Review: World War Z

From the earliest days of the narrative motion picture to today, studios have been adapting literary works for the big screen. And, for just as long, they've been changing those literary works to better fit the needs of the new/different medium. Most times, this comes down to tossing out a whole lot of narrative and hitting the essential/basic plot points--the Harry Potter films, for example. Sometimes this means changing major plot points to accommodate movie stars--compare the ending of the remake of True Grit starring starring Jeff Bridges to the original big-screen version starring John Wayne; one is very true to Charles Portis's novel, the other is not.

And sometimes, it means tossing out the literary work completely and keeping nothing but the title--the James Whale/Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein may be the best example of this, with Edgar G. Ulmar's The Black Cat (also starring Karloff) a close second. Little of Mary Shelley's novel was used for Frankenstein, save the title and the basic concept (a scientist plays God by creating life and suffers the consequences). The Black Cat uses even less of its source material, appropriating only name of Edgar Allan Poe's short story and adding a brief cameo by the titular feline.

My Point? The practice of changing/ignoring literary works while adapting them to the big screen is as old as the movies themselves, and it is possible to produce good--even great--movies under these circumstances.

World War Z, "adapted" in title/basic concept only from the best-seller by Max Brooks (son of screen legends Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft), is not a great movie. It is really not a good movie either, though it does have good moments in it, especially early on. What's somewhat baffling is why so much cash was dropped acquiring the rights to adapt World War Z when this zombie apocalypse could have been executed for far less.

Maybe it was the global scope of Brooks's novel--which bounces from the USA to Japan to Israel to South America--that appealed to star Brad Pitt and director Marc Foster. Obviously, though, they were turned off by the novel's narrative structure, which looks back on the war with the undead through interviews with people from all walks of life all over the globe (heads of state, soldiers, suburban moms, etc.); it's something like Studs Terkel's Working, only with a lot more zombies. Brooks used this structure for sometimes sly, sometimes obvious political/sociological commentary while not neglecting the horror elements of the story.

World War Z the movie, on the other hand, goes for a much more conventional, action-driven narrative while jettisoning nearly all of the characters and situations from the novel. Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, a retired United Nations investigator who's more than happy to spend his days making pancakes for his wife (Mireille Enos) and their two adorable daughters. Life is idyllic--and, therefore, doomed to change big-time.

And so it does--while driving through Philadelphia, Gerry and family get caught up the undead outbreak, with seriously fast zombies swarming through the streets and sinking their teeth into anything that moves (at a tasteful distance--this movie is, after all, rated PG-13). The family must now fight to survive long enough for Gerry's buddies at the UN can rescue them.

Said rescue comes at a price, though: The UN wants Gerry go back into the field and investigate the cause of the zombie plague and, hopefully, come up with a solution, and fast: the population of the world is dropping like a stone.

Up to this point, World War Z the movie is engaging, entertaining and involving--we care about what happens to Gerry, his wife and his kids. Unfortunately, once Gerry flies off to investigate the origins of the plague, the wife and kids--and, pretty much, any further character development--fall very much into the background, and action set pieces dominate the rest of the way.

The action scenes themselves are well orchestrated, with swarms of flesh-hungry fiends charging forward, spilling over walls and toppling buses. We've seen fast zombies before (28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead, but never like this, acting in most scenes more like locusts or ants than individual monsters. That gives the action scenes a greater scale--it's almost more like a natural disaster than a zombie-made one--and lend some scenes an appropriately claustrophobic quality.

Unfortunately, the lack of individuality in such scenes also makes the action more anonymous and distant than in most zombie movies, where getting bitten by a single flesh-eater is as much an immediate threat as the multitudes of gut-munchers milling about in the streets.

Speaking of gut-munchers...we don't really see much of that in this movie. I'm hardly a gorehound, but if you're going to make a movie about a plague of flesh-eating zombies, we damn well better see them eat flesh. And we don't.

So not only are the characters robbed of opportunities to develop, but the monsters themselves are robbed of their most prominent threatening feature--some might say their only threatening feature--making it difficult to care about predator or prey.

There's a good--even great--movie to be made from Max Brooks's novel. This World War Z isn't it.

Who Knew This Was a Problem?

When in Portland, watch out for zombie strippers!

Truer Words Were Never Spoken

From the Onion AV Club's review of the Jane Austen/undead invador mash-up novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: "Almost any endeavor these days, it seems, can be enhanced by the addition of pirates, zombies, or ninjas."

All You Need Is Braaaaaains!

A coworker who also regularly participates in Bring Your Action Figure to Work Day recently sent me a link to a website featuring a toy he thought I'd enjoy. He was right, of course--we've worked together for a couple of years, and he knows me well--but the website in question was out of stock of this particular toys, so I joined their mailing list so they could let me know when they had replenished their supply.

A few days later, I was in Chicago Comics, which happens to not only be a fine comic book shop, but a dandy toy store as well. And what did they have, in stock and ready for me to take home? That's right--the toy in question.

Three words, people: Remote. Control. Zombie.

The next day, I received an email from the website, letting me know the RC Zombie was back in stock and ready for purchase. Timing, as they say, is everything.

Today, the Zombie is on my desk, along with his remote control--shaped like a brain, of course. (It is, however, a misconception that zombies crave only brains, born from the overwhelming popularity of the mid-80s undead epic, Return of the Living Dead; zombies will pretty much eat any part of your body they can sink their decaying teeth into.)

He is also joined by Wolverine, Sabertooth (and his kid, Wild Child, who is kept on a chain and has a disturbingly Mini Me vibe to him), the zombie punching bag and a very Yellow Submarine-ish Sir Paul McCartney with his "friend," the Love Glove.

The RC Zombie will not go hungry this day.

Review: Grindhouse (2007)

A grindhouse, for those of you who don't know, was a movie theater that showed primarily low-budget action and horror movies, with loads of violence and sex. I say "was" because grindhouses don't exist anymore; nor, for the most part, do the cinematic subgenres they displayed, like urban comedies, kung-fu revenge sagas or Satan-worship monster shows.

Downtown Chicago used to be peppered with once-prestigious movie houses that had evolved (or devolved, depending on your perspective) into grindhouses, with names like the Woods, the United Artists, the Michael Todd, the Oriental and, of course, the Chicago. A couple of these theaters (the Oriental and the Chicago) survive as live-performance venues; the rest were demolished long ago. No great surprise. Many of these theaters were in rough shape, and the late Chicago Tribune/WBBM-TV film critic, Gene Siskel, once showed a dead mouse in the lobby of one of the downtown theaters in a segment on the evening news.

Grindhouse fare also popped up at drive-ins like the Bel-Air on Cicero Avenue in Berwyn, where I saw the likes of Beyond the Door and Race with the Devil, but most of those are gone as well. (A brief Internet search turned up only two operating drive-ins near Chicago: the Cascade Drive-in in West Chicago and the McHenry Outdoor Theatre in McHenry.)

I have more than a little affection for the grindhouse era--it's when I started going to movies, no matter what was showing or where--but Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino obviously have not only affection, but a deep, abiding love for the era. What else could explain Grindhouse, the directors' attempt to re-create the experience of watching a cheap-looking double feature at your neighborhood theater or local drive-in?

Rodriguez helms Planet Terror, the front end of the twin bill. It stars Rose McGowan as Cherry darling, a go-go dancer ("Not a stripper," she explains, "There's a difference") who wants to do something else--maybe become a stand-up comedian, since "everybody tells me I'm funny" except her ex-boyfriend, Wray (Freddy Rodriguez, no relation to the director), who still loves Cherry even though she walked out on him and took his jacket with her.

They don't get much time for witty banter, though, as Cherry is attacked in the dark by roaming, ravenous creatures chew off Cherry's right leg (OW!) and run away with it. Wray rushes Cherry to the local hospital, where all hell is breaking loose: Casualties are pouring in with similar wounds (or worse), overwhelming the staff, which includes Doctor Block (Josh Brolin) and his wife, Dakota (Marley Shelton), who's trying to run off with her ex-girlfriend (Stacey Ferguson, a.k.a. Fergie) when the mayhem starts.

Pretty soon, the whole town is overrun by "sickos"--which are pretty much your basic flesh-eating zombies, but with more personality (if they had a speaking part before becoming infected, anyway) and nasty, puss-filled boils all over their bodies. This whole mess ties back to some nerve-gas nonsense and a mysterious military type (Bruce Willis), but does that really matter? It's all an excuse for some gut-munching, head-'sploding action, with Wray, Cherry (who's outfitted with a table leg and, later, a machine gun in place of her missing limb) and an assortment of colorful characters (played by the likes of Michael Biehn, Tom Savini, Jeff Fahey and Michael Parks, playing Texas Ranger Earl McGraw just as he did in From Dusk Till Dawn and Kill Bill) try to survive the zombie apocalypse long enough to find a cure to the rapidly spreading infection.

Robert Rodriguez in one of the most energetic, exuberant filmmakers working today, and his enthusiasm is hard to resist. He's clearly having fun with the cheesy material and so are his actors--even McGowan, who gives a grueling physical performance not only in the bump-and-grind she does beneath the opening credits, but throughout the rest of Planet Terror, at least half of which she spends bounding about with one leg missing.

Rodriguez mimics the action-horror films of the '70s and '80s well enough, both in terms of content, with visual and plot cues to movies like George Romero's The Crazies, John Carpenter's The Fog and Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead, but in physical presentation as well, with faux scratches on the film, a "missing reel" and a soundtrack heavy on synthesizers (a direct reference to Carpenter, who, like Rodriguez, often scores his own films).

One of the unfortunate side effects of directorial exuberance, though, is lack of self-control. Rodriguez pours on the gore (sometimes literally) to the point where it stops being funny and is merely gross. (Were the forensic-quality close-ups of chewed up skulls or the popping boils all over the "sickos" really needed? How the hell did the MPAA give this film an "R" rating?) There's also Rodriguez's use of Quentin Tarantino, the actor. He chews the scenery with abandon, which would be fine if Tarantino were even a mediocre actor. But he's not. He's an annoyance, and Rodriguez should have known better than to use him for anything more than the briefest of cameos. On the plus side, Rodriguez's indulgences don't ruin the fun as much as momentarily sidetrack it.

Tarantino indulges himself as well in his Grindhouse contribution, Death Proof, a revenge drama/car-chase ode that begins with multiple close-ups of women's feet (Tarantino has an admitted fetish). He follows the feet--and the women attached to them (including Jordan Ladd, daughter of Cheryl, and Sydney Poitier, daughter of Sidney)--as they tool around Austin, TX, shooting the shit about boys, pot and what they're doing for fun that night. They wind up in a bar (where the bartender is played by--surprise!--Tarantino), where they get drunk, shoot the shits some more and generally kill time--until they meet Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell).

Stuntman Mike is a ruggedly handsome man--or he would be, if not for the whopping scar down the left side of his face. Reasonably charming, too. Except, of course, for the fact that he's a serial killer who likes to stalk women and run them down with his armored-up, tricked-out stunt car. (The skull and crossbones on the hood? Not a good sign.) After a horrific crash in which Stuntman Mike is the only survivor, Earl McGraw (Michael Parks again) muses that Mike is probably a murderer. But proof? None.

So Stuntman Mike goes back on the prowl, this time stalking a foursome of females making a movie in Tennessee: Actress Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), makeup artist Abernathy (Rosario Dawson), and stuntwomen Kim (Tracie Thoms) and Zoe Bell (billed "as herself" because she's a real-life stuntwoman who doubled Uma Thurman in Kill Bill). Stuntman Mike gets a whole lot more than he bargained for, though, when three of his intended victims fight back in one of the most thrilling car chases ever filmed.

Even with the period subject matter and style, you can't mistake this for a film by anyone but Tarantino. There are the usual obscure pop culture references. There is great use of music, including the terrific "Hold Tight" by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich (perhaps the most awkwardly named rock group ever) and the opening theme by Jack Nitzsche (which was also used as the theme for Bert I. Gordon's Village of the Giants and is one of the best instrumentals ever). And there are long conversations that don't necessarily advance the plot, but do flesh out the characters. Tarantino's dialog isn't nearly as sharp as usual, though, so it's easy to become impatient while the women talk and drive and drive and talk without seeming to go anywhere or say anything. Still, one of my main complaints about mad slasher films has always been that we hardly get to know the victims at all (other than hair color and bra size) before they're dispatched by the crazed killer. Getting to know these characters before they're threatened and/or slaughtered makes us care a bit more about their eventual fates.

No matter how much Tarantino spins his wheels (pun intended) for much of Death Proof, the chase at the end--by turns thrilling, frightening and hilarious--more than makes up for it. It also doesn't hurt that Russell gives a quietly menacing performance reminiscent of Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter--calm and cool when playing with his intended prey, increasingly frantic as the situation is yanked out of his control by women who refuse to be victims anymore.

Both Tarantino and Rodriguez present strong female characters capable of kicking serious amounts of ass, but both make these characters suffer before they get to be strong; the women in Death Proof are terrorized by Stuntman Mike before they turn the tables, and Cherry Darling has to be outright mutilated before she's given the opportunity to save the day. Both directors have been down this road before: Tarantino's Kill Bill features a martial-arts master who defeats everyone in her path, but not before she's shot in the head and substantially degraded. And Rodriguez's Sin City is a misogyny-a-go-go. (To be fair, so are Frank Miller's graphic novels, which Rodriguez faithfully adapted.) It would have been nice if, this time around, both directors could have let their strong women have some damn fun without paying such a high price for it.

Both halves of Grindhouse are a good time nonetheless, just like they're meant to be. Sure, this is a vanity project suffused with nostalgia for an era most filmgoers have forgotten, if they were even alive to experience it--isn't the whole of Grindhouse an obscure pop reference, when you get down to it?--created two obsessive cinema buffs who have the muscle to get it made.

That's not the point. The point is, have Rodriguez and Tarantino achieved their goal? Is Grindhouse a cheesy, sleazy good time? Yes and yes.

Movie Review: Shaun of the Dead (2004)

You know, we haven't had nearly enough zombie comedies.

Think about it. The undead have been lurching through our cinematic nightmares at least since 1932's White Zombie, but how many outright comedies have been generated by this popular subgenre? Zombies on Broadway? Return of the Living Dead and its immediate sequel? A few scattered direct-to-video efforts?

Now we have Shaun of the Dead, which has plenty of fun with past flesh-eating films--the title is a riff on George Romero's classic, Dawn of the Dead, and there are references aplenty to Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series and even contemporary horror movies like 28 Days Later....

But if Shaun were just a spoof of classic splatter, we could get a few good laughs and forget about it. But it also aspires to be a romantic comedy and a social satire as well--and succeeds at both admirably.

Shaun (Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the script with director Eric Wright) has a dead-end job as an assistant manager at an electronics store in the greater London area. His relationship with his girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield), might be at a dead end, too: She's tired of spending her evenings hanging out at the local pub, the Winchester, with Shaun and his best friend/flatmate, the rude, crude, obnoxious and occasionally amusing Ed (Nick Frost). She wants to know where their relationship is going. When Shaun screws up dinner reservations the next night and suggests that they instead go to the Winchester, she dumps him. Shaun and Ed then go out and get good and drunk, not aware that, for whatever reason, the dead are rising and putting the bite on the living. (This is consistent with Romero's approach, where the plague of zombies is explained in, at best, vague terms.)

This leads to what has rapidly become one of my favorite scenes in any movie ever: Hung over and depressed about his breakup with Liz, Shaun pops out to the neighborhood convenience store, so wrapped up in his own misery that he's entirely oblivious to the walking dead all around him. It's funny and thought-provoking at the same time: How much of what goes on around us--immediately before us and in the world at large--do we miss when we're so self-involved?

Shaun and Ed find out about the situation soon enough, though, and come up with a plan: Pick up Shaun's mom (Penelope Wilton) and stepdad (Bill Nighy) and Liz, along with her flatmates, bubbly actress Dianne (Lucy Davis) and cynical, dour David (Dylan Moran), and head for the safest place they can think of: You guessed it, The Winchester.

The script is extremely tight and well thought out, with hardly a line thrown out that isn't referenced again later in the movie, while references to other zombie movies aren't so overt that they alienate those unfamiliar with the genre. (Musical cues are lifted from Romero's Dawn of the Dead, while character names and dialogue from Night of the Living Dead are called out, with Ed shouting, "We're coming to get you, Barbara!" to Shaun's mom through the phone.) And the horror and comedy aspects are balanced well, with Shaun's efforts to win back Liz while fighting off the living dead (Shaun swings a mean cricket bat).

The zombies themselves are the butt of some jokes, but are for the most part treated as real threats to life and limb. Because of this, the conclusion does have some downright serious, emotional moments, but this by no means negates what has come before. It only underscores how thin the line between comedy and drama--or life and death--really is, and how one can straddle the line deftly to produce a comedy/loving tribute also capable of causing scares and effective parody at the same time.

Shaun of the Dead is not only one of the best horror comedies ever made, but it so impressed Romero that he gave Wright and Pegg cameos in his own most recent undead epic, Land of the Dead. You can't get a much better endorsement for a zombie movie than that.

Review: Land of the Dead (2005)

The past few years have been pretty kind to fans of flesh-eating zombies, with a steady stream of ghouls stumbling across cineplex screen in movies like Resident Evil, 28 Days Later..., a "re-envisioned" Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead.

This streak of undead success has even had a happy side benefit: they allowed writer/director George A. Romero to return to the genre he created nearly 40 years ago with Night of the Living Dead, to revisit his apocalyptic vision--this time with a modest budget (reportedly $15 million, more than the budgets for his previous three zombie epics combined) and actors you've actually heard of.

Years have passed since the dead began to rise and feast on the living. Humanity now exists in scattered outposts such as Fiddler's Green, a luxury skyscraper ruled by Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) and occupied by the wealthy. The poor huddle in the streets surrounding Fiddler's Green, while zombies mill about outside the guarded, electrified perimeter. (Land of the Dead is set in Pittsburgh, but was shot in Toronto.) Kaufman sends out a team of scavengers headed up by Riley (Simon Baker) and Cholo (John Leguizamo), who venture out into nearby towns in an armored assault vehicle called Dead Reckoning (the original title of this movie), which looks like the Mammoth Car from Speed Racer with a whole lot more firepower.

While out on a run, Riley notices that some of the undead--referred to by the living as "walkers" or, more desparigingly, "stenches"--are acting kind of peculiar, especially Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), who doesn't merely wander around, but seems be trying to communicate with his fellow flesh-eaters and manages to grab a gun from one of the Dead Reckoning crew. (Don't you just know he's going to use it later?)

Things get complicated, though, when Cholo wants to join the residents of Fiddler's Green. Kaufman coldly rejects this notion, claiming that there's a "long waiting list." (Who is on this list, since damn near everybody is dead or poor or dead poor?) Cholo doesn't take this very well: He drives off with Dead Reckoning and threatens to blow up Fiddler's Green if he doesn't get five million dollars by midnight. Kaufman, in turn, hires Riley to retake Dead Reckoning--mostly because he wants to use it as a getaway vehicle should anything go wrong. (And it will.) So Riley goes out to get Dead Reckoning--with the idea of driving it to Canada himself--while the undead, lead by Big Daddy, slowly converge on Fiddler's Green, munching on more than a few soldiers and unlucky souls along the way.

Riley is a pretty dull hero; he's basically a nice guy in a not-so-nice situation. But the hero is usually less interesting than the supporting characters surrounding him or her--Dorothy was pretty bland compared to the Tin Man, Scarecrow or Cowardly Lion; and Luke Skywalker wasn't nearly as much fun to hang out with as Han Solo or Chewbacca. Fortunately, Romero surrounds Riley with colorful characters like Charlie (Robert Joy) a burn victim who's a deadshot with a rifle; Slack (Asia Argento), a tough, take-no-shit ex-hooker with the obligitory heart of gold; and Pillsbury (Pedro Miguel Arce), an enormous SWAT guy who gets some of the best lines in the movie.

Romero pacing is tighter than usual (at 90 minutes, Land of the Dead is the shortest of his undead movies to date), but as in the past, he uses the situation to comment on society and its ills--sometimes to great effect, sometimes less so.

For instance, Romero touches on consumerism (both literal and figuritive), but the economic state put forth in Land of the Dead are pretty murky. How is money still worth anything after the apocalypse? Where exactly are you going to spend it even if you still have any? And didn't Romero already touch on this all the way back in the original Dawn of the Dead, when two characters loot a shopping mall bank and hold bundles of cash up to a security camera? Or is he implying that humanity will cling to consumerism even after the world ends, because money and possessions are all we humans care about? It's not clear what point Romero is trying to make, if any. The intellectual grow of the zombies is hardly fresh, either--remember Bub, the undead soldier from Romero's previous ghoul grind, Day of the Dead? He was more charming than Big Daddy, too.

The metaphorical use of Fiddler's Green, though, is more than flexible enough to accommodate multiple levels of interpretation. Haves vs. Have-nots. Conservatives vs. liberals. Even America vs. the rest of the world. (Romero nods overtly in this direction when Cholo threatens to unleash a "jihad" on Kaufman.)

The presence of social commentary doesn't mean Romero skimps on the gut-munching. Oh no. There is more than enough flesh-scarfing, head-'sploding action to please even the most discriminating saucehead, with some visually beautiful moments, like when the army of undead rises out of the water, or long shots of ghouls roaming free on the streets of the city that had only moments before been quiet, if not peaceful.

Romero and the actors make the characters interesting enough (even the dead ones) that we care about what eventually happens to them. The notable exception is Hopper, whose performance is so atypically restrained and whose part is so underwritten (it's never explained how Kaufman amassed so much power or why somebody doesn't just drag him out of his tower and throw him to the zombies) that he's not an especially compelling villain, though he does get some good lines ("Zombies, man...they creep me out"). Leguizamo, on the other hand, is a more compelling bad guy with a more understandable set of motives: He's worked hard, paid his dues and wants what he feels he deserves. Who can't relate to that?

Though the ending of Land of the Dead leaves open the possibility of further sequels, this may well be Romero's last zombie flick. If that's the case, he goes out with considerable style and some admirable scares. If you're a fan of the films of George A. Romero, you'll adore this movie. And if you're not a fan? What are you doing here, anyway?

Review: Day of the Dead (1985)

In the years since its initial theatrical release, Day of the Dead has, in some circles, gained a reputation for being the darkest and most intellectual of George Romero's three Living Dead epics. And this, bluntly, confused the living hell out of me. When I bought my first VCR back in 1988, I rented three movies, one of which was Day of the Dead, (the other two were The Hidden and a porn flick called Sex Star--but did you need to know that, really?) and while I didn't think it was the worst horror film I'd ever seen, it was probably the most bitterly disappointing. I was (and am) a huge fan of the first two Dead movies, and I found Day to be loud and stupid, tossing aside the atmosphere carefully constructed in the first two films for a cheap, sloppy and ultimately depressing conclusion to the series.

But I'll be the first person to admit that I'm fully capable of being wrong, so I recently sat down and watched Day of the Dead again for the first time since that initial viewing. And found that my contempt for it has only grown.

I can't argue with the perception that Day is the darkest of the trilogy; that's stating the obvious. The dead rule the world, and humanity has been driven underground into cavernous bunkers like the one we find our characters in. The big problem, though, is that the remaining survivors all seem to be either idiots, assholes or idiot assholes. From Sarah (Lori Cardille), a pill-popping shrew, to Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato), a maniacal military freak, to Dr. Logan (Robert Liberty, who gives the film's best, most eccentric performance), a scientist so removed from reality that even his subordinates refer to him as "Frankenstein," everybody in this movie seems to be in varying stages of mental disintegration. That's understandable-if the world were ending and the dead were waiting right outside the door to belly up to the table with me as the main course, I'd pretty well lose it, too. But these characters are so universally unpleasant and poorly drawn that spending time with them for even a few minutes gave me a ringing headache. And interminable stretches where actors unconvincingly scream at one other qualify as "intellectual," then Day of the Dead may be the most dizzyingly cerebral movie ever made.

Many of the quieter moments in the movie, in which the more marginally likable characters discuss theories as to why the zombies do what they do or how it would be better to forget the past and just start the whole worldover again, are much more effective than the more "dramatic" scenes, even if they echo moments from the previous two Dead movies. And Tom Savini's special effects reach their ultimate zenith--or valley, take your pick--withan ending so overrun with spilling guts that they must have raided every butcher's shop on the East Coast to pull off those gushy effects.

But it all comes back to the script, which was reportedly severely reworked because funding had fallen through for the zombie picture Romero had wanted to make. That's no excuse. Romero has had zilch to work with on many ofhis movies, but has most often turned out startling work. Day of the Dead only startles in how easy it is to predict which of the survivors will make it to the end of the flick and in how shallow and, inevitably, disappointing the whole exercise is. What a shame it is that the one horror series entirely controlled by its main creator still ends with an entirely unworthy entry. Maybe, someday, Romero will revisit the material and come up with a more fitting conclusion to the Dead saga.

Till then, Day of the Dead is what we're left with--and we deserved better.

Review: 28 Days Later...(2002)

The young man opens his eyes. Where is he? On a bed. Restricted by tubes and tape. A hospital. But where are the nurses? The doctors? No one in sight. He gets up. Pulls out the tubes. Puts on some clothes. Stumbles down the hall. "Hello?" No answer. Not in the hall. Not in the street below. Not in downtown London. Not anywhere.

He doesn't know about what happened at Cambridge. He doesn't know about the monkeys. Or Rage.

Animal-rights activists break into a research lab to set the animals free. A tech begs them not to. Says the chimpanzee is infected with Rage. They don't listen. Open the cage. Set loose the Rage. Doesn't take much. A bite. A drop of blood in the mouth or eye. An activist is infected. Then another. Then another. The infection spreads. The dominoes fall.

28 days later, a young man walks through downtown London and thinks the city deserted. If only it were.

These opening moments of 28 Days Later... are bloody near perfect. The wandering young man--a bicycle messenger named Jim (Cillian Murphy) who had the misfortune of getting sideswiped by a truck and knocked into a coma just before the outbreak--gets to stand in for the audience. With the exception of the information about the breakin at Cambridge, where we get to see the first moments of contagion, we don't know any more than Jim does. We can deduce more--that the infection wiped out London at least, if not all of England--but Jim find this out soon enough anyway when he makes the innocent-enough mistake of walking into a church filled with infected Londoners. Blood-spattered. Red-eyed. Hungry. Jim, weak but sensible, runs for his life. Other survivors arrive. Jim gets to live. For now.

This is hardly fresh territory. George Romero defined the flesh-chomping zombie genre with his trilogy of Living Dead movies, but even he wasn't the first to play on this gore-caked ground. Richard Matheson's novella, I Am Legend, about a plague that turns much of the world's population into vampires, set the framework for much of what was to come and was itself twice filmed (as The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price and The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, with a third film version rumored for years).

Director Danny Boyle (of Trainspotting fame) and screenwriter Alex Garland seem fully aware of the restrictions and expectations of the genre they're working in and attempt to work around them. Their most noticable--and most welcome--change to the plague itself. Victims don't die; they are transformed, and hence aren't really zombies at all (they're referred to regularly as "infecteds"). And the disease itself is specific in origin--a biological weapon experiment that goes about as wrong as it can go--rather than vague (a crashed probe in Night of the Living Dead) or entirely unexplained (Romero's two Dead sequels). The Rage virus also has a demonic logic to it: Turn it loose in a city or country you don't like and watch its citizens tear each other apart.

Boyle and Garland do acknowledge their predecessors, though, especially Romero. When a group of survivors--Jim, Selena (Naomie Harris), Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Frank's young daughter, Hannah (Megan Burns)--follows the directions on the one remaining radio broadcast and make their way toward a military outpost north of Manchester, they make stops along the way, including a shopping spree in a supermarket and a visit to a presumably deserted gas station, that echo heavily of Dawn of the Dead (which mostly took place in a shopping mall).

Unfortunately, the back third of the movie, which takes place after the survivors reach the outpost, also echoes Romero--but not in a good way. The soldiers, led by the deceptively calm Major West (Christopher Eccleston), prove to be a greater threat than the infecteds, just as the soldiers and scientists in Romero's third and least-effective zombie epic, Day of the Dead, wound up being more monsterous than the monsters could ever be. The shambling, slobbering things that were once like you and me might be out for blood, but only because it's now their nature. To be cruel, hateful, evil...these are conscious decisions. We, the survivors, the "normals," have a choice. The infecteds/zombies don't.

This last act may turn 28 Days Later... from a thoughtful study of characters under the ultimate strain to a more ordinary action/horror flick. But enough good will and interest in the characters' fates has been built (mostly through intense, sensitive performances, especially from Harris and the ever-underestimated Gleeson) that it's easier to stay with the movie until the end, even if that end could have been less cliched, could have been as finely detailed, thought-provoking, sharped-edged as the beginning and middle were.

Worst...Sequel...Ever!

Yeah. Okay. I know. I haven't updated this site in a while. But I'm back.

Well, sort of.

I still need to write a fresh, original piece for the site. And yes, I will do that. Soon. No, really. But until then, here's something I wrote about a year ago in response to a special request from my best friend, JB: "Pick the top 10 Worst Movie Sequels starting with the least offensive and ending with the stinkiest stinker." And this piece is appropriate, too, for this time of year. After all, isn't the summer movie season the the time when sequels swarm all over us like flies on the windows of the house in the Amityville Horror movies? (Speaking of some bad sequels...)

10. STAR WARS: EPISODE ONE--THE PHANTOM MENACE
All right, so this is a "prequel" and it's not as painfully bad like some of the other entries on listed below, but it probably qualifies as the most disappointing sequel on this list. Unlike most sequels, which have pretty low expectations, this one had fanboys yelping for years before it came out. And with 15 years to think about it, all George Lucas could come up with was a thinly veiled remake of the original? With Jar-Jar Binks, a "comic relief" character no more advanced than the Chinese cook in King Kong, which was released over 60 years earlier? Episode One has great special effects, but that just makes it the best-looking bad movie I've ever seen--which makes it all the more offensive.

Speaking of the Chinese cook from King Kong...

9. SON OF KONG
RKO Pictures had pushed hard for King Kong to be a huge hit, and it was. But they got greedy & wanted to capitalize on it with an immediate sequel, so they rushed this movie into production that same year (1933)...and it shows. With only Robert Armstrong (as Carl Denham) and the aforementioned Chinese cook returning from the original film, this sequel needed some great monsters to get it by. So what did we get? A cute and fuzzy Li'l Kong. Kind of like giving us Scrappy Doo when we expect Scooby. Without the time to set up more elaborate sequences, special effects master Willis O'Brien had to settle for a couple of brief fight scenes and lots of the white fuzzy Kong Jr. making cute faces. Either RKO should have taken some time to come up with something even halfway decent, or they should have left well enough alone. (Then again, that can be said for most of the movies on this list.)

8. BATMAN & ROBIN
Okay, I'm not great fan of the Batman movies. But I could, at least, see why they would appeal to others: The first two films in the series (Batman and Batman Returns) had Tim Burton's creative energies behind them, and the third (Batman Forever) had two terrific, campy villains in Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face and Jim Carrey as the Riddler. (Nicole Kidman's presence didn't hurt, either.) But Batman & Robin struggles to be coherent, much less entertaining. George Clooney, usually a reliable screen presence, makes a bland Batman. Arnold Schwarzenegger throws off one-liners perpetually, eliciting more groans than giggles. Uma Thurman's sex appeal is muffled beneath glitter and a goofy accent. And Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl? Give me a damn break. Throw in editing that looks like it was done in a blender and you've got one headache-inducing mess. No wonder it killed the franchise.

7. SCREAM 3
The franchise was pretty well screamed out by this point. Yeah, the first one was entertaining, even if it engaged in some of the same "hack-up-pretty-girls" cliches as the genre it satirizes. And the second one had some sly commentary about film violence and sequels ("Sequels suck," one helpful film student points out early in the proceedings). But did we really need Scream 3? Does it do anything the first two didn't do already, and better? Was it necessary to kill off every single cast member of Stab 3? (Come to think of it, Stab 3shouldn't exist, since the Stab films are presumably based on the "real" events depicted the previous two Scream movies--is Stab 3 based on a psychic vision or just made up or did nobody involved in Scream 3 give enough of a white lab rat's ass to notice such a continuity glitch?) And does it have the guts to whack one of the remaining original characters, thus cutting down the odds of Scream 4? If you answered "no" to any of these questions, then you've got more sense than the director, the writer or any of the stars. And any movie that kills off both Kelly Rutherford AND Parker Posey earns a permanent spot on my cinema shit list.

6. POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE
The original "Poltergeist" wasn't a great movie, but it at least was fun. And it made us all permanently afraid of clowns (like we weren't already). But this nonsense sequel tried to go serious on us with some shit about family togetherness being able to fight off evil--were it that audience unity could have been employed to fight off the evil of this crappy movie or its even more useless followup, Poltergeist III. This movie isn't fun. It isn't creepy. It's not even so bad I can laugh at it. It's just boring. And annoying. And stupid. And did I mention boring?

5. HALLOWEEN II
I had the significant misfortune of catching this bloody bomb on the big screen, and it pissed me off. Not only is Halloween II a bad movie in its own right--with nasty killings, a fright wig intended to make Jamie Lee Curtis look like a teenager again, and that maddeningly slow walk that Michael Myers had--but it diluted the impact of the original film, which had a damn-near perfect ending that this film and all its lousy followups thoroughly trash. John Carpenter (who served as co-executive producer and co-screenwriter) said director Rick Rosenthal fucked up the movie and re-edited it. Rosenthal said that Carpenter's editing fucked up what he was trying to accomplish. Sorry, boys. You both fucked up. And we had to live with the results.

4. INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
You could try to write off my hard feelings toward this sequel to the classic Raiders of the Lost Ark to the fact that this was probably the most uncomfortable in-theater experience of my life: the Nortown Theater had recently been remodeled, but with little legroom, so I had to sit sideways on a aisle seat for two-plus hours (oddly enough, it closed down not long after that). But no. Even if I'd seen Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom in the luxury suite of the Hotel Intercontinental with Angelina Jolie and Bridget Fonda delivering full-body massages to my weary bones, this movie still would have sucked, sucked, sucked. Steven Spielberg replaces the thrills of Raiders with gross-out gags of bugs, hearts ripped out of chests and "chilled monkey brains." He replaces the tough, gutsy Karen Allen with the shrill, shrieking Kate Capshaw. And he engages in borderline racism in the treatment of Indy's sidekick, Short-Round, and the villains, all of whom are people of color. Or maybe he's satirizing the racism of the old movie serials that had stereotypical Asian sidekicks and ethnic villains. Whatever. Once you get past the opening action scene, which is fairly brisk and fun, watching this movie is about as entertaining as listening to someone file their nails for a couple of hours.

3. DAY OF THE DEAD
There are some who maintain that Day of the Dead, the third and, from all indications, last of George Romero's zombie extravaganzas, is the best of the bunch. I wish I knew what type of medication these folks are on so I could get a prescription--anything to dull the pain of watching this trash. I'm a big fan of the first two movies, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, but this one loses me across the board. The acting, never the strongest aspect of Romero's Dead movies, is particularly awful and amateurish here, with lots of screaming back and forth and maniacal laughter replacing any hint of subtlety, thoughtfulness or intelligence. Most of the movie takes place in an underground facility that looks suspiciously like an elementary school basement. And as violent and disgusting as the previous two entries could be (especially Dawn), this one surpasses them with dismemberments as flesh-chomping galore. (There's even one repugnant bit, where a zombie gets up from a table and its guts flop out on the floor, that Romero and special effects master Tom Savini were so proud of that they use it not once, but twice.) A lousy script, abundant overacting and disgusting special effects. Yep. Something for everyone.

2. ALIEN 3
Remember all the stuff you liked about Aliens? You know, like that cute yet spunky little girl? Or the tough yet tender Corporal Hicks? Or the android who risked his "life" to save everyone else's? Remember all that? Well, forget it: when Sigourney Weaver's Ripley crash lands on the prison planet at the beginning of Alien 3, two of those characters die instantly, and only one, the android (played again by Lance Henriksen), gets e brief, dismembered cameo. Things go downhill from there. Alien 3 is a tremendous downer, substituting the pedal-to-the-metal 'tude of the previous movie with gray, uninspired surroundings; grimy, untrustworthy characters (even the usually excellent Charles S. Dutton); and, ultimately, the death of the lead character of the series. No adrenaline-rush fun to be had here, kids--just a dreary march to a depressing end. The director, David Fincher, went on to make more critically acclaimed movies (Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room), but doesn't do a thing to keep the franchise going here. The series did continue, though. Alien Resurrection is even a marginal improvement on Alien 3, but that's damning it with faint praise: a blanks screen would have been a marginal improvement on Alien 3.

1. EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC
How do you go from one of the most frightening movies ever made to one of the most unintentionally hilarious movies ever made? Maybe by hiring an Oscar winner (Louise Fletcher) and a couple Oscar nominees (Richard Burton and Linda Blair) and sticking 'em with a horrid, contradictory, half-baked script and a director (the otherwise reliable John Boorman) in the midst of a nervous breakdown. The result? A movie that's barely watchable, much less scary. Burton's eyes bug out a lot. Fletcher looks sedated. Blair looks alternately confused and stoned. James Earl Jones (as an African priest who rides on the back of a grasshopper) and Max Von Sydow (briefly reprising his role from the original) are on hand to embarrass themselves as well. How bad is Exorcist II: The Heretic? The followup, Exorcist III--a bad sequel in its own right, but I digress--makes no reference to any of the events in Exorcist II. When even your own sequel disowns you, you know you've done wrong. And Exorcist II goes as wrong as a movie can go without the print spontaneously combusting--and even that unfortunate event would have been more entertaining than anything that actually made it up on screen.

Review: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

I was about eight or nine years old when I first saw George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. I may or may not have been a reasonably bright kid, but I must confess that I didn't get it. Not at all. I couldn't understand: what was so scary about people being chased by...other, really slow, really pale people? I watched the whole movie, shrugged and went back to my Marvel comics and my GI Joes.

A year or so later, I saw Night of the Living Dead again. It was playing on a local UHF station, flickering out at me from a black & white portable TV my brother and I shared in a small room just off the kitchen. It's been said everything can change in the blink of an eye, so just imagine what a year can do for the mind of a young child. More intelligence. More experience. More awareness of the world. But there are prices to be paid for awareness: I now understood perfectly what Night of the Living Dead was about and, before it had even run its full length, I turned the TV off and left the room. Shaking.

That night I dreamed of them, the ghouls with disheveled clothing, shuffling step and moist, wide, starving eyes. And many nights since as well. Sometimes they even caught me, tearing me limb from struggling limb. Some say you can't die in your dreams, while others maintain that the "ability" to die in your dreams is indicative of a highly creative mind--not something you think about much when you're watching your arms and legs being carried off in various directions, food for the stumbling, undead masses.

Many years passed before it was possible for me to stay in my seat and watch, without covering my eyes or averting my gaze, every last frame of Night of the Living Dead. In fact, it took watching it with a friend who, to her credit, found a great deal worth laughing at in Night before I felt even moderately comfortable sitting all the way through the movie.

And to be honest, there's plenty to mock in Night: Most of the acting is amateurish (maybe because most of the actors were amateurs); the music is lifted from other movies, most noticeably Teenagers from Outer Space and The Hideous Sun Demon; there are a few outstanding continuity errors (day becomes night awfully fast--like in the space of one edit--and one zombie who has long hair at the start of the movie has clearly gotten a haircut by the conclusion); and the special effects aren't terribly special.

This movie doesn't even have a particularly original concept. Similar scenes of zombie frolic had been used in Invisible Invaders and in The Last Man on Earth, a mediocre Vincent Price movie based on Richard Matheson's legendary vampire novella, I Am Legend (which was later adapted again as the awful Omega Man with Charlton Heston).

The story of Night is pretty familiar now: Barbara (Judith O'Dea) and her brother Johnny (Russell Streiner, who was also one of the film's producers) go out to the country to visit their father's grave. While there, they're attacked by the first of many, many zombies, who kills Johnny and chases Barbara to a deserted house where she meets up with Ben (Duane Jones, easily the best actor in the film), a truck driver who's fought his way through the undead hordes. Other survivors pop out of the basement (including Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman as a bickering husband and wife), realistic radio and TV reports try to make sense out of the mayhem (at one point, it's proposed that radiation from a probe to Venus is somehow responsible, but this is dropped quickly and never referred to again), and the zombies attack in graceless waves.

What lifts Night of the Living Dead above its flaws and meager budget is the style, conviction and realism Romero and crew bring to the whole thing. The stark black & white cinematography is more suggestive of documentary than of fiction; the escalating tensions among the survivors--especially between Jones and Hardman--ratchets up the strain on the audience; and the lack of a happy ending hearkens back to the EC Comics Romero enjoyed so much as a child (and would later pay more direct tribute to in Creepshow).

Then there are the living dead themselves: ever-present, shuffling, decomposing, hungry for the flesh of the living. They never tire, never wander off, never give up. The pressure never ceases. And when they do actually snag some skin to munch on, the movie gets downright grisly--although, after so many years of sequels, remakes, spinoffs and ripoffs that were far more graphic and gruesome, Night can now play on broadcast TV with no edits whatsoever.

Night of the Living Dead remains the stuff that nightmares and still, after all this time, packs one hell of a punch. Watch it with friends--and leave the lights on afterwards.

(NOTE: Because Night of the Living Dead has been in the public domain for so long, many truly nasty-looking prints can be found on both VHS and DVD. The only print worth owning-or even viewing--is the beautifully restored, digitally remastered print available through Elite Entertainment. They released it on video in 1995 through Anchor Bay and more recently put the same package out on DVD. Forget the rest--this is the best.)

Review: Resident Evil (2002)

Most movies based however loosely on video games--from Street Fighter to Super Mario Bros. to Lara Croft: Tomb Raider to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within--are light on plot and even more slight on character development, but at least are usually at least visually arresting. The latest video game to make a run at the big screen, Resident Evil, somehow manages to go one level lower, though: not only are its characters one-dimensional and its plot tissue-thin, but much of its look and feel has been cribbed from other, better horror movies like Aliens or any one of George Romero's Living Dead flicks.

The plot is such: the Umbrella Corporation--which, according to the somber voice-over man who insists on speaking to the audience even though every words that comes out of his somber mouth is on the screen in big, bright red letters, has products in 90% of American homes--is engaged in nasty biological and viral warfare experiments in a complex called "The Hive" located half a mile below the ridiculously named Raccoon City. Of course, the deadly T-Virus gets released in the Hive, and the artificial intelligence computer Umbrella has watching over the complex, "The Red Queen" (who appears throughout the movie as an annoying little holographic girl), goes apeshit and kills everybody inside. This is unfortunate, as one of the side effects of the T-Virus is that it animates the dead and turns them into flesh-craving maniacs. Oops.

Enter an Umbrella-sponsored commando squad that intends to go down to the Hive to figure out what the fuck went wrong. (Why? Can't the Umbrella Corporation communicate with the Red Queen? And as we see in the first few minutes of the movie, there are, like, a million cameras in the Hive watching everything everybody does. So why not watch the tape at a safe distance?) They drag along Alice (Milla Jovovich), who is apparently an employee of Umbrella hired to guard the "emergency entrance" to the Hive that the commandos are using now. I say "apparently" because the Red Queen, in her infinite wisdom, gassed Alice with some kind of nerve gas, so that she can't remember who she is. (Will somebody find the dipshits who programmed the Red Queen and fire them, please?) The commandos also find a cop at the emergency entrance, and Alice's "husband"--also an employee of Umbrella--down in the train leading to the Hive, and drag them along as well. Now, doesn't this just sound like the most well-oiled military operation this side of Custer's Last Stand or what?

Once inside the Hive, the commando force resolves to shut down the Red Queen who, for whatever reason, doesn't kill them as soon as they walk in, even though she knows they're there and tracks their every move. They do manage to turn the Red Queen off, getting a bunch of commandos knocked off in a bloody (figurative and literal) obvious trap. Unfortunately, in the process of shutting down the computer system, they unlock all the doors and let all the zombies and various other genetic experiments loose. Brilliant.

From there, the movie becomes little more than a shoot-'em-up, with Alice, commando Rain (Michelle Rodriguez) and a few guys, all of whom look pretty much alike (what, was the Umbrella Corporation busy cloning lantern-jawed brunet males, too?) trying to outrun the living dead--who like to gather in small spaces and charge out all at once, almost like they're having huddles to plan strategy and are being perpetually interrupted by those pesky, gun-toting alive people--and get back to the surface before the Hive is permanently sealed.

This may make Resident Evil sound like insipid, so-bad-it's-funny stuff, but trust me: it's not. The characters are all recycled cardboard, just targets to be turned into Zombie Chow. Even Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez, who managed to get their names above the title of the movie in the ads, aren't given much to do. Milla looks adorable throughout, running about in a slinky red dress and patent-leather knee-high boots--just the thing you want to wear when going into a hazardous-materials situation, right?--but she spends most of the movie having flashbacks to the time before the Red Queen gassed her ass or executing Matrix-style flying kicks. Michelle Rodriguez is even worse off: her character is thoroughly pissy even before she gets chomped by a zombie. And considering how quickly Rodriguez's star had been rising because movies like Girlfight and The Fast & the Furious, she might just want to leave Resident Evil off her resume.

Even the lack of plot and characters to give a white lab rat's ass about would be tolerable in the movie were at least scary or funny, but it's neither. The "jumps" are telegraphed so clumsily that the audience knows what's going to happen minutes before any of the characters figure it out--like the trap that (literally) cuts the cast in half, or the flooded room that the antivirus may be in, which is the same room the cast passed earlier and saw a dead body floating in; what do you think the odds are that that same dead body will pop up to threaten them later? And while I have great affection for flesh-eating zombies, they're not used to good effect here. In most of their scenes, they attack in large groups, like waves consisting of flailing arms and clacking jaws, which manages to make them less threatening. In Romero's first two Dead movies, he confined his living characters to small, well-fortified spaces, while the dead were free to roam in the open, thus underlining for the audience just how fucked the living really were. Romero's last zombie epic, Day of the Dead, turned the zombies loose in a large underground complex where experiments were being performed (sound familiar?) and cut down on the scares substantially.

More shocking, though, is how little humor there is to be found in Resident Evil. Most participants in the "shoot-the-monsters-in-the-head" genre understand how ridiculous and riddled with clichŽs it is and work around these challenges by injecting healthy doses of snark. A good example of this approach is John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, which also dealt with flesh-hungry combatants chasing down a small band of gun-toting good guys. Carpenter's film, though, is laced with smartass comments and winks at the audience, as if he's saying, "Sure, this is derivative shit, but we're having a good time with it, so you should, too."

But the wisecracks are very few and very far between in Resident Evil, and nobody seems to be having a good time--not the actors, not director Paul W.S. Anderson, and certainly not the audience. And if Resident Evil isn't funny or scary--if it's just an exercise in joyless, derivative film making--why, exactly, did they bother to make it at all? And, more to the point, what need is there for anyone to see it?