REVIEW: Sleepaway Camp (1973)

Sleepaway Camp sitting on my shelf for about a year now, ever since I picked it up during my crusade to form the world's largest collection of the world's shittiest slasher films. While a noble venture, it ended rather abruptly when I realized that a lot of the world's shittiest slasher films are actually shitty, as opposed to the fun kind of shitty. So, my collection went unheralded, unfinished, and unloved, up until last night when I decided to blow the dust off of my DVD booklet and give this classic a try.

In a bizarre departure from the genre (kind of), Sleepaway Camp does not feature gratuitous female nudity from dozens of nubile 19-year-old camp counselors. Sure, there are counselors around, but the focus of the movie is actually on the summer camp attendees this time, which makes the overt themes of sexuality simultaneously off-putting and revolting. Sure, it has a context and a definite thematic value, but after being weened on films that taught me that all camp-based slasher films must have incredibly hot nude women, it's a little troubling when all the women in this one are thirteen.

Welcome to 1974, when a little boy and a little girl are happily sitting on a tiny boat with their father in the middle of a lake. It's summertime, and the beaches are full with teens, and a lifeguard is taking a girl out for a ride with some water skis. The little boy and girl decide to pull off the prank of pushing their dad into the water, which (of course) capsizes the boat, but all is well. Their dad's friend shouts at them from the beach...but they still don't see that the water-skiing boat is headed directly for them! Before anyone can say "1970s fashion sucks!" the boat slides right through the family, and moments later we see the father's corpse doing a really good version of the dead man's float.

"8 Years Later"

The following is either a great scene or a horrible scene, depending on what you think is "good" versus what you think is "funny." A crazy woman is packing up her two youngins, Ricky and Angela, for a summer at Camp Arawak. Angela isn't actually the woman's daughter; she's (presumably) one of the kids from the opening scene, and the woman is her aunt. Her crazy, crazy aunt. She dresses like she's on her way to Oz, and she speaks like a community theater understudy. I'm not entirely sure what kind of actors the director had to work with, but I can't quite tell if she's supposed to be speaking like a bad actress, or she's just a really bad actress. I guess it depends on the circumstances, but this scene is either deplorable or in some manner sophisticated. I love that kind of apologetic ambiguity in my horror films.

So, off the kids go to Camp Annawanna. (Arawak. Whatever.) It starts off well enough, and Ricky is happy since he's spent other summers there, but Angela is a little different. She's not the bustiest or prettiest of the preteens, although that doesn't stop the pedophiliac chef from bringing her back to the storeroom to show her "something." Luckily, the deviant is interrupted, and hours later gets a vat of boiling water tossed on him. Coincidence? Not in this genre!

Angela, being a little quiet, gets picked on by the other kids, especially Judy the camp slut. In fact, pretty much the only people that don't pick on her are Ricky and his friend Paul, who starts a little camp crush "steady" thing with her. Things are going well, until one of the other campers turns up just shy of alive. After what feels like forever, his death is followed by some of the other nastier campers, and for good measure some campers that seemingly had nothing to do with Angela. Up until this point, we're still not really certain who the killer is; signs point to Angela, but Ricky seems to take the insults to his cousin awfully personally, and he's conveniently never around when the murders take place. I give the movie a measure of credit for not explicitly spelling it out until the very end, because most other movies that play the "Was it them or THEM?" game give it up much earlier. Despite our guesses, we don't really know until the last five minutes or so. And what a last five minutes they are.

This movie, despite being one of the films that really kicked the entire slasher genre into high gear, is incredibly slow. Incredibly incredibly slow. The body count is really low, and they space the suckers out, too. My girlfriend had a ten-minute rule that she instituted about forty-five minutes into the movie, where if someone didn't die at least every ten minutes, she got to turn off the movie -- it's slow enough so that my girlfriend was giving me ultimatums. Luckily, her rule came after the interminably dull and useless baseball scene, which thrilled us with the athletic skills of characters we don't know doing things we don't care about for ten or eleven minutes of screen time. (Although it features the fantastic line: "Eat shit and live, Bill.")

The movie is nothing special, except for the very last scene. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the movie isn't worth watching except for the very last scene. I'm not sure if it actually redeems the movie, but it helps. Spoilers will abound in the next paragraphs, so you can just skip them if you want.


I'll just come right out and say it: Angela isn't the little girl from the opening scene; she's the little boy. He was the only survivor of the accident that killed his father and his sister, and he went to live with the crazy aunt. I'm not sure why she was so messed up, but flashbacks tell us that she didn't want to be raising a second boy along with Ricky, so she somehow warped the fragile, accident-shattered mind of the boy into accepting the new fact that he was a girl. Even worse, there are more flashbacks: we learn that Angela and his sister had caught their father in bed with another man -- the guy that was waiting for them on the beach during the accident. I guess the implication was that this messed up his perception of his own sexuality.

This whole story is so messed up that I can't tell if it's offensive or not. Initially, my first reaction was that the movie was saying that having gay parents will turn children into cross-dressing murderers. Then, I figured that it was really more about the aunt's wackiness that screwed up Angela, and being forced to become a woman. I mean, the movie shows the two men in bed together during the late-game flashback, and it's genuinely portrayed as though it's a really loving relationship; it doesn't show it as something that's negative or naughty or anything. I lean towards thinking that it was just a way to show why Angela might have been attracted to men (although she really didn't seem to be all that attracted to men), since just making her a gay character would have been kind of hard to explain in the context of the story -- easier to have a "well, maybe because of her dad" explanation than also explaining that she just happened to be gay. If she was gay at all, anyway. I mean "he." Maybe the movie was saying that you can make someone trans-gendered by putting them in dresses, which might get back to offensive. Maybe they're saying that kids should get summer jobs instead of wasting their summers at camp.

(Although for twenty bucks you can schedule a live phone call with Felissa Rose, the actress behind Angela, at this here website. Maybe we should call her and ask her what her real motivation was.)

I give up on thinking about this movie.

I'll say one last thing for those of you who don't care about my grad thesis on gender roles in horror films: the last shot in the movie is vastly creepy. That should be enough for those viewers that prefer shallow bloody entertainment.

REVIEW: Mad Monster Party (1967)

Out of all the movies that I knew I was going to be reviewing this holiday season, the one that I was the most excited about was Mad Monster Party. The other Rankin-Bass stop-motion cartoons that everyone knows -- "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Frosty the Snowman," "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" -- were absolute staples of my childhood; I can't remember a year when I didn't watch those. If my family happened to be sitting together in the same room during the holidays, it was probably because one of those was on. You can probably imagine my excitement when I found out that not only did the Rankin-Bass team do a HALLOWEEN MONSTER stop-motion cartoon, they did a FEATURE-LENGTH one!

Sweet Jesus Christ on crutches, this was the longest, hardest ninety minutes I've sat through in a long, long time. I can barely describe the suckitude of this picture in words; I might have to do a finger-painting with my own blood. The only way I can accurately portray the agony of sitting through this is to actually make you sit through it, but I think we'd all be better off pretending that this doesn't exist at all.

This odious piece of entertainment takes mostly takes place on Monster Island, a mysterious Caribbean Island that's ruled by Dr. Frankenstein, played by the venerable Boris Karloff. In the opening, the good doctor discovers a potion that causes things to explode, and declares that he can retire now that he's discovered the secrets of the creation and destruction of life. I guess he never heard of TNT, or chainsaws, or guns, or nuclear bombs, or heroin, or falling from great heights, or blood loss, or the bubonic plague, or watching Mad Monster Party more than once. I thought the destruction of life was the easy part, but I guess things work differently in the animation world.

Since Dr. Frankenstein feels like retiring and living the slothful life, he decides to pass on this great secret formula to his only true heir: Felix Flanken, his nebbishy nephew (shades of the elf that wanted to be a dentist in the "Rudolph" special). Being a smart guy, Dr. Frank comes up with the idea to call together a meeting of the world's greatest monsters to announce his departure from running their coalition. Invited are: Count Dracula, the Werewolf, Dr. Jekyll, the Invisible Man, Frankenstein's own Monster, and his Bride; also attending are Frankenstein's assistant Francesca, his lead butler Yetch, and his crew of skeleton and zombie waiters. So far so good! It sounds like a great time!

Unfortunately, almost the entire thing is flat. Dead flat. Unforgivingly flat. Maybe it's because this was one of the first of the animation specials that they made, but the timing is off, and the writing is deader than a corpse. (Believe me, the jokes in MMP are worse than my "deader than a corpse" gag.) The jokes are not funny, and when they happen to have a little spark it's ruined by horrible, horrible pauses and stutters where the animation has to catch up to the punchline. In the beginning, Doc Frankenstein mentions that he's not inviting the "It" monster to his party, because...something about being a "wild bore" which pun-ified into carrying "wild boars." The joke was so shitty that even I didn't understand it, and I have a Master's Degree in bad jokes from Mad Libs University. (Which is a fully accredited four-year NOUN, by the way.)

If nothing else, the character designs were pretty neat. Doc Frankenstein looked a lot like Karloff himself, and the other creatures looked like suitably stylized versions of their movie counterparts. The one exception is the Monster's Bride (called the Mate in this for some bizarre reason), which is designed to look like Phyllis Diller (who lends her voice to the role). Diller, actually, is probably the one high point in the movie. She acts exactly like the Phyllis Diller that we're used to, except that this time her weird post-joke laugh comes off as an act of defiance against the horrible jokes that the writers gave her. Normally, I'm not one of her biggest fans, but she did make me laugh in this. Once. The only other time I laughed is when Dr. Jekyll first turns into Mr. Hyde, and immeeeeediately smashes a window that he happens to be standing next to -- as if he was somehow instinctively drawn to smashing that specific window.

Aside from those two bits in this sea of drivel, every second of the film dragged on like fingernails across my eyeballs. I gave this movie its entire running length to engage me in a manner other than hatred, and it let me down. This is a boring, stupid, sloppy movie, filled with stupid, unconnected musical sequences, poor animation, and jokes that would make the Cryptkeeper ashamed.

You can avoid this one next October.

REVIEW: The Night Stalker (1972)

It's a shame they brought back "The Night Stalker" as a television series (and not a very good one, I hear) because I really can't imagine Kolchak not being played by Darren McGavin. In preparation of the new release of the old series on DVD, I went into my vast and disorganized video vault and came back out with my copies of the McGavin TV-movies: 1972's The Night Stalker and 1973's The Night Strangler. I've seen both of these movies before, although I was barely paying attention to Strangler -- I think I was busy sending money to charity or adopting homeless kittens or something. Perhaps there was a video game in there. Regardless of my charitable attention-sapping antics, I decided to pop the first of the two back into the ol' DVD spinner and see if it could bring back the Halloween spirit.

The time: 1972. The place: Las Vegas, Nevada. The man: Carl Kolchak, reporter for the Las Vegas Daily News. Kolchak is what one might consider a "loose cannon" type of reporter: always out to get the truth, by any means necessary, and always (or almost always) at odds with the authorities and his very own editor Tony Vincenzo. He's one step above the con men of the world, and you get the feeling that if he weren't working for the Daily News, he'd just be another name in their police blotter column.

Kolchak begins with the perfect "X-Files" hook; he's sitting in a hotel room with a few day's worth of stubble, dictating the story into his always-present tape recorder, and concludes his opening with "Any attempt to verify these events will be unsuccessful." (Or something to that effect.) It might seem old hat nowadays with all the conspiracy types of TV dramas, but it still works; it's a script from Richard Matheson, the man behind I Am Legend and countless other famous stories and scripts.

The story itself begins like any other police procedural: a woman's body was found, in a trash bin, with date and time dictated in Kolchak's narration. Turns out that the body was empty of blood, none of which was found at the scene. Kolchack uses his wits, charms, and favors to get more information out of the police, and more and more bodies begin to turn up with the same problem: no blood. Some of them also have other mysteries around them; one woman's body was found in a sand pit, with no footprints leading to or away from it.

A few more bodies turn up, and as Kolchak's story unfolds he meets with increased resistance from his editor and the police, who want to keep the story of the "vampiric night stalker" under wraps in order to avoid alarming the populace. Kolchak, of course, doesn't believe in vampires; but that starts to end once he and the police actually encounter Janos Skorzeny, the Night Stalker, and realize that he's much more than a man.

Eventually, Kolchak and his FBI friend Bernie (I think he was in the FBI) track the vampire down to his lair, and attempt to do what's necessary. There's a nice semi-twist ending (not in a supernatural way) that surprised me by being, you know, intelligent. I think it's what would have actually happened had the events in the movie occurred, and it was a nice twist that most other movies never even go into.

When I started writing this, I had assumed that there was actually more to the story, but in hindsight it's a pretty simple tale. The vampire kills, and Kolchak and the police try to track him down and stop him, often arguing along the way. Despite its simplicity, the premise really works because of the procedural elements; it's a lot like "Dragnet" was, and to an extent the "Law and Order" franchise. It's very by-the-book and matter-of-fact, and that's incredibly refreshing when compared to the stupidly credulous horror films I normally watch, in which the first reaction to most murders is "OMG WTF it must have been a ghost!!!!!!" I like when characters display a degree of doubt and skepticism that's at least half-realistic.

The other half of the film's success is from Darren McGavin. Most people remember him best as the father from A Christmas Story, but from now on I think he'll be Kolchak in my mind -- horror always trumps comedy in my brain. He's absolutely electric in this movie; every line rolls off his tongue with character and nuance. McGavin portrays Kolchak as a man with different sides -- he can be charming, sneaky, intelligent, smarmy, angry; the character is completely believable, thanks to the fantastic work being done. It almost makes me want to get a cheap hat and a tape recorder.

I also give honorable mentions to the rest of the cast, which is primarily made up of other journeymen actors. Notable (for me) is Ralph Meeker as Kolchak's pal Bernie, since Meeker played Mike Hammer back in the awesome Kiss Me Deadly of 1955. It's almost strange to see a movie like this: slow, methodical, with a cast of middle-aged or older men. These are pretty rare in this world of 20-year-old sexpot victim slasher films, and it's great to see one for a change of pace. Not that I don't like lots of mindless scary slashing and 20-year-old sexpots, but every once in a while it's nice to know that some actors can actually still act with talents other than their breasts.

Just a few more notes: The Night Stalker was apparently the prime inspiration for the "X-Files" series, which featured its own investigative approach to the supernatural. Frank Spotnitz, a producer on "X-Files," just launched the new "Stalker" TV show with the bland, lifeless Stuart Townsend in McGavin's role. The vampire's real name is Janos Skorzeny, which was also the villain's name in "Werewolf"; at one point the vampire uses the alias Bela Blasko (if I'm remembering correctly), which is Bela Lugosi's birth name. Finally, The Night Stalker was produced by Dan Curtis, the man responsible for that vampiric daytime soap, "Dark Shadows." So many connections!

I recommend this movie, once again going against my passionate hatred of the 1970s. It's a great little flick to watch late at night, just to get yourself in a spooky mood. It's a little dated, and not really scary, but I think in the context of investigation and procedure it doesn't really matter that it's not frightening. It's a neat, small, and entertaining story, and it's worth every Netflix penny.

Go rent and enjoy.

REVIEW: Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972)

Remember A Christmas Story? You know, the one with little Ralphie and Red Ryder, "You'll shoot your eye out"?

As it happens, the man behind the camera for that beloved Christmas tale also made a zombie movie early in his career. (He also made Porky's, but that's a review waiting for next Boobtober.) Right now, we'll have to turn our attention to Bob Clark's one and to date only zombie feature, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. (In hindsight, he also made one other movie that might be construed as a zombie film. If we really want to define, I'll say no flesh or brains eaten = no zombie film. His movie Dead of Night might be called a ghoul film, instead, because while the guy came back from the dead, he was still pretty normal except for the sucking the life out of people. I know some people that are like that in real life.)

First off, I love the title of this movie. It's not only catchy and easy to remember, but it doubles as practical lifestyle advice: children really should not play with dead things. I remember walking into Movie World's Castle of Horror when I was a kid, and spying this awful, ugly video box. I thought to myself, "You know, they're right. I shouldn't play with dead stuff." Then I went and rented Children Should Be Familiar With The Constitution's Establishment Clause, and my fate was sealed.

What we have here in terms of plot are zombies, which are the titular dead things, and a troupe of actors, none of which are children but they're actors so they all have the mentality of nine-year-olds. Leader Alan (played by writer Alan Ormsby) takes his cast of players on a mysterious trip to an island cemetery (?), in order to prance around like idiots and test out a book of satanic spells on the dead. Their plan is to find a suitable corpse and revive him -- that's that's the entire plan, which, in terms of a zombie movie, is pretty short-sighted. I don't know what they'd planned on doing with their zombie pet afterwards, but I guess Alan and Co. really just want to see if the whole thing worked at all and then they'd figure something out. It's just like actors to come up with retarded and impractical plans like this.


So, off on the fog-enshrouded island, Alan, Val, Anya, Paul, Terry, Roy, Jeff, and Emerson go ahead and dig up the grave of Orville Dunworth. Alan is almost the embodiment of everything I hate about every actor I've ever met, and what mind-crushingly unbearable traits that his character doesn't cover, the rest of the cast makes up for. Alan is completely over-the-top flamboyant, and I'm as surprised as anyone that he doesn't constantly leap gracefully around the set singing "I'm a great artist! I'm a great artist!" There are many subtle allusions to his sexuality (including his marriage to Orville's body), but the horrendous gay jokes are mainly covered by Terry and Emerson, the fabulous duo who argue about cemetery life: "I can't imagine why you'd want to bury yourself in a filthy little hole." Get it?

Eventually, they manage to drag Orville's corpse out of the grave, and invoke the powers of Satan in order to coax him back to life. There's a halfway decent scene after Alan reads his spells and nothing happens, so Val bitches him out for (I guess) not invoking Satan flamboyantly enough; the number of alternative names for "Satan" she comes up with is impressive. Too bad for the running time, this still doesn't make people come back to life. The kids "walk" Orville over to a half-boarded up cabin, where Alan continues his asshole diatribe about how useless everyone else is, how easily he can replace them in his troupe, and how they're all like slabs of meat hanging in the corner to him, and probably some more stuff but I couldn't quite make it out due to the incredibly loud sound of my fist pummeling the TV screen trying to murder everyone in the movie.

Then....fiiiiinally, just before my knuckles crack the screen, the spell kicks in. Either there was a time delay, or the spell didn't actually work at all and Satan just decided to raise the dead because he getting too goddamned annoyed with these people. I thank Satan for this either way.

What follows is the good stuff: the zombies lurching about, hungering for human flesh. It's the one actually effective part in the movie, mostly on account of the creepy music. They use a kind of long, wavering electronic droning noise -- bordering on outright dischordant -- and I think that it really works in context. (I hear it's a Moog device, but that's not confirmed.) I've seen this movie more than once, and it's solely for this music; it elevates the scene -- not quite to "scary," but at least up to "uncomfortable in an vague, unarticulated way."

Once the troupe realizes that the dead are coming back to life, they quickly board up the house and come up with a plan: they need to send someone for help, so they'll try to distract the zombies in front while a few kids run out the back. The plan works flawlessly until the kids in back run directly into a horde of backyard-grazing zombies. Then it all kind of falls apart, as the undead chew excitedly on the actors as if they somehow realize that they're doing the world a great service.

Alan, being the fearless leader of the gang, realizes that if his spellbook can bring the dead back to life, it might be able to put them back down. He flips through the grimoire looking for the antidote spell, and finds that there is one -- but it requires getting the original corpse (Orville) back into his own grave, which is deep in the undead-filled graveyard. I think I heard even the zombies snicker at this plan. Before Alan and Anya (who I think are the only two remaining actors at this point) can figure out plan B, the corpses come crashing in. Anya does her weirdo hippie thing and basically gives herself to the zombies, while Alan does the cowardly actor thing and exits, stage left. Stage upstairs, to be more precise, right to...yep, right to the room where he was canoodling with Orville only forty minutes ago.

Orville is now awake, and he wants revenge. Not so much for the off-screen hinted-at violations, but for Alan just being Alan, I think. I think his personality is more offensive than anything he could do to my body, so I'm right there with Orville on this one. In fact, I'm still punching Alan's flickering TV-image, in case he gets the upper hand on our dead protagonist.


And then...roll credits. I think the movie sets itself up for a sequel, as what appears to be a group of zombies boards a boat, presumably heading towards the mainland USA in search of other theater groups to eat. I wholeheartedly wish them the best on this quest.

You can pretty much avoid this picture, unless you're really keen on Moog synthesizer music. I'd include the chance that you might really enjoy watching bad actors get devoured mouthful by mouthful, but that also entails sitting through the first hour for your Hate-O-Meter to rise enough to make the end worth it. You'll also have to contend with some of the ugliest fashion and hairstyles that 1972 could provide, as well generally shoddy make-up and special effects.

I keep thinking about this movie, trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the acting. Was Alan (playing Alan) trying to do an impersonation of a crappy, pretentious actor, or was that just how he was? The script pretty clearly treats the actors as complete boobs, so does that make the zombies the protagonists, and the actors the villains of the movie since they were the ones defiling the dead? Are they all bad guys? WHY ISN'T THERE ONE LIKABLE CHARACTER IN THE MOVIE?

I hate when movies get all meta.

Stick with Bob Clark's two or three better pictures, despite their lack of zombies.




Oooh, I hate Alan. But I'll forgive him because he also wrote this book, which I had as a kid:


But then I'll un-forgive him because according to this interview with Orville I found over at Badmovies.org, his performance was really him playing himself. Just take a look at him, and you'll understand:



Ugh.

REVIEW: Land of the Dead (2005)

I can honestly say that I write this review with a great deal of mixed feelings, since my entire perception of the movie has been so warped by my nigh-indecent love of the zombie genre, as well as the insanely high expectations that stemmed from Romero's older zombie films. I saw the movie on its opening weekend in the summer, but I waited to review it until I could watch it again and try to work out what was right and what was wrong.

To preface (for those of you who came in late), I'm a zombie movie fan. I'm a zombie nut. I love zombie movies, far more than any other kind of horror movies, because zombies are the only monsters that will genuinely frighten me. I can watch every Friday the 13th movie in a row, but I still won't feel anything other than the shock of the 'jump' scare. If I put Dawn of the Dead into my DVD player, it's with the understanding that I'm going to be filled with a palpable sense of dread, and it's almost a guaranteed night of bad dreams; I even had horrible zombie nightmares after I watched Return of the Living Dead 4 & 5 -- and those movies sucked.

I credit seeing Night of the Living Dead with one of the direct sources of my zombophobia; it was the first horror movie that I remember affecting me. I doubt that it was the first horror film that I ever saw, but when you throw it on the same platform with mindless schlockfests like 976-Evil or Trick or Treat, it's easy to see that one of these is not like the other. NOTLD works so well because it has a subtext that's actually stronger than the text; the terror didn't really come from the zombies (although they were scary, too), but because the humans just couldn't get their shit together. It was as horrifyingly bleak a film as I'd probably ever seen, and I'm not even counting the ending. After watching so many slasher films, Romero's universe hit me in the gut with a very real fear.

Years later, my brother rented Dawn of the Dead, and I vividly remember trying to watch it by myself in the basement of my house. I had to turn the lights on, just so I could make sure that there weren't any zombies slowly and quietly sneaking up behind me. That movie freaked me out in a huge way, because not only was it much gorier, but because it was slower; the world had begun to slip away and the bleakness of the first movie got mapped onto the entire country. The characters were real to me, and I can still see in my mind the baseball player zombie, sitting in front of Gaylen Ross and staring at her through the glass; even the zombies were real people. The heartbeat synth music still makes me tense up inside.

Eventually, I watched Day of the Dead, and I didn't really think too much of it. Thanks to cable and the adios-to-the-VHS-format sale at my local Blockbuster Video, I've probably seen Day more times than the first two, and it's grown on me more every time I watch it. (Romero himself says that it's the one that's grown on him the most.) It's certainly different than the first two, but it makes sense to me now in a way that it didn't when I first watched it; the way the characters act and the things that they do are all reasonable in their context. I'd be loony, too, if I had to face the fact that the world really was ending, and that my best hope for a future was making it to a remote island so that I could wait for a natural death. Plus, the opening scene in the dead city -- "Hellooo! Is anybody there?" -- is a real doozy. (And that Gorillaz song is unlistenable because of the way the sample makes me feel.)

After two decades of flirting with making the project and then watching it slink back into development hell, George Romero finally made Land of the Dead. I saw it on a Sunday afternoon, and I walked out of the theater feeling...

...unsatisfied.

And confused. I almost had no opinion about the movie at all, other than that it didn't feel quite like a Romero zombie movie. It was too slickly made; it had a larger budget, and it showed. Gone were the bland flourescent lights that made Day and Dawn feel real; gone were the ugly sets that looked like real ugly apartments and malls and stores. There was a full-blown score in place, and not the weird synth heartbeat that made my hair stand on end so many times. There were recognizable actors, so I instinctively knew that they were just playing a part, and that cut some of the scares.

Land of the Dead wasn't a Romero horror film.

At least, that's what I thought the first time through. I watched it again on DVD at night, just after I crawled into bed, and I came away with a different opinion. Now, I think of it as almost a Romero film, in pretty much the same way that I felt about Day of the Dead the first few times that I saw it. I liked it a lot more the second time through, and it worked better, perhaps because my expectations were different.



Land begins in a small town somewhere near Pittsburgh, long after the zombie outbreak began. The dead have taken over the world, and, continuing the evolution from Dawn, the zombies are showing signs of thinking. The townspeople (or their corpses, to be precise) are still showing signs that they're pretending to be alive: a zombie band noisily fiddles with their instruments in the park, and two dead lovers shuffle through the town hand-in-hand. A ringing bell at a gas station introduces us to Big Daddy, who comes out of the booth to service a car that isn't there -- a nice undead Pavlovian reaction. Even worse for the still-living scavengers that are hiding behind the bushes is that Big Daddy seems to be able to communicate with his zombie brethren, alerting them that there's food nearby -- it's very bad news when zombies form unions.

The scavengers, led by Riley and Cholo, are working for Dennis Hopper's Mr. Kaufman over in the human enclave of Fiddler's Green. The Green was a resort apartment complex for the wealthy, and then after the change Kaufman fortified its river-protected location and created one of the last havens of the living. Unfortunately, Kaufman is kind of an evil dictator, keeping the rich people in luxury, and keeping the poor oppressed, mostly ignoring the fact that the rest of the world is going under.

Anyway, it's Riley's last night out scavenging -- he knows that the world is going to hell, and he wants to make his way up north to Canada so he can get away from zombies and humans alike. It's Cholo's last night as well, since he's saved enough money to buy his own luxury place in the Green high-rise, and can live it up like Kaufman and his pals. Unfortunately, he's not white, and there's no place in the world of the affluent for the 'lower-class' people. Cholo barely escapes Kaufman's death sentence, and makes off with Dead Reckoning (a super military scavenging vehicle), threatening to launch its missiles at Fiddler's Green unless Mr. K ponies up many millions of dollars.

Oh, and Big Daddy is still pissed that the living came to his town and fucked shit up, so he gathers up his zombie brethren and starts a march to that bright, tall building that the humans drove towards.



Those are the basic conflicts in the story: Riley is enlisted to stop Cholo, and intends to steal Dead Reckoning himself for his trip north; Kaufman needs to stop Cholo, but is also preparing to abandon the Green and its people to the stenches if things go south; Big Daddy and his many, many friends want some warm snacks.

I think the plot works fine, although the super-political aspects of it might be a little bit overdone. Kaufman could not be more George W. Bush if he wore a nametage that said "Hi, I'm George W. Bush." When dealing with the Cholo situation, one of his board members suggests that they pay the money, but Kaufman "doesn't negotiate with terrorists." In turn, that prompts Cholo to remark that he'll "go jihad on his ass." Those are probably the most blatant connections, but there's a whole subtext to the film that, when applied to the USA's current political situation (or then-current), I don't fully understand. Maybe I'm dense, but since the various factions don't quite relate perfectly to real-world political counterparts, I think that some of the more over-the-top stuff was a mistake. The references are almost too literal, and it doesn't add up. I'm no friend of the Republican party, but some of the subtext feels like it was shoe-horned in; on the other hand, it does make sense in the context of the film's political world, and maybe I'm just trying to read too much into it. There was certainly a similar theme in Day of the Dead, but it was far more broad and general, and it was more interesting because it lent itself to interpretation; it was part of the movie, but it never came across as being the point of the movie. The political aspects of Land seem like they're trying to take precedence over the actual story, and they're really the weaker angle.

Speaking of the story, it's another thing that threw me by the end. Night had an ending that bordered on heart-breaking; Dawn's finale was messed-up, but a little hopeful, and Day's ending was about as close to a happy ending as Romero gets. Land finishes on such an odd note that it makes a little piece of me cringe inside. It's too upbeat, despite the fact that what's possibly the last remaining human outpost has been overrun by the undead, and thousands of people are being eaten in the streets. Riley and his gang giggle at each other and drive off hopefully to the north under a sky of fireworks -- while the few remaining people in the world are ostensibly being trapped and devoured a few blocks away. It's doubtful that they really could have done anything to help, but there was a large contrast with how they'd been painted as characters up until that point and how they acted at the end. Plus, there's the whole "they're just looking for a place to go" line that I've spent hours trying to rationalize.

For those that aren't concerned with plot or story, there's still plenty of gore and carnage this time around, supplied with gusto by Greg Nicotero and Co. There's a lot of very, very gory practical effects, enhanced by some CG blood splatter. Sometime in the third act, Riley and Manolete enter an ammo warehouse, and flit their flashlights over a zombie feast that echoes the very famous basement scene from Dawn. There's one particular effect in this scene that -- even as a desensitized horror buff -- made me do the "uuuuuughh" sound in the theater. Who knew that mouths could be stretched that far? It's disgusting. It's awesome. It's a nice gruesome scene, but it could have been much more effective if it weren't for the bland score; the whole movie could have used tense music, not jump music.

I get the feeling that I'm being too harsh on the movie, but that's what I expected because of my deep love and appreciation for the other movies in the series. This is still a good movie, and stands head and shoulders above all of the other recent genre entries -- I just don't love the movie as I love the others. Not yet, anyway, but I do think that will change with repeated viewings and a little time. It's always tough to look at something that you've been waiting for, especially if you've been waiting twenty years for it to come around. Right now, I think of it as the kid brother of the Dead series. It's a worthwhile movie on its own merits, but it doesn't kill me like Night and Dawn do.

REVIEW: The Unnamable (1988)

There's nothing quite like taking a dip in the macabre and many-tentacled world of H.P. Lovecraft. Unfortunately for us cinephiles, it's usually not very rewarding. For each of the decent Lovecraft film adaptations out there, there's a million zillion (actual figure) wastes of time and money in the growing abyss of VHS and DVD. I can probably count the number of decent Lovecraft flicks on one hand: there's Re-Animator, which was certainly fun, and probably the most famous. Then we've got Dagon, which I thought was more entertaining than most people did, and From Beyond was a hoot. I've also got hope for the recent Call of Cthulhu, a new silent picture from the twisted minds over at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which looks incredible.

Sadly, The Unnamable does not earn a rank on my good hand. If I'm feeling particularly generous, it might have an honorable mention on my other hand somewhere down by the pinky.

We begin with the tragic tale of Joseph Winthrop, who 100 (or possible 300) years ago made a startling discovery: his pregnant wife was giving birth to something...unnamable. Actually, "giving birth" was probably too polite a term, considering that he later mentions in his journal that the creature "ate its way to the light, and then recoiled just as quickly." Nice imagery, huh? Luckily for the residents of Massachusetts, Winthrop was also an amateur sorcerer and used his mystical manuals to trap the creature forever inside the walls of his home, but as he notes, the rotting wood will not last forever.

Curiously, Old Man Winthrop also bucks the status quo and names his creature "Elyda." So much for the title, eh?

The story jumps forward to the present day (or what was passing for the present day back in 1988), where pretentious grad student Carter is telling the legend of Winthrop and his beastly daughter to his pals Joel and Howard. Science major Joel thinks the story is just the stuff of local superstition, and sets out to prove it by offering to spend some time in the decrepit place that evening. Howard, being weak-willed, follows Carter back to the library, while Joel walks into the house and gets the no-trespassing speech from Elyda's ancient claws.

Meanwhile, Wendy and Tanya are hanging out at the university library discussing the many problems of being hot freshman girls. This was "1988 hot," so when we adjust that for inflation they're both about "2005 pretty okay." Maybe they'd be upgraded to "nice-looking" if their hair weren't so damn frizzy. They're not about to mess with their hair, though, because frat guys Bruce and John walk over and invite them to check out the creepy old house at the edge of town, which they're planning to use for hazing pranks later on. I think that Lovecraft was ahead of his time, because his accounts of freshmen girls being duped turned out to be eerily accurate.

Elsewhere in the library, Howard starts to wonder what the hell happened to Joel -- it's been an entire day since anyone's seen him! After much begging and counter-rationalizing, Carter agrees to join Howard on his search for Joel.

For the sake of brevity, I'll run through the rest:
-Wendy gets naked. Bruce and John die. Wendy dies.
-Howard earnestly tries to save everyone, and gets Tanya's respect.
-Carter treats Howard like he's retarded, but still saves him with magic spells that incite the "tree spirits."
-The end!

I'd recap those parts, but it's really just forty-five minutes of running through hallways and screaming. I won't try to hedge and kinda-recommend the movie, because it's pretty bad. The acting is passable at best, the special effects are terrible (the tree spirits are really shaky tree branches), the make-up is mediocre, and the plot stretches the boundaries of credulity. A one-hundred year old house with dozens of local legends based on it, and there are still centuries-old sorcery books on the dining-room table? Considering that seven characters in the movie walked to the house would seem to indicate that it's not that damn hard to find. The more likely scenario would be that Joel would walk in and trip over homeless people and junkies, and then Carter would have to stop rebellious high school kids from spray-painting fakey Satanic symbols all over the walls. "Satin Lives!!!"

The movie also suffers from what I call "The House Hunt Paradox." This is what happens in horror movies when there are two conditions that logically contradict each other: there's a haunted (or stalked) house that has to be searched, and a cast of characters so large that most of them die in entertaining ways but still leave a couple to defeat the evil. I'm sure that everyone is familiar with this. The problem is that most houses are simply not that big. I've been in a lot of houses, some of them very large, and I've never, ever, ever been in danger of losing track of anyone else inside them. In 99% of non-mansions, everyone is within shouting distance at all times, if not speaking distance. Even in most really big houses, the geography is certainly not maze-like; there's usually a central area and then branching rooms, and the higher floors tend to have even less space. At best, I'd imagine if the house was really big, and there were only two characters, they might lose each other. A cast of six screaming people in this house would NOT lose each other. It would need to be labyrinthine. The house in this movie is large, but the only reasonable way for these kids to get lost is through major head trauma.

And that's all I've got to say about the negative aspects. They're enough to make me assure you that you probably won't enjoy watching this movie, so you can take that as the final line of the review if you like.

On the other hand, for the sake of all drive-in movies everywhere, I'll also talk about the parts of the movie that I enjoyed -- because I didn't walk away completely empty-handed.

The thing that struck me during the final half-hour of the movie is that The Unnamable is really a live-action Scooby Doo episode, with a little bit of gore and some boobs. The monster is ludicrous and laughable, there's tons of running around in a small house searching for clues, and the character of Howard is like a slightly smarter Shaggy. Honestly, if there's one single bit of outright praise I have for this film, it's the relationship between Howard and the rest of the cast (especially Carter). Charles Klausmeyer (or Charles King) plays Howard with such a wide-eyed naivete that he's incredibly likeable, and his interaction with the demanding and terse Carter is actually really funny -- you can tell how much Howard wants to save everyone, but he's completely clueless as to how to do it. Klausmeyer's line readings and facial expressions made me chuckle out loud several times during the movie, and I mean that in the sense that they were all obviously intentional. In most movies of this caliber I couldn't care less what characters survived, but I was actually rooting for Howard to defeat the unnamable and make out with Tanya.

That's about all the praise I've got the movie, but it's really just something to keep in mind if you're somehow forced to suffer through the rest of it. Every movie's got to have some sort of life raft, right?

(MYSTERY UPDATE: The actor who played Carter has both actor AND actress credits on the IMDB, most recently as a woman in Domino. Weeeeeeird.)

REVIEW: After Midnight (1989)

Just when you think that the minimum running time for a scary story is ninety minutes, you come across the old creepy movie stand-by, the anthology picture. Anthology films seem to be loved and hated with equal ferocity; some people love the variety of having several stories in one movie, while others whine because a lot of anthology films suffer tonal problems from different directors and casts. Personally, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I find that a lot of horror anthology films are anthology films because none of the stories within them are good enough to last for more than twenty minutes; a lot of the newer anthology releases these days are just low-grade amateur shorts that were bought up and packaged together for pocket change.

Then again, we're not talking nowadays, since tonight's film After Midnight was released all the way back in 1989, which was a decent year for drive-in movies. It was pretty much at the top of the video release market, when the Elm Streets and Friday the 13th franchises were still going strong. Most importantly in my version of the history of horror, it was pre-Scream, the film which somehow managed to introduce irony into the genre thereby ruining everything with hipness and self-references.

After Midnight begins in one of the most terrifying locales in the entire genre: a freshman psych class. The new and mysterious professor Edward Derek is teaching "The Psychology of Fear," and he announces quite proudly to the class that they're not going to need their books -- he'll be using other kinds of teaching techniques this semester. For instance, he pulls a gun on the jock in the class, and threatens to blow his brains out until the jock pees himself. Then, he turns the gun on himself and paints the wall behind him with red, gooey blood. Naturally, the class is horrified, until Prof. Derek stands up and giggles that it was all special effects; he was trying to make them afraid. Afraid of having to find a new elective when most class slots will already be filled.

Whereas in reality, where Derek would be arrested and sued more times than I can count on one hand, the movie administration simply tells him not to do that again. Apparently they're pretty light on the administrative action over there at After Midnight University. Anyway, the professor suggests that for those in the class that aren't afraid of a little extra class time, he will continue to hold his own private study sessions at his house.

Once the after-hours session (which most of the class shows up for) begins, they settle down and begin sharing scary stories to inspire fear in each other. So far I've neglected to mention that the framing story's lead girl (a shaky, willowy girl that gets "bad feelings" about things) starts to get "bad feelings" about this class. And the study group. And the teacher. She gets a lot of bad feelings, and she has to mention allll of them. The girl is completely unimportant to about 99% of the film, so we won't get hung up on her.

The first tale is the only one that I would actually classify as a "horror" story. It stars Marc McClure (Jimmy Olsen to most of you) as a timid man whose car gets a flat on the side of a lonely country road, after a scenic drive with his wife following his birthday dinner. It seems that someone has thrown a bagful of tacks on the road not too far away from the creepy old house -- the same creepy house where thatt madman murdered all those people with hedge clippers. There's a light on in one of the upper rooms of the mansion, and before Marc McClure can say "We should get help from Superman!" his wife is off and running to look for a phone to call AAA with. After they enter, she disappears, and it's up to him to find her and perhaps defend himself from the hedge murderer. I won't give away the ending, but it's one that I've remembered since I saw it in about 1990; it's unfortunate that it doesn't really hold up after all these years, but it's still pretty neat in a way.

The second story is the one that I remembered as not being all that scary as a kid, and it turns out I was right. It's the story of four underage girls driving around the seedy parts of town looking for a good club to dance the night away in. Because they're stupid, they end up running out of gas in what appears to be the ninth circle of Los Angeles, a filthy, empty, and altogether abandoned section of town. Actually, it's only mostly abandoned, since they have an encounter with a crazy homeless man and his vicious dogs. He's all set to rape and murder them when the girls get the upper hand and make a car sandwich with him as the meat. You'd think it was all over, then, right? I hope you didn't say yes. There's still three or four nasty dogs left to hunt them down in revenge. This story was actually pretty well done, although it would be a stretch to call it a horror story; at best, it's an action thriller. There's lots of running and jumping and even some explosions at the end, but nothing remotely supernatural (or even creepy) going on. As a plus, three of the four girls are recognizable from other projects, two of them from an installment of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the other from her role on "Mr. Belvedere."

The final story-within-a-story is the "crazy man keeps calling me and may be getting physically closer and I can't get anyone to help me oh shit I think he's inside the building" story. Having rented When a Stranger Calls not too far in the past, this one just didn't work for me. Marg Helgenberger plays Alex, a receptionist for a late-night telephone answering service. (Didn't they have answering machines in 1989? Heck, I saw one in Kiss Me Deadly, and that came out in 19-fifty-nine.) Alex is just getting back from a skiing vacation, and she's got the broken leg to prove it. Upon her return, her boss informs her that she's had to fire everyone except her, so she's all by her lonesome until tomorrow -- oh, and there's this guy that calls about a dozen times an hour. I have to admit, the rest of the story lost me. The crazy guy is calling some rich woman, and is seen standing outside the woman's apartment. Later, he switches to harassing Alex, and manages to track her down. In the end, there's one accidental death, and the dude is still calling Alex, so it's like the story actually has no ending. You can probably skip this one, unless you've got some kind of receptionist-with-a-broken-leg fetish, in which case I recommend that you get this immediately. That's a tough fetish to appease.

Getting back to the framing story again, the psychic girl Allison starts to get a bad feeling again, and as it happens the bad feeling is correct. That urine-stained jock from the beginning of the film is back to make the professor experience his own kind of fear, and starts a ruckus. The professor -- being an extremely creepy man -- keeps egging on the jock, and before he can change the course to Pass/Fail the professor has been immolated, and turns into an angry walking skeleton with a fire ax. Like any good finale, there's a lot of wind and lights, and Allison gets briefly transported into each of the stories as she's being chased by the skeleton. And then...

...she wakes up. Goddammit I hate when they do that. It's such a cop-out. It's even more of a cop-out when she gets out of bed to go to class, which happens to be the first day of psych 101: the Psychology of Fear. This is likely the scariest moment in the entire film, because it poses the threat of having to watch it alllllll overrrr agaaaaaain. If I were authoring the DVD, I'd make it really scary and have it automatically got right back to chapter one when she got to class. I wonder how long I could make people sit there and think the movie was really going someplace.

Did it live up to my childhood memories? I'm afraid not. It was more of a pleasant trip back down the nostalgia path. Still, the production quality was relatively high (especially for this kind of movie), and the direction wasn't bad. Strangely, I think the acting in the sub-stories was actually pretty good; I do recall thinking for a moment during the "dog" section of the film that the way that the four girls were all given different personalities was actually quite impressive for what was essentially a short film. The worst performances come in during the framing tale, where Allison the psychic deserved a good smacking, and the good professor deserved some non-Shatner thespian tips -- it's a performance that's best described as "off-kilter."

Before I damn the movie with so much faint praise, I'll cut this off and say that if it came on cable on a dark and rainy night, I'd check it out again. Until then, it's going back on the DVD shelf.

REVIEW: Return of the Living Dead, Parts 4 and 5 (2005)

Since the two movies premiered back-to-back on the Sci-Fi Channel the other night featuring the same characters and directed by the same guy (and I actually watched them both in a row), I'm just going to throw the two together and pretend it's one really long horrible movie, instead of two individual crappy movies. It'll save me time and energy, since I can write things like "These movies are awful" rather than go through the laborious process of typing "ROTLD 4 is an awful movie. ROTLD 5 is also an awful movie."

After a long wait since 1993's Return of the Living Dead Part 3, the zombie-comedy franchise returns with the light-hearted and stupid Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis. It begins in the shell of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor (the first film to shoot there since the disaster), with skeevy Peter Coyote as a mysterious scientist who's determined to get his hands on the last remaining canisters of Trioxin, known to us ROTLD fans as the chemical that makes dead people get the munchies. Coyote makes a deal with the Ukrainian (or Russian) Mafia to get the canisters back to the US for research, presumably of the "evil" kind. After a short zombie scare, Coyote takes off with the cans of Trioxin, and then there's a totally inexplicable car accident that has nothing to do with him and probably happens somewhere else in the world.

Actually, let me backtrack for a second: the movie really begins with a short commercial for the fictional company "Hybra Tech," which is the Umbrella Corporation from Resident Evil with a different name. According to the commercial, they do everything from make cheese products to being the number one name in quelling all zombie infestations, which leads us to believe that zombie outbreaks are not all that rare or secret. I'm only mentioning this because it's the only way I can explain everyone's complete lack of surprise that there are walking dead people later on. Now, onward again.

Turns out that Coyote's scheming Dr. Garrison is taking care of his two nephews Julian and "Pyro" (named for his firestarting habits), since their parents died -- in a car accident! Just like the unexplained one we saw a few minutes ago! I'm making this connection apparent for you, because the movie doesn't. Even now, I'm not certain that they ever mention that the parents died in a car accident, but that's the only plausible explanation for having the accident scene in the movie in the first place.

Coyote, of course, is a horrible parental figure, spending all of his days and nights over at Hybra Tech being evil and reanimating arms and stuff. Julian is pretty much left to fend for himself and Pyro, all the while trying to convince his pal Zeke that he's not trying to hook up with Zeke's ex Katie, who -- for plot convenience -- works as a security guard in the Hybra Tech compound. I would talk about how bizarre it is for a high school girl to be a security guard at a giant top-secret lab, but, y'know, not fair to the movie.

Finally, after forever and ever, the plot really begins. Zeke hurts himself slightly in a motorcycle accident, and when Julian tries to visit him at the hospital, they tell him that Zeke has died. Feeling like bearing bad news, he calls Katie at work, only to find out that she just watched the paramedics wheel Zeke's still-breathing body into the Hybra Tech building. Something is amiss! Julian gets his pal Cody to hack into the Hybra Tech computers, where they find a secret weapons research program called "Necropolis." Being idiot kids, they decide to grab their dirtbikes, break into the compound, and rescue their pal.

Turns out to no one's surprise that Hybra Tech is trying to develop the very same zombie weapons program that began in Return of the Living Dead Part 3, then continued into Resident Evil, then Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and probably five or six thousand other unrelated movies. They've got a whole storage facility for angry zombies downstairs, and that's where they've locked up Zeke, so of course the kids make their way down there. You now get one guess as to what happens.

If you guessed that the movie got really gory and entertaining, you're wrong. Go back to line one and try again.

If you guessed that the morons accidentally open all the cages in an edited-for-TV manner, you are correct. Your prize is knowing enough about the rest of the movie so that you won't feel bad turning it off.

So, what's a gang of high-schoolers to do when locked in a building with a hundred zombies and Peter Coyote? You're right: they immediately go down to a lower level because that's where Julian's parents' weaponized zombie bodies are, just to see. I do not even want to imagine what these kids got on their SATs.

And that's pretty much it. Zombies kill everyone in the facility, Zeke turns into a zombie, and a decent amount of the main cast actually dies. Even little Pyro gets his brains chewed on, which won some respect from me since small children tend to live through these things in most movies like this. Coyote lets loose the parent zombies for pretty much no reason other than that he's evil; so evil, in fact, that one of the kids asks him what Hybra Tech really wants and he actually says: "Why, world domination, of course! What else is there?" In the end the army shows up and takes care of the zombies in an incredibly efficient manner, and Coyote makes off with three cans of Trioxin.

Then, we go to Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave.

Julian is now in college with his old survivor buddy Cody, enjoying himself almost as if his entire family wasn't murdered by his zombie-making uncle that's intent on world domination. He's got a hot blonde girlfriend with a dipshit drug-addled DJ brother, and Cody is now a chemistry major with a minor in illicit drug manufacturing. Things are going just fine until Peter Coyote is killed during a Trioxin sale gone horribly wrong, and Julian finds a couple canisters in a hidden compartment in his house. It would seem to me that the smart thing would be to immediately report those things to the police, or the feds, or a haz-mat outfit or something, but I guess if movie-people were smart there would just be a lot of movies about people being successful and happy and in love, and I'd have nothing to do on Saturday nights.

Julian and his girlfriend Jenny wheel the barrel of Trioxin over to Cody's lab on campus to "find out what's inside," apparently not remembering that two of the three of them had seen the same container hooked up to the zombie-making machines in the Hybra-Tech building not ninety minutes ago (in viewer-time, that is). Cody finds out that Trioxin is chemically kind of like a combination of crystal meth and LSD. The stupid DJ samples a bit to see if he can get high; he does for a little while, and it appears to have no adverse effects. Julian demands that they stop experimenting, but after he leaves, Cody, the DJ, and their drug-dealing pal Skeeze decide that they've got a phenomenal money-making opportunity on their hands: safe hallucinogenic meth. They call the little pill "Z," in that it makes you stand still and drool like a zombie. Why the coincidence goes over Cody's head is beyond logic.

Skeeze sells the drug all over campus in preparation for the big "Rave to the Grave" that weekend, and apparently makes a lot of cash off of it before Julian catches on and demands that they stop before it gets out of hand. Before Cody can even say, "Jesus, Julian, I'm a fucking moron, because I was in the prequel and already know that this stuff makes people come back from the dead and eat brains," we've got a whole campus full of zombies looking for dining hall brains.

To mix it up a little bit, the movie throws in a couple of Russian Interpol agents who are looking for the caviar bonuses that come with tracking down the canisters. They're pretty much for comic relief, and their role is to make "funny" jokes by messing up common English phrases. On occasion, they also shoot zombies.

The plot climaxes at the titular Rave to the Grave, where the Z pills start turning everyone into zombies regardless of how much they ingested. The middle of the rave scene has what's probably the only effective part in both movies, where Cody is looking for his girlfriend in the crowd as people around him suddenly start changing into the undead -- there are a few moments of genuine creepiness in there. Almost as good as the last movie (if that's an applicable statement), most of the main cast dies, save Julian, Jenny, and one of the Interpol guys -- sorry about that big spoiler I threw in there, but believe me, by the end of the movies you won't care who lives or dies.

Both Necropolis and Rave to the Grave were directed by Ellory Elkayem, the New Zealand filmmaker that brought us the pretty enjoyable mutant spider flick Eight Legged Freaks. (Oh, how the grammar Nazi in me hates that title. It should have a hyphen between "Eight" and "Legged," otherwise they're not referring to freaks that have eight legs (spiders), but to a group of eight freaks that all have an indeterminate number of legs. ARGH.) Freaks was a fun little homage to all the 1950s mutant animal movies, and watching his two ROTLD films gives the impression that he wants to continue that same vibe: mad scientists, evil goings-on, and youngsters out to save the day. Unfortunately, the tone just doesn't jive with the material and the whole thing falls apart pretty quick.

The main offense of these two flicks is that they're really, really dumb. Back in film school, I was writing my senior thesis script for my epic film noir cartoon, and I got to a point where the hero is locked up in a guarded room while the villains are off on their quest for the mystery device. I got stuck; I knew what had to happen afterward, but I had no idea how to actually get the character there, so I just wrote:

WINTER comes up with an incredibly clever plan for escaping the room, disposing of the HENCHMAN, and catching up with DR. STERLING right before the climax.

That works as a placeholder if it's the first draft and you're only the second week in, with another eight months to actually come up with a clever way for the hero to escape. It doesn't work in a final shooting script, but somehow the ROLTDs ended up with a lot of moments where I thought, 'Did they not finish the real script?' Everything in the two movies happened too conveniently, everyone was too evil, or too good, or too lucky. The zombies were too slow and then too fast, too smart and then too stupid. They make much of the Trioxin canisters, tying in to the first movies, and yet blatantly ignore all the rules that it set up -- zombies can be killed with a bullet to the head in this one. It's almost as if the two screenwriters just mashed out a big outline for the two movies, and then forgot to fill in the rest of the screenplay with cohesive details and logic. It's not hard to imagine the two movies as being relatively decent horror films -- maybe even fun ones -- but the filmmakers weren't really trying.

The two that I hold mostly responsible for the mess(es) are William Butler and Aaron Strongoni, who should really know better: Butler co-starred in the vastly superior zombie flick Night of the Living Dead (the 1990 remake, not the original). As far as remakes go, that one was a decent horror movie. It had scares, it had a heart, and something resembling a point in the end, three things that his ROTLD films did not.

And what in the hell happened to Peter Coyote? Not that I was a big Peter Coyote fan, but I'm passingly familiar with some of the bigger movies that he's been a part of -- and he looks awful in ROTLD. Awful-awful, like his face has been frozen into a bizarre Joker grin, perhaps with Botox; he drawls most of his lines as if he can't really move his lips. Whatever muscles power his cheeks are apparently receding deeper into his throat, making him look like he's always on the verge of swallowing his own tongue. It's not pretty.

Luckily, the rest of the cast looks like they're going to live through the filming. If there's one real compliment that I can pay the film, it's that most of the high school kids in the movies look like they might plausibly be high school students -- none of that 30-year-old girl with a Trapper Keeper stuff for this series. They're all appropriately skinny and doofy-looking, although in Part 5 they manage to squeeze into the college freshman look. Looking back, although I was going to crap on all of the acting, it really wasn't too bad overall. Coyote was slumming (and he knew it), but the rest of the kids did about as well as can be hoped with a script like this. Not every line comes out sounding natural, but there're so many absolutely retarded things being said that I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and accept the 75% of decent readings as being as good as humanly possible. I can't even imagine Pacino being able to pull off some of this stuff.

I'm pretty disappointed with these two, as you can probably tell. I love ROTLD Part 1 with a passion, and although Part 2 was a dumb comedy, Part 3 was actually starting to get the series on an interesting track with its Romeo-and-Juliet theme. I was hoping that these two films -- with the assistance of Elaykim -- would continue to provide some kind of neat-o entertainment, but it turns out that I'm gonna have to wait until Dan O'Bannon comes back to the franchise.

In summation: avoid even on a lonely Saturday night. If you have to watch a video, at least go rent something that has gore and boobs.

REVIEW: Wild Zero (2000)

I'm on a quest.

It's the same quest that many others have embarked on, a noble and glorious tradition involving all people who are passionately in love with their hobbies: we are all brothers in the quest for the ever-elusive and mysterious hidden gem. We're all looking for that obscure movie or unknown album that will shake us and give us cause to think that we've discovered a new and undiscovered country, like pioneers of cinema and sound.

Okay, fine, that might be too majestic. Really, I'm just a Netflix junkie that watches a lot of shit, so it makes me really happy to find a movie that I've never heard of before that turns out to be more than halfway decent.

Up until about four days ago, I'd never even heard of Wild Zero, which blows my mind because while I may not be 100% up-to-date on all trashy horror films, I'm pretty close. I'd say high- nineties. I read the movie sites, listen to the internet chatter, and scan release dates like they might reveal prophecy. Still, I missed Wild Zero completely, and it was only by the fluke of having Netflix suggest it as a rental that I got it. Zombies and aliens, it said, and I took a chance. This movie is wild, and that's pretty much the only connection the title has to anything going on in the plot.

From the shores of Japan, director Tetsuro Takeuchi and lo-fi rock band Guitar Wolf bring us a silly tale of true love, zombies, and the power of rock and roll. The movie plops itself down in the relatively small genre of "Nonsense Comedies Built Around Bands," and I'll make the argument that it probably has more in common with the Beatles' flick Help! than it does with Dawn of the Dead. The movie is ninety minutes of musical madcap silliness, kept afloat by pure energy and adrenaline. The movie has so much fun with itself that it doesn't really hold to any genre rules; the editing is crappy, the plot doesn't make sense, and even the rules of zombiedom don't hold up internally -- but it doesn't matter, because it's pretty apparent that those qualities are of no importance to the filmmakers. What is important is that everyone has a good time, and that Guitar Wolf gets to rock.

Wild Zero's real lead character is Ace, a doofy teenager that idolizes Guitar Wolf with a zealousness that borders on cult behavior, evidenced by the glazed eyes he uses to stare at them in concert. He has a mile-high pompadour that he's constantly combing, and wears the true rock n' roll black leather biker jacket that Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf, and Drum Wolf also sport. (Yes, the band Guitar Wolf is made up of Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf, and Drum Wolf.) I guess one of the biggest joys of the movie is that I really liked the music; think the Ramones with bizarre mistranslated half-Japanese/half-English lyrics, and microphones that spit streams of fire when Guitar Wolf wails into them. Guitar Wolf was once promoted as the loudest band in the world, and are known to prize volume and the rock n' roll attitude as more important than talent; adjust your television volume accordingly.

After their latest gig, Guitar Wolf has a violent run-in with the club manager known as the Captain, a whore-abusing drug addict who wears really little shorts. Ace, of course, happens to be outside the room when the Captain says "Rock and roll is over!" and so bursts in to defend the sacred spirit of rocking, accidentally ending the Mexican stand-off inside. Guitar Wolf, in an act of thanks, makes Ace his blood brother in rock and roll, and gives him a magical whistle so he can call the band whenever he's in trouble. Yeah, it's that kind of movie. Turns out that Ace might need that whistle pretty soon, since an alien attack on Earth (by thousands of tiny spinning saucers straight out of the 1950s) causes the people of Japan to turn into flesh-eating zombies.

Elsewhere in the story, three petty criminals try to rob a gas station, only to be accidentally foiled by Ace's door-opening skills. In the aftermath, our hero meets a girl named Tobio (and we know it's instant love thanks to the red hearts that appear around their heads), but leaves his love unrequited so he can make it to the next Guitar Wolf show. There's also a bunch of arms dealers and Yakuza types that turn into zombie fodder pretty quick, and when Ace comes across that roadside flesh feast, a vision of Guitar Wolf instructs him that if he really loves Tobio, he'll go back for her. A little later on, a dark secret about Tobio is revealed to Ace's screaming disgust, but Guitar Wolf reminds him that true love, like rock n' roll, doesn't recognize boundaries, nationalities, or genders.

There is blood-a-plenty in this flick, and enough gore to keep all the genre fans pleased. Guitar Wolf turns out to be the most badass band in all of Japan, killing zombies by the boatload with magical electric guitar picks and their super-heroic ability to be awesomely cool. Guitar Wolf himself is so hardcore that he takes out the alien mothership with a ninja sword that he keeps inside his guitar; heck, he even blows up Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf for no apparent reason, although they're also so rock that they show up in the next scene with not a scratch on them. We get a bunch of live concert footage, lots of soundtrack, plenty of comedy, and more fun than us jaded horror watchers probably deserve.

I've heard on other websites that Wild Zero is almost beyond reviewing, but I think that I can say that it works, at least in the one way that it seems to want to succeed in: being entertaining. I'd guess that most movies want to be entertaining, but most movies also want to be other things like coherent, heartwarming, scary, and so forth, and when they fail at those things it takes away from the entertainment. Wild Zero has no such pretensions -- it's like a sugar-high circus clown that wants you to smile and will do whatever it takes, be it love stories or zombie attacks, to make you happy. It throws in so many great and silly things that even if you don't like the first thirty jokes, there's just bound to be a good one in the second thirty, and they'll play punk rock as a bridge to get to something that'll make you smile.

The best thing that I can tell you about this movie is that you should just let the rush of it all wash over you, and remember to treat it like it is: a testament to the lo-fi rockers in all of us. If rock n' roll is God, then Guitar Wolf is our savior.

Although I've only seen it once, this is one of my new favorite 'late night' movies, and just might be one of my favorite zombie flicks of all time.



Also included on the DVD is the Wild Zero drinking game, which flashes images of a beer mug on the screen whenever anyone takes a drink, does drugs, says "rock and roll," a zombie's head explodes, or something gets lit on fire. You could get drunk watching the DVD menu screen with these rules.

REVIEW: Christine (1983)

"She smiled at me. I want to have deep, meaningful sex with her."

With that nugget of wisdom, I present the bastard child of Stephen King, John Carpenter, and Detroit, 1983's opus of vehicular terror, Christine.

Christine's got a bad rap. Admit it, you chuckled the first time you heard about this movie -- a haunted car? A possessed Plymouth? At least that's the reaction that I got when I mentioned that I had rented it. Let me get it out of the way now: a possessed, evil car is silly. But it's no stupider than a haunted house when you really think about it, so as a society we'll have to adjust our standards: all hauntings are equally stupid. I digress.

Christine is, in my mind, first and foremost a John Carpenter picture and a Stephen King adaptation second. I'm not among the biggest King fans of the world -- not that I've got anything against him, but I never took to his writing -- so his participation in the movie is more or less unimportant to me. According to our friends at the IMDB, King was such hot stuff back in '82 that the movie was in pre-production before the book was actually published; also, I hear that the movie takes some unfaithful diversions from the source material, but then again, I don't care. The movie works on its own merits, thanks to one of my all-time genre favorites, John Carpenter.

John Carpenter is primarily known for writing/directing/scoring Halloween, but what people outside the genre don't realize is how unstoppably awesome he was back in the earlier days of his career: Halloween, Starman, Prince of Darkness, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Escape From New York, The Fog... all of them horror or sci-fi greats, and all of them certifiable cult hits (argue with me and I'll punch you). From there, something happened, and the magic stopped; he starting turning out dreck. As far as I can remember, he went downhill pretty suddenly back in the late eighties, right after They Live came out -- although it might be right before he did They Live. I change my mind about that movie every time I see it. Fortunately for us, Christine was a baby from the good ol' days, and it shows.

Christine opens with the sound of a growling engine over the credits rolling in the standard John Carpenter font. (Speaking of which, how many other directors have their own font? If anyone can find it for download, let me know.) We follow the trip down the factory line for the 1958 Plymouth Fury, which doesn't end well for the worker that accidentally ashes his cigar on Christine's fine leather seats. This is about as much of an origin as we're going for the murderous car, an artistic detail which you can either love or hate. On one hand, maybe the car seems more evil because it really doesn't have motivation; it's just built evil. The nuts and bolts were bad. On the other hand, it's got no backstory whatsoever that we can make sense of, and for some people the idea of an evil semi-sentient automobile might sound stupid unless there's a ghost or something. Personally, this part doesn't bother me, because I believe most things that make it out of Detroit are determined to destroy the world. (Actually, this isn't entirely unlike Carpenter's Michael Myers character from Halloween, who was apparently just born evil, if you ignore the five or six sequels.)

Jumping forward to 1978, teen geek Arnie Cunningham gets bullied during the lunch period by the knife-wielding Buddy Repperton, who does his most menacing Vinnie Barbarino impression before he gets expelled for showcasing his knife skillz. Luckily, Arnie's pal Dennis comes to the rescue in the nick of time, and it's while they're driving home that afternoon that Arnie spots the trashed Christine sitting by her lonesome in someone's backyard. It's love at first sight, and since Arnie isn't troubled by the super-cheap asking price, it's not long before he gets his baby into tip-top shape -- seemingly overnight. There's also a new girl in school, Leigh (Alexandra Paul of "Baywatch" fame), that both Dennis and Arnie have their eyes on.

All would be well, except that Arnie starts to change. He gets a sudden influx of machismo and overconfidence -- even enough to win the heart of Leigh, and to earn the continued ire of Repperton and his gang. In retaliation for the expulsion, Buddy decides to make Christine a little prettier by smashing her to pieces with mallets. One of the guys in the gang (including Bill Murray's test subject from the beginning of Ghostbusters) even shits on her dashboard. What's a possessed car to do? Why, satanically fix itself and kill 'em all, of course!

That's pretty much the entire movie. Arnie goes more and more insane about Christine, Leigh and Dennis get worried, and the car starts killing the gang. There's also a nice small role for Harry Dean Stanton as the cop investigating the murders, and Robert Prosky as the cantankerous owner of Darnell's Garage. It's really a simple plot, overall, but it's bolstered by strong performances from the leads who really sell their characters. I'd say that John Stockwell (who later went on to be a director) makes Dennis one of the most likable horror movie characters that I can remember (don't know if that says much), and Keith Gordon's Arnie is a little over-the-top but still believable as he sinks further into murderous obsession.

Also of note is how confident the direction and camerawork is. Carpenter makes the most out of every inch of the screen, and even goes all-out with lens flare that makes Christine look even more frightening -- the glare stretches so far across the screen that it's almost as if Christine's got her arms stretched out to grab you with. Every movement of the camera is precise and measured, and even the sound effects are top-notch; this movie is tightly edited, and is pretty much the opposite of the sloppy production that mars most horror films, especially the horror films of the early eighties. And I need to throw in a double-especially on account of the track record for Stephen King adaptations. It's probably clear by now that I'm a big admirer, even though it's not the best horror film I've ever seen. Then again, I just sat through Amityville II: The Possession, so my judgment is skewed enough to make me rethink my opinion on Batman & Robin.

I'm no car nut, but I think the movie is a darn good entry into the genre, and I recommend it. Especially for those of you that like to see classic cars get destroyed over and over and over again. You know who you are.

REVIEW: Amityville II: The Possession (1982)

Sometimes, you rent a movie just based on the title alone, and this was how I came to spend money on Amityville II: The Possession. I saw it sticking out an extra couple inches on the shelf, and thought to myself, 'Hey, I'm in no mood for quality! I should get crap!'

And so I did.

Not having seen the original (or remake) Amityville Horror flicks, I figured that since this was a prequel, it wouldn't really matter. And...it doesn't. It still sucked. It sucked so much that about thirty minutes in, the Lady Retropolitan decided to go look at linen sales online. I cut my toenails, and decided that it would be better if I clipped them more often, and then I tried to figure out a way in which to handle the nail clipper where the clippings wouldn't shoot out in random directions at light speed. I had a martini, which I made with cran-raspberry juice that was 100% juice and no sweeteners; I prefer the sweetened kind. The Lady and I talked about how neither of us liked Juicy Juice when we were growing up.

Oh, yeah, the movie. It sucked. Being the Joe Bob Briggs fan that I am, I staunchly stand by his drive-in movie edict: I can find something good about pretty much any movie, provided that it isn't boring. Amityville II: The Possession is boring, and when you hear from me that a movie isn't worth watching, you know you've pretty much hit the bottom of the video barrel. Sometimes it's actually underneath the barrel.

This movie is apparently a prequel to the regular Amityville series, which were about a haunted house. The tagline for the series is that it was based on a true story, which in a small way, it was. The DeFeo family moved into the nice Long Island home, and the son went a little nutso and murdered his parents and siblings -- that part is true. The rest of the tale, with the Lutz family and the hauntings, has been so thoroughly debunked (including on this site, I think) that it's not really worth mentioning again, other than to say that the whole ghost aspect of it is bullshit. According to this movie, the DeFeo lad (Montelli or something in this movie) was actually possessed when he murdered everyone by something evil that lived in the weird crawlspace in the basement. To his defense, if I were stuck in this movie, I probably would've killed everyone too.

The film begins with the Montelli family moving into the new home, which mysteriously has all the windows nailed shut. It also has poor insulation, and there's a termite problem, but for some reason the movie doesn't touch on those parts. The family is dysfunctional; the father is an abusive bastard played by Burt Young with all the zeal of an actor that knows he's slumming in shitty horror films. Mrs. Montelli is an enabling paranoid Catholic, the eldest son is a teen angsty jerk, and the two youngest kids are so non-existent as characters that the producers could've saved a buck and hired two cardboard stand-ups that had "Young Boy" and "Young Girl" written on them in a Sharpie scrawl. The older daughter actually acts a little, but I was more concerned by the fact that I recognized her as being Monique in "Better Off Dead," which you are better off renting. After some stuff happens, the mother calls in the local priest, Father Adamsky, to help move the plot along.

Just trying to remember what happened in the movie hurts, so I'll make this quick: the older son gets possessed, and has sex with his sister in what's probably the only genuinely creepy part of the movie. I noticed early on that their relationship was somewhat frisky, but by the time that she took off her clothes for her brother I knew something was amiss -- and that was before she even knew he was possessed, which is, like, extra-creepy times a thousand. (For good creepiness measure, she later tells him, "Are you feeling guilty? I'm not." And she doesn't even have the devil problem! Yech!) Some more stuff happens, and the boy's Walkman tells him to kill everyone, which I was kind of rooting for because we've hit the forty-five minute mark and no one has died yet. Arrests are made, the priest comes in, and he's convinced that the Devil is responsible. He tries to get an exorcism underway, but the Scary German Guy from Monster Squad says that he doesn't have church approval.

There's more horrible plot that is unfortunately thrust upon the viewer, and the movie completely devolves into Exorcist mode, including the "Take me! Let his soul go! Take me instead!" bit, but without that little thing that we amateur critics call effectiveness. There's some shitty special effects, a 90% unresolved plot, and then it's thankfully over.

Seriously, now, I don't say this much, but rent something else. The best things that I can say about this movie is that you see Monique from Better Off Dead's nipple (but even that is ruined by the incest subplot), and that watching this movie might encourage you to maybe clean your apartment or something. I know I was pretty much begging to check my bank statements against my ATM receipts by the twenty minute point. I asked the Lady Retropolitan if I could iron her clothes.

Please, do not rent this movie. If you must rent a movie, I will give you an entire list of movies that are better. Just call me. I'm here to help.