going the long route. It's just a geography thing. In Gainesville, you didn't do much shopping down by the power plant, but you did shoot your movie there if you wanted some cool scenes of industrial creepiness. Lord knows I spent half my video production class stalking around the power plant. You could get right up close to it, and one of the buildings gave off this eerie green glow. And when I get back down to Gainesville to film some stuff for an idea I have for a film, one of the first places I'm heading is the GRU plant. So I can't fault them for using it, I suppose. Meanwhile, in one of the film's better scenes, Charles' girlfriend professes her hatred of sprouts, causing Charles to fly into a murderous rage with the hedge clippers he was using to cut the sprouts. Having the top of her head sheared off annoys the girl to no end, so she bandages herself up and goes to bed. While Paul is skating home for a quick shower, he is cornered by the same gang of drunks. They fuck with him, even going so far as to pour beer on him and kick his skateboard. Paul busts out with an elbow to the groin and some punk-fu, but his righteous fury is cut short when he gets run over. Granted, he might not have been run over if he didn't stand perfectly still for ten seconds waiting for the car to get to him. Just a case of bad editing. The sluggish cuts make it seem like a lot more time is passing than should, and you get too many seconds of Paul standing there, completely motionless, waiting for the action. But like I said, given the limitations of the medium, I'll let it slide. The drunks dump Paul's body and call it a night. The corpse is soon picked up by a druggie mad scientist and his crazy necrophiliac assistant. In my review of Goblin I discussed briefly the problem a lot of no-budget DIY films run into: the age problem. Most of these films are made with a cast and crew of friends. It's rare that you go outside the circle to look for people. So what happens when you need a cop or a mad scientist? You end up with a twenty year old guy in sunglasses and a wig pretending to be an adult. I've seen twenty year old cops, doctors, Presidents of third world nations, and everything else. It's one of those things you just have to role with. Weirdly enough, Hollywood and it's sickly cult of youth has embraced this, and now we're seeing movies with actors in their early-to-mid twenties cast as famous nuclear physicists and ex FBI agents. The mad doctor and his sidekick toy with the idea of simply fooling around a tad with the corpse, but then settle on the much more rational idea of bringing it back to life. After a montage of close-up of pulsating goo and meat products, Paul is resurrected as a vengeance seeking zombie. Since the doc had to rip skin off Paul's face to repair his leg, Paul dons a fencing mask to hide his hideous disfiguration, then promptly kills the doctor, who for some reason kept a very large, mint condition wooden stake just sitting on top of his crude equipment. This is another one of those things that may seem weird to outsiders, but people who live in Gainesville will just nod and say, "Yeah, I knew a guy with a fencing mask who was really into collecting stakes. Chickenwire, too." What Paul does next is the movie's true stroke of genius. Forget all the arty editing and montages of social decay. Paul takes drill and bolts his skateboard to his foot! He'll never have to worry about anyone kicking it away again! He then skates out to extract gory revenge on those who killed him. The murders are bloody, though not exactly technically challenging. He crushes one guy's face, complete with the ol' Lucio Fulci eyeball flop-out effect, which could have been done better but isn't too bad. This guy happened to have a sword in the front seat of his car, which is another thing that might strike you as weird if you aren't from Gainesville. If you are, then again you'll just nod and go, "Yeah, I knew a guy that used to walk around armed with a mace while wearing a rooster outfit." Zombie Paul makes use of the sword to do away with the remaining members of the drunkard gang. It's fun enough stuff, finally making up for the dull first half an hour or so. But just when you start to think the movie is going to lay of the ultra-weirdness, Pinion throws you a curve ball and the film goes spinning into a completely bizarre subplot, which is where the real genius begins. Charles has this sort of arch nemesis guy named Hawk, who collects medieval gear among other things. This, again, was not unusual as you could throw a rock in Gainesville and hit half a dozen SCA and Renaissance Faire people. Hawk is the man hired to bring down the zombie Paul, along with these other guys who don't do much of anything. For reasons I have yet to fully comprehend, Charles and Hawk engage in a completely bizarre battle royale of killing each other multiple times. Hawk shows up looking like the Zodiac Killer, complete with clunky metal bucket on head, and the two proceed to gun each other down, stab one another, rip apart limbs, and watch the entire battle being played on television as it happens. It gets pretty surreal, and goes completely off the deep end when Charles ends the fight -- and the movie -- by turning off the television, thus presumably killing everyone involved. So there you have it. It's a weird one all right, and that alone makes it more interesting than most shot on video feature films. It introduces a sense of surreal absurdism into the mix, making the movie something more original and creative than just your standard shot-on-video zombie movie, of which there must roughly half a billion (which is still only half the number of vampire films that seem to get made). Sometimes it doesn't make sense, but that doesn't really matter. What counts is that there were some real smarts behind some of the more deranged moments of the film, and that's refreshing given how many obnoxiously bone-headed no-budget videos are out there. For once, we get a shot on video horror film that tries to do something different, and it actually succeeds far more than it fails. Chalk it up to small town punk influences. They'll fuck you up good, but they also provide you with a lovely, warped perspective on things. This website is a grand example of just how damaging it can be. Twisted as it can end up, that small town punk ethic also drives you to strive for something unusual and creative in ways others might not. Your standard horror fan making a horror film is going to mimic what he's seen in the past. Throw a fucked up punk perspective into the mix, then let it all simmer in the sweltering Florida heat for a spell, and the outcome is sure to confuse and blow minds. Twisted Issues takes chances, and when it does is when the movie becomes a real hoot to watch. I imagine it's those parts that attracted so many outsiders to it and allowed it to succeed beyond a small circle of locals. It also keeps a sick sense of humor, which is really the best sense of humor to have. The whole murderous relationship between Charles, his gal, and their friends is ridiculously funny. Watching her nonchalantly wave hello to someone as blood gushes from her mouth and head, or watching Charles twist his face into disturbing smirks as he ponders the point blank shot to the head he just took keep the proceedings amusing when other shot on video films might get bogged down in their own desire to shock. The use of the television set as sort of this omnipotent peeping tom prying into everyone's lives is also interesting simply because while it's spying on some people, it's enslaving others with the allure of voyeurism. Hmm, looks like Twisted Issues was criticizing the sick trend of "reality television" years before the trend even happened. I've always thought that there was no need to build 1984 type televisions that watch people so long as you could keep people watching the television. That Charles "kills" everyone by simply turning off the television is an especially effective punctuation mark given how slavishly we follow every sleazy moment of the lives of neurotic strangers. Teleport City enjoys a lot of weird shit. Reality-based television shows are not among them. Of course the film has it's flaws, most of which we've already touched on. The acting is often bad. The musical interludes go on far too long with far too little happening in them. Both lighting and focus are an issue, although sometimes the use of lighting is quite effective and unique. Same goes for camera work, which ranges from average to inspired when it manages to stay in focus. Some judicious editing of dead weight near the beginning would have really helped this movie out. As it is, it's probably pretty damn amusing to people from Gainesville, and probably mildly entertaining to fans of shot on video horror films and splatterpunk movies. All in all, it's a flawed but generally enjoyably experiment with momentary flashes of brilliance. Labels: Horror: Microbudget, Horror: Zombies, Year: 1988 posted by Keith at 1:44 PM | 0 Comments |
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