This MAGGIE Trailer Is Surprisingly Affecting

When it was first announced that Arnold Schwarzenegger would star in Maggie, a film about a father who's forced to protect his daughter as she slowly turns into a zombie, I was hardly alone in the assumption that the former Governator would spend a fair amount of screen time fighting off swarms of the undead.  But now we've got our first real look at the film courtesy of the trailer below and it is surprisingly...emotional.

That is not at all what I was expecting.

People don't give Arnold enough credit as an actor.  His post-political performances in stuff like The Last Stand and Escape Plan have been shockingly on point.  Like a potent and smokey bourbon, the man has only gotten better with age, to the point where I'm getting more and more excited about the promise of the long-threatened Legend Of Conan sequel.  Maggie is the feature debut of director Henry Hobson, a man who's mostly known for crafting title sequences in movies like Rango, The Lone Ranger and Snow White and the Huntsman.  But this thing looks somber and moody and heart-wrenching in all the best ways.

Do I want to watch Arnold shotgunning a horde of zombie faces?  Of course.  This is America.  But I'll happily fork over my hard earned cash to watch bearded, grieving farmer Poppa Arnold care for a disintegrating Abigail Breslin anytime.

It's A Very Zombie Halloween With George A. Romero's Original DEAD Trilogy

"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth."

After spending a month watching almost nothing but horror films, I had big plans to cap it all off for Halloween.  The Brattle was showing Night Of The Living Dead with a live band providing an alternative score to the film on October 30th and, as luck would have it, the Coolidge was showing Dawn Of The Dead on Halloween night.  That was just too good an opportunity to pass up, so I made sure to grab Day Of The Dead from Netflix well in advance and planned to go through the entire trilogy in order.

Then the World Series went to six games.

If I had tried to squeeze in the Brattle screening I would have missed the first half of the potentially clinching game and then had serious trouble trying to get into a bar for the last few innings.  So I made an executive decision and skipped out on that evening's showing, but since I'd already purchased my ticket for Dawn Of The Dead the following night I had no choice but to pray there wouldn't be a Game 7 and settle for watching the three films out of order.  Certainly not ideal, but still better than nothing.

I love that all three Dead movies exist in a shared universe and that you can see the zombie infestation growing exponentially worse and worse over the course of the trilogy.  Not only that, but each story increases in scope as well.  Night introduces the very first zombie attacks and keeps the action isolated to a handful of strangers who've barricaded themselves into a remote farmhouse.  Their only objective is survival, staying alive long enough to find some kind of help.  They don't know exactly what's happening or why, but such concerns are academic when there's a horde of ghouls (the word "zombie is never spoken) banging down the front door.  We do hear some radio and television news reporters struggling to get a handle on exactly what's happening out there and in fact the initial reports are classified simply as mass murders with an element of cannibalism.  It's not until the president starts convening with NASA scientists that it becomes clear that something far stranger is afoot.

PS: Night clearly attributes the zombies to radiation carried by a satellite returning from Venus.  That's about one step shy of an alien infestation or biological attack.  Why didn't anyone ever tell me this?  How did I not know that Romero's zombies actually come from space??

These early zombies also exhibit behavior would be considered pretty a-typical these days; a few of them use rocks and clubs to smash in windows or beat down doors and one even stabs a woman to death with a gardening trowel.  You don't often see zombies using tools in that way and indeed such unique behavior would go on to become a major plot point for Romero down the line.  From a visual standpoint, Romero's first batch of zombies are almost charmingly simple compared to the kind of stuff now seen every week on The Walking Dead.  The makeup isn't overly complex and the majority of the zombies simply appear gaunt and pale with a detached look in their eyes.  There are a few standouts, but most of the extras don't feature severed limbs, rotting flesh or festering wounds.  That's fine though, because the black and white aesthetic gives Romero a lot more bang for his few bucks and gives the nighttime setting a stronger sense of menace.

Dawn Of The Dead immediately throws us right into the deep end of the apocalypse, with a local news station struggling to stay on the air and broadcast accurate and useful information to the masses while riot police storm through housing projects in an effort to mop up both criminals and reanimated corpses alike.  The national infrastructure is still somewhat in place and we hear reporters talk about the President sending legislation to Congress, however it's clear that this is no longer just a series of isolated incidents but in fact a full blown national emergency.  Trying to stay ahead of the disaster, news producer (I think?) Francine and her pilot boyfriend Stephen fly off with SWAT officers Roger and Peter and eventually settle down in an abandoned shopping mall.  They clear out whatever zombies are inside and then lock the place down to prevent any outsiders, living or undead, from breaching their little corner of security.  After that the group finds themselves stocked with an embarrassment of riches.  The world may be sliding into chaos outside, but inside they've got piles of food, guns, ammunition, TVs, fur coats and fancy champagne.  Along with having their run of the entire mall, they actually turn an isolated old storage room into a secluded little bungalow, complete with a living room, love nest and fondue set!  It looks like good times and smooth sailing, despite the growing number of corpses walking around outside the gates.  Eventually they even fall victim to the ennui of the wealthy, idly skating around the empty ice rink and trading hundreds of meaningless dollars in a game of cards.  Stephen actually proposes to Francine but she turns him down because "it wouldn't be real," implying that their emotional bond isn't enough reason for them to stay together and that without a ceremony full of adoring onlookers their marriage would somehow be considered a sham.  Yet they're not willing to go out in the world and search for other survivors despite having their own helicopter.  They're won't risk their own ivory tower in order to help those most in need.

But as is customary when the 1% hordes necessary resources, eventually the 99% gets pissed and comes looking for a piece of the good life.  In this case, the common folk are embodied by a biker gang led by Tom Savini, who was also the film's head makeup artist.  (I'll forgive Savini the terrible blue-faced zombies only because the rest of his work is so outstanding.)  Once the bikers come upon the mall and realize that there are people living in there, they storm the gates and ransack the place, letting in a swarm of zombies in their wake.  But it's telling that the looters don't go after food, guns or essential supplies and instead snatch up jewelry, TVs and cold hard cash from the mall's bank branch.  It seems that everyone, from street thug to socialite, is preoccupied with a sense of crass materialism and ensuring their own comfort to the detriment of all.  They're willing to forego stark practicalities or deny the new status quo in order to cling to a reality that no longer exists, to say nothing of eschewing the simple morality of helping other people because there's safety in numbers.

Day Of The Dead escalates the scale of the zombie destruction even further.  The struggle between man and corpse has long since ended, with whole cities overrun by the undead and not a living soul in sight.  We meet a handful of survivors who've locked themselves away in an underground military bunker in Florida, the only remnants of a last ditch effort by the government to determine exactly why the dead are coming back to life and how to stop them.  These people, a hodgepodge of military personnel and research scientists, have all but given up searching for other people in the wreckage of civilization; the isolation, sleep deprivation and dwindling supplies have brought the group to the very brink of sanity.  The soldiers (one of which is played by effects artist Greg Nicotero) have devolved into screaming, violent lunatics who want nothing more than to abandon their post and satisfy their own bloodlust, while the scientists, led by Dr. Frankenstein, have come up frustratingly empty despite countless hours spent dissecting and studying the zombies they've trapped in an old mine shaft.  In fact, it's gotten so bad that Frankenstein has abandoned all attempts to stop the zombie outbreak and has instead turned to finding a way to domesticate the creatures.

Frankenstein asserts that since we can't get rid of the zombies we must learn to live in harmony by training them to perform menial tasks and not to think of living people as food.  (This same concept was amusingly realized at the end of Shaun Of The Dead.)  His star pupil is Bub, a.k.a. the single greatest character in the entire trilogy.  He's seems to exist in a state of childlike wonder, which makes sense considering that Frankenstein acts as a sort of father figure.  Watching Bub use a shaving razor, try to read Salem's Lot, or learn how to make music come out of a cassette deck is downright adorable and you almost forget about the creature's savage nature.  Of course the dark secret to Bub's success is that Frankenstein has been rewarding the zombie's progress by feeding him the remains of dead soldiers, the discovery of which sends Rhodes, Steel and the other soldiers completely over the edge and forces a final bloody showdown featuring unparalleled zombie carnage.  Most of the film is simply people arguing in a bunker (a setting that always feels like a cost-saving measure), so it's not until the film's final 15 minutes or so that we get any really good zombie kills.  But rest assured that your patience will pay off, as film's finale is an absolutely gleeful splatterfest of gore at the hands of a number of amusingly costumed zombies.  If you enjoyed the Hare Krishna zombie in Dawn, wait till you see some of the outfits in the finale of Day.

The progression of the zombie apocalypse and the human response to it over the course of all three films is pretty fascinating: the zombies begin to slowly evolve into actual people while humanity slips backwards and embraces its most base instincts.  Or at least all the white people do.  We've all grown accustomed to the horror trope of the black guy dying first, so you've got to give credit to Romero for giving each film a strong, intelligent black lead who always acts with dignity and never sheds his own morality just to stay alive.  Ben, Peter and John are all unflappable in the face of disaster and they're exactly the kind of guys you want by your side when you're fighting off legions of the undead.  It certainly stands in sharp contrast to The Walking Dead, a show that operates on the unspoken rule that the audience is only allowed to care about one black character at a time.  The fact that Michael and D'Angelo from The Wire are both still alive after four episodes feels like a minor miracle, but since they're both out on the same supply run right now I fully expect one of them to go down before they make it back to the prison.

I do feel like there's an element missing from Romero's original trilogy that The Walking Dead actually handles pretty well, and that's depicting an attempt to actually forge a life and perhaps even a community in the midst of the zombie wasteland.  Dawn spends a lot of time with the zombies as an almost abstract threat that only exists outside the safety of the mall.  Our heroes are insulated and able to live a life of idle contentment within the walls of their hideaway.  And while I don't necessarily think we're supposed to believe that the soldiers and scientists of Day are the last people left on Earth, they might as well be since we never meet anyone else.  Either way, those guys have already gone fully round the bend before the movie even starts.  But between Dawn and Day lies a middle ground, where zombies remain a threat and people struggle to survive but they're able to work together and maintain some semblance of hope for the future.  Zack Snyder's Dawn Of The Dead remake moves a little closer in that direction, but if my vague recollection of Land Of The Dead is correct then I think that's the droid I'm looking for here.  I'll have to give it another watch this week to be sure.

I'm reminded of my reaction to Contagion, in that it's fairly impossible to watch a zombie movie and not start coming up with your own zombie contingency plan.  I actually love the shopping mall idea if only because it would provide you with a wealth of resources, but such a place would also surely attract Savini-esque looters.  The trick is to find a secure, defensible location that lies outside of a major population zone.  Hopefully that would ensure fewer zombies to deal with but also perhaps fewer marauders.  As much as I criticize the callous and insular behavior of Dawn's heroes, I have to admit that in the same situation I would probably act in a similar fashion, wary of broadcasting my position to outsiders.  Sure I have an intellectual problem with that now, but when it's a matter of personal survival with no promise of rescue or safe haven, it's hard to imagine what I wouldn't do to protect myself and those closest to me.  You want to believe you can take in strays and help others, but as I just admitted we all have the capacity for ruthless action when our back is up against the wall.  In the zombie apocalypse, all bets are off.

I will say this.  My disdain for "fast zombies" has now grown exponentially.



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Title: Night Of The Living Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Starring:  Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne, Judith Riley
Year Of Release: 1968
Viewing Method: Netflix DVD

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Title: Dawn Of The Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Ken Foree, David Emge, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross, David Early, Tom Savini
Year Of Release: 1978
Viewing Method: Theatrical - Coolidge Corner

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Title: Day Of The Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Jospeh Pilato, Richard Liberty, Jarlath Conroy, Anthony Dileo Jr., Sherman Howard, G. Howard Klar, Greg Nicotero
Year Of Release: 1985
Viewing Method: Netflix DVD

24 Hours Of Halloween Horror Part I: Zombies And Slashers and Universal Classics

I’m a bit of a crazy person.

My friends Jason and Lucy loooooove Halloween and, more specifically, Halloween movies.  Every year they host a movie marathon full of all sorts of crazy shit and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since they first put the bug in my ear a few months ago.  They set the date for the Saturday before Halloween, scheduling 12 hours of non-stop horror from noon to midnight.  The only hitch was that I had already planned on attending the Coolidge's 13^th Annual Halloween Marathon, taking place immediately thereafter from midnight to noon.  For most people this would present an insurmountable problem, forcing them to choose one marathon over the other.

I just said fuck it and went to both.

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I arrived at Jason and Lucy's apartment in Somerville just before noon.  I was the first one there, but they had clearly been prepping the place for quite some time.  The living room was packed with enough comfy chairs, pillows and blankets to seat about 15 people with nary a bad seat in the house.  I snagged myself a prime spot on the couch and settled in while loads of bizarre horror trailers looped on the TV and Halloween music drifted out of the speakers.  Jason hung sheets to black out the windows while Lucy literally cranked up their Whirley Pop and filled two big bowls with perfectly seasoned popcorn.  Throw in the two jack-o-lantern buckets stuffed with candy (one chocolate, one fruity), the refrigerator full of beers and the impending pizza delivery, it quickly became clear that I'd be taking a break from conscientious eating.*  It was also clear that this was gonna be a good day.

Let the madness begin!

Zombie Flesh Eaters, a.k.a. Zombie, a.k.a. Zombi 2 (1979)

Yes, that's right.  That's a zombie fighting a shark.

We started the day with Lucio Fucli's undead masterpiece Zombie Flesh Eaters, originally sold in Italy as an unofficial sequel to Romero's Dawn Of The Dead.  The story centers on a reporter and a woman who travel to a tropical island in search of her father after the old man's boat arrives in New York Harbor with only a single zombie on board.  They track down a British doctor who's been doing experiments and studying the locals, many of whom seem to be rising from the grave to attack the living.  Soon it's a race to evade the zombie hordes and get off the island alive.

A perfect way to kick things off.  After the initial zombie attack the story is a bit slow to get started, but really Fulci's just lulling you into a false sense of security.  The second half of the film is full of some really fantastic zombie attacks, including the infamous one above in which an underwater zombie fights off an actual shark.  (The zombie is actually the shark trainer in heavy makeup.)  There's also a really fantastic scene in which the doctor's wife gets a pretty serious splinter to the face.  It's incredibly cool that Fulci is able to use Romero's modern zombie sensibility while also bringing it all back to island voodoo, the proper birthplace of zombies.  The last thirty minutes is chock full of that really awesome Italian gore, with latex skin and gurgling red paint galore.  And, like so many Italian films of that era, the cast is made up of both English and Italian speaking actors, all of whom speak their own native language with no sound recorded on set.  That means every line of dialogue is done in post, so sometimes it feels like you're watching a dubbed foreign film and sometimes it just feels like you're watching an American film made up entirely of shitty ADR.  There's an inherently comical element to the disconnect between what you're seeing and what you're hearing; combine that with some really well staged zombie attacks (I'm particularly fond of the conquistador graveyard) and the first rate make-up and practical effects, and you've got an absolute classic with a seriously killer ending.

The Mummy (1932)

I was feeling guilty about going through an entire month of horror films without ever getting around to any of the Universal Classic Monsters, something I planned on doing way back in week two.  I felt so bad that I even forced myself to purchase the Blu-ray boxed set of beautiful new restorations when Amazon had it listed at over 50% off last week.  Thankfully, Jason makes it a point to watch at least one Universal Monster movie every October and this year he settled on The Mummy starring Boris Karloff in the title role.  He brings a remarkable sense of quiet menace to Imhotep, who only appears as the traditional cloth-wrapped corpse in the film's opening scene.  He's quickly revived and escapes into the desert, at which point the film jumps forward ten years and Karloff spends the rest of the film posing as a wrinkled contemporary Egyptian.  My understanding is that the incongruity between the general public's perception of these characters and their actual early execution is a running theme throughout these films.

Technically this is considered the source material for the Stephen Sommers franchise starring Brendan Fraser, but there aren't a whole lot of similarities.  Arnold Vosloo's character is also named Imhotep and the plot still centers around his attempt to reincarnate an ancient Egyptian princess in the body of a modern day beauty, but everything else is radically different.  Sommers' film is a rollicking adventure tale, with Fraser as the wannabe Indiana Jones, but Karl Freund's original is an exotic supernatural mystery that's far darker in tone.  Each have their own time and place I suppose.  The restoration here is so good that I'm really excited to delve into my shiny new boxed set even further.  Maybe I can knock out one movie a week or something.

Karloff has a weird line about how he doesn't like to be touched because of his "Eastern prejudice."  That phrase would become a running joke throughout the day.

Bud Abbot And Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Another great introduction to the Universal Classics.  About fifteen minutes into this movie I realized that not only was it the first time I was seeing Bella Lugosi's Dracula or Lon Chaney Jr's Wolfman, but it was also the first time I was seeing Abbott and Costello doing something other than arguing about baseball.  We do miss out on Karloff as Frankenstein's Monster, but it doesn't feel like a huge loss because the character is barely present in the movie.  There's a pretty remarkable blending of tones here: Abbot and Costello are as funny as ever, but Lugosi and Chaney are playing their famous characters pretty straight, resisting the urge to really ham it up or mock themselves to keep up with the comedians.  Everyone's just sort of doing their own thing and having a ball doing it and somehow it all just falls into place.  There's a whole lot of Costello encountering the monsters while Abbott is out of the room and while that might sound tiring on paper, watching the two of them argue is so entertaining that I not only didn't mind the contrivance, I actually wanted it to last the whole movie, for Abbott to NEVER see the monsters and remain convinced that Costello was just imagining things the whole time.

There's a whole running gag about two beautiful women named Sandra and Joan who are seemingly infatuated with Costello while Abbott keeps trying to convince his friend to "let him have one," talking about the women like they were cheeseburgers.  It's easy to write this behavior off as just an unfortunate relic of a bygone era, but I actually think the film is smarter than that.  Neither of the women is actually interested in Costello and they're both playing him to serve a greater agenda - Sandra wants to steal his brain to put in Frankenstein's Monster and Joan is an undercover insurance investigator who suspects the duo of theft.  The men's misogyny is thus undermined by two women who are both smart and capable and they make Abbott and Costello look like even bigger fools for trying to trade them like a pack of gum.  In reality both Sandra and Joan have the ability to completely destroy these men in very different ways, and Abbott and Costello have absolutely no idea what's really going on.  It's actually a fairly clever subplot that feels sharply ahead of its time.

Also, the hand drawn animations whenever Dracula turns into a bat totally rule.

Re-Animator (1985)

This is another flick I've been meaning to watch for years, despite knowing almost nothing about it other than that it stars Jeffrey Combs (familiar to me from his numerous roles on the various Star Treks) as a scientist who can bring back the dead thanks to a syringe full of some glowing green stuff.  That's actually the only thing you really need to know, as the movie isn't really concerned with exploring the characters with any kind of depth or even explaining exactly what's in the mystery reagent and how Dr. Herbert West managed to get his hands on it.  All that really matters is that West has got a duffel bag full of the stuff and he's willing to use it.  Director Stuart Gordon knows exactly what kind of movie he's making and he powers through all the perfunctory plot stuff in order to linger on violent reanimated corpses and insanely great visuals that will make you laugh and scream simultaneously.

West is a perfect mad scientist, singularly focused and unconcerned with trivialities like politeness or, you know, morality of any kind.  All that matters to him is results and if that means being a tremendous dickhead  or killing your cat ("Details later.") then so be it.  Generally you'd expect an upright, idealistic hero to counterbalance a character like West, but his nice guy roommate Dan is such a boring pushover that he practically blends into the background.  Bruce Abbott can't hold his own with anyone in a scene, including Mace the security guard and his copy of Boudoir magazine.  (That's not a gramatical error.  The guy gets upstaged by a magazine.)  Barbara Crampton, who was lovely in the recent You're Next, acquits herself well as Dan's girlfriend Meg, even if her character is often left with little to do other than scream at the madness all around her.  But neither of these characters ever properly take charge of the situation and assert themselves.  Instead they just get sort of sucked into West's insanity and hold on for the ride.  The only other character that really steps up is Dr. Hill, the supremely creepy teacher who wants to bang Meg and steal West's potion for his own fame and fortune.  Hill's an outright villain - if he had a mustache, he'd spend half the movie twirling it - so by the time we get to the film's conclusion, in which Hill creates an army of reanimated and lobotomized corpses to do his bidding, (it's awesome) Herbert West practically becomes the fucking hero by default!  It's a hell of a turnaround and a great subversion of the classic and anticipated plot structure for this kind of movie.  Instead of Dan and/or Meg growing a spine and standing up to West, the movie simply introduces an even BIGGER asshole scientist so that West looks practically altruistic by comparison.

I'm tiptoeing around the finale a bit because there's some stuff in there that's absurd, great and just absurdly great and I was grateful to not know it was coming in advance.  Re-Animator is currently streaming on Netflix.  Watch it with friends and beers.

Black Christmas (1974)

Black Christmas was released the same year as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the two films pretty much gave birth to the modern slasher genre.  But whereas Leatherface begat killers like Jason, Freddy and Michael Myers, Black Christmas is the direct forebearer of the more grounded, domestic killing sprees of films like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, When A Stranger Calls or Prom Night, where it's less about the actual killer and more about executing the concept.  Here we've got a sorority house full of attractive young girls who are preparing to leave school for Christmas break.  An unseen killer, presented entirely through first person POV (You're welcome Friday The 13th!) sneaks into the house and starts to slowly pick the girls off one by one while simultaneously calling the house and screaming almost indecipherable obscenities over the phone.  Nobody is the wiser until the first victim's father arrives to bring her home and she's nowhere to be found.  The largely inept local police, led by John Saxon (who would later play Nancy's father in A Nightmare On Elm Street) finally start to take notice when a little girl is found murdered in the park nearby.  They put a tap on the sorority's phone and we get some great scenes of the phone company guy literally running up and down corridors trying to find what physical switch the call is coming from, leading to the infamous and destined to be co-opted line, "The calls are coming from inside the house!"

It's a great cast, including Olivia Hussey,  a wonderfully boozy Margot Kidder, a big-haired Andrea Martin (who would appear in the 2008 remake) and Marian Waldman as Mrs. Mac, the well-meaning house mother who's constantly sneaking shots of straight sherry from a collection of bottles hidden all over the house.  And while none of the kills are particularly gruesome, they are all pretty varied and fun.  We get suffocation by plastic bag, a pulley hook to the face and a stabbing with a crystal unicorn head among others.  But otherwise it's not a terribly flashy movie.  If you didn't know that Black Christmas was the film that influenced generations of horror filmmakers, you'd be tempted to write it off as just another movie about a psycho killing a herd of young hotties.  What sets it apart is that it got there first and set the bar for everyone that followed.  That and the film's ending, a really ballsy decision that not only have I never seen copied before, but one that provoked a perfect reaction from our assembled ranks.  Black Christmas is the one that started it all and it's just as great today as it ever was.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

HOLY.  FUCK.

This movie was so insanely great that I simply cannot contain myself.  The fact that it does not exist on Blu-ray and the DVD looks to be out of print is downright criminal.

While I had heard the title before, I knew absolutely nothing about this movie going into it and trust me, that's the ideal situation.  In fact, I really hesitate to say anything at all about the movie and would rather just implore you to pull it straight to the top of your Netflix queue.  (Sadly it's not streaming on Netflix, although a few of the surely disappointing sequels are.  UPDATE: Jason rightly pointed out that the whole movie is available in HD on fucking YouTube of all places.  But seriously, plug your laptop into your TV.  It's worth it.)  The basic premise is obvious from the title: a series of brutal murders take place at a sleepaway camp and the killer's identity remains a mystery.  There is SOOO much more going on though and delving into really any detail would be a massive disservice.  Yeah, it feels silly to contort myself like this to avoid spoilers for a 30 year old movie, but Sleepaway Camp is very much a cult title and I'd rather use this as a platform to convince you to check this thing out for yourself, especially if you're a fan of seriously fucked up movies.  The film's final freeze frame is one of the most disturbing images I've ever seen in a movie and it's little wonder that it remains on screen throughout and even after the credits roll.  If any of that sounds appealing, stop reading now and just watch it.  You can thank me later.

Still here?  Okay, I will say this much: the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Sleepaway Camp is one of the most brilliantly executed stylistic fake outs I've ever seen.  Especially watching the film today, you get so wrapped up in all the hilarious 80's fashion (some of the shortest shorts I've ever seen) and some really over the top performances in the supporting roles that you're quickly convinced you're just watching a bad movie.  But a lot of those weird performances and confusing story choices are really just a smokescreen that serve to keep you off balance and set up a finale that will absolutely knock you sideways.  Sleepaway Camp is a dark shard of psychological horror masquerading as low budget cheese.  It's like if you started out watching Troll 2 and at the end it had suddenly turned into Seven.

You must watch this movie.

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After Sleepaway Camp it was a little after 11:00 PM, which gave me just enough time to make my way over to the Coolidge before the festivities kicked off there.  I was missing out on Game 3 of the World Series, so I listened to the local radio broadcast on my way across town.  When I pulled up in front of the theater the Sox had tied the game up for the second time, but by the start of the first movie St Louis had won on a controversial and now-infamous obstruction call at third base.  (I agree that the ump made the correct call, but I also think that the rule itself probably needs to be revisited to consider intent.  Major League Baseball agrees.)

But no matter.  The Sox had plenty more games of baseball to play, and I had twelve more hours of movies to watch.


UP NEXT: Midnight To Noon At The Coolige!


*I've put myself back on my pre-wedding diet, although I haven't been quite as strict about it this time.  Getting to the gym has proven difficult, so it was either eat better or buy all new clothes.  I chose the former.

WORLD WAR Z Circles The Globe But Goes Nowhere (Spoilers)

"Movement is life."

You know that something has gone wrong when you walk out of a movie asking yourself, "What was the point of all that?" 

When it comes to World War Z, I guess the point was to give Brad Pitt a new franchise.

The book by Max Brooks is an oral history of a zombie apocalypse that has already happened, documenting past events and how different people and countries dealt with the crisis, some more successfully than others.  I started the book ages ago but never finished, although my understanding from those who have read it is that Marc Forster's film bears almost no resemblance to its supposed source material. Here we see a global zombie outbreak occur in real time, with Brad Pitt's UN investigator Gerry Lane immediately sent on a globetrotting mission to find "Patient Zero" in order to discover the source and perhaps even a cure for this worldwide calamity.

He doesn't.

Pitt certainly does travel to a number of exotic locales, following a trail of breadcrumbs that takes him from Philadelphia to South Korea to Jerusalem to Wales all in a few days.  Each of these set pieces is individually entertaining but only on a surface level.  David Morse tells us that North Korea's solution was to extract the teeth of everyone in the country, thus stopping the viral spread by preventing bites.  That sounds awesome!  Too bad we don't get to actually see it.  Israel intercepted some early intelligence reports describing zombies in India and, thanks to a completely absurd decision making process, ended up constructing a giant wall around the capital city.  And rather than turn people away, they've decided to turn the city into a haven for survivors, asserting that, "Every human we save is one we don't have to fight."  That got me curious: what kind of society would that become?  Surely they're bringing in people of different faiths and nationalities that weren't exactly getting along before the zombies showed up.  Will they all suddenly play nice and band together against the larger threat?  And what about scarcity of resources like food and clean water?  They are in the middle of the fucking desert after all.  That sound like a city with all sorts of interesting opportunities for drama, both large and small.  Too bad as soon as Brad Pitt shows up, a horde of zombies scales the wall and overruns the city.  Look, I understand the reason for shifting the time frame from the past to the present - theoretically it gives the proceedings a sense of immediacy.  But World War Z seems more interested in teasing us with provocative zombie scenarios than actually showing those scenarios play out on the screen.  Instead Forster seems content to mention something cool in passing before dropping us into another hectic zombie swarm. 

By now, everyone has an opinion about fast vs. slow zombies, and while my tastes tend to run more towards the slower side I will admit that the concept of zombies as a massive swarm actually feels pretty novel. But the cinematic zombie landscape is not what it once was.  In a world where one of the most popular shows on television is chock full of some of the goriest, most violent zombie attacks I've ever seen, audiences should demand more from their big screen tales of the undead. With a final budget hovering somewhere in the vicinity of $200 million, World War Z is without question the most ambitious and expensive zombie film ever made, but rather than try and compete with the likes of The Walking Dead, the film opts for a startlingly bloodless approach.  The zombies quickly overtake people but they never really chow down on human flesh.  Instead they just bite down and move on to the next sucker, thus eschewing gruesome death scenes and replacing the familiar rotting corpses covered in festering wounds with a grey-faced collection of contorted limbs.  After a while, the (mostly digital) creatures all sort of run together and become boring, which is pretty much the cardinal sin of zombie design.  

But there are also some serious narrative problems plaguing World War Z.  First and foremost, Brad Pitt is the only fully formed character in the whole movie, which means that whenever he gets tangled up in a zombie attack it's obvious that Pitt will survive and everyone else will die around him.  And poor Matthew Fox strangely shows up for literally 27 seconds of screen time as a faceless helicopter pilot with one line of dialogue. What a waste!  He's got a wife and daughters, but he shepherds them out of harm's way fairly quickly and then they're just sitting safe on a boat waiting for him to come home from his mission.  But therein lies the other narrative problem: about 3/4 of the way through the film, Pitt drops his search for Patient Zero when he develops a theory for a way to biologically camouflage people from the zombies.  After surviving a zombie attack on a commercial plane, he staggers off to a W.H.O. facility in Wales to test his hypothesis.  The film then slows down as Pitt stops jetting around the planet and spends the rest of the movie working his way through the Zeke-infested lab to get all the materials he needs.  It's some of the best stuff in the whole movie but it also feels terrifically disjointed from everything that's come before.  That's not surprising, considering that the studio ordered not just extensive reshooting, but also a complete rewrite of the film's third act by Lost writer Damon Lindelof and Cabin In The Woods writer/director Drew Goddard.*  

Taken on its own, the Welsh segment is top notch stuff, well conceived and smartly staged, but it feels like a completely different movie from the previous ninety minutes. What's more, the film's final montage makes it clear that Pitt's camouflage method is only a temporary stop-gap measure.  It's not a cure or a vaccine, its just a tool for survival.  And in case you're unclear whether Paramount was hoping for a sequel, (it's already in development) I'm pretty sure the last line of the movie is, "Our war is just beginning."  While this film is a jumbled mess of action and fractured storytelling, I actually feel as if there's some incredible franchise potential here if you hand over the reigns to someone totally nuts and really start exploring the weirder corners of this new world, like a whole country full of people with NO FUCKING TEETH.  

Hell, they might even be able to use something from the actual book.

*Apparently most of Matthew Fox's scenes were in the 40-odd minutes of footage excised from the end of the movie.

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Title: World War Z
Director: Marc Forster
Starring: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, James Badge Dale, Fana Mokoena
Year Of Release: 2013
Viewing Method: Theatrical - Showcase Revere