Till Death Do Us Part: This Year In Chaos

I thought it only right to take a look at some zombie films before I delve into the curriculum change I've been planning since last year. Think of it as cleaning out my notebook if you will. Today we examine three films with more in common than the undead. One is brand new and one of the only French zombie films in existence, two of them aren't exactly new but they were made with help from my favorite independent studio Glass Eye Pix and all deal with the idea of love and family withstanding members of that family becoming zombies. The reason I don't devote more time to each specifically instead of doing this here threesome is because that though each has their say about love at the edge of life and death, none of them gets it right, but each does it differently. This gives me hope because not only does it show that filmmakers are always trying to do new things with the zombie genre, but that there's still a chance that someone's going to come along and really nail this. Well let's work our way up, shall we?

Mulberry Street
by Jim Mickle

When a diseased rat takes a bite of some people on the bottom of the food chain in a New York neighborhood, a virus begins to spread. The first bite is at dawn; by nightfall the whole city's been infected. Not only are they flesh-eating zombies, but they also take on rat-like countenances a la The Witches. The people we'll be concerned with are the residents of a tenement building. Clutch, the handyman is awaiting the arrival of his daughter Casey, an Iraq war veteran. He was planning a surprise party with the help of his friend Coco, a black gay man who starts out as a welcome diversion from all the ugliness and low-budget performances but wears out his welcome near the middle of the film, and Charlie, an older Jewish man who lives with his even older friend Frank. Clutch seems to have a sort-of-a-kind-of-a-thing for Kay, the single-mother who works at a local bar run by Big Vic, but neither has made much of their mutual attraction. Sadly, though these are well-defined characters (in a 30 Scenes for Two Actors kind of way) the only thing that writers Jim Mickle and Nick Damici, who also plays Clutch, are all that interested in is killing everyone off.

Mulberry Street starts off strong enough, promising a sort of slice-of-life zombie film on the The Fog model but with a decidedly Spike Lee-esque undercurrent; it is New York after all, and chaos and a heat-wave spell Do The Right Thing even in a film as lowly as this. And what's more this movie becomes a kind of love letter to New York based character actors. Damici and Mickle cast people who I have to guess are friends of theirs like Larry Fleischman and Glass Eye guru Larry Fessenden and in an uncredited and touching cameo, departed character actor Victor Argo appears with Damici in a picture in Clutch's apartment. So as a love letter to those thousands who struggle to make it as actors, Mulberry Street is kind of heart-warming. As a movie, movie or even a zombie movie, it doesn't really do much more than set 'em up and knock 'em down. The most compelling things about the film are the relationships between the characters (Clutch and his daughter, Kay and his son, Coco and Clutch, Charlie and Frank) but the script dispenses with nearly all of these characters before they can prove much about their friendship.

Mickle makes for an uneven director at the best of times, relying heavily on cheaply rendered fake news footage and oddly static action scenes and poorly done CG effects and obnoxiously muddled editing. His camera sits at a strange angle, which in the claustrophobic apartment building where the film takes place gets old fast. And for a film that takes place almost entirely in the same building Mickle doesn't establish a definite sense of place - the building needed to be another character, not just the place where people hide and die. And unfortunately the zombies weren't even that well executed and for all their menace, Clutch has an easy enough time punching their lights out for them to create much tension. Still I've seen much, much worse.

Zombie Honeymoon
By David Gebroe

Now here's a film that promises a real delving into the idea of romantic love and the undead intersecting. Open on a wedding. Wait, scratch that, open on the credits set to the sound of people chewing. Not a great move, kids. I get that it's supposed to be unnerving but really I just kept thinking how rude it was. Noisy chewing's like nails on a chalkboard to me, not a surrogate string quartet. Anyway, Denise and Danny get married then rush off to their rented honeymoon home. I don't get this place one bit. It's a beachside home (not a mansion but big enough I guess) with expensive shit in it, like big TVs and arcade games. Now I've never spent enough time on the west coast to get acquainted with anything like this, but is this a thing in California? Weirdly overstocked beach houses that middle class newlyweds can rent for a week or two? But ignore the arcade games and shit, they never return...come to think of it I can't really see why they're there in the first place. So they have fun and do a lot of having sex and laying out and such until one afternoon a man wanders out of the ocean and spews up black bile into Danny's mouth. Denise rushes him to the hospital but for whatever reason it's too late and Danny dies in front of her and the attending physicians. She's naturally crushed until he starts coughing and comes back to life, good as new that is.

Ok, so I think you can guess where this film is headed. Danny appears normal at first but soon he's killing and eating small animals, then people, then his flesh starts to decay, then the police get involved and Denise has to decide what's most important to her. If I had one complaint it's that we don't get any real sense of these two despite spending the whole movie with them. Their personalities change for the sake of whatever kind of scene writer/director David Gebroe wants to try and carry off. He makes a pretty huge mistake in telling Zombie Honeymoon like a conventional young-love story with just a few substitutions because he also doesn't bring enough to the telling of the story to escape its pitfalls and inevitable dullness. I knew the minute that fellow spewed up in Danny's face how the film was going to end so it was up to Gebroe to then make the next hour as tense and horrifying and claustrophobic as can be and he failed to do any of those things. The first of Zombie Honeymoon’s problems is that it's shot in oppressively bright colours to emphasize the youthful, west coastness of everything from the house the newlyweds stay in to the small animals Danny winds up eating. It's hard for there to be much darkness in a film that refuses to get dark. Every frame is full of wasted space and there is never the sense of urgency a story like this requires.

I feel that the one thing that would have saved Zombie Honeymoon would be if the filmmaker stopped fucking around. Why is it crucial for us to see the "let's buy our house and move to Portugal" scene in quite such ecstatic detail if we already know it's not going to happen. I mean, it never happens in typical romantic dramedies, and we already know what the score is, so why waste everyone's time? Not to mention that Denise and Danny become two completely different characters during this scene. They're also completely different characters when they argue during dinner with their friends Buddy and Nikki and when they feud over Danny's just having killed and eaten their travel agent (if someone could tell me whether I'm supposed to find this funny I'd appreciate it, because the tonal shifts are all out of left field and have no consistency or level ground to return to). We're obviously meant to care for Denise but she just isn't a real character, she's a series of actions with a semi-sad look on her face who is too well-lit and nicely composed to be a real character who's actually watching the love of her life become a zombie. It's also mildly distracting that Tracy Coogan who plays her is from Ireland and her American accent slips more than it ought to in an eighty-minute film. One minute she wants to cover for his killing, the next she can't stand him, and the only thing that remains consistent is that this film wants a rewrite it never got.

I guess if I had looked at Honeymoon's poster and seen that John Landis had recommended it, I could have stayed the hell away from it. Ultimately a film with the word "Honeymoon" in the title that is about the cross-section of horror and romance could have used a more believable dose of either. Gebroe presents Zombie Honeymoon like it was made-for-TV or like he was gathering footage for a music video. Things happen and have no impact on our emotions, which is damning in a little movie. Little films are supposed to have heart, that's why the rest of the world goes to them (to deliver the romance they weren't going to find in either Transformers 2 or He's Just Not That Into You because both are about science-fiction, implausible relationships and special effects, really). Zombie Honeymoon thus comes off like Gebroe's resume film rather than anything he cared enough about to instill with the kind of heartbreak his plot required. What would you do if your husband were turning into a goddamned zombie? Don’t you think you might be on edge all the fucking time? Might you make every second left of your life together count? For more on this subject, we head overseas where the situation is much worse than the one in California.

Mutants
by David Morlet

I admit to being really psyched about Mutants because I was told that this was slowly building up steam in Europe and that it was being kept out of US cinemas for the usual reasons (subtitles). That said, early word was mostly positive and I simply had to have it! And for a few wonderful minutes it really seemed like Mutants was going to be the perfect close to a decade of pretty excellent horror films. In a beautifully composed opening sequence a woman runs away from zombies in a creek, heading desperately toward the road nearby. But just as she dodges her pursuers and gets to the road she's hit by an ambulance and literally explodes as if she were not a person but rather a poorly sewn burlap sack of blood and thin vital organs. This should have been my first-clue that Mutants was perhaps not the first-rate zombie film I'd been expecting. Anyway, zombies are running amok but we don't really get a sense of how bad things are all over. The ambulance is being driven by Sonia, a paramedic. Her husband Marco tries to revive the man in the back and both are watched by Perez, a SWAT with a large gun pointed at both of them. When the critical case stops breathing she forces Sonia to stop the van so she can shoot the dead man in the head. And to prove just how nice she really is, she then makes Marco and Sonia clean the blood out of the back of the van with river water. Perez evidently needs these two for some reason because she won't let them out of her sight. They stop at a gas station for fuel and supplies and things take a nasty turn. The discovery of someone who is probably infected leads to a showdown between Husband and Wife and the lady with the gun. The boy who attacks Marco doesn't look infected, just mentally impaired, so Sonia won't leave without him and Perez won't risk his presence. Marco grabs a gun, the boy attacks, and things get ugly. When Sonia gets back in the ambulance she has Perez's gun and a gutshot Marco who may or may not have swallowed some of the infected boy's blood.

She rushes him to a derelict office building to operate on him in peace...or anyway it looks like an office building on the outside. Inside it looks kinda like a basement they rented to do their interior filming with and doesn't match the outside at all. Regardless, they're stuck here and even after Marco recovers from the gunshot, there's still the chance that he's got the virus. As his hair comes out in clumps and his mood turns dour, his doomedness seems assured but Sonia won't let him die without a fight. She too was bitten, it seems, over two weeks ago, but nothing ever happened to her. Maybe if they can find out what about her makes her immune, they can cure him. That's all well and good but Marco has three good days left in him maybe and if they ever get help to come, the chances of finding someone to figure that shit out in time are slim to none. Sonia seems to know they'll never get that far but she doesn't care; when time is just about up for her husband she pumps him full of morphine and locks him in the basement so she can work out a solution on her own but just as she goes back upstairs the marauders arrive. Four survivors arrive and basically force Sonia to help them get fuel for the ambulance. The fuel is in a roadside office through the woods and as their leader doesn't want to risk going back to get it, he's going to send Sonia to get it. She agrees to help only when she hears that there's a radio in the office as well. It's hear that we learn that she has another reason to want her husband to come out alive; she's not just immune to the virus, she's also pregnant, so she books it to the radio and back, but, as we're about an hour into the movie, things spiral out of control and loads of folks get theirs in a messy and fast-paced fashion.

In Mutants' defense it is easily one of the most beautifully shot zombie films of all time. Director David Morlet or possibly cinematographer Nicolas Massart has a real eye for the scenery that surrounds the abandoned building and it really is just a joy to take in every exterior shot they have to offer. Though soon after they get to the building I found myself wishing for more shots of trees and less time with the characters. Morlet is clearly a student of old-school horror as there are a ton of things in play. In the setting there's plenty of The Shining, in the editing, the gore and interior cinematography Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, in the interplay between the people and the virus and the notion of the government's role in things and that it is a virus that's causing the zombies there's a good deal of 28 Days Later and in Sonia's pregnancy and last-ditch escape Children of Men. There's a nod to Rosemary's Baby and of course to Romero's film in the general atmosphere of hopelessness, especially in the context of a married couple alone with zombies all around. And though I could spy a lot of references going by, none of it strengthened the film's narrative, leading me to think that Morlet didn't really have confidence in the story he was telling. This is further underlined by his choice of editing style. The problem with slick, modern editing and frenetic high definition camera work is that character stop being characters and start being objects. They move around a good deal and they never slow down and the most directors think that sheer momentum of bodies is the same as getting to know these people.

And furthermore the story really is quite thin. Sonia and Marco are alone for what is maybe a day, during which time we learn nothing of their relationship, other than the fact that it doesn't mean quite as much to Marco as it does to Sonia. Then when the gang shows up the film turns into a 28 Days Later paraphrase with Sonia, like Jim, bringing the zombies down on the heads of her oppressors, except that we haven't been through enough with Sonia for her arrival to be all that heroic and we haven't spent enough time with the gang for them to really have earned their villainy. So their deaths feel perfunctory more than satisfying. I could see Morlet scripting the scene and shooting it feeling like he had a conclusion as strong as Danny Boyle's and in the staging it appears like he should have but there's no weight behind it. We know that the villains will die and we don't like them so it doesn't matter, we know Marco will emerge and save Sonia at the last minute, and we know that Sonia is immune. Where exactly does the tension come into play? Hélène de Fougerolles is such a strong physical performer as well that it's a shame that Morlet almost makes no use of her. Her beauty, hidden under sweat and grease and blood and fear, makes all her scenes interesting just because she's in them but I can only imagine how good they could have been if Morlet had actually gotten us into her head. Also the film's score in no way matches up to John Murphy's for 28 Days Later. It's fucking awful; rhythm people, tell the drummer to slow down or you'll wind up inviting Ghost of Mars comparisons and NOBODY wants that. Forgive my sounding so cruel but Mutants started out so strongly and is handsomely put-together but the script just couldn't meet the direction halfway. Beyond that the gore effects are distractingly over-the-top, especially when they punctuate what should be difficult emotional scenes between the two leads. Morlet cared much more about how the film looked than what the people who occupied the frame for 90% of the movie thought or felt. I've seen break-neck editing, and hopeless looking characters with an abundance of fire-arms despite this being the end of civilization and I've seen gore and I've seen the ending to 28 Days Later (though for the life of me I can't think of where...). I need more than different scenery, no matter how arresting it is.

Mutants is the most recent of the three films discussed today and it really does represent the most mature and concise directorial vision but it still isn't good enough. Morlet clearly speaks the language of horror films and that to me says that he should have had a better and more interesting story to tell, not one that is interesting in its being superior to amateurish films like Mulberry Street and Zombie Honeymoon. In the end despite my enjoying the tension created in at least the first 40 minutes of Mutants, I can't really rate it heads and shoulders above the others which both went straight to DVD. The problem, so far as I can see, is that director's think that the idea of a zombie film is enough to make up for listlessness and aimlessness. Not a one of these movies has a great ending but most importantly not one of them has a consistent stance on relationships. Mulberry Street clearly has ideas about families as it presents several of them it's just too preoccupied in set-pieces for the characters to actually have a conversation about what they're feeling. Zombie Honeymoon is about two people who are in love but that love is never conveyed in the script, direction or performances. Mutants is a movie about love lasting after death has changed the nature of your life and your struggle to survive, but it happens to people we never get to know. What the makers of low-budget horror films always need and seem to always forget (there are of course exceptions) is that we need to care first before we can be shocked and we need to care when it's all over too. You can't drop characterization in favor of action, nor can you have empty gestures that amount to something in other films. In order for a film about zombies to work, you need the one thing they lack: a beating heart.

Horny Zombies I Have Known: This Year In Chaos

I suppose it was only a matter of time before sex began to play a pivotal role in zombie films. I mean it's always been around (after all what motivates Charles Beaumont to seek out Murder Legendre and his zombie-making formula in White Zombie) but the fusion of the two in both a content and thematic sense has been surprisingly few and far between. Ken Wiederhorn pays lip service to the idea in Return of the Living Dead Part II, Michel Saovi played with it further in Cemetary Man, in fact the only movie I can think of that makes the connection perfectly explicit was John McNaughton's under-rated Masters of Horror entry Haeckel's Tale. So I thought before the cicrriculum change I would delve into two repulsive zombie tales that deal with sex in a manner both frank and polarizing. These are by no means the only two ways to take the notion of a sexualized zombie movie, but these are two of the only movies to take an exclusively sexual approach to the zombie movie. One posits a world in which humans and homosexual zombies co-exist and the other is as good an argument I've yet seen for mass male sterilization, yet strangely they make for an interesting double-feature if you're hoping to teach a lesson about extremes.

Otto; or Up With Dead People
by Bruce LaBruce

Otto takes place in the not too distant future where our narrator informs us that zombies have become "if not commonplace, then at least unextraordinary." They're a fairly common occurence and have even learned to "speak and reason." In the midst of her extemporizing about this, that and the other thing we learn of the titular Otto, a recently deceased and walking dead soul, "a zombie with an identity crisis." Our narrator, who we learn is an experimental filmmaker called Medea Yarn, lets us know that she studied Otto with her camera and was fascinated by him. He was about twenty one or so when he died and then came back. He has flashes of the life he once lead and it haunts him in death (one of many ideas that LaBruce sadly doesn't do anything with). Yarn tells us that a wave of gay zombies has struck, inciting more fervor than ordinary zombies. Once the public found out about this, gangs took to the streets trying to kill them. Anyway, we watch the exploits of two slightly older gay zombies as they spread their message of equality to a homophobic and violent public....or maybe there are no zombies and it's all part of Medea's film....or maybe some of them are real zombies and others are just fetishists who like the idea of looking like a zombie......or maybe Otto is the only zombie.....or maybe he's not one at all.....? All of this is left infuriatingly vague by the film's end.

Bruce LaBruce is one of cinema's most committed punks and if you need proof of his dedication to the same kinds of ideals that guided the best punk musicians just remember that before now you've never heard of him except maybe in the context of this movie. Like Kenneth Anger before him LaBruce is a gay filmmaker who lives to make films that will arouse the contempt of any poor bourguoise sap who stumbles on his movies. His is a body of work steeped in filmic tradition but in no way willing to play by even the most basic of rules. I'd hazard a guess that aside from today's film (which only appeals to a broader audience in the sense that it is nominally a genre film) the closest LaBruce had ever come to the mainstream was his Fellini homage Super 8½, which was probably never shown to more than 20 people at a time in rented rooms at film schools. The blessing and curse of a personality like LaBruce is that though there is not even the slightest chance of him compromising or doing what is asked or expected of him, he will also neccesarily never find an audience big enough for him to make a lasting impression on the art form. The only other downside to his remaining on the fringes of film culture is that he has apparently resisted learning how to construct a decent movie from his self-destructive and minimalist urges; like Sid Vicious, he tries but he never really learned how to play the bass guitar in the first place. Otto; or Up with Dead People looks like shit and though it's jam-packed with interesting ideas, it never does any of them justice, winding up under-cooked, pretentious and only ideaologically more appealing than straight-to-dvd fare like Dead Summer or Ozone. Even Medea's cameraman Adolf uses a Bolex yet LaBruce sticks with lo-res video (film nerds only complaint). Though I'd have over-looked its craft if it had managed to create characters I could care about Otto's biggest problem is that it's dull and, perhaps fittingly, lifeless.

The reason I stayed with Otto is because despite looking terrible and by the end not really having solved any of its problems, it is a film with ideas. From the opening where Medea says that the zombies learned to communicate with each other mentally (which we never see any evidence of...possibly because it's all just a part of her movie....or not...?), possibly because they want to rebel against the "unceasing hostilities of the living", it becomes clear that LaBruce went out of his way to apply every ounce of reactionary leftist thought he could into Otto but he stopped at that. He never develops any of his ideas beyond running them off like the quotable phrases of his previous film Raspberry Reich; his insolent sloganeering is acceptable if a film's sole purpose to stir up trouble and cause both discomfort and awareness (as all of his films are) but in a film that purports to be a zombie film I wanted more. I wanted a story. The closest thing to a narrative that LaBruce manages is split between the exploits of the two revolutionaries (who wind up being characters in the movie-within-a-movie), Otto's stumbling from one sexual encounter to the next as he remembers his old life, and then the making of Medea's film Up With Dead People. The story of the film-making is a paraphrase of the story of LaBruce's Super 8½, which is kind of a shame. A shame, incidentally is how I'd generally describe Otto. This was the first openly gay zombie film that squanders its ideas as throw-away lines, pays attention to its least interesting characters, and alienates all but committed fans of LaBruce's audacious style.

As far as that style goes, there is as I've said, the ultra-pretentious collegiate jargin that, while not as bad as the dialogue in The Addiction, is still irritatingly facile. Then there are the few film school touches that LaBruce adds as inside jokes for die-hards like that Medea's girlfriend Hella only appears in silent, scratchy black-and-white footage for some reason or that when he mentions violence against zombies, he shows an animation instead of real action (my guess is the budget precluded showing any real violence). Finally the film is full of hard-core sexual inserts (a staple of LaBruce's films) which while admittedly interesting, will scare off anyone interested on the surface in a queer-themed zombie film who is not already used to pornographic images in horrror films. I was expecting it and wasn't bothered anyway, but I feel like there are a few curiousity viewers who are going to get a shock at about the twenty minute mark. I do think there is something compelling about the contact between the two nameless twenty-somethings. LaBruce's portrayol of their sexual contact as involving disembowlment and, in one scene that will undoubtedly have people grabbing for the remote, fucking an open wound is fascinating. It opens all kinds of doors for talk about human sexuality that it then promptly walks away from, leaving it and many like it maddeningly ajar.

Otto is about those maligned, still not given equality - obviously gays and zombies are meant to be viewed as one and the same because LaBruce makes them one and the same. It's an interesting idea but it's also very loud and naked in LaBruce's hands. He has ideas but nothing like a real story to tell, in fact the storytelling often gets in the way of his fountain of ideas. While I understand the impulse to make extreme cinema, I don't think that ideas are enough to carry a film. Craft is equally important. That said, when you have a dearth of ideas and minimal craft (in the case of our next film, decent cinematography), your film is likely to wind up even less appealing (to most straight men, I guess. I don't presume to know what turns people on) than watching an orgy of men painted up like zombies.

Doghouse
by Jake West

This film probably shouldn't have started with a helicopter shot of London. I know that what they meant to do was put us in mind of 28 Days Later but nothing will ever match up to 28 Days Later if they try to. Some films may be incidentally as good but nothing, least of all antiquated sex crimedies with Danny Dyer, is going to beat 28 Days Later at its own game. We next meet the unlovable man-children we'll be spending the film with. There's Mikey, who's kind of an asshole and Matt who's a nerd and an asshole, there's Patrick, who's kind of a new-age asshole, Neil, who's the head asshole, Graham, an asshole who's the only one of the bunch who's not straight, Banksy who's meeting them there thanks to car trouble who is a corpulent asshole, and Vince who's the only one seems a decent chap. He's just been divorced and the rest of the gang are taking him out to the village of Moodley for some pre-Deliverance but instead of sex-crazed hillbillies, they've got something else, something far more sexually regressive, waiting for them.

They arrive in Moodley only to discover the place is a derelict. A little searching (with way too many "we can see it but the boys are oblivious" gags) reveals that the place is over-run with hyper functioning zombie women. The way that our director introduces them is via some gender specific sight gags - never a good sign. First Neil looks under the doors of a toilet and some thick gore falls between the girl inside's legs. Fucking charming. Next we see a woman who I believe is supposed to be a bride carrying an axe, but she's actually dressed in the lingerie equivalent of a bridal gown. Next is a hair-dresser with two pairs of scissors in her hands, a barmaid with enormous tits carrying a sword, you notice the pattern yet? All the women are zombies and they each carry some tool that vaguely matches the costume they're wearing (well, except the barmaid...still a bit puzzled about that). The only man left in town, a Sgt. Gavin Wright, fills them in on what's been happening. Yeah, it's a virus, yeah it only effects women, yeah we still only have these pricks to root for. So, the reasons they're stuck: their bus-driver got the virus and Neil put all their phones in a bag to keep them from calling girlfriends before they got to town which he left on the bus. The reasons to watch the film are even fewer than that. Actually, there's no reason to watch this movie.

Here's Doghouse in a nutshell. When Matt asks the group a logical question, Neil replies with the kind of reductionist mysognysit humour that characterizes the whole movie. "What kind of virus only effects women?" "Bird flu." HAHA! Get it? Cause British people call women birds! I'd love to make a joke like that if I'd been stabbed in the hand, like Neil just was in the story, but I just don't think I'd be smart or witty enough. If you don't get it I could explain it to you in detail, it's a really subtle and nuanced kind of humour and it's just...cause I really want you to get it if you don't. The film is just one gory, anti-feminist set-piece after another. The female zombies exist as the sort of grotesque caricature that only douche bags who cheat on their girlfriends and go to strip clubs imagine. Women are there to be reacted against, not viewed as people. Which is not only harmful toward women, but also sells men short because it fundamentally lacks imagination. Between Dan Schaffer's truly awful, trite and painfully unfunny script and Jake West's clumsy and tension-free direction, the film doesn't even work as the "men and women are different" expose it would like to be. And can I just...the film was made and released in 2009 and as I write this it's 2010...people don't actually invest this much money and energy into this kind of fucking trash, do they?

By the time you figure out the zombies are a government project gone awry, you really couldn't be bothered as its played out its one trick. As a side-note the movie goes to great lengths to explain that its indebted to The Evil Dead. Yeah, no! That film was intelligent and fun and scary. This is awful. Stephen Graham and Lee Ingleby try to rise above the material but can't and in fact appear more than a little embarassed to be here while Danny Dyer and the others are only too happy to sink beneath it. Also, quick clarification, though I know there's no point in this case: Neil says that the zombies are feminist at one point. This isn't even right in its wrongness. Feminism doesn't imply a hatred for men, it's about equality on every imaginable level, which is impossible when fuck-ups like Schaffer insist on getting it wrong for the sake of a bunch of jokes that are older than fucking time. So, yeah....fuck this movie, its creators, producers and everyone who enjoys it. And now I don't think I'm being overly harsh because there are ten thousand zombie films that don't make me furious in their sexual politics alone.

So while I'd take Otto over Doghouse anyday, I can't say either won me over. Otto, at the very least has a reason to exist beyond its many forgotten ideas. People really do fear and despise homosexuals (and as we've seen, almost as badly as some men hate and fear women) so to make a film that points this out and tries to insist that homosexuality is normal is something I absolutely stand behind. Both films are reactionary and both are about the fear of castration/impotence, and though one has the balls to own up to it, neither has a combination of ideas and craft that satisfied me. I know that there are good ideas to be found in Otto, and I know that everyone involved in Doghouse owes it to themselves to do better work than this. So until someone fuses sexuality and zombies in a satisfying way, I suggest you stick to the tried and true, or as one of Otto's victims says, "Come on, it's dead in there"

Domestic Demons I Have Known: This Year In Chaos

One of the advantages that today's filmmakers had over yesterday's is that if you've got a little film that wants to be big, there are ways of achieving the illusion. Imagine what William Castle would have done with internet marketing and flash mobs and a budget for faux-live appearances comparable to that lavished on The Dark Knight. Well today relatively inexpensive movies like Cloverfield (relatively. I SAID RELATIVELY!) can make full use of every avenue for tricksy marketing strategies. The other thing that the internet provides in spades is hype. I've spoken here before about the fact that so many of the opinions one generally finds on here are just opinions from regular people (I'll come clean now and say I don't actually have a Ph.D., a doctorate or a degree and I can't give you college credit for Honors Zombie) and though they can't provide qualified expert advice, they sure know when to get together mob-style and tell you when to pay attention. At the end of last year all anyone wanted to talk about what was that a little film called Paranormal Activity did or didn't scare them. I had never heard of the film so couldn't enter into the discourse but I will say that when a gauntlet like that is thrown down everyone has something to say. You don't want to be the one guy on the internet who was terrified by the film all the other kids say didn't scare them, do you? Well I've never really believed the majority so it was with some reservations that I approached this movie. When The Blair Witch Project came out at the start of the decade you couldn't talk about film without someone wanting to tell you that it was either the scariest or stupidest thing they'd ever seen. Like Blair Witch, Paranormal is told in faux-verite style and gives us twenty-something protagonists and has forums alight with discussion. It seems fitting to finish out the decade the same way it started, though I can say that at least one thing is different - today's film is pretty scary.

Paranormal Activity
by Oren Peli

Katie and Micah are two dense rich kids who've just moved in together; I feel like if they were smarter and a little older you could call them yuppies. Micah commemorates the event by buying an expensive digital camera. Katie is a little miffed at first but thinks she has a practical use for her dipshit boyfriend's new hobby. Katie has, for months now, been visited by microscopic evidence of something otherworldly. She's heard whispering voices and footsteps and felt like someone or something has been watching her. Well Micah thinks for the most part that she's full of shit (I'm right there with him, incidentally) but he's looking for a reason to combine girlfriend and camera and as Katie won't sleep with him on film, he agrees to film them while they sleep. The first night's footage appears normal until 3:09 in the morning when the door to their room moves a few inches on its own. Micah examines it the next day and notices that nothing else in the room is affected by a draft and had locked all the windows and doors. He still views it as more or less a practical joke but that's proof enough for Katie who calls in a psychic called Dr. Fredrichs to talk shop. Of course Fredrichs believes her but Micah remains unconvinced of the gravity of the situation even as it becomes creepier and creepier.

Night after night some minute occurence will occur scaring Katie but only exciting Micah. One night Katie steps out of bed and simply stands looking at the bed for an hour then sleepwalks downstairs to the swing on the porch where Micah finds her when he wakes up alone. She refuses to come upstairs and then when he confronts her about it later she has no recollection of the incident - creepier still the television in their bedroom spontaneously turns on while both are downstairs. On other nights there are loud banging sounds and lights turn on. Katie grows increasingly worried but Micah just gets confrontational. Being the alpha-male type, he views the presence as more a threat to his pride than a real danger to himself or his girlfriend. His insistence on pissing off the entity bugs her almost as much as his perpetually filming their problems with the malevolent entity. Some research into the subject convinces them it's a demon, not a ghost, that's hiding in the house but what finally convinces them that they're in over their heads is two-fold. Micah puts powder on the floor one night to trace the beast's footsteps; this leads them to the attic where they find a picture of Katie as a girl. When Micah decides to disobey Katie's wishes and buys a Ouija board, there's no denying that the beast wants something.

Let's start with the good, shall we? You may recall in my Drag Me To Hell review that I said something along the lines of "nothing much scares me anymore." Well, this is not strictly true and I said it more to bolster my sentiments about Raimi's film. I still do find things scary, in fact probably more so than your average genre junkie, but it takes a little more than flesh and blood or a few garden variety scare moments. I'll let potential filmmakers and/or people looking to frighten me for the sake of a practical joke in on something. Something that invariably scares me is when someone with human features but an inhuman expression stares right through the camera. It works just about everytime. Works in both version of The Grudge (despite the remake being a far less interesting film), works in The Exorcist, works in X, Y and Z. Well I approached Paranormal with something like reserved skepticism. My best friend, who is a little more susceptible to the tricks in horror films than I am (which is not her fault, I've just grown up with scary shit and routinely seek out the most frightening and depraved things in the history of film), said that it was terrifying and I can't tell you how anxious I was to prove immune to it as so many other snarky internet horror buffs claimed to be. Sadly, even with my problems with the film as a piece, it did in fact do a sound job terrifying me to the point that I actually wanted to cover my eyes.

I watched Paranormal alone in my room at around one or so in the morning with the lights, which I think we can agree are ideal circumstances (opening night would have had a lot of chatter and probably would have just distracted you). So I was able to pay full attention to the bedroom stuff. I greatly enjoyed the anticipation provided by the leaps ahead in time in fast motion as they built an atmosphere of expectation broken masterfully by the great sound effects. I found myself quite terrified by the big things as well as the little, like Katie's final attacks by the beast and the conclusion had me by the hair. I even liked the wierdly compelling stuff with the Ouija Board. The effects were all nicely executed and the performances believable for the most part (Katie Featherston has a little trouble conveying surprise at having been caught out of bed, but that's more writer/director Oren Peli's fault than hers as it is a slightly overused device). The problem was that though just about everything the film wanted to carry off as a horror film was convincing, the film around the effects feels conspicuously like the set-up to shock scenes and not like a proper movie.

Ok, it's time for a truncated film school class. Ever see Annie Hall? Remember when Marshall Mcluhan shows up in that fantasy sequence while they're queued up for a film? Ok, so his deal was that the medium by which you see something contains a message. If you watch reality TV, it isn't really important what you get out of that episode, it's that you're watching something that purports to be reality that matters. That's what's going to effect ratings, demographics, etc. etc. etc. I couldn't shake the feeling that this was an internet phenomena, a really thin showcasing for a few effective scares rather than a movie with characters and a plot. I mean, yes, the characters are believable but they're also one-note and rather unlikable. They do things that put them in the most amount of trouble, they buy into the idea of the demon almost immediately, they hang around longer than they should and they do what's most advantageous to get them to the next scare. They, like the plot, are a bit like the house they inhabit: unfurnished and flat. The film quickly becomes about wanting to get to the next bedroom scene because you don't care in the slightest how they spend their days. The editing is mostly arbitrary and the film's aspirations to realism dissappear whenever a cut happens. The effects are good but they also feel like the bare minimum, like Peli figured out what he could pull off, then built a paper-thin film around it. So really the effect is like watching the world's longest and scariest youtube video and only manages to shake its flimsiness in the final fifteen minutes. It's certainly to Peli's credit that he manages those solid fifteen minutes but the film still feels like something that made its way to theatres by virtue of its popularity rather than its cinematic qualities. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with that but it just sits with me awkwardly. I don't know why, exactly; most of AIP's and Monogram's films did roughly the same thing for most of their early history, so its not as though it's unprecedented for a film to feature two or three characters in a house setting, I just...I don't know I can't put my finger on it. It's just to me there are films as good as this made every day that never get the attention they deserve yet this has so captivated people. I would have loved to see I Sell The Dead or Cairo or [Rec] get this kind of attention when they were new.

I won't ruin the ending on the off chance that you still haven't heard of or seen Paranormal Activity, but I will say that at two in the morning with the lights out, I was nearly catatonic and was afraid to go into the hallway to use the bathroom after watching it (my apartment and every door in it creaks like a motherfucker). So there you go, my reservations aside, it does what it sets out to do and that's indeed something worthy of praise. And for once all the hype has pointed out something deserving of discussion (I would, however, like the ten bucks I spent on The Dark Knight back). Now in spite of all that, here's what I suggest you do. Ignore everything anyone has said about the movie (myself included) find it on DVD and watch it for yourself. No one's going to be able to predict your reaction to it and I think the beauty of a film like this is that it is so small and will definitely provoke something from you, if only the acknowledgement of tiny films with big hearts. The more you hear about a film, the more your reaction's going to be colored by the things you hear. So, ignore the hype and see the movie and maybe in future we can all talk more about some little movie made for no money at all.

Emigrant Extraterrestrials I Have Known: This Year In Chaos

This may just be the best time in history for filmmakers with ideas. The numbers behind dollar signs on a film's budget are becoming more and more arbitrary as indicators of the end result. In the last twenty years the independent filmmaker has risen to prominence in a huge way. The makers of small films are being recognized for their ideas and given chances to expand their vision into big budget projects. David Gordon Green, the same man who directed the beautiful, no-budget George Washington is currently directing a remake of Suspiria. Small time quirky comedy directors Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach now have access to the Hollywood elite and whatever resources they could hope for. Music video directors like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry are now making critically acclaimed children's and super hero movies. Those mumblecore kids are getting more and more famous by the day despite my continued perplexity at their popularity. People have caught on to my favorite independent director Ti West and the fellows at Glass Eye Pix, giving them some much-deserved love and attention. And recently South African called Neill Blomkamp, on the strength of a delightful and clever short film called Alive In Joburg, in which puppety alien throw cars around while the locals bemoan their presence, was given the chance to direct a film that the whole world would have seen. That project fell through but he still got to show the world that first-rate talent doesn't come from major studios; it typically comes from people with ideas that extend beyond how best to frame explosions and women in cut-offs. 

District 9
by Neill Blomkamp

Open on a slight, nervous corporate lackey called Wikus Van De Merwe. He's just been given the job of a lifetime or so it would seem. In 1982 an Alien ship came through our atmosphere hovering just over Johannesburg, South Africa. Nothing happened for a good long while and eventually the government sent some guys up to cut their way into the ship. What they found inside had the look of an alien crack house. The aliens (which are given the nickname "Prawn" for their resemblance to the sea-creature, though they look more like human cockroaches to me) were mal-nourished and seemed to be living in their own filth. They were brought down in helicopters so that they could be taken care of, but trouble soon followed. The South Africans learned their language and taught their own to the aliens and soon after people started taking advantage of them. Like some ethnic groups in South Africa, the aliens were not treated quite as nicely as say, a visiting white soccer team. Soon the squalor they were found in is replicated on the ground and they're relegated to a slum called District 9 where polite society doesn't have to interact with them. Of course they're still awfully close to civilization and the rest of the world is watching so a shady firm called MNU is tasked with finding a home for them. Their solution is District 10, a tent city set-up even further from the speciesist public. As you may have guessed it's Van Der Merwe who's been put in charge of the move - his first task: getting all the aliens to sign their eviction notice so that the move is nice and legal. And because MNU isn't quite as amiable as Van Der Merwe seems on the surface, they send a gun-toting mercenary escort led by the bloodthirsty Koobus Venter to make their argument a little more persuasive.

While Van Der Merwe and his Black Water escort fuck shit up in District 9, a Prawn called Christopher Johnson and his son are busy collecting something. When the mothership landed someone turned a camera on in time to catch a piece of the ship detaching; as no one's found the piece, they don't know what it's for. Johnson has spent his time on the ground collecting drops of fuel from other scraps of the technology brought down by his fellow aliens. I think you can guess what the fuel is going to power. On the day Van Der Merwe shows up Johnson collects the last drop but is interrupted when the gawky man makes his rounds. Johnson abandons the bottle of fuel and Van Der Merwe finds it and accidentally sprays himself in the face with it. That's when the fun begins - the fuel gets into his blood after he's injured by a prawn and then it begins fucking with his genes. He starts turning into one of the aliens. This fucks with his day in more than one way. First of all, how is he going to explain his changing into an alien to his wife? Second of all, once the head of MNU, also Van Der Merwe's father-in-law, gets wind of this transformation he has the poor dope secreted off to a lab in a sub-basement at headquarters. Now, the reason MNU is so interested in solving the alien problem is because they are also one of the world's largest weapon manufacturers. They've been trying to figure out the secret to the alien weaponry for years but haven't gotten very far because the prawns engineered their guns to interact with them biologically - you can't fire a prawn gun without a prawn arm. So naturally when they find out that something is turning Van Der Merwe into the world's first prawn-man, they want to dissect him to figure out what it is, mass-produce it, and start using the alien weaponry. Wikus knows that there's little chance that his having a wife (the head honcho's daughter, no less) is going to stop him from getting cut open for science, so he breaks out and tries to find the one person - or should I say prawn - who knows what's happening to him. But he's only got so much time before either MNU catches up with him or he resembles just another impoverished alien.

Well if you want to talk about unprecedented, you could do worse than to talk about the people involved in District 9. First of all Sharlto Copley as Wikus gives one of the strongest performances of any first-time actor. It could be that he really is the nervous Van Der Merwe (minus the bigotry, of course) in reality, but that his performance seems authentic for every second of his screentime is incredibly impressive as he is almost always the focus of the action. I'll admit that I find something inexplicably hypnotic about the South African accent but I still think that everyone in this movie is great (most of them first-timers), Copley foremost among them. The editing, sound design and production direction are all first rate and cinematographer Trent Opaloch must be commended as his only prior experience was on the director's early shorts. Neill Blomkamp had never directed anything longer than a few minutes in length before today's film. In what has since become fanboy lore, Peter Jackson had, on the strength of Blomkamp's few short films, asked the director to helm the big screen adaptation of Halo he was executive producing. When that fell through, Jackson gave him the keys to Hobbiton and said "go nuts." With 30 Million dollars and the crack special effects team behind Jackson's latest projects, Blomkamp turned in one of the best sci-fi films of the decade. Pretty impressive, no? His and Terri Tatchell's script is at turns thought-provoking and irreverent and his direction is pretty goddamned excellent. The film becomes all the more impressive when you consider the sheer amount of footage that must have been shot. District 9 employs the ever-popular found footage tack, alternating between interviews/documentation of the mission happening in the present, security camera and TV news footage, and then the source-less narrative angles for the stuff that happens with Christopher Johnson and Wikus' attempts to save himself. I was a little skeptical of the switch from verite to source-less footage but eventually I stopped caring because the story begged for my attention. 

If you're the kind of obsessive who can't let lapses in logic pass by unnoticed, District 9 is probably not gonna be your movie. Whatever, more movie for me. Sure the film has a lot of loop-holes, but it's science-fiction so take it easy. The whole point of science-fiction is to posit something implausible to get people thinking about shit. I know that some people's wariness came from the fact that sci-fi has recently meant serial killers in space and robots putting each other in headlocks but trust me when I say that District 9 is still as good as all that with its flawed logic. I will say that I was willing to overlook the majority of its flaws because people are the villain of the story; I was unabashedly rooting for humans to get blown up with lasers for most of the movie. Blomkamp has said that the film is based on his experiences growing up in South Africa during apartheid and really if you set anything in South Africa and someone's going to think apartheid. The aliens are a fairly obvious stand-in for the blacks who were treated with contempt by those in charge of the country those few years ago. Blomkamp doesn't strictly blame whites for the hatred though. No the real problem is that people were not viewing each other as equals. So rather than draw color lines (though it does make sense that both the head of MNU and the lead mercenary would be white men) Blomkamp simply takes his anger at the situation out on people in general; it's only when Van Der Merwe treats the alien Christopher with the same kindness he reserves for his family does anything positive happen. Now that's the kind of moralizing I can get behind.

People have accused Blomkamp of being less than his message because of his portrayals of the Nigerian warlords who run guns and prostitutes in District 9 but I really don't think he was trying to say anything overtly negative about them as a whole. I view this as more a Grampa Simpson aside that doesn't mean quite what you think. After all a few dozen gangsters don't stand in for the whole country, do they? One can criticize the disgraced former governor of Alaska without humiliating the people of her state, so why does a fictional warlord mean that Blomkamp has it out for Nigerians? I would argue that between the violence and greed (represented by MNU and the gangs in equal measure) humanity has a tough time emerging. Van Der Merwe is far from perfect and it takes quite literally the most extreme circumstances imaginable for him to look past his own prejudices and rise to the occasion. And when he does the film enters its most enjoyable phase, the "let's blast the shit out of things with Peter Jackson's special effects crew" phase. Blomkamp's handling of the action sequences is really stellar and he takes every opportunity to do something innovative and nifty with the camera. The siege of MNU and the crawl to the mothership at the end are so awesomely directed that its not hard to wish Jackson had secured him that job directing Halo. As an aside I'd like to say that this is the kind of film that carries on the legacy of James Cameron's best work while the man wallows in his own egoism; this is the film I wanted when I heard he was making Avatar. This is a film as good and exciting as Aliens or Terminator that shares their fusion of hi and low tech, their heart and brains.

Peter Jackson's influence is all over District 9. The faux-documentary that makes up the first act is right out of Jackson's excellent Forgotten Silver and the splat-tastic second and third acts all drip with the same gooey excesses and harrowing claustrophia of Bad Taste and Dead Alive. In fact the only thing missing is Jackson's sentimental streak and after seeing his dreadful take on The Lovely Bones I'd say it's a good thing he's got this movie to be proud of this year. The effects in the film are also about as excellent as I've seen. The prawns are a thing of wonder and make for convincing (not to mention sympathetic) enough company that you don't mind spending the movie with a subtitled alien pining for his home-planet. Their animation is pretty seemless and their design sufficiently other. Beyond that, all the havoc that Wikus and Christopher wreak is both fun to watch and flawlessly incorporated. Like J.J. Abrams, Blomkamp makes sure to mask his effects with shaky cam so we don't notice them being effects (something Jackson would do well to take note of). So not only could I enjoy the idea of people exploding I could also revel in the realistically gory spectacle.
District 9 has precedents and is far from a wholly original film but it is both winning and about something, so I look past its derivativeness and occasional plot-hole and simply enjoyed myself. I could root for both of its leads because they were concerned for the well-being of others, even as not-great examples of their species roam around breaking shit and indulging in their most base impulses. As much as you or I might like to go around blowing shit up to take our aggression at the staggering amount of people who waste time banning marriages, shooting each other, driving SUVs and keeping women under burkas, we can't. Part of me really enjoyed vicariously taking my rage out on humanity, but the rest of me felt for Blomkamp, who had to live through apartheid in order to tell this story - that he emerged from the conflict with a sense of humour is really kind of amazing - knows that it's people who are their own worst enemy and his film is rather more touching than I expected it to be. Does everything in the film make sense? Certainly not, but the point is to get people talking and if anyone walks away from District 9 just a little afraid that they'll get blown up if they treat other people like shit based on something as trivial as where they're from or how they look, then I'd call the film a success. Granted we live in an age of Michael Bays and McGs so who knows what penetrates the massive unconscious anymore. Regardless of its reception, I still call District 9 a success and one hell of a movie.

Family-Friendly Flesheaters I Have Known: This Year In Chaos

At the tail-end of my time at Solebury School, a high school that used to foster the kind of long-haired freaks you've probably seen running craft fairs or hackey sack games across the United States, I asked some friends of mine if they would like to listen to me talk about zombie films for a half hour or so a week. I'd call it a class and then complain when the school wouldn't officially recognize it. I was never a tremendously popular kid at my school (in fact some people would tell you alternately that they loathed and feared me before I graduated - not making that up by the way) but when seven kids showed up more than once to hear me tell them about White Zombie and why Night of the Living Dead was a cultural phenomenon I felt for the first time like I had a family away from my own. Since then I've kept the tradition alive here on this site which I named after that ill-fated class and also by having stragglers from the class and other sorted misfits over every now and again to watch something sordid. I'll never forget the horrified reactions to Revenge of the Living Dead Girls and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals when I unleashed them on my unsuspecting friends (they've since come to suspect). Anyway, as I drift further and further from adolescence and I begin to see what and who is most important to me, I've come to view these nights of vicarious cinematic debauchery as more and more important. Not that I think this needs belaboring but I love Zombie movies; they're my livelihood, my bailiwick, my bread and butter, they bring meaning and comfort to my life, to quote Nathan Rabin, they feed my imaginary family. And I think it's been long enough since I covered an honest-to-god Zombie Movie. As even the most anti-genre cultural critics have observed, zombies have come back into favor since Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. I couldn't be happier as not only does that mean that I've gotten at least one decent zombie film every year since then but that people are now taking the genre in new directions. If we look at the comedic zombie films alone there has impressive growth in what the sub-genre can comfortably support. Andrew Currie's Fido introduced a camp 50s sensibility, Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead brought British slacker comedy to the field and most recently Rueben Fleischer made a film that merges a Kevin Smith-type "whatever's bugging me lately" approach to comedy with a post-modern zombie movie. Though his movie suffers from first-time screenwriter's disease it's still endearing in a way I never thought my beloved zombie films could ever be; this may be the first film I've seen in theatres that I have waited patiently to show to my friends at one of my undead get togethers because it is a film made for just such people as ourselves.

Zombieland
by Ruben Fleischer

Open on the white house. It, and as we'll soon be informed the world, has been rendered meaningless and empty thanks to the zombie invasion. Before we get underway, can I just say that the slow-motion intro to Metallica's "For Whom The Bell Tolls" is fucking awesome. Anyway, our narrator and hero, to borrow another of Rabin's phrases, perpetual man-child Jesse Eisenberg (the other, other Michael Cera) has only survived it thanks to a list of rules. Stay fit, shoot twice, stay out of bathrooms, always wear a seatbelt, etc. He has dozens of the things in what I think is the first attempt at fusing quirky comedy (a la Wes Andersen and his many, many descendants) and horror. Anyway, our man is traveling from Austin, TX to Columbus, OH when he's picked up by a comic bad-ass played by Woody Harrelson who's on his way to Tallahassee, FL. He doesn't believe in connections so they'll just call each other by the names of their destinations. Columbus admires Tallahassee because he's a self-aware comic book character, a super-hero whose knowledge of his own arrogance doesn't prevent it from sticking around. Also, he enjoys the hell out of killing zombies. Columbus is all-too-happy to play "Sancho Panza" to his baseball bat-wielding Don Quixote.

While searching for a twinkie in a grocery store (Tallahasse's mission for much of the film is to find the last twinkie in the universe) they run afoul of Wichita and Little Rock, two sisters headed to Pacific Playland, a Californian theme park. Wichita is obviously going to be the romantic interest; first of all, Little Rock is played by a 13 year-old Abigail Breslin who will be filling the adorable side-kick quotient and second of all, Emma Stone is made-up like every college boy's dream - goth eye-liner, tight jeans and a fuck-you attitude. When the girls continually outsmart the boys and keep stealing their cars, they decide that instead of going round and round, they should join forces and head to Pacific Playland together. The reason Wichita wants to take her little sister there is because in all the chaos of surviving, Little Rock never got the chance to be be a kid - what better place to do that than a potentially zombie-free amusement park? So they head west and as they near the park their exteriors soften and they learn the importance of family.

I kinda sorta wish that last part wasn't true but all the same Zombieland is an utterly charming movie. I guess I should come clean now and admit that Zombieland isn't really much of a horror film, it's a quirky road comedy whose framing device happens to be the apocalypse. I can think of worse ideas to hinge a quirky comedy on but what surprises me is that despite the script being a collection of mostly unconnected bits it is still very effective and really quite funny. One of my favorite bits is a throw-away montage where the four leads take turns driving and commandeering the radio. Jesse Eisenberg's unmanly description of his shaving habits and Abigail Breslin explaining Hannah Montana to an incredulous Woody Harrelson don't really have anything to do with zombies but they are incredibly funny. I won't ruin the rest of the jokes for you because alot of them are really quite funny (the celebrity cameo which I also won't ruin sorta makes the movie, despite being a non-sequitur). The humour is specifically irreverent (apparently screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick also hate the consistency of coconut) so while the writers enjoy reveling in Woody Harrelson lampooning his own tough guy persona and the violence he inflicts on the undead, they spend even more time spinning quickie gags. Take for example the rules by which Eisenberg's character lives by; early on Fleischer introduces a stylistic device in which the rules are superimposed over the action in silver lettering. It feels like it might get old but mostly retains its freshness simply because the script never abandons its quirkiness; then there's Eisenberg and Harrelson's rapport and the mostly muttered comments the former has for the latter. The movie is full of almost inaudible "that's adorables" and "charmings".

In fact if I had one complaint it's that there aren't enough zombies. Though the film's zombies and production values suggest Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, a closer model might by Thom Eberhardt's Night of the Comets. The zombies serve the comedy like waiters at a restaurant. We get vague hints about why it happened: "Patient zero took a bite of a contaminated burger at a gas'n'gulp" but the zombies were really just paving for the story to drive over. For a film called Zombieland the movie is about 60% other stuff. During this time the zombies are mostly a peripheral element to introduce humour and get us thinking about the warm-and-fuzzy conclusion, which I guess to be fair isn't quite as bad as all that. Considering it comes after Woody Harrelson destroying a fried twinkie stand and as its delivered by Jesse Eisenberg, it can't be all that precious. Eisenberg makes for a trying hero at times and I feel like the movie would be better with maybe half of his near-constant voice-over. The only other thing that bothered me was that the soundtrack and a few of the gags date the movie. In ten years this movie will be as much a time capsule as a zombie film. The soundtrack (which I still kinda liked) is full of bands with success still fresh in everyone's mind to the point that their placement in the film smelled of market research; I can't imagine the Metric and Doves albums that the featured songs were taken from had been in stores for more than a week or two before being inserted in the movie during post-production.

But really its the sense of fun that pervades every second of Zombieland that won me over. Not only does Ruben Fleischer take his job as director of zombie killings seriously but he has the production values to back it up. His use of slow-motion is funny and intense, as is his toy stoere color scheme and the childish sense of wonder attached to each stop on the foursome's journey. And best of all his technical prowess overcomes the slackerish quality of the story, making it a sort of nerd's delight. It's the first movie I can think of that's clearly for, by, and about obsessive dorks. And that is probably why I came away from the movie brimming with good cheer. The movie finally embraces the kind of cult of good spirit that surrounds zombie film addicts. We are generally an affable bunch; I know that whenever I host a zombie movie watching party I do feel a sense of family with the freaks who congregate in my living room. Because then we're not freaks - the freaks are the normals out there who don't like eating vegan cake shaped like a severed head while watching Bare Behind Bars. What better way to find who to call when the zombies come then by seeing who most enjoys the films? I've recently come to see the importance of people who will sit down to watch whatever horrid film you've unearthed and can't wait to tuck into. Take note, readers, anyone who will sit through the works of Jean Rollin, Jesus Franco and Nagisa Oshima with you might just be your soulmate.

And though, like The Road, overt sentimentality isn't exactly what you want in a movie about the end of the world, it isn't unwelcome. This is a movie that celebrates the twitchy, OCD fanboys who come to zombie films in droves. Eisenberg is the nerd who lives (Harrelson his violent, snack-food loving inner child/idealized self), the audience surrogate, who in an equally implausible turn of events saves the day and gets the girl. What zombie loving nerd can't get behind that? Unlike another Harrelson-starred apocalypse film, 2012 (which makes a brief cameo in Zombieland), we have to care about the characters because they're us!  Sure, I'd have liked a little more ass-kicking and a more palpable sense of danger, but if you take out the heart of a zombie film, you wind up with Undead or Flesheater and for once the little zombie film that could had a major studio behind it. It was a victory all around as far as I'm concerned and I left Zombieland feeling great about life...then I told all my friends about it.

Nuclear Families I Have Known: This Year In Chaos

In my review of Time of the Wolf, I confessed a weakness for post-apocalyptic stories in greyscale. I should like to confess another weakness, the one I harbour for writer Cormac McCarthy. He is in my not-at-all-humble opinion, our greatest living author, though I admit to not having nearly as many books as I should; I don't know if you've guessed this or not but I'm a touch more into cinema than literature. I like all his books but I'd have felt comfortable with that assessment based solely on the strength of his two finest novels. The first, Blood Meridian, is quite unlike anything ever written and is one of the most beautifully harrowing pieces of prose I've encountered. The second, The Road, is one of the most polarizing books in recent history. When it was announced that John Hillcoat, Nick Cave's favorite filmmaker and director of The Proposition, would be adapting it for the big screen, a similar love-it-or-hate-it reaction was due to be elicited from everyone who saw it. I was encouraged by the many flags that kept going up around the production in the year and a half leading up to its release. The first was that much of the shooting would take place in my home state because why CG up a hellacious vision of a dying planet earth when Pennsylvania already looks one? Next was that the film would be delayed a full year before release. That made sense because you don't want to release this film in the height of the summertime. Then right around October a smarmy film critic (sort of like me, but, you know, he gets paid...and he hated The Road) came bustling into a coffee shop I was sitting in looking like Christmas had been cancelled. He had just come from a preview screening of The Road and seemed offended by the images it had placed in his head, specifically because they were planning to release it around Thanksgiving. That cinched it for me and finally that year waiting ravenously paid off when I sat down to devour The Road.

The Road
by John Hillcoat

A man and his son wander in and out of towns, trying to stay in sight of a road that will lead them south. They're in America but it doesn't particularly matter. The world has ended; plants and animals are dead, as are most people. The few that remain are by and large cannibalistic scavengers who leave meal to meal. The man lives with the memory of his dead wife and knows that his role as a father is much more important than anything else. Not only does he have to teach his son about morality in a world where there is none but he has to keep him alive even as they encounter gangs, harsh weather, disease, starvation and unpredictable natural occurrences like forest fires and earthquakes. As they get further south and the man's health deteriorates he has to make sure he doesn't leave his boy at the mercy of the elements without instilling in him the right kind of knowledge and the right level of mistrust. As they encounter more people who are less monstrous than the gangs the boy comes to see that maybe there's hope for people after all.

Not much to it, really. On paper The Road sounds a mite aimless and in truth I was put off by the lack of continuity between the edits but that was quite literally one of two complaints I had. The Road the book has a linear structure but it is just a series of encounters between the man, his son and whatever new horror is over the horizon. So without McCarthy's voice dictating the proceedings the film does feel a little like recreation rather than reinterpretation. Honestly though I was sort of looking forward to that. John Hillcoat does what needed to be done with a book like The Road, which is gorgeously written and replaces lengthy passages with incredibly photographed exteriors - in essence trading one lushness for another. And the cinematography and design are really something. Javier Aguirresarobe's brilliant colour scheme matches the film's relationship with hope; sometimes it flickers, sometimes it's gone. The otherworldly amber that shows up in the sky and the water and eerie night. Further underscoring the importance of the film's thesis is Nick Cave & Warren Ellis' score which is a thing of minimalist genius and poignancy. Critics tended to harp on it for being too naked and emotional but I think it's the best work they've done (as well as Aquirresarobe, Hillcoat and Mortensen) and to see the movie as being too emotional or dire is to miss the point entirely. It's the end of the world! You didn't really think we'd all get ripped, grow mohawks and ride motorcycles, did you?
I think what probably caught people off guard is how The Road was advertised. I knew as soon as they appeared that the trailers featuring all the stock footage floods and fires was bullshit; a way to get the 2012 crowd into arthouses. Even Hillcoat lamented this decision; he directed the movie, he knew what it was like, he's gone on record as being opposed to CG-laden farces like Avatar on principle. The CGI in The Road is unobtrusive, which is how it should be always. Hillcoat puts so much stock in just the great locations and the prowess of his actors. The locations go a long way toward extending the feel of the movie. You're watching dead plants and grey skies for literally the entire film, which is meant to elicit feelings of despair. Personally I love the look of it and have always loved the look of landscapes overwhelmed by ice and dead trees. If you don't love the look instantly you've got to get through it, just like the boy and his father. The performances are, like the effects, subtle to the point that at times it's easy to forget you're watching people pretend. Bit players like Guy Pearce, Garrett Dillahunt and Michael K. Williams are awesome but the leads make the character actors seem almost small by comparison; though I have to say that they have one scene a piece and leave such a strong impression is really admirable. Garrett Dillahunt is our Warren Oates. Viggo Mortensen carries off the role of the father with such panache; I've seen The Road three times and I'm blown away by just how normal he is. Kodi-Smitt McPhee is great and I think someone has to be congratulated on just how like Charlize Theron, who plays his mother, he looks. Hillcoat and his leads make the familial relation heartbreaking, which is the point despite the overwhelming cries of "too much" from some critics. It's the end of the world, you're telling me you wouldn't get emotional? That's what I thought. So while I can see people being thrown by the rather grizzly implications of the cannibal gangs and the basements with people stored like meat, that's not what the film is about. Though my second point of contention is in the treatment of the cannibals. In the book there's a nightmarish episode involving a baby that Hillcoat removed in favour of a fast-paced non-sequitor; I get why he did it (the cruelty of the world was already well-established, making it almost redundant) but I still wish he had left it in.

The script makes it clear almost immediately what lies at the heart of the conflict. One of Mortensen's first lines is "the boy is my charge - if he has not the word of god, then god never spoke." Well guess what? God never spoke! Penhall focuses all his energy on making it clear that it's people who we answer to, not god. One could make the case that whatever brought about the walking end times that our heroes traipse through could have been prevented if the people in charge could have learned what the boy does by the film's conclusion. The film is about people and how crucial being humane is; the mock prayer midway through the film is as close to a message that the movie has: "Thanks....people." If The Road can be said to teach anything it's that though we've fucked up just about everything we as people have encountered, we have to work within it to help each other; people need to be nicer to people. And because the film's exclusive focus is on people and not the supernatural or superficial, the film is necessarily dark. I also think that considering that The Book Of Eli just came out, it's important to see films that don't put emphasis on re-fucking up the world the same we did last time. The Road posits that people fucked us all with their various habits (carried over in cannibalism - the capitalism of the post-apocalypse, if you'll allow) we need to abandon them if we have any hope of doing this again. There's a scene that takes place in a church towards the end in which the most memorable occurrence is the father spitting up blood - god's not helping him any. That said I'm in tune with the politics of the book and the film. The Road asks people to confront darkness; if you're alone in the dark, you tend to think of the things most dear to you and any film that encourages you to do that isn't really all that grim. If you leave The Road feeling depressed, chances are you don't believe in people.

This isn't a film for everyone but I will say it is a film for people I like. You have to be able to see through cannibals and starvation and greyness to be able to see the love between these two. That said the movie does cannibals and starvation and greyness quite well. It's like Time of the Wolf with twice the budget and as with that lovely and sorrowful tale, this is maybe my favorite kind of film. I can see where your complaints come in, but unless you wanted just a little more violence....you're wrong.

Gypsys & Goatmen I Have Known: This Year In Chaos

2009 was an unprecedented year for come-backs. Many of them were not so great; James Cameron's ego made the ridiculous Avatar and Peter Jackson showed everyone that he had lost his mind with The Lovely Bones. On the plus side Kathryn Bigelow got her dignity back with the excellent The Hurt Locker, John Woo returned to form and then some with Red Cliff, and Sam Raimi returned to kick the horror genre's ass with Drag Me To Hell. I had all but written him off to the netherworld of comic book adaptations and producing less-then-stellar audience-less horror fare like Boogeyman, The Messengers and 30 Days of Night. Sam made two of my all-time favorite films The Evil Dead and The Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn but after that went down-hill quick. Sam left behind the horror elements of his first two films in favor of the slapsticky streak that made his first films so brilliantly off-beat. What Sam did best was horror that jumped out at you, screamed and flailed then pissed off; once you calmed down, repeat. He shouldn't ever have left the horror genre; his forays into the superhero genre (Darkman, Spiderman and its sequels) and a few others (For Love of the Game, Crimewave, The Quick & The Dead) were far less successful. In fact his only successful films after Evil Dead 2 were two taut thrillers A Simple Plan and The Gift. Given the difference in tone between The Gift and Spider-Man 2, I guess it was only a matter of time before he finally merged them again for another successful outing - his problem wasn't that he had turned his back on his roots, but that he had made the real horror and bombastic comedic elements too disparate. Something clicked though last year and he figured out that he needed to merge them and he got back to the magic he used to create; Sam Raimi is nothing if not a magician of the macabre. His first trick: giving me the opportunity to approach a ticket window, look at the man behind the window and say: "Drag Me To Hell!"

Drag Me To Hell
by Sam Raimi

In a brilliant red herring of a prologue a mexican family brings their sick looking boy to a seer called Shaun San Dena. He stole a necklace from a gypsy then everything in his life went to hell - excruciating pun intended there, friends. Shaun knows he's being haunted by a Lamia and tries a speedy exorcism but alas, the great demon is too cunning and takes the boy to a fiery nether-region via a crack in the floor which seals up immediately afterward. Shaun stares through the immaculate floor to the horned creature below and vows revenge. And that is how you start a film. Jump ahead forty years. Feisty former farmgirl Christine Brown has a hopelessly average existence that leans towards nice. She works for a bank, has a coin-collecting professor boyfriend, Clay, a lovely home and a cat. She's up for a promotion but the shit-eating new guy has her beat in the ass-kissing department. If she wants that assistant-manager position she's gonna have to start making the tough decisions - that's bank speak for denying people loans and hope. Her chance comes when an elderly and frankly kind of gross old woman called Sylvia Ganush arrives asking for a third extension on a loan - the men with the moving trucks have shown up to cart all her earthly possessions away. Christine decides this is her one chance and puts her foot down for the first and what might be the last time in her young life.

Sylvia Ganush is a proud old dame and doesn't take kindly to women a third of her age shrugging her off. She stoops to begging on her knees for Christine to give her another extension - this backfires. Christine is so put off by the old woman's shameless display that she calls security - big mistake. That night Sylvia is waiting in the backseat of Christine's car and after a deliciously Raimi-esque struggle, steals a button from the young girl's coat and says something about sicking a Lamia on her. Needless to say Christine is more than a little spooked; you don't need to have seen the prologue to know how bad this looks. She makes Clay stop at a fortune teller called Rham Jas just to see if, maybe on the off chance that Mrs. Ganush wasn't just a kook, she's been cursed. Rham Jas puts on a big show of deflecting Clay's cynicism with his mystic shtick but he shuts down when he sees into Christine's immediate future - she doesn't have one, you see. He stops the session and offers to give her money back but he refuses to go any further with the operation. Clay tries his hardest to calm her down but Christine simply isn't listening to reason anymore - the nightmares she has about a gypsy in her bed and fly going in her mouth freak her out, and so does the noisy gust of wind that knocks over everything in her house, not to mention Christine herself. The final straw comes the next day at work when a projectile nosebleed covers her boss while he's in the middle of complimenting her on a loan she's completed and for telling that gypsy to go fuck herself.

She tries to apologize to Sylvia, but the vindictive gypsy died just hours after the attack in the parking lot. Another trip to Rham Jas reveals that the Lamia takes three days to work its mojo before taking her soul. She's already lost one...two to go. Rham Jas thinks he might know who to talk to about the goat but he's gonna need money to convince her to come out retirement. But it shouldn't be too hard as she's been waiting for a rematch for forty odd years. In the meantime, who's for a bunch of classic Sam Raimi jolts and scares, not to mention one of the most awesome sound design jobs in history? I took some friends to see this movie after I saw it on opening night - yeah, that's right, I was there on opening night, I've been waiting for this movie since the fourth grade - and one of their responses was that it was not like a movie at all but literally like demons were coming to get him and I couldn't agree more. Sam really outdid himself with this one. In fact the only thing missing from this movie was the cut-throat tone of the first two Evil Dead movies. In those films you got the sense that everyone was fair game and nothing, no matter how depraved, was out of bounds. In Drag Me To Hell, a lot of truly terrifying and grim stuff happens, but it's hard not to picture Sam Raimi laughing just out of the frame. Which in a way makes the experience fun in a different kind of way because it gives the impression that he's enjoying being on just as much as we die-hards are enjoying the nods in our direction - the outline of the tools on the walls of the shed and the use of Sam's old Oldsmobile Delta 88 being just two. Now, all they needed was Bruce Campbell...

That sense of fun also extends to the performances. Alison Lohman gives it her all as Christine Brown and hits all the right notes at the right times - she oozes a kind of demented determination that is never not fun to watch. Whether she's lying her way through dinner or digging up the body of an old woman, she has a wonderful dead-pan delivery. What's especially great is the sincerity of the other actors she interacts with; everyone else is a type and they've all been turned to eleven, making Christine seem like the only sane one even as she's hallucinating eyeballs in her desert. Justin Long as Clay is hysterical because of the way he just cuts through all of the mysticism surrounding his girlfriend's problem. He's so utterly normal and a hilarious foil to the craziness that happens everytime he turns his back. Then there are his parents. Molly Cheek, who plays his mom, gets some of the best lines. She's a stereotype of the "when are you going to settle down" variety and a welcome one. Her insistence that Clay deserves better than Christine, who will always be a farm girl to the older woman, is a riot like the one-sided conversation Christine overhears between Clay and his mom. The brow-beating she gives him at every opportunity is hilariously over-wrought. Dileep Rao is great as a put-upon psychic who isn't prepared for his bullshit to be quite as real as it turns out to be. David Paymer as her boss (the hilariously named Jim Jacks) is wonderfully understated and Reggie Lee as Stu, the new guy who's angling for the same promotion as Christine is just awesome. His nit-picking and wordless "Fuck You's" are hilarious in an everyone-knows-this-guy kind of way. Lastly seasoned theatre actress Lorna Raver chews the scenery with aplomb as Sylvia Ganush; she's easily the best horror movie villain all year. And who doesn't love a goatman? Honestly. I even like the shitty ones from The Devil Rides Out and Vengeance of the Zombies so to see one carried off with this much panache was a real treat.

But of course the real kicker is that Drag Me To Hell is legitimately, awesomely, hilariously terrifying. See as many movies as me and you're likely to not find a good deal scary anymore, even stuff that used to do the trick. You wear yourself down a good portion of the time until all that's left are the memories of when you were scared. I saw Drag Me To Hell twice, both with theatre surround and a big screen, and I had just as much fun the second time as the first. Sam spends just the right amount of time on exposition (about fifteen minutes) and then we, like Christine, start our descent into the belly of the beast. I guess it should be said that he starts with an antique Universal Studios logo, which gets us into an Evil Dead state of mind. Really what Drag Me To Hell is about is loving classics; the story is fairly predictable, but I think that's sort of the point. Sam and his brother Ivan filled the script with a number of well-worn tropes and pretty loud character types but all the better to fuck with you, my dear. It makes sense in the context of a racist culture like ours to have a gypsy as the villain - it's a tradition as old as the Universal Horror films of old. Who were the harbingers of evil in The Wolf Man? Dracula? I also love having a laugh at the expense of this country's normal and rich and so to see a bank as the cause of all this trouble is not only timely but edifying. The film's message - Banks send you to hell - is one for the ages. The last bit of classic mischief Sam gets up to is in the film's conclusion. Obviously I won't spoil it but let's say it's just as tasty whether you know its coming or not and it fits the movie like a glove.

Drag Me To Hell is about as charming as horror films get - a rusty master gets back to doing what made his name and spares us no scare. The film drips with gooey special effects and joke vomit and I happily let it hit me in the face - this marks the first time that Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger's special effects haven't bothered me - and if for no other reason than that, Drag must be considered a success. Every line, every jolt is there to be devoured by those who appreciate this kind of thing. Sam and his cast and crew are so committed to the premise and to lulling you into sleep so they can jump out from under the bed that it's hard not to fall in love. I hear Sam's gearing up for another Evil Dead film. Though the ticket taker will hear me say "One for The Evil Dead" inside I'll be screaming "Drag Me To Hell!"