Hausy & Hopky

In the 1980s, there were a whole lot of two things: terrible horror films and remakes. I tell you I’ve discovered something that combines both of these things, Wings Hauser, zombies and so much more. What I’m talking about is two films called Mutant (1984) and Nightmare At Noon (1987), one a cheesy horror film the latter a fucking remake of the former, with the same two leads. When Mutant came out and no one saw it, someone said: “You know what this is missing? That one guy from Bladerunner And Helicopters! And I hear George Kennedy’s doing pictures for a song, let’s get him on the phone. He can play a sheriff, like he likes to.” And by god if he didn’t get those things. Trouble was he also got one of the least creative B-picture aces Greece had to offer, Nico Mastorakis. At least actor-come-director John “Bud” Cardos had a little more flair than this guy when he made Mutant, and when I say a little, I mean a little. The pairing of 'stars' Wings Hauser & Bo Hopkins, a collaboration I've dubbed the Hausy & Hopky connection, provided us with hollywood's first pairing of two middle aged stoners with no chemistry whatsoever; a sort of coke-head's answer to Cheech and Chong.

Mutant
by John "Bud" Cardos

Wings and his brother are a couple of cardigan wearing city boys who’re vacationing in the south for some reason. I say this because they both seem to hate every second of their time there, especially when some blowhards in a truck run their mustang off the road, forcing them to spend the night. Anyway, the younger of the two, Mike (Lee Montgomery looking as much like an 80s teen as one can look) discovers a body, but when they alert the sheriff (Bo Hopkins), it has been replaced with a very much alive street person. Needless to say, they want to leave as soon as possible, but as their car needs whatever mechanic’s tools lifts ones car from a creek, they’ll have to spend the night in a motel, where Mike is abducted in the middle of the night. From here on in, it’s up to Wings, the sheriff and a bartender/schoolteacher to see what’s causing people to disappear, reappear and then turn blue and murder people. Not a terribly original plot, and the science is a bit shoddy (chemicals + water supply = zombies?), but the zombies attacking en masse has some uniqueness to it. The zombies have some personality. Their look and movements put them halfway between Dawn Of The Dead and Demons which means they are a reasonably spooky threat. On the whole it’s just no good because you could care less what happens to the people. Wings Hauser plays a slack-jawed asshole, so it’s hard to route for him even if he is squaring off against even more contemptible southern stereotypes or a lot of little kid zombies.

Nightmare At Noon
by Nico Mastorakis

I’m completely baffled as to why anyone would remake Mutant, but they did it, with both Wings and Bo practically reprising their original roles. Wings and his aggravating spouse are a couple of cardigan wearing city folks vacationing in a southern town for some reason. I say this because they both seem to hate every second of their time there, especially when they stop at a restaurant and see one of the regulars drive a steak knife through a waitress’ hand. Meanwhile out in a van on the outskirts of town, an albino (Brion James from Bladerunner) with a lot of men in jumpsuits carrying guns contaminate the water supply with some green stuff. When Wings’ wife drinks the water and becomes a crazy, it’s up to Wings, the sheriff (George Kennedy), a drifter (Bo Hopkins) and the sheriff’s deput daughter to see what’s causing people to go crazy and shoot everyone. The plot and effects are stolen and the direction is so listless I felt like I was watching an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger. Nico Mastorakis is one of the laziest directors I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve had my share. It’s only the truest ineptness that allows gunfights, car and helicopter chases, zombie knife fights and constant explosions (CONSTANT!) seem so completely boring that one forgets they’re watching an action film. Also, there are some bits of weirdness that damn this film from the beginning, the biggest piece being a sheriff not noticing Wings Hauser carrying a shotgun around, everywhere he goes. He’s just copping a “fuck-you, small town yokels” attitude and toting the biggest gun for miles around and NO ONE THINKS TO ASK HIM NOT TO!!! 

Not only that, he acts like he’s acting reasonable. The strange turn the movie takes at the end makes this feel like Mastorakis wanted this to be a cross between a zombie film and a western, but because the pacing, tone, acting, production design, script, direction are all so lame that its sub-primetime-television in it’s execution. Lord knows why Bo and Wings re-teamed for this winner, but clearly no one has learned their lesson.

Ed Cahn & Bernard Gordon

I watched a film recently which that pleasantly surprised me. Surprise after surprise met me when I delved deeper into its history. The film, Zombies of Mora Tau, 1957, directed by little known B genius Ed Cahn should be a lot better known than it is. Cahn made dozens of B pictures in his lifetime, not the least of which is Invisible Invaders, which the second half of this review will concern. Cahn was, as others have suggested, a successful version of Ed Wood, making sci-fi, westerns and war pictures, garnering at least decent commercial success. Among his 124 credits as the man in the chair we have Creature With The Atom Brain, Invasion of the Saucermen, and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. Cahn, though not exactly Marcel Carne was talented enough to occasionally make a film whose weaknesses were easily overlooked in favor of it’s strengths, which given their subject matter were often considerable. One such example of his competence and strong style was Zombies of Mora Tau, which I found simply because it had the word 'zombie' in the title. More interesting still is that when it ran on TCM it was side by side with another film from around the same time called The Man Who turned To Stone, which matched Zombies for it’s charm, and workmanlike quality. I found out soon after that that their similarities could be explained by the fact that they shared a writer: Bernard Gordon. Gordon was a screenwriter for universal who was blacklisted two pictures into his career; he was turned over to HUAC by his boss William Alland. He wrote much of his body of work under the pseudonym Raymond T. Marcus. Gordon deserves props for being the first screenwriter to propose that zombies beget other zombies and for showing us an extemporaneous 50s movie romance that makes sense. Cahn deserves similar praise for bringing two wholly original zombie films to the screen while the world waited for George A. Romero.

Zombies Of Mora Tau
by Ed Cahn

A woman visits her aunt in an African coastal town where she lives in a mansion with her serving staff. She's greeted by all kinds of weird; her chauffeur runs a guy down en route to the house and everyone seems real keen on forgetting the whole thing ever happened; the closest thing resembling an explanation from the couple driving is that the man was one of “them”. Meanwhile out on the water, a band of aquatic scumbags celebrate the commencement of a plan to steal diamonds from the wreckage of a forgotten ship. Legend has it in fact that the men who drowned guard the wreckage to keep scavengers like our square-jawed heroes away from the goods. Pretty straight forward stuff: the men encounter the zombies and our heroines in the manse. The zombies are pretty well done, technically that is. They remain partially enshrouded in darkness for a good deal of their screentime and some of the shots of them emerging from the jungle and the sea were pretty cool. As for Gordon’s script, the behavior of his characters is believable under the circumstances and the aforementioned romantic subplot is hardly romantic and helps move things along. After all, if you were rich, wouldn’t you ask the most beautiful women you knew to marry you?

Invisible Invaders
by Ed Cahn

In this movie, zombies are again in the limelight, but this time it’s something more ominous than a vendetta. This time the dead walk the earth because Aliens are taking over the world. They first inhabit the body of a scientist (John Carradine) who warns his old partner that things better change or some stock footage of the apocalypse will roll in. It’s up to three scientists and John Agar to hole up in a bunker and see what reveals the aliens beneath the dead skin. Ok, plot’s kind of…cool? Silly? I don’t know, but, that’s not why I watch these films (though a good one never hurts and the bad ones always do). I watch these films to see the zombies (and the racism). The zombies are pioneer zombies; out of the jungle, in business suits, turning man against his brother, wounds still fresh. They can even be kind of creepy. Fancy that. Present in Invaders is just about everything Romero would use in Night, Dawn & Day of the Dead, save for the idea of Zombies turning people into Zombies. Military complex, holing up in a small space to hold over the crisis and turning against one another in the process, leaving safety for ill-fated rescue attempts, zombies in plainclothes. The only difference here is that aliens are bringing about the trouble directly in Invaders. We're never quite sure what causes them in Night, though there are some pretty strong overtones of science-gone-awry. But that's talk for another day. At least John Agar is coy about his idea of courtship.

A Note For Filmmakers To Be

In setting out on my quest to watch every zombie movie ever made (unless I find them and watch the first few minutes and the DVD player becomes so clogged with vomit and disapproval that the movie stops playing and returns itself to Netflix) I found a good number that were made by first time crews. These people have an enthusiasm unlike any other seasoned band of filmmakers and are brimming with zeal and appreciation for the trailblazers of the genre, but one thing they don’t possess is any concept of quality. God bless them they try so hard and if I were a filmmaker from the 80s with a stack of cash to spend on my first zombie film I would probably have produced the same results: A huge show of the films I worshipped, an overabundance of reasonably realistic looking gore effects, a cast of friends, a cameo from the only genre non-celebrity who returned my calls, and a plot that was actually semi-interesting. I actually have a friend who’s hard at work interning for film studios just so he can make these films. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is so that if you find yourself part of a crew of filmgeeks who’s just won the lottery, for god’s sake hire actors and a screenwriter who can both deliver reasonable dialogue. Gore will not be a problem if I know film geeks; you’ve had a lot of practice. Let’s have a look at a pair of these efforts and try and see where they went wrong.

Flesheater (or Revenge of the Living Dead)
by Bill Hinzman

This film, made by amateurs under the direction of Bill Hinzman (yes that Bill Hinzman) who was the first zombie encountered in George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead (“they’re coming to get you, Barbara”). Well, Hinzman’s first time directing wasn’t nearly as original or successful as his first employer. Hinzman made a film called The Majorettes from a script by Romero’s one time scriptwriting partner John Russo. Well, if the fact that I’ve never once in my life heard of this picture is any indication, investers weren’t exactly banging down the door looking for the cemetery zombie to direct another film. So it was with his own money, his own script and his own hand that he made Flesheater or Revenge of the Living Dead (apparently he wasn’t above shameless cash-ins). The story is as follows: some college kids go drinking and screwing in the woods and a zombie (Hinzman) kills and turns them one by one. Ta-Da! Anyway, we see breasts, kids getting murdered and eating their father, and the only two original characters get killed in a Night-inspired ending. The film doesn’t have a piece of believable character development or dialogue and the story progresses like it’s being told by a drunken movie fan to a basement full of equally drunken friends. If Hinzman had spent his money on a decent script and real actors instead of overweight twenty somethings pretending to be teenagers, he might have made a decent film.

The Dead Next Door
by J.R. Bookwalter

The title would have been good if it had anything to do with the film, but it doesn’t. J.R. Bookwalter has had one long and pointless career. His first taste of celluloid was as an uncredited zombie in Day Of The Dead. Well, apparently this was a dream come true for the twenty year old nerd, because three years later he and a bunch of friends got together with a small fortune, a small army of extras, and a plethora of gore effects and made the best-worst film ever made. The Dead Next Door, starring for a few minutes Scott Spiegel of Evil Dead fame, concerns a group of police officers in the Zombie Squad, dedicated to killing the large number of ghouls who have taken over their town. The crew, led by Lt. Raimi (get it), isn’t very good at their job as one of them seems to drop every minute. They also bankroll the kind of experiments Dr. Logan performs in Day Of The Dead, teaching zombies to talk, etc. Anyway, the cops split their time between watching The Evil Dead in the station, combating protestors who are for some reason opposed to killing zombies and uncovering and thwarting a cult who worship the zombies. The gore is pretty marvelous considering; I mean, it's not quite Savini, but it's pretty goddamn gross. The dialogue is poorly written, delivered and is entirely uncalled for most of the time. The story is actually pretty interesting and were it not for the fact that I know the kind of people who made this movie I’d say it was a pretty poignant comment on the level of hero worship that goes into horror films, that continues to this day. The J.R. Bookwalters of yesterday, making incredibly gory zombie films to show their love of Sam Raimi and George Romero are just the predecessors or the Eli Roth’s of today, making incredibly gory torture films to show their love of Dario Argento and Ruggero Deodato. So in that sense, and in the much better than average gore effects, The Dead Next Door is brilliant, but unfortunately I think at the time Bookwalter thought he was just making a second rate zombie film. 

The fruits of Zombie Night '07

Here are the two new films we watched during Zombie Night, the rest were just old hat (and old favorites). What a blast we had. Shame the two films I made a point of having available for our viewing pleasure were such turkeys.

Zeder
by Pupi Avati

What a muddy mess of a picture this is. Ok, so Pupi Avati I know solely for his directing the Lynchier-than-most giallo House Of Laughing Windows which featured midgets, jarred oddities and vagaries surrounding a coven of witches. This picture, shot on video, relied pretty heavily on weirdness over gore, but there was some of that too, all in all not totally backwards and even a little creepy. With that in mind I got a hold of what I thought was his take on the zombie movie. What I actually got a hold of was one of the slowest, most confusing giallo I’ve seen yet. It’s one of these pictures where a reclusive billionaire is trying to attain the secret to longer life for some fucking reason. Anyway a guy inherits his typewriter and then gets wrapped up in a mystery he’s nothing to do with and then finds himself in a lot of porno set-ups and then the picture is an hour and 15 minutes old and we are no closer to figuring out what made Avati think this one would be a big hit. It’s nothing but talk, talk, the odd murder & talk. The only zombie was really just the billionaire come back to life and then killing some people off screen. Oh and there’s a subplot with a woman with an injured leg, but I assure you it won’t matter when you hit eject and send this back in the little red and white envelope to whichever sucker thinks this movie has gut-munching.



Grapes of Death
by Jean Rollin

Well, given that Zombie Lake was in Jean Rollin’s future, he could have actually started out much worse than this. Yeah, I was able to predict just about every act of cruelty the film had in store for us, but, the silliness and stark confusion made it worth the hour and a half…sort of. First, we see some people working at a vineyard, one of them has a rash, the other smokes a pipe really well. Anyway, rashy gets on a train where two twenty something French women are already riding. They leave separately and one of them is killed and rashy sits next to the other and then he starts decomposing and festering pretty sickly. She flees and runs away across what looks to be the entire French countryside. She finds a house where an abusive husband has a similar rash and a wife has a smaller one just below her soon-to-be-exposed breasts. The girl tries to help, but the wife just gets pitchforked for her troubles. She runs away, meets with a particularly pusy forehead and a blind girl whose solely purpose is to be stripped of her clothes and crucified on her own door. Then her boyfriend cuts her head off, carries it around and makes out with it. If I Drink Your Blood taught us one thing, it’s that if you spend money on a severed head, you’re going to see a whole lot of it before the end of things. She meets a spooky lesbian who sets up what could have been a humorous outfit changing scene only to discover she’s leading the zombies in her town. Then some of the vineyard workers meet the girl, burn the lesbian to death and flee the scene. They come to a vineyard where they’ve slowly figured out is the root of all evil. Slow, gross, confusing, mean, pointless.



I dare you to make sense of this. The only thing i can say in defense of these two reprehensible trips is that now I'm two films closer to having seen every zombie flick ever made.

A Blind Eye

Come with me readers on a journey. It starts in 1099…I’m just kidding it starts in 1971 when for whatever reason Amando De Ossorio took Spain’s fear of the Knight’s templar and turned it into a horror film which became the only Spanish horror film of any repute until Guillermo Del Toro let Spain ride his coattails. It wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but it was original enough and spawned three sequels, don’t ask how. Meanwhile in 2007 I somehow sat through all of these movies and now, in the comfort of my living room, with the lights dimmed just how I like it, with two pieces of toast and a superior movie on my television, I shall share this experience so you never have to do it yourself, not that I discourage curiousity in the face of a horror film.

Tombs Of The Blind Dead
by Amando de Ossorio

We are given the back-story on the “knights from the east” about how they had their eyes pecked out by crows after raping women in the name of the lord in a flashback we have not seen the last of. And then the ‘plot’ starts up. An ugly Spanish couple are lounging poolside when they meet the girl’s old roommate who another flashback tells us did some of that experimenting guys are always wishing more girls did on their own. Well their reunited friend starts hitting on the guy and it makes the first girl feel like a third wheel. Instead of confronting her problem she jumps off the train and runs off to a nearby abandoned ruin and decides to make a life for herself there. But that gets tabled when really cheesy looking skeletons in tattered costumes awake from, well, the dead I guess and kill her. The scene is moody and spooky and the fact that seemingly endless numbers of the things seem to come from nowhere is at least mildly scary, but the skeletal fiends are just too damned goofy looking to be all that scary. Anyway, the girl is found with bite marks all over her and then she comes back to life in the morgue and attacks her old job only to burn to death, for a second time. So then the girl’s friends and a greasy bandit and his uniformly greasy girlfriend go back to spend the night at the villa and they’re killed in the same slow way except the first girl’s friend who makes it to a train which starts to move again just as it’s boarded and it’s occupants massacred. The train makes it town, leaving room for a sequel, which is exactly what director Amando de Ossorio did not do. Oh there was a sequel, but the only thing it had in common with Tombs was the fact that they have the same villain. This movie is lumbering, ugly and mean. People are killed, slowly, stupidly. The villains are implacable and though not invincible, endless. There is no way for this movie to end but bleakly, and the fact that the people we have to sympathize with are disgusting, piggish, vain and petty doesn’t help this film any.
The Return of the Evil Dead
by Amando de Ossorio

The second car in this train wreck The Return is meaner and approaches legitimate scare value occasionally. This time the love triangle is actually a quadrangle consisting of the Mayor of a town that shares its name with the villa from the previous film, the Mayor’s bodyguard, the Mayor’s secretary and a fireworks expert who the secretary once had a fling with named Jack Marlowe. The fireworks guy and the secretary lead the small party of survivors into a large church after the knights come back to life during a celebration occurring on the same night that they were originally blinded, though, this time it was with a torch, not by crows. Anyway, the dead are brought back by a blood sacrifice provided by one of the most disgusting caricatures of a retarded person I’ve ever encountered in a horror film named Murdo. Murdo, the Mayor, his bodyguard and secretary, a young single woman, an expendable guy, his wife and child all take refuge in a church a la George Romero and are slowly whittled down. The demise of the Knights at the end is unexplained, probably for the better and we are forced to see a retarded guy get his head cut off. Go Spain!

The Ghost Galleon
by Amando de Ossorio

Movie number three has even less to do with the knights templar than either of the first two combined and the fact that its called The Ghost Galleon ought to have been my first clue. I thought they might have tried explaining it somehow, but I guess the idea is that the Knights are something like Spain’s Godzilla, just out there somewhere, waiting to attack whatever be-make-upped 30 something that should cross their path. Anyway, some models are performing the worst thought out publicity stunt in history by pretending to be stranded on a dingy awaiting rescue. This plan is being thought out in a dungeon somewhere where the model’s only friend is raped by one of the men behind the scheme, but she seems ok with it, all in all. Anyway, the girls encounter some kind of Ghost Galleon and are killed. The rape victim and three of the heartless ugly Spaniards behind the publicity stunt go looking for them, find the ship and are also killed. Notice the one guy, he's played by Jack Taylor (That sweater! THAT MOUSTACHE! GODS!) What are the bodies of the knights templar doing on a boat? Why does it become dark whenever one boards the titular galleon? Why is there treasure on the ship? What causes the professor’s heart attack? Anyway, this film has one thing that works and one thing only and that is the obviously soundstaged boat exteriors. The boat looks like it’s in the middle of a forest but it is actually creepy, unlike everything else about this piece.
Night Of The Seagulls
by Amando de Ossorio

Ok, film number 4 is actually my favorite and not just because it has a slightly more favorable view of retarded people. The prologue to Night of the Seagulls has some foreboding but is completely irrelevant, both to story and the templar mythology. A man and his buxom bride stop to knock on the door of a house for help of some kind, we’ll never learn why. The help they receive is actually from some horseback riding gentlemen with crosses on their white robes. These guys provide as much help as the blouse the girl sports, which is soon ripped off to give us the film’s first in a long line of forcibly topless women. In the present, a doctor and his wife move into a seaside town where they are most certainly not welcome. The first night in town the doctor’s wife is visited by the town’s retarded man, named Teddy. In Spain. His name is Teddy. Yeah. Anyway, that night the couple hear seagulls and a strange chanting, neither of which make sense given the late hour (someone’s been reading real books). They go to the beach to investigate the noises and witness the first half of a ritualistic murder but leave before the end. Some of the town’s folk try ignoring them completely except for a young brunette named Lucy who offers to be their maid. The doctor tries to get to the bottom of the weirdness when a girl comes to their door seeking refuge and is taken away by the black hooded procession from last night’s beach party. They do the same thing as last night with this new girl, except they outfit her in a see-through silk nightee. Anyway, they try to kill both Teddy and Lucy, but the doctor stops them from being killed initially and bring ‘em home for some Night of the Living Dead and then they both get killed anyway. The doctor and his wife escape on the blind dead’s horses who don’t obey their orders and then they discover their weakness is the giant stone idol in their seaside castle. This is the one movie that could actually work as it’s own film were it not for some much needed exposition. If they had added some other explanation for a town-wide agreement to sacrifice virgins, instead de Ossorio expects people to rely on the evil already set-up in his first three films. Happened once, why not again? But this has a coherence the others do not. Easily the strongest of the series in that some of the images are pretty cool and frightening and the film feels a lot less mean and a lot more tactful. But to say any film is tactful because it doesn't feature explicit rape, children murdered and a scheming retarded person isn't saying anything.

The internet might have just about everything you want but what it lacks is a statement from the late de Ossorio explaining how he arrived at the conclusion that prompted him to make these movies, because I for one have some questions. The series as a whole: FUCKING TERRIBLE. Why make such a big fucking deal about the fact that these guys can only hear you if everybody screams and whimpers like a puppy being hit with a baseball bat. Gimmicks are supposed to mean something. Then there’s the everyone dies thing. What a mean-spirited bully this guy is. Also, the knights templar never change from film to film, but their stories do. How do they get there? And the knight zombies are NOT SCARY! Their hands most glaringly so. They are frail little plasticy things that never bend in any way as if to accentuate the falsehood. Then there’s the pacing; slow as the day is long these movies are. This stems from the impossible slow speed the knights themselves move at. All of this makes for four screamingly awful films, and that’s not even bringing in the atrocious day-for-night photography that accompanies every attack not done on a studio lot. And why is every sound echoed whenever the knights attack? For scare value? Cause all it does is make the film feel like an endless chasm of boredom and like the movie itself will never die, even with fire.

Extra Credit

Beccah turned this report in to me during the winter, before christmas, even. so, i thought it only right to give credit where credit is due and put it up for the world to see. If any of you had done the same, this class might have turned out a little better in the end. Nice Job, Beccah.

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things
1972

Director: Bob Clark

Starring: Alan Ormsby (Alan); Jeff Gillen (Jeff); Paul Cronin (Paul); Anya Ormsby (Anya); Jane Dally (Terry); Velerie Mamches (Val)

Plot: a ridiculously pretentious/ fucked up company of actors go to a cursed island, which is ¾ cemetery. There, their seriously demented/ enragingly pretentious and arrogant douche-bag of a leader plans to awaken the dead with Satanic rituals just for kicks. When obnoxious Alan’s spell fails miserably, they take a dead body back to the rat-infested abandoned cottage in which they’re staying, and proceed to have a grand old time disrespecting the dead—until they actually come alive and start eating the members of the troupe.
Fun facts:
• 1st North American zombie film inspired by George Romero
• Budget was between $40,000 and $70, 000

Reactions:
• Obviously extremely low budget (all I can say is wow regarding the “special effects”)
• The plot moves at a snail’s pace—the zombies don’t even come alive until 10 minutes before the end of the movie, and the acting really isn’t good enough to carry the plot
• The opening scene is pretty great though—it sufficiently confuses you, and sets you up to be tricked by Alan’s joke later. Plus, live burial is always a disturbing topic (having the view from the inside of the coffin is a nice touch)
• The zombies do make a genuinely creepy entrance into the film (extremely late in the game, but whatever). The whole protruding limbs/ rotten-looking flesh is pretty effective when popping out of the dirt (eerie green fog helps too)
• It’s less a zombie movie, and more a commentary on pretentious artists. As the latter, it’s pretty effective (and funny), but it kind of falls short as the former.
• The zombies steal the (now dead) company’s boat at the end…presumably to head toward civilization for a night on the town
• Alan throwing Anya to the zombies, then locking himself in the room where Orville is patiently sitting on the mattress waiting to exact revenge on his ass (probably the best part of the whole movie)
• This movie is hilarious, and the bastards get it in the end

Sequel Season Begins Again

Well, I finally got over myself and saw this, the sequel to my favorite horror film in the last ten years (Save for The Devil’s Backbone (The Ring and Dawn of the Dead are remakes, so they don’t count)). Anyway, here’s what the sequel was up against. 28 Days Later was the first horror film of it’s kind in many ways: Digital video; grainy footage; it was the first fast-running zombie film in 20 years; principles were all unknowns; spookiest opening in years; incredible soundtrack; stunning visuals; believable characters; new cause for zombification; taut plot; riveting ending; average-Joe hero; and the list goes on. Anyway, the odds weren’t just stacked against a sequel, they were dumped and incased in concrete and then turned into a memorial to Danny Boyle. So, I took a hard look at the pros and then saw it. It was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who’s directed three other horror films, one of them, Intacto sounds like a creepy Spanish version of The Cooler with Max Von Sydow. 

28 Weeks Later
by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

The film starts with six people in a dark, eerie farmhouse of indeterminate size and location, four of who are married. The first couple is Don (Trainspotting’s Robert Carlyle) and Alice (Shadow of the Vampire’s Catherine McCormack) whose children were sent on a school trip which puts their minds at ease, kinda. The others are the old couple who own the house, an angry loner named Jacob and a blonde girl whose boyfriend ran out on them days ago. They’re all sitting down to eat when a knock on the door and the screams of a young child give them all a heart attack. Don reluctantly lets the voice in, it belongs to a young boy who eats with his hands and tells them he was chased by a whole shit ton of zombies, who show themselves about 8 seconds later. The music from the ending of the first movie starts up, which can only mean bad news. The infected make short work of the blonde girl and the old couple while Jacob flees, and Alice and the young boy get trapped in a bedroom. Don goes after them and the infected quickly fill the room, giving Don one hell of an ultimatum, which cowardice makes a lot easier. He leaves his wife and the young boy and runs away, his tail between his legs. He watches helplessly from the road as his wife is overtaken by the infected and runs through a field, dozens of the things behind him. Then, as if things weren’t bad enough a bunch more come from over an adjacent hill. He runs to a lake where Jacob is trying to start a boat and jumps in while Jacob falls off the dock and is bitten and then begins attacking the boat as more and more of the infected make it into the lake. The boat motor cuts up some of the buggers in the water, turning the water red and Don gets away. Ok, so...guy from Intacto knows his shit.

The plot is simple after that: The american military has set up a quarantine in Britain where some incredibly lewd snipers are stationed. The most sympathetic of them Doyle (Jeffrey Dahmer himself, Jeremy Renner) and Flynn (The Matrix Sequels’ Harold Perrineau) are friends who seem to be of some importance. Don and Alice’s children Andy and Tammy are sent back to their dad to London, which has recently been reopened after the events of the first movie. Don lies to his children about how their mother bought it and then they go back to London to find a picture of her at their old house. They sneak past the surprisingly inept guards and make it to their house where they find not just pictures of their mother, but mum herself. The soldier’s quarantine her and the most irritating military scientist in the world finds out Alice has something in her blood that makes her immune to the infection. Scarlet (Wicker Park’s Rose Byrne) wants to do tests (ah, what’s a science fiction movie without a protesting scientist who wants to run tests) because they discovered that though she is infected, she still has all her motor skills. The military just needs to hear that she can still spread the disease through her blood and saliva and they want to kill her. Anyway, Don sneaks in to Alice’s room and she spreads her saliva around and Don goes berserk and kills her terribly and escapes, causing a code red, which means everyone has to be killed. It starts with shooting and ends with firebombing. It’s during this time that Doyle’s conscience gets to him and he leaves his post and helps Scarlett, Andy, Tammy and some expendable meat escape. Scarlet believes that the immunity gene lies in one of the children and puts their escape high on their list of priorities.

Ok, what made this film worth the price of admission. First of all, I really like Robert Carlyle and his thick Scottish accent, so any chance to see him act like a regular guy is always rewarding. Second, the visuals were amazing. Fresnadillo knows how to show you something beautiful in the midst of something heinous. I couldn’t believe some of these images; the scenes of the city at night were unbelievable and the scenes of the small party escaping the city at dawn and running away from the firebombing and whenever they found themselves in field (I have a weak-spot for fields). Also Andy’s eyes are a really great image; they are two different colors. Anyway, the fact that the movie was just beautiful made it much easier to sit through this bleak nightmare.

Ok, the major downside: the Americans. Except for Flynn, who escapes this fate because Harold Perrineau is a real actor who doesn’t need direction to act like a human being, all of the Americans are wooden stereotypes. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo might know how to film a cityscape but he can’t direct people worth a damn. Rose Byrne as concerned, caring scientist Scarlet is so fucking aggravating; any scene with her in it reminded me of a Disney film, that is until zombie Don beats her to death with the butt of a rifle. Renner seemed to think he was in a WB program because he acts like a dude for most of the film. For whatever it’s worth I was sad to see him burned alive, so I guess he wasn’t a total wash. Neither of these two sound as if they have a day's experience doing their jobs. The whole film just gets bleaker and bleaker and more disgusting as it goes. And I'll admit I was a little miffed when they tried that helicopter blade through a field of zombies trick. Nightmare City started it, Planet Terror ended it, 28 Weeks should have left it the hell alone. This is not supposed to be an Italian homage, so stop pretending it is. The fewer reminders that Nightmare City ever existed the better and this one provided a few, not the least of which was running zombies. And then there was the heavy-handed military talk. The military seemed to exist to remind the world that Americans are twats and they have really misguided military operations (No Shit!). Watching a colonel give the order to kill everyone in sight, I guess was supposed to represent the idea that you don’t know the difference between a terrorist and a regular person, or an infected and a not…whatever. It was more than the film needed. We know the military sucks and if English was Fresnadillo’s first language the military stuff might have been more poignant.

Entertaining, scary, tense, gory, bleak, beautiful. All in all it could have been much worse, however, I fear for this franchise so Hollywood take heed. NO MORE SEQUELS. If I see Roger Corman’s 28 Minutes Later, I will be very, very upset. Zombies might rise from the dead to tell producers what they think of a third movie. I’ll watch Intacto and see if I couldn’t have seen this coming.