May 21, 2008
Lessons from Zombiefest, Part the First
Gather 'round, members of the living. You are about to become educated on the finer points of the undead film genre.
A while back my brother and I watched every film begotten (and misbegotten) from Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead -- 16, plus one trailer.
That's right. We've done the hard work so you don't have to.
Zombie films almost always contrast human incompetence, ignorance, or incompatibility with the external threat of the revenant hordes. Which is to say, humans nearly always screw themselves worse than the zombies do. Zombies are not stalkers or serial killers. They frighten because they are single-minded and unstoppable -- unstoppable because of quantity rather than invulnerability. Like a virus. In fact, substitute viruses for the undead and you basically have the same movie.
Even so, fear of the undead usually stands for something else. It's always the fear of others, a group that shifts with mainstream society's notion of norms. So, for instance, it has been argued that Night of the Living Dead's zombies represent drug-addled hippies, out of their minds and focused on getting their fix. It was 1968, after all. That symbolism is debatable -- and it gets a lot more complex, though no less true, when the zombies become somewhat sympathetic in later films -- but it is clear that Romero at least always tries to depict the pitched battle of humans vs. undead as something more than just that.
A note for the true fan, there are spoilers below because, well, all zombies spoil eventually. Also, some of the clips are gory, duh.
We watched the films based on release date, but they are here grouped according to main series and remakes.
Lastly, please forgive the stylistic schizophrenia of the write-ups. That's what you get when you mix a collaborative spreadsheet and several personal kegs of beer over a weekend of sedentary film-viewing.
Romero Series:
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
The granddaddy, near perfect. Black-and-white. Zombies are not slow, mindless or lumbering. They are the living recently-dead, not rotting corpses. Some even use tools to kill. (Joey: "That may be the most un-zombielike thing I have ever seen.") No crawling out of the grave. Some confusion about whether they can be killed in any way that a human can be or if you have to shoot them in the head (which becomes the standard later on). Seems they cannot "infect" the living. Mention of a Venus satellite coming back to Earth and starting the "epidemic". Mr. Cooper is a dead ringer for Rob Corddry. Odd fixation on taxidermy. Little girl zombie confronting her parents as disturbing now as it surely must have been in 1968. Lead character is a black man, unusual for 1968. He never gets it from the zombies but is killed in the end (mistakenly?) by a group of rescuers that looks exactly like a lynch mob. Best quote: "They're coming to get you, Bahr-bah-rah."
One of the reasons that Night spawned so many remakes and derivatives is that it has lapsed into the public domain. As such the entire thing is online for your viewing pleasure.
Rating: ★★★★★
Hard to argue with a movie whose setting is the locus of the real undead in America: the suburban shopping mall. This continuation is conceptually brilliant, but executed not as well as the original. Possibly influenced by Network (released two years earlier), the film starts in a TV edit suite broadcasting news of the sprawling zombie epidemic. (Interesting flipside to the always-on TV in the first film, basically a character unto itself. At one point in Night someone justifies his actions by saying "Well, the television told us to.") Action shifts to a mall where a small band of survivors takes refuge from the madding crowd, a consumerist utopia vs. unstructured lust (the urban street, natch). The agent of zombification is now officially viral. The voice of reason, again, is a black man. Firsts: Tom Savini (make-up effects auteur) cameos as a biker; disembowelment; helicopter scalping; obese zombie (rare!). Also, entire biker gang is drinking High Life, which in itself merits applause.
Here's Savini fending off the shoppers, er, zombies and coming to his own end.
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Day of the Dead (1985)
An undead movie with a message. That sucks. Or rather, doesn't live up to the Romero standard, which disappoints all the more. (For true suckage, we must wait for a few remakes, coming in future post installaments.) So, the outbreak is basically worldwide, lots of shots of overrun cities. A group of scientists and military folk hole up in a vast underground bunker. The scientists are running experiments on captured, shackled zombies because, you see, even zombies have feelings. Bud, the only zombie in any Romero flick that speaks a line, is the central figure. Behind him is this weird three cross motif on the wall. What is he, the messiah? The whole thing is paced through rubber cement, e.g. the first kill (of a zombie, no less) is 58 minutes into the film. The brainy scientists vs. brawny military disagreements tire after, oh, the first one. In the end, it's too much preach, not enough gore. One of the sensitive humans says "How can we set an example for them if we act like barbarians ourselves?" Gag.
Here's an unchained Bub actually shooting (and saluting) the head military guy, who is then gang-dismembered.
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Twenty years separate this from Day and thank god for that. This is a great movie. The world is completely overrun with the undead. Uninfected humans are barricaded in walled urban centers (hello Baghdad Green Zone!); there's something of a comfortable equilibrium. Frequent sorties for supplies are undertaken outside the city in a heavily-armored truck-tank that can mow down zombies and distract them with fireworks ("sky flowers"). The twist is that the undead are beginning to remember things, are getting smarter, acting braver. Oh, also they learn to swim. There's a bit of a zombies-are-people-too vibe which annoys and I'm no great fan of zombies seeking revenge (meaning they are compelled by more than just a hunger for flesh, boo), but overall this is one great flick. Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo are fantastic.
Here's the original, unreleased trailer that integrates some footage from the first three movies, plus the creepy quote from Night.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Stay tuned for the next riveting installment of the undead marathon recap. And for god's sake aim for the head.
Posted at 7:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
March 28, 2008
Zombiefest
The Weekend of the Living Dead has begun over here at Ascent Stage HQ.
My kid brother Joey and I are long-time horror film fans. There isn't a sub-genre that doesn't delight: vampire flicks, Japanese stuff, Italian stuff, classic slashers, supernatural, psychological, torture porn, you name it.
But there's a special place in every horror buff's heart for George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead from 1968. It is the granddaddy of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of zombie flicks that have eaten our brains ever since.
Recently I came across a crude "genealogy" of the films spawned by Night of the Living Dead. Got me thinking about doing an undead marathon. Did a little research, added a few films and ... here we are, a birthday present for the Leap Day Kid. 17 films, 25 hours, some beer ok a mini-keg of beer, rum, vodka, and scotch, and two little boys watching scary movies while the family is out of town.
It's wrong to call all these movies a franchise as you'd do with Friday the 13th or Halloween given the divergent creative visions of the two original writers George Romero and John Russo. They each took the series down very different paths. With remakes, unauthorized sequels, and special editions thrown in you get, well, you get a lot of the living dead.
Romero
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Day of the Dead (1985)
Land of the Dead (2005)
Diary of the Dead (2008)
Remakes
Night of the Living Dead (1990, Savini)
Dawn of the Dead (2004, Snyder)
Day of the Dead (2007, Miner)
Russo
Return of the Living Dead (1986)
Return of the Living Dead 2 (1988)
Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993)
Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (2005)
Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005)
Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition (1998)
Children of the Living Dead (2001)
Unofficial
Day of the Dead 2: Contagium (2005)
Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006)
Netflix provided most of the movies. I'd get three at a time, rip them to the Apple TV and back they'd go. But a few -- the Savini remake, 30th anniversary edition, and Children of the Living Dead -- proved very difficult to find. (Facets and Specialty Video & DVD in Chicago are great places to find the most bizarre of your cinema needs.) At least one had not even made it to video yet. (Thank you, torrenters.) The very last in the list chronologically, Diary of the Dead, just left theaters and is represented here as a trailer only. Boo.
So we've just begun. Joey recommended a strictly chronological progression through the lot, regardless of series coherence. He thinks it'll be interesting to map the evolution against social/historical climate and larger trends in horror. There are of course other ways to slice it, as this chart shows.
We'll no doubt be posting the findings of our research as the weekend proceeds.
If you're interested in trying this out yourself, might I recommend a survival manual?
Posted at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 7, 2007
Shudder
Yesterday I watched two extremely disturbing movies, Open Water 2: Adrift and Jesus Camp. One was infinitely more troubling than the other.
Open Water 2 is a sequel only in that it uses the same premise as the first which is simply and completely this: people stranded in the water at sea. Horrible, of course, but this one tries to up the ante by plopping the bobbing humans into the drink right next to a yacht that they cannot climb back onto. Whoops, forgot to put the ladder down! Panic ensues. People die. But wait there's more. Did I mention that there is a baby who's been left on board the boat? And a monitor on deck that faithfully transmits her hungry, neglected wailing to the stranded floaters (including her parents) boatside? Sound awful? It is. Most movies of this ilk ask for a generous suspension of disbelief, but Open Water 2's premise manages to be completely unbelievable yet still disturbing. I don't recommend this movie if you are a poor swimmer, afraid of the water or being alone, a parent, or if you've ever been a child.
But the stomach-churn caused by Adrift pales in comparison to Jesus Camp, last year's documentary about an evangelical summer camp for young Christians. I actually had to turn away a few times. Simply couldn't watch as little kids trembled and cried and threw themselves to the ground for God. The adult organizers of this camp are truly scary as they prompt the kids into ever more ridiculous shows of their faith. The implicit -- and a few times stated -- impulse is that if the Muslim world is creating armies of mindless devotees in madrasas then Christianity best do it too. What's so troubling is how mature these little kids act. Like they are reading from a script. There's absolutely no shred of free-thinking or even childishness. And that's the great shame: to be raised in an environment of such unquestioning dogma that the wonder and curiosity of childhood is not even an option.
I'd rather be the kid trapped on the boat, frankly.
Tags: evangelical, drowning
Posted at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
August 18, 2006
SOAMFP
What are you doing reading this blog and not standing in line to see this movie?
UPDATE: So I got to see this movie about snakes. Believe it or not, they are actually in the plane, not on it. So you can imagine the problems this causes! Good fun. The movie was sublime perfection, everything I could possibly have imagined. Best part: the story doesn't so much as imply a reason why a gangster would try to down a plane with a crate load of snakes. Plausbility is for the weak.
Posted at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
February 3, 2006
Airplane movies
For some reason on my flight to Turkey I was compelled to watch not one but two thrillers that take place on an airplane. I'm not sure my seatmates were altogether thrilled.
Flightplan is more-than-decent. Jodie Foster is excellent as a mom on the verge of hysteria having lost her child on a massive new airplane clearly modelled on the double-decker Airbus A380. I can't think of when I've seen Foster in a role coming apart like that. The suspense is remarkable given the oft-voiced point in the movie "how can you lose a child on an airplane?" And there's a twist that only Sept. 11 could give us.
No less surprising was Red Eye, Wes Craven's slow extrication from the horror genre he's so comfortable in. Yes, you can make a compelling movie two-thirds of which takes place between two people sitting in plane seats. It isn't as clean as Flightplan, but it has its moments and Cillian Murphy is perfect as a charming seatmate psychopath. Wes Craven does a good job substituting the latent fear of dying because a madman killed you in your dreams with the post-9/11 fear that you never quite know who you are sitting next to on an airplane.
Of course none of this matters. The countdown is on for Snakes On A Plane . You think losing a child on an airplane is tough? How about getting away from several hundred snakes? Kudos to the studio for merging title and plot synopsis in one pithy phrase -- a sure sign that this will be a winner.
Also a tip: if you are watching a movie on your laptop when dinner arrives and you have a backpack, just prop it up between your knees. Take the laptop off the tray table and rest it on the pack, stabilizing it with your knees. Watch, eat.
Posted at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 22, 2005
Three movies you do not need to see
I had close to 48 hours of flight time while in and in route to China so I watched a bunch of movies, my full Netflix backlog plus a bunch of DVD's I had ripped to my HD. I scored with House of Flying Daggers (though I didn't love it quite like I did Hero) and Napoleon Dynamite (the dramatic power of a vacant teenage stare!), but oh did I bomb on my other selections. I don't mind bad movies, movies who know they are awful and revel in it. But truly terrible movies try real hard and still suck.
You know you have a winner with a line like this: "For maximum damage we use bullets coated in a photon-accelerated luminescent resin. Cuts right through 'em." For you laypeople, that's a glow-in-the-dark bullet. Scary! Alone In The Dark was incomprehensible. It started with many paragraphs of written prologue, apparently because test audiences were completely befuddled. It didn't help. And the funny part is that this movie derives from a game (never a recipe for success) and intends to provide the backstory to it. So when the backstory needs an explicit backstory you know you're not telling the story right. Part Aliens, part Relic, part Night of the Living Dead, part Men in Black, with a silhouetted Top Gun love-making interlude and dashes of glamband hard-rockin’ video, Alone in the Dark isn't comically bad (that'd be watchable) -- it is irresponsibly bad.
Boogeyman wasn't much better. When the one and only plot point of the whole movie is for a grown man to confront the fears from his bedroom of youth there just isn't a lot of room for drama or even fear. The dark is scary. We get it.
Hide and Seek could have been decent. Dakota Fanning and Robert DeNiro do a pretty good job. But it is a plodding movie. The payoff twist at the end doesn't offset the pain of making it there. Though seeing Elisabeth Shue shoved out of a second-story window is almost worth it.
Posted at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 3, 2005
I, Cartographer
One of the most popular posts on this blog was my copyright-unfriendly screenshotting of images of future Chicago from the movie I, Robot. I really loved the way the film layered future urban development into the current cityscape. I annotated some of the images and developed a map of where I thought the film's main building, the U.S. Robotics headquarters, was located.
Well, turns out the special edition of the DVD just released contains a shot of a pre-production map (above) that the CGI team used when rendering Chicago 2035. I'll leave the comparisons to those who care but suffice to say that I think they got the placement of USR HQ and Spoonerville wrong.
God help me if I am turning into the type of person who submits continuity errors to IMDB all day.
Posted at 9:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 19, 2005
Younglings
Readers of this blog know how much my almost-4-year-old loves Star Wars. The kid is obsessed. He actually cried when I shut off the NPR review of the movie (because I didn't want to know) after they played a snippet of the film's fanfare. He might have been looking forward to Revenge of the Sith more than I was. Well, I saw it today with some co-workers, without my son. What an excellent coda to two atrocious movies. It almost made up for Jar Jar and the other awfulness. Somebody doctored the script because even Lucas's dialogue was decent. And the threads tied up for Episode IV were perfectly done. (Check out the young version of Darth's star destroyer general -- Tarkin? Nice touch.)
I was so skeptical of the pre-release warnings about not taking young children to see this movie. My first movie memory is my father taking me to see the original in 1977 so I desperately wanted to do the same with my son. But it ain't gonna happen. Most of the violence is the normal stylized swordplay, but not all of it. The emperor is scary; Anakin's final moments gory; and the clincher (stop reading: spoiler comin') is that the child Jedis are not spared.
I'll wait for the DVD for my boy. That is, after I go see it by myself again.
Posted at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 9, 2005
How to pass a 14 hour plane flight
Watch two stunning movies and spend the rest of the time thinking about them.
On this latest hop over to China -- Shanghai, baby! -- I took in two of the best movies I've seen this year. First was Hero, a Chinese martial arts movie set in pre-unified China. To call it a movie is maybe to overstate the fact that it was distributed on celluloid (or plastic disc). This is a "picture" in the truest sense. The scenes are so visually stunning I would just pause the action and stare. Like walking through a gallery of vivid stop-action animation, but it is all moving of course -- and fast. The choreography puts Crouching Tiger to shame and that's not easy to do.
Then after a too-brief nap in went Saw, a twisted recommendation from my brother. Not scary in the Ring/Grudge way, but ohmygod was it warped. Basic premise: two unlucky strangers wake up in a putrid bathroom, chained to the piping, and told they will die in 6 hours unless one guy kills the other. Depravity ensues. Since I was in the center seat I was constantly looking to my seatmates to make sure they were still sleeping. Some of the scenes in this movie, even seen peripherally, could probably be considered un-neighborly in a crowded airplane. (It was my DVD, not on the plane's rotation.) Precisely the opposite -- but no less enjoyable -- than the rich tableaux of Hero.
Posted at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
March 19, 2005
Always back up
My 3½-year-old son has become a Star Wars freak in the last few weeks. He watches all five movies (and recently the new trailer) every weekend -- though not in order and not even in the order of their chapters. This constantly-on video mash-up does a good job of highlighting patterns in Lucas's thinking.
- Both Death Stars were destroyed by single shots to essentially unprotected (though difficult to reach) Achille's heels.
- The shield protecting the unfinished Death Star on Endor was disabled by blowing up a single power station.
- Young Anakin destroys the trade federation ship -- accidentally! -- with a single shot to something.
- The entire battalion of battle droids on Naboo is disabled by the explosion of the trade ship.
Posted at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
February 20, 2005
Japan scares me
First it was Ringu and The Ring, now Hollywood has remade Ju-On: The Grudge keeping only the subtitle. Both these movies are terrifying remakes of terrifying Japanese films. There's no slashing, no crazed killer, no demonic possession, and few American horror genre clichés. Though neither movie is about technology per se, everyday items of technology are the primary means of effecting the kind of frights that I am coming to associate with Japanese horror filmmaking. For instance, both films use imaging technologies -- photos, video, surveillance cameras, etc. -- to convey that Something Is Very Wrong with the subjects of the shots.
Photograph from The Grudge
Photograph from The Ring
Phone calls figure prominently in both films too and, while this is not unique to Japanese horror, when you step back and look at how all technologies are used in the films it is clear that this level of remove -- seeing the bad thing on a TV screen, hearing the bad voice on the phone, noticing the bad person in the background of a photo -- are just contemporary versions of the old "spotting the killer standing behind you as you look in the mirror" trick. The fright comes from being one remove from the killer, having some kind of mediation between you and it, and knowing that that mediation offers a false sense of security. You still gonna die.
Maybe in the hyper-technologized culture of urban Japan this technology-as-mirror motif is the ultimate scare. Seems to be for me.
Posted at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 19, 2005
Barile
My great-grandparents came to America in 1903 from a small town called Barile in the region of Basilicata, Italy -- basically the "instep" of the boot. I've visited Basilicata twice -- more on that in an upcoming series of posts -- and, though it has made much progress in the last ten years, I often find myself calling it the West Virginia of Italy. Rustic and mostly arid, many of the towns in the region are built on top of or straight out from sassi, the caves carved into soft rock that have formed the homes of inhabitants since well before Roman settlement of the peninsula.
Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was shot mainly in Matera, Basilicata, the town with the most striking sassi in the region. Shortly after seeing The Passion I learned that Gibson was merely following the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in shooting a life of Christ in the region. In 1964, Pasolini released Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, a cinema vérité treatment of the gospel of Matthew using non-actors from Basilicata. I've read that Italian audiences actually demanded subtitles because the Albanian dialect of the "actors" was too difficult to understand. There's absolutely no dramatic flourish in the film (a path Gibson diverged from in minute one of his film). This is Christ-as-peasant-among-peasants, seen from ground level. Call it Reality Hagiography.
The sassi of Barile form the backdrop of the "slaughter of the innocents" scene. It is hard not to laugh at the centurions as they scamper up and down the hillside slashing at mothers and babies (some of whom fly out of embraces a little too easily). The film is likely to irritate modern viewing sensibilities for one reason or another, especially since the English dubbing is just awful. But I applaud the effort in the context of when and where it was made. If you're going to shoot Christ as a man of humble origin you'll not err in choosing Barile as a home town.
Compare the shot from the film above to a panorama of the same caves, now private wine cellars, taken last year.
Posted at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 25, 2005
Zombie comedy
Some people with whom I've shared my Netflix queue using the new Friends feature think I watch too much horror. True, some of the worst movies I've rented fall into this category. Maybe that's what makes Shaun of the Dead such a great movie. On the surface this British "romantic comedy with zombies" is just a parody of the undead-run-amok flick. But also in way it is a double-parody, implicitly mocking the now-established horror parody subgenre (think Scream and its offspring).
The movie is simply hilarious. A scene where Shaun argues with his slackass friend about which of his vinyl record collection they should fling at approaching zombies approaches perfection. And you just know the whole time that the final stand against the hordes will happen at the local pub.
Describing zombie behavior, one of the characters notes that they are "Vacant, with a hint of sadness. Like a drunk who's lost a bet." This parallel between the modern slacker and the classic revenant runs throughout the film and provides seemingly endless fodder for joke-making.
OK, back to the crappy horror in my queue ...
Posted at 7:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 4, 2005
Lamerica
Netflix finally got Lamerica, a film I'd been hunting for a while. This is a wonderful movie about two Italian carpetbaggers who come to Albania shortly after the fall of Communism and attempt to set up a fraudulent business. Well, that's the plot anyway. What it is about is the way Italy has become a symbol of hope for the destitute Albanians, their own "America" across the western sea. It is an allegory of Italian fantasies about coming to the USA so many generations before. And it is a beautiful one at that.
Posted at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 5, 2004
Donnie Darko
I'm late to the game on this, but no matter. Donnie Darko is the best film I've seen all year. I can't remember the last time a DVD finished and I immediately jumped to the menu to play it again. (My normal post-movie routine is to visit IMDB to read the trivia on the flick.) Re-viewing is almost built into the movie itself. The dramatic fulcrum of Donnie Darko is the title character's reaction to knowing how things will turn out before he should know. Donnie Darko is richly rewarding, bitingly funny at times (Patrick Swayze is absolutely superb), and even frightening. Apparently the director, Richard Kelly, was 26 when the movie, his first, was released in 2001. Goodness gracious.
Time travel, a creepy man-bunny, Michael Dukakis. It's all there. Rent this movie.
Posted at 6:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
