How bad is Survival of the Dead?  If you make the rounds among the various horror blogs, genre podcasts and sit in on the discussion panels at the various fan conventions around North America, you’d think that Survival rank up there with the AIDS virus and 9-11 as scourges inflicted on humanity.   Or is that just a bunch of hyperbole, like the second sentence of this paragraph?  I’m  not surprised that some people don’t like the movie.  We all have different likes and dislikes. Some people are bound to like it and others not so much, with more people falling somewhere in between.  What has surprised me is the emotional intensity of those who didn’t like it, which has gone beyond panning it as a sub par film, venturing more into taking it as a personal insult. Is Survival of the Dead really that bad?

I  have been wanting to revisit George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead almost ever since writing my review a few months back.  I had some things I wanted to say  in my review, but I felt that I had to hold back in order to avoid spoilers.  This time I’m totally going to town, so be warned, this article is going to be chock full of spoilers.  Before I go any further, I should also probably disclose that I’m not a fan boy when it comes to Romero.   I want to get that out of the way right now. So you can save you dismissive cries of “Fanboy” for somebody else.    Unlike many horror fans (and Romero fanboys) I don’t carry a big tent pole for Dawn of the Dead .  I first saw it on video something like five or six years after it was made, lured by its reputation as being one of goriest  films ever made up til that time.  It seemed just the sort of tasteless forbidden fruit a teenage Captain Midnight might like.  Except for the first fifteen minutes or so of the film, I didn’t find it scary at all.  I found it campy and fun, but not the revelation that so many other fans experienced in their first viewing.

Some fan revere George Romero as a god; others view him as a ham-handed filmmaker who peaked early.  I think of him as a nice old guy who makes quality horror films on very small budgets.  For me, Romero’s films fall along a full spectrum of good (Creepshow, Martin) to boring and hard to watch (Season of the Witch) and all points in between.  So, if I’m not a big ol’ a fanboy, why is I bothering writing this, after all, it’s not my movie and I have nothing personal at stake?  I’m writing this because in their haste to toss mud at Survival and in some cases at Romero personally, many people have been saying some rather stupid things.  Sure, people talking out of their asses is nothing new, especially in a public arena like the web or what have you, but that makes it no less stupid and tiresome. Yeah, it’s small and trivial topic compared to the big issues of the day, but I just don’t feel like letting it go unchallenged.  Besides, this is a horror film blog,  what the heck else should I be writing about?

It’s safe to say that prior to its release in 2010, fans of horror, and of the zombie sub-genre in particular, were pretty exited at the prospect of a new Romero zombie movie.   The buzz in cyberland was mixed.  Some were hopeful that Survival would be another Dawn of the Dead, others were pessimistic, suggesting that if Romero missed with Survival it would be evidence that he’d lost his touch as a filmmaker.  In short, most fans seemed to fall into one of two broad groups: those that were setting themselves up for disappointment and those who seemed already resigned to the idea that Survival was going to blow.

My own feeling was and still is this: The zombie sub-genre is full of poorly-made films, many of which still find an audience despite the lack of quality.  It is a sub-genre with a very low bar and even Romero’s weakest effort to date is still better than the lion’s share of what is out there.  From Romero I expect a quality production that will be above average for the genre.  In my opinion, he has never failed to meet that.

So what are people so butt-hurt over Survival of the Dead?   Let’s look at some common themes that have cropped up in critical reviews, podcasts and blogs:

Cowboys and Zombies?

Part of Romero’s inspiration for Survival of the Dead was the 1958 William Wyler’s western The Big Country, a film about the fight between to ranching families over water rights that stretches into a personal vendetta for the sake of vendetta. What carries over from The Big Country is not just the idea of a vendetta and some of the cowboy flavor in the guise of the Muldoon ranch, but the widescreen and vibrant colors.

A lot of podcasters and reviewers have described the setting as a zombie western.  That’s not entirely accurate.   Muldoon and his flunkies dress in western garb, as opposed the O’Flynns, who dress in a more fishmanly style. I will admit that Seamus Muldoon’s taste for the Old West,  his ranch house and its contents seem incongruous in the setting of Plum Island, but no more so than the odd Spanish style house I see now and again here in the Great Plains.     Say . . . you don’t suppose that by having the ranch-hand Muldoons wear western hats and the O’Flynns dressed for a day of hauling crab traps out of the sea that Romero was suggesting uniforms do you?  The rest of the islanders, though decidedly and unsurprising low tech, seem a lot more like what you’d expect to find in an isolated community where the economy is driven by fishing and ranching.

Smart Zombies?

A lot of people have wined about Survival having “smart zombies.”  What’s all the fuss about?  Are there zombies running around writing beat poetry, mastering oil painting or solving Fermat’s Last Theorem?  No. We are talking about a zombie riding a horse and a zombie starting a car.

Zombies on horseback are nothing new.  We saw zombies on horseback in Armando De Ossorio’s Blind Dead movies.  Yes, I know that by showing a zombie on horseback Romero seems to violate the rules he set down in his previous movies, at least at first blush; but to be fair all Romero zombies are not equal.  In Night of the Living Dead, the Cemetery Zombie shows the ability to improvise and use tools by trying to smash a car window with a rock after trying to open a car door.  No other zombie in Night showed that level of intelligence.  Dawn of the Dead ’s Flyboy shows the other zombies the way past a fake wall to the hiding place he and the other survivors set up earlier.  In Day of the Dead there is Bub, a zombie that is being taught, uses tools including a gun.  Again, Bub is the exception.  Lastly, there is Land of the Dead ‘s Big Daddy, who is probably the smartest zombie yet.  He actually teaches other zombies to use tools!  Compared using tools or improvising, staying on a horse or turning over the engine of a car is no big deal.  Smart is a relative term and until Romero shows a zombie doing my taxes, or writing a new computer operating system, I’m not going to worry about it.

Darby O’Gill and the Zombie People?

“So what’s up with all the Irish accents?”  Actually only two of the characters speak with a seriously pronounced brogue, but never mind that.  Ever heard of Chinatown? Little Italy?  Have you ever been to a community settled by immigrants of a particular country of origin?  If not, let me clue you in.  There are communities all over North American that feature a high density of a given ethnic group.  The fictional Plum Island of Survival of the Dead was settled by Irish immigrants, a few of which still speak with a brogue.  Why create this setting? Romero wanted to emphasizes the idea of an unending struggle between foes by giving it an Irish flavoring that recalls the five hundred year fight between Catholic and Protestant in Ireland.  It may have been an artistically inelegant choice, but it’s certainly nowhere near as inexplicable as some critics have whinged about.

Hatfields and McCoys?

Most reviewers compare the hate-on between Patrick O’Flynn and Seamus Muldoon with the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys.  This is another example of using cultural shorthand (out of sheer laziness) to explain something and getting it totally wrong.  The O’Flynns and Muldoons seem to be the largest families on the island and by extension the leading families.  There is nothing in the film to suggest that there is a multi-generational struggle involving murder between these two clans.  The situation here is quite the opposite.  Only Patrick O’Flynn and Seamus Muldoon themselves seem to carry any real animosity. This is not so much a family blood feud as it is two old men who have a deep hatred for each other that stretches back to their respective childhoods and has only intensified over time. Their venom isn’t aimed at the families so much as it is at each other, with both families being reluctantly dragged in.

The High Cost of Corn Syrup and Food Coloring

Outside of the horror community, the CGI went largely uncommented on by critics.  I assume that this is an instance where the critics are no more critical that the average movie goer.  Ah well.  However, within the community there was a collective groan at Survival’s uneven CGI effects.  I know how they feel; after all, are corn syrup and food coloring really all that expensive?

I understand why Romero chose CGI.  It’s far less expensive to add the effects in during post production than it is to keep a crew on set or on location to set up the effects shot; even if you can get it every one of them right on the first take.  On the small budget Romero had to make Survival of the Dead CGI was a necessity, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like it and I don’t.  I always prefer practical effects to CGI and on this particular point I’m with the whiners.

Not all the CGI effects are badly done and not all the badly done CGI effects lack entertainment value.  One zombie is dispatched when a fire extinguisher in fired off in his mouth sending brain and eye balls popping from his eye sockets.  It looked silly but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it.  The make-up and practical effects, like the CGI, are uneven.  Some of the make-up and appliances, such as the undead Mrs. Muldoon,  are Bub-worthy, with others, such as some of the corralled zombies at the end of the movie, looking like bad haunted house make-up.

George and his Heavy-handed Message

Yeah, it’s time to drag out this old chestnut.  I’ve heard people say that Romero’s films all have a message, usually socio-political, and that he shoves it in your face. This is one of those things people repeat without giving it any thought.  Sure, some of Romero’s movies have a message, some with a stronger message than others and often Romero has something to say that we don’t want to hear, which is why people are so sensitive about what he has to say.

Night of the Living Dead had as its underlying theme the idea the racism, segregation and infighting were ultimately self-defeating which in 1968 was a radical thing to say.  A lot of people at the time didn’t want to hear it. In Dawn of the Dead, there is a leitmotif that sings of America as a land of mindless consumer whores who will be devoured by our own excesses. * That was the last thing we Americans want to hear.  In Day of the Dead, we see government authority fall on its face and everyone dies.  In the feel good, upbeat go-go Eighties, this downer was out of step with the mood of the nation.  We were more interested if fighting for our right to part-tay!  In Land of the Dead, Romero points out the excesses of the capitalist system, again, a message most Americans don’t wan t to hear, even now after the near collapse of the world banking system, much less back in 2005 when the economy was flying high, fueled on real estate fraud and ponzi schemes.

So what was Romero’s message in Survival of the Dead?  Well, for a guy who is supposed to hammer it home with no subtly at all, critics and bloggers were certainly all over the place interpreting this one.  I heard that the message of Survival was about keeping the dead alive, or that it is about dead being more human that the living, that it’s about the evolution of the dead as a new intelligent species, that its about teaching them to eat something other than people, etc.  One panel discussion  leader at a recent fan convention even suggested in a passing remark that the message of Survival of the Dead was that the internet is bad.  Apparently Romero needs to push harder.

In case you’re curious, Romero has state that the idea behind Survival of the Dead was to critique the increasing intolerance and extremism in our national dialogue.  People of goodwill with differing positions no longer debate, but rather we have slid, especially since 9-11, into a national shouting match.  This can also be extrapolated outward to our foreign policy.  It’s about irreconcilable forces locked in conflict.  I’ve yet to read a review which discusses the meaning of the film beyond its surface.  Most of the reviews have contented themselves with being snarky and oddly self-congratulatory.

As always, with Romero,  beneath the surface there lurks the idea that authority, particularly authority derived from force is not to be trusted.  In the end authority by virtue of force fails and drags the rest of humanity down with them.  This is a consistent feature of Romero films and is a warning that people should take to heart.

Now and Then

Survival is a very different film from Night, Dawn, Day and even Land.  I think that many fans were expecting one thing and got another.  What makes the first three Dead films special?  Each movie set a new standard in horror and in the zombie sub-genre.  Night of the Living Dead was the transition point from the Hammer Era of gothic horror to the modern horror film.  It was also the first appearance of flesh eating walking dead.  Dawn of the Dead pushed the boundaries in gore and solidified the flesh-eating ghoul in popular culture.  Both share, in my opinion, a weird nightmare quality that normally isn’t in American horror films.  The acting, audio engineering and visuals in both films stray from the realism that marks US films.

I think that the surreal nightmarey quality in Night and Dawn is one reason that Italian horror filmmakers leapt on the Romero style zombie like a dingo on a gravy coated baby.  Zombies, as Romero conceived them, needed no big backstory and are, compared to other monsters, inexpensive to produce.  What is called for was plenty of atmosphere and visual flair,  two areas in which the Italian film industry traditionally excelled.

Day of the Dead is the high water mark for zombie and gore effects.   There are no zombies the equal of Bub in the first three films and the goriness of the scene in which Captain Rhodes gets pulled apart like so much human monkey bread for zombies is downright iconic.  In Day, make-up maestro Tom Savini goes far beyond the blue-grey zombies of Dawn, setting a new and gruesome benchmark for zombie effects.  Survival lacks the surreal nightmarish quality of the first two Dead films, nowhere approaches the gruesome and wonderful effects of Day of the Dead.

Something Seems to be Missing

The first three Dead movies do have something that Survival lacks – the underlying layer of zombie tension.  In most zombie films beginning with Night of the Living Dead, and masterfully done in both Dawn and Day is the feeling that a zombie can and will come quietly shuffling up behind you the moment your guard is down and apply the toothy neck kiss.  Once you’re bit, you’re royally hosed.  Even a little nibble is sufficient punch your ticket for the crossing of the river Styx.  Even if you could wade through a horde of the living dead, kicking zombie ass like, I dunno, some sort of great zombie ass kicking machine, one of them is going to get lucky and take a little nip out of you.  Once that happens it’s all over, you have three days at most until you die.  Layered over that is the tension between the survivors, which invariably comes to an explosive head and ends up getting everyone killed.

In Survival, the zombies are less of a direct threat than in any previous Romero film.  The focus here is placed on the inevitable showdown with Seamus Muldoon.  This affects the pace of the film, causing it to drag in the middle  before building to the conclusion.

The Real Horror

If not from zombies, from where does the horror come?  It comes from the people.  Survival of the Dead is a story about bad people.  The protagonists are bad.  The villain is worse. The  heroes (more or less) of the piece are Sarge Crocket and Patrick O’Flynn both of whom have been up to no good.  Crocket and his little band of AWOL Nation Guardsmen have been busily robbing people on the highways.  Meanwhile O’Flynn has posted a video on the internet enticing people to come to Plum Island which is accessible from the harbor that he is using to trap and rob people before sending them on their way to the island.  This serves two purposed for O’Flynn; one, it provides him a steady steam of victims; two, sending people over to Plum Island will hopefully be irritating to Seamus Muldoon.  O’Flynn knows that the island isn’t the zombie free environment he claims it is, but that doesn’t stop him.

As bad as Crocket and O’Flynn are, they are nothing compared to Seamus Muldoon.  Muldoon views the island and all on it as connected himself in a very persona; and parochial way. Muldoon fancies himself the divinely anointed  boss of the island.  Apparently this is not a new conceit on his part; which has suddenly found room to flourish with the collapse of civilization, but a deeply rooted belief that life, order and the livelihoods of all on the island depend on him and his good graces.   And for many on the island that is apparently the case, at least as far as their livelihood are concerned.  He is a self-righteous bully who views the world around him as existing to suit his purposes.  The horror is that in a world where the dead walk, even in death those who live on the island are not free from this man’s will.

When Crocket and company land on the island they find the mailman, dead and walking and chained to a mailbox post, where he will deliver the same letter over and over again until the flesh melts from his bones.  Across the yard from the mailbox and its grim letter carrier is an old woman, also one of the living dead, also chained, where she will push a crude wheelbarrow until she rots. Later we see Muldoon’s wife, undead and chained to something in the kitchen.  She looks no happier now than they she probably did when she was alive.  Not even in death are they able to escape him.  For me, that is the true horror of Survival of the Dead, the idea that even in death you will not be allowed out from under the boot.  Muldoon tries to justify his action in terms of piety or humanitarianism, but that falls flat.  All those people that O’Flynn robbed and sent to the island ended up murdered at Muldoon’s bidding.  Even the undead islanders, whom he claims to be trying to save, are wantonly gunned down when they fail to suit Muldoon’s purpose.  Muldoon claims to be doing God’s work.  If by God’s work he means reserving for himself the power of life and death then perhaps he’s onto something.

One other scene that I found chilling came early on in the film.  It’s the scene in which Crocket and his pals stumble upon a few rednecks camping the woods.  After a brief firefight that ends with the rednecks surrendering, Crocket hears  strange noises coming from nearby.  Quizing the rednecks, one explains that “ We was  jes havin’ some fun  . . . the things out there . . . they was chasin’ us.  So we did somethin’ about it!”  Crocket steps away to find eight animated severed heads on a post.  The effect is done in CGI and looks kind of cheesy. The thing that turned my blood cold wasn’t the idea of animated severed zombie heads, but the incongruity in  that all eight  heads were African-American.  What are the chances that there were eight African-American zombies, and only African-American zombies, running around in the woods with which  these guys could  “have some fun?”  The chances would be fairly small, I’d wager.  I came away with the impression that they weren’t undead until after they were decapitated.

Horsing Around

Muldoon’s men spent a large part of the movie trying to get the zombies to eat animals other than people, to avail.  Muldoon was obsessed with the idea, believing that teaching zombies to eat something other than people would vindicate him in the end.  Eventually a zombie (Jane, the zombie that rides a horse earlier in the film) takes a chunk out of her beloved horse.  This is played up a bit of a revelation by her twin sister, who not five minutes earlier has  her hand nearly bitten in half by the same zombie.  There is a voice over by Crocket just before the end of the movie where he wonders aloud about what might happen if the living dead could be taught to eat something other than people, before cutting to a scene in which a handful of zombies shown chowing down on a horse.

Does that mean Muldoon was right?  I rather doubt it.  Jane bites her sister, then bit her pet horse.  Rather than underlining the idea of zombies being taught to eat something else, it suggests to me that a zombie’s definition of that is edible can be expanded rather than shifted.  Remember the bug eating zombie in Night of the Living Dead?  The zombies eating the horse at the end had to other choice as it seems that everyone else on the island was dead.  But even if Muldoon was right, his motives and means cannot justify his ends, no matter how successful.

Further, after Janet O’Flynn is bitten by her sister, she is gunned down by her dying, raving father, Patrick O’Flynn, who yells to Crocket and pals, “She said I wasn’t strict enough to shoot one of me own!  There! I did it, didn’t I?”  This reminds us that in O’Flynn’s argument with Muldoon, it didn’t matter who was right; what mattered was who won.  So why does Romero muddy up the waters at the end?  He has to make Muldoon’s position within the framework of the story at least somewhat tenable and make O’Flynn’s motives somewhat questionable or the underlying message of the film gets totally undermined.

Survival of the Dead’s final scene,  O’Flynn and Muldoon meet, as zombies on a hill top framed by the moon, still attempting to kill each other, firing empty guns, standing apart like the pistol duels of old.  It’s a scene that drives the movie home most effectively in my opinion.

A Matter of Timing

When I reviewed Survival of the Dead, I talked a bit about how the expectations for the film by some fans was unreasonable.  It seems to me that quite a few people went into it thinking that Romero was going to make an epic zombie film.  In fact, I think that folks have been hoping for that since Land of the Dead and with every new zombie movie that Romero makes, it has become apparent that there will be no Avatar of the Dead, if you pick up what I’m laying down here.  Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead were films that introduced new concepts into the genre.     Both films are technically deficient compared to most Hollywood fare, which is understandable given the resources with which Romero had to work.  Again the greatness of these films lay not in the execution alone but in the ideas behind them.  Comparing apples to apples, Dawn of the Dead (2004) is certainly a better made and slicker film.  It’s technically superior and has far better production values than Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.  It’s also derivative, soulless and commercial. In some ways it’s the antithesis of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.  None-the-less, people, including myself included, ate it up.  It’s the sort of fast paced, slick zombie film that most people want to see.  It’s also the sort of movie that George A. Romero will probably never make.  Why? Because that is not what George A. Romero does, expecting him to make that sort of movie is unrealistic.

The other thing at work against Romero now, as I mentioned in the review, is that Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead were the biggest fish in the pond in their day.  There weren’t very many zombie movies made in the 1960′s and 1970′s.  In the last few years the floodgates have opened.  In the decade between the release of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead there were about twenty-five zombie movies released, most of them not very good.  In 2009 alone, there were more than sixty zombie movies released, many of them quality films.  The sub-genre has caught up with Romero, who continues to make the films he’s always made — now, so is everyone else.

Lastly, I think a lot of fans are suffering from zombie fatigue.  With so many zombie films coming out, it’s kind of hard to savor them.  I mean, how many headshots, dismemberments and staggering actors in gray grease paint and wearing white contacts can you stand?  I suspect that a bit of this fatigue has hurt fan support for Survival of the Dead. If Romero had started making his second round of zombie films in 2000, rather than 2005, they probably would have done far better with fans and casual zombie film goers.

What does it all Mean?

It means that you must like Survival of the Dead or you’re a bad person with terrible taste and I will make my life’s mission to make you love this freakin’ movie. . .   I’m kidding, of course.  I thought it was an entertaining little film and certainly one that I’ll revisit in the future from time to time. As I said in the beginning, the most surprising thing was the intensity of the negative reaction some fans and many critics directed toward Survival of the Dead.  Survival of the Dead is not a technically deficient film, aside from some poor to middling CGI, so I figured that it might be good to take a step back and look at the film again, and put it and the complaints some fans and critics have tossed out there into something like context.

Bonus Points:

Here are some random stupid or erroneous comments made by critics:

How come the internet still works (after the zombie apocalypse)?
By design.  The internet was designed to be a command and control and pornography distribution system that could still function in the event of a nuclear attack. Ever been in a server farm?  No?  They have their own back-up power supplies and redundant connections.  They’re pretty robust.

A lesbian soldier exists only to taunt the men with her untouchable hotness.
No, just to taunt you.  Spend less time being pithy and more time being accurate.

Two Irish clans have been feuding for centuries
No.  Nowhere in the movie is that even suggested, much less stated outright..

All have been dwarfed by Max Brooks’s brilliant novel World War Z, a collection of linked stories exploring a Romero-esque zombie plague from every angle: political, sociological, militaristic, spiritual, and cultural.
Your critique of this movie is terrible compared to the paintings of Van Gough.  See what I did there?

But if Romero is in fact after anything topical here, it’s unclear.
Did you not hear?  The internet is bad!

But after you’ve seen, oh, I dunno, 20 or 30 zombie movies, you sort of stop caring very much, unless something new is going on, as in “Zombieland.”
Yeah, because buddy road movie + zombies = original idea.

The Muldoons keep their zombies penned up — like livestock, only dead — in an effort to teach them to eat something other than people, until a cure can be found. It’s kind of sweet, really. Naive, but sweet.
That comment is the gold standard of WTF.

*That is what the word on the street is at any rate.  I first saw Dawn of Dead as a teen back in nineteen eighty-four.  This was the golden age of the shopping mall.  At the time it was the center of suburban life with tees hanging out in the arcade and food court, the elderly staking out the park benches near the fountain, middle-aged housewives jog-walking in groups of two or three up and down the mall, and people of all kinds meeting, shopping and eating.  The idea that the survivors in Dawn would hole up in a shopping mall seemed totally obvious to me at the time.  Further, I was aware that Dawn was a low budget film and confining most of the action to one location was, as far as I figured,  probably as much of a mercenary decision as an artistic one.

A good title can sometimes sell the book or movie.  Take War-Gods of the Deep, for example.  That is a seriously awesome title.  It conjures up images both sensational and cheesy.  “There isn’t going to be a lot of subtly here,” The Title says, “There will be some hammy acting, an attractive woman in a low-cut dress, and some corny monsters with rubber masks.”  Okay.  This might work.  The Title has my attention.  It just needs a little something to put me over the edge.  Oh, ho!  It stars Vincent Price!  I’m in.  I can almost hear The Title laughing to itself, “Bwah-hah-hah, I’ve hooked another one!”

War-Gods of the Deep (a.k.a. City in the Sea) open promisingly enough with Ben Harris (Tab Hunter) and some fishermen finding the corpse of a lawyer washed up on a Cornish beach on a stormy night.  Whatever killed the lawyer didn’t eat him, probably out of professional courtesy.  The lawyer, Mr. Penrose, was working for Miss Tregillis, an American residing at the local manor.   Harris leaves the body with the fishermen and heads up to the manor to inform Miss Tregillis that she’ll need a new lawyer.

Aside from Jill ( I just can’t bring myself to call her Tregillis), the manor is host to a handful of stuffy upperclass Brits, who would be at home in a Jeeves and Wooster story; also in residence is the eccentric Harold Tufnell-Jones and his pet hen, Herbert.

Harris arrives just in time catch Jill in what looks like a low-cut nightgown.  Score!  She introduces Harris to Harold Tufnell-Jones, and Herbert the Hen.  Aww blocked!  Harris then asks after Penrose.  Jill says that Penrose is in the study. They open the study door to find something is amiss.  Harris goes into hero mode, sending Jill back to the other room, before entering the study alone.  Suddenly there is a crash and in the glow of a lightening flash, Harris sees a fish-man, who chucks a vase at his head before disappearing.  Jill and Harold burst in the room.  Jill, ever the keen observer, notices that Penrose is not where he was supposed to be.  Harris informs Jill that her lawyer is dead and that earlier found Penrose’s corpse on the beach.

Back on the beach the fishermen are trying to decide what to do with Penrose’s body.  They may not be good at figuring out what to do with a dead lawyer (Claim that you found it in your food the next time you go to McDonald’s. “Hey!   I just found this dead lawyer at the bottom of my fries!  What are you trying to do? Poison me?” They’ll refund your money.  I’ve not paid for a meal there in years.) but one of the fishermen is the Michael Jordan of exposition and he goes on to tell the story of the death bells and the ancient sunken city of Lyoness.  Whenever the death bell sounds from beneath the waves a corpse washes up and the local McDonald’s ends up serving me a free meal.

Back at the manor, Harris and Harold are cleaning up the study.  Harris notices a book is missing from the shelf and asks Harold about it.  Harold seems unconcerned about the book and mentions in passing that he had placed a sketch he’d drawn of Jill in its pages.  Harris then suggests that there is a pattern.  A dead body and stolen book and the only common variable in both events is Jill.  Jill takes the news in stride and goes to off to bed.  Harris says that he’s going to stick around to make sure else happens.

Later in the night, Jill in taken by a fish-man who was able to enter the room through a secret passage behind a bookcase in the study. Harris, Harold and Herbert the Hen follow the fish-man’s path  into series of underground caves decorated in a hodgepodge of ancient Mediterranean art, eventually arriving at the ancient underwater city.

The city slid into the sea thousands of years ago.  The people that lived there were able to survive by building a system of pumps powered by heat from a nearby underwater volcano, which enable them to make air and fresh water.  They continued on under the sea until most of them died out leaving behind the still functioning remnants of the city and a few fish-men that are the last of their race.   This back story is provided by The Captain (Vincent Price), who has not only taken our heroes prisoner but was also the one who arranged for Jill to be taken as well.   It turns out that Jill is the spitting image of The Captain’s long dead wife whom he now believes has been reincarnated.  Poor Vincent Price.  In the films of the 1960′s he survived more dead wives than Henry VIII.

The Captain, not one for idle house guests, informs Harris and Harold that unless they are useful in some way, they’ll probably end up dead.  The Captain goes on to explain that the city is threatened by the very volcano that give the city life.  Harold tells The Captain that Harris is a renowned seismologist.  The Captain gives Harris three hours to fix the volcano problem . . . or else.   Will our heroes save the day?  Will the Captain eat Herbert the Hen?

There is much to like about War-Gods of the Deep, beyond its totally awesome title.   The plot is insane, comprising of bits taken from other AIP produced Vincent Price movies and cobbled together like a Winchester Mystery House of plots.  There is the girl is mistaken to Price’s dead wife plot and the mystery of the dead lawyer plot and the romance between Tab Hunter and  Susan Hart plot and the curse of immortality plot.  And perhaps the strangest idea of all, a volcano in Cornwall. Am I saying that it’s bad?  That depends on whether or not you like the Winchester Mystery House.  I am okay with fun houses but I’d not like to live in one.

War-Gods of the Deep has a look that I very much enjoyed.  It came later in AIP’s series of gothic horror films, so they had an accumulation of sets and props to reuse.  I do like the unwieldy steam punk scuba gear with the extra copper big helmets with dolphin crests.  Then again, I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.   I also love the vibrant Disneyesque color featured so many of the movies made in the mid-sixties.

While the sets and some of the costumes look great, some of the effects are pretty mediocre, especially the look of the fish-men in the under water chase scene near the end of the film.  They pale in comparison to the look of the Gill Man of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.  The fish-men are a bit more effective in the scene on dry land, where they are obscured a bit by darkness and shadow.

The underwater chase scene that I mentioned above goes on for a little too long.  It’s a bit like watching a fight in slow motion; it’s not very exciting and very slow.  There just isn’t much tension or menace.  I kept hoping a shark might swim by and add a little drama.

I probably enjoyed this movie more than I should because of Vincent Price.  I feel that I need to add a little disclaimer here: Captain Midnight is a total Vincent Price fanboy.  Vincent Price instantly makes any movie, at the very least, entertaining.  Have you ever seen Top Gun?  It’s probably the worst movie ever made.  I’d literally rather have plague carrying rats slowly chew through my neck and open my jugular vein rather than watch Top Gun again – unless it was Top Gun staring Vincent Price!

The title promises so much, and the notion of a half mad Vincent Price running a civilization of mutant fish-men sounds good, but instead going somewhere interesting the writers contented themselves with roasting old chestnuts. In the end, unless you’re a fan of Vincent Price or Tab Hunter, you’ll probably find War-Gods of the Deep disappointing.

Staring:
Vincent Price
Tab Hunter
David Tomlinson
Susan Hart

Screenplay:
Charles Bennett
Louis M. Heyward

Directed:
Jacques Tourneur

Pre-ramble:

I was rummaging around in the pantry off the galley, you know, looking for a snack to go with the movie I’m about to review.  After sorting through the cans of green beans and boxes of crackers for a while I came across some old cook books hidden behind a bag of Baked Doritos:   Dining with Titus Adronicus, How to Serve Man, Mrs. Lovett’s Big Book of Pies and The Donner Family Cookbook.  I don’t remember buying those, so I’m a bit worried. Also my evil sidekick, Julian Lizard, has been acting a little strange lately.  Say, you don’t think . . . He’s not planning to . . . Nah!

I’ll just pop in a movie.  That should take my mind far from my suspicions.  Oh yeah!  Necrosis.  That’s the ticket.

The Skinny:

It’s the winter of 1846 and all is not well in the Sierra-Nevada mountains.  A group of settlers is caught in a snow storm.  Unable to continue, they settle in for a hard winter in the mountains that ends in cannibalism and murder.  Cannibalism is bad enough, but at least they could cook it, maybe Chinese style.  Sum Yung Guy anyone?   No, they eat it raw.  Bleh.  It’s Suzy, not sushi!

Okay, that’s enough cannibal humor.  We skip the present before the credits are even over and are quickly given the plot.  Six yuppies are heading up to a secluded cabin in the Sierras for skiing, sex, and drinking.  On the way up they stop to get gas up their SUVs and meet the local color.  It’s the “get to know your characters” segment of the movie.  If a typical horror film takes this part of the movie and sketches out the victims as a quick charcoal sketch, then Necrosis does it, by way of comparison, with a cheap, dull green crayon on a piece of lighter green construction paper.  None of the characters make sense or are well defined but remain just as blank and superficial as the smiles of J Crew models.  I’ve decided that I don’t like them; neither do the locals, except for Seymour (Michael Berryman) who tries to warn our protagonists to avoid the cabin, but is hushed up by his pal Hank.

Later, after getting to the cabin, doing a little snowmobiling and seeing a talking dead woman, our party gets to the cabin and settles in for drinks and hot tubing.  Spoiled Rich Boy (Robert Michael Ryan), the lead yuppie and owner of the cabin, regales the other yuppies with the story of how he bought the place on the cheap.  It seems that the place has been cursed since the Donner party foundered there during a winter storm, lapsing into cannibalism and murder.  Their spirits still, according to the locals, haunt the place.   The exposition was unneeded.   We saw what happened at the beginning of the movie.   On the other hand, I’m glad they did this because it gave the filmmakers an excuse to show more Donner gore and violence, which is infinitely more entertaining than any other topic of conversation they could be having, except for possibly the weather.  It’s about to snow by the boatload and these yuppies better get comfortable, because they’re going nowhere.

Funny Yuppie Guy (James Kyson-Lee) has been singled out by the dark spirits of the mountain as the weakest link.  He begins having visions of the Donner victims and murders roaming around the cabin.  Yuppie Tiffany (Tiffany) starts having bloody, violent nightmares that are nearly as frightening as her career arc.

If you’re expecting The Haunting of Hill Cabin, look elsewhere.  Necrosis is not a subtle ghost story that slowly builds to a terrifying conclusion like The Haunting or The Shining or even The Skeleton Key.  No, it has all the subtlety of a beating about the face with a rotten mackerel and like a Brazilian bikini, it leaves nothing to the imagination.  On the flip side, the gore and walking corpse effects are good. If you are going to show horrible things, the horrible things had better work. The special effects crew doesn’t let us down.

One technical defect of the film is the sound.  There are several points in this movie where it sounds like it was recorded with the mic on my mom’s twenty-year-old VHS camcorder.  Okay, maybe that’s a little hyperbole on my part, but nevertheless, the sound has a bit of echo and flatness in some key dialogue scenes.  It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t make out what was being said, but it was enough to be distracting.

The acting was uninspired, but to be fair, none of the actors got any help from the dialogue.  Casting Tiffany in this movie was a mistake.  She’s a terrible actress.  Most of the rest of the cast is made up of bit part televison actors except for James Kyson-Lee and  George Stults who were regulars on television’s Heroes and 7th Heaven respectively, both of which are shows I’ve never seen.  Nobody turns in an especially good performance.

Using the history of the Donner party as a launching pad for a story about a lonely mountain plagued with evil spirits is a good idea.  It’s too bad that writers, Robert Michael Ryan and Jason Robert Stephens, couldn’t build a better story on that foundation.  There are gaping plot holes (and huge historical errors), boring dialogue and some of the more interesting elements are left unexplored such as whether or not the evil started with the Donner killings or where the Donner killing merely the first known deaths sparked by the evil of the mountain.  There are other holes, but they are a little spoilery, so I’ll leave off with those.

It sounds like I hate this movie, doesn’t it?  I don’t hate so much as I don’t really like it.  It was mildly entertaining but I’ll probably never watch it again.  If you are sick of zombies and want to see something cheesy that you don’t have to think about, you could do worse than Necrosis.

Staring:
James Kyson-Lee
George Stults
Tiffany
Michael Berryman

Screenplay:
Robert Michael Ryan
Jason Robert Stephens

Director:
Jason Robert Stephens

Short Review:

Childhood can be rough.  As adults we like to think that children live in a magical, saccharine Disney-esque world, full of singing bunnies, wonder and magic.  This idea is a new one, historically speaking, fostered by the purveyors of Happy Meals and children’s entertainment.  In reality, children live in a world of horror and loneliness, just like the rest of us.  We may not admit it, but subconsciously we all know.  Oh, we try to cheer them with sugary breakfast cereal shaped like Shrek or a shiny new bike made by other children in a Chinese sweatshop. We want to lighten the pain, though we cruelly denying them the alcoholic beverages and pills that make adult life tolerable.

Some children, usually those whose parents don’t buy them sugary cereal and shiny bicycles,  carry on with their own survival strategies.  I knew a girl who had an imaginary friend.  She insisted that her friend was real and would talk about him at length, never letting her assertions slip.  I thought this was cool.  The closest I could get to that was visualizing Godzilla stomping my hometown and eating my father.  The Legend of Ol’ Goldie splits the different between the two.

In The Legend of Ol’ Goldie we follow a lonely little boy who has a ravenous goldfish that is growing and growing and growing.  Goldie is clearly his best and only friend.

The creature effects are  obviosuly CGI, but still a definite notch about the “SyFy Originals.”   This should be a source of embarrassment for the Syfy Channel, not only does The Legend of Ol’ Goldie out-gun them in effects, but also in style.  Each stage of Goldie’s development yields a different look and original look.  Goldie is way superior to the likes of Dinoshark.

Effects, aside, The Legend of Ol’ Goldie is an entertaining little movie, like a lovely slice of old style EC comics brought to life.

For a limited time you can see it here: http://thelegendofolgoldie.tumblr.com/

Pre-ramble:

One day, many years ago, when Captain Midnight was just a small child, I met a girl at sandbox in the park. She was like many little girls, a bit of a bossy know-it-all. As she was probably a whole year older than I, so I figured she was somebody I’d better listen to. Listen I did. She told me some pretty horrendous tales, including one about the Devil. She told me that the Devil lived underground. That seemed reasonable to me. I knew there was a devil. I’d seen him in movies. He had to live somewhere, right? Why not underground? Still, I wasn’t a total sucker. I wanted proof. She said that if I buried something and came back to dig it up later it might be gone. If it was gone, it was because the Devil took it. So we buried a marble in the sandbox. The next day she and I tried to dig up the marble but never found it. A cold chill went up my spine. The Devil had my favorite aggie! Still, I could console myself with the fact that, Prince of Darkness or not, at least he wouldn’t eat me.

The Skinny:

I’m a sucker for horror films placed in a historical setting. It’s like getting two movies for one, in this case a monster movie and a western. The Burrowers takes us back to 1879, a time when every man was Forrest Tucker and every woman was Larry Storch (Go ask your parents or check Wikipedia), and pops us down in the Dakota Territory. I sat with crossed fingers hoping that some of the horror driven mayhem would spill into the saccharine world of Little House on the Prairie, but sadly The Burrows unfolds further West then DeSmet, South Dakota.

Fergus Coffey (Karl Geary), a young Irishman who has come to the vast prairie of America to settle and start a farm and a family. He has his eye on the Maryanne Stewart (Jocelin Donahue), his neighbor’s eldest daughter. The movie opens with a little montage of Fergus and Maryanne doing a “courtin’ on the prairie” routine with a voice-over my Fergus as he clumsily practices asking for Maryanne’s hand in marriage. This gets us going with skill and economy.

Night falls and the Stewart house is filled with excitement. Fergus gave Maryanne a silver brooch that belonged to his mother as token of his love. The next day he’d be coming to ask Mr. Stewart for Maryann’s hand in marriage.

Suddenly, gunshots and screaming can be heard outside. A neighbor comes banging on the door yelling that Indians are attacking and telling them to get in the cellar. In the cellar, the Stewarts hear more screaming and gunshots and the sound of something scrapping along the floor above. Something smashed through the floor. The lantern is dropped. Screaming is heard. The scene goes black. Awesome!

The next day Fergus comes calling to find the Stewart house in ransacked, a dead body in the doorway and community leader John Clay (Clancy Brown) already starting to get the situation in hand. They believe that Indians have abducted the Stewart family. Clay recruits William Parcher (William Mapother), a man who is familiar with Indian customs and language to help. Partcher brings Dobie Spacks (Galen Hutchison), a young man he’s mentoring in the skills of frontier living.

Our group sets out to track the Indians and is joined by a troop of soldiers commanded by the colorful Captain Henry Victor (Doug Hutchison). Along the way they begin to pick up unsettling clues as to who is truly responsible for the missing settlers. We get all this and we’re not even fifteen minutes into the movie. The Burrows get off to a quick start and steps up a little at a time as it goes, building to unnerving conclusion.

The Burrowers has many of the basic western archetype characters, but they are written and acted with skill, rather than falling into cliche. The principal cast members get to deliver some cracking old West dialogue. It’s enjoyable, making the characters both comfortable and familiar. Though Karl Geary’s Fergus Coffey is more or less the hero designated “hero” of the film, it really is an ensemble cast. William Mapother and Clancy Brown get nearly as much screen time and as many lines. It works out well, especially since it eliminates the need, story-wise, for any single character to turn into the Ellen Ripley of the Prairie.

At first blush, The Burrowers seems like writer/director J.T. Petty just spun Tremors into a cowboy picture; but that is hardly the case. Tremors was a fun tongue-in-cheek 1950′s style atomic mutant monster movie. The Burrowers is a seriously grim horror-western. The feel of it is almost like if Edgar Allen Poe has written a cowboy story.  I’m not saying the J.T. Petty is the second coming of Poe, so much as I am saying that he certainly seems to borrow some of Poe’s themes and puts them to good use.

So what about these Burrowers? Some people like to see the monster, like Godzilla; others like to keep the monster in the shadows, obscure and menacing like Jaws. Petty splits the difference and we get the full reveal near the end. The creature effects are good, though the monsters themselves might have been a bit scarier. What I had imagined before the reveal was way worse, but isn’t that always the way it goes?

The Burrowers is a well done bit of cinema, so much so that even if the monsters were stripped out of the movie and replaced with a fictitious malevolent native tribe the story would still work as a western, and because of that The Burrowers should appeal to horror and western fans alike.

Staring:

Karl Geary
Clancy Brown
William Mapother
Doug Hutchison
Sean Patrick Thomas
Galen Hutchison
Laura Leighton

Screenplay:
J.T. Petty

Director:
J.T. Petty

Pre-ramble:

Have you ever liked something that you shouldn’t have?   Maybe it was that Volkswagen van that constantly overheated.  Sure, it was a part-time job just keeping it on the road, but it was cool.  Or maybe, like my Uncle Dave, you like putting peanut butter on hamburgers.  What is wrong with you, Dave!?!  Or maybe it’s worse still, like my lifelong sidekick Wonder Stork, who thinks that Howard the Duck is one of the best movies ever!  Yes, he dragged to see that when it came out.  It’s been more than twenty years since and I’m still angry about that!  I’m sure that you can find examples of this, though maybe not so extreme, in your own life.  I know that I can, which brings  me to Deadlands 2: Trapped, a film that I enjoyed and I have no idea why.

The Skinny:

You might be wondering to yourself, “Deadlands 2: Trapped, okay but what about the first Deadlands?  Shouldn’t I see that first?”   In a word, no, Deadlands 2: Trapped stands entirely on it its own.  So why did they title it as if it were a sequel?  I dunno.  Maybe Filmmaker Gary Ugarek is trying to establish it as a brand, similar to George Romero’s Something, Something . . .  of the Dead.

The movie opens with an introduction by Helena, the Hussy of Horror.  Helena does a horror host act similar to Elvira, the Mistress of the Night.  She has nothing whatsoever to do with the movie itself, but does get you in the right mood for a low rent zombie movie, which is good because  that is exactly where we are heading.

There is something foul going on at the Department of Defense.  There, Donald Rumsfeld (not really, but really), is playing an evil game with his evil new toy.  Can you guess what it is?  If you said, “Something that turns people into zombies” you’d be right.  If dumping a zombie plague onto a town isn’t enough reason to hate this guy, he goes around the office, bossing people around and  acting like he’s the Queen of France.  And if that isn’t enough, Fake Donald Rumsfeld (Jim Krut) has one of his associates killed just because he wasn’t as gung-ho to murder innocent civilians as Fake Rumsy thought he should be.  Why is Fake Donald Rumsfeld doing all this?  He wants to test the latest in biological warfare, the sliced bread of America’s arsenal of freedom, on the freedom loving people of Hagerstown, Maryland – just to see how it works.

Enter the yokels from Hagerstown.  First, we have Douchey McWhiteguy (Joseph D. Durbin) and his best friend Fake Ted Nugent (Josh Davidson).  They’re having a night on the town which includes a visit to a topless bar.  Okay, the bar itself isn’t topless because if it was  all the drinks would fall on the floor.  The dancers are topless.  Douchey and Fake Ted meet up with Fake Ted’s sister, Alienated Cutter (Corrine Brush).  Alienated has a cunning plan.  She’s leaving town for Seattle.  She wants them to join her for a late night dinner and some quality time before she beats it out of Dodge City.  So they pile into her car head off to the local Denny’s or something.

On the way there, through the character’s banter, we discover two things: Alienated has a long time crush of Douchey.  Douchey is aware of this but has been pretending that he isn’t – until now.  In true Douchey fashion, he is clearly considering giving her a farewell ride on the baloney pony.   All of this is terribly boring and goes along with some dispatch.  Just as Douchey starts setting up his smooth moves, they stop at a red-light where they see a woman staggering in the night and falling over, flat on her face.  Fake Ted and Douchey, laughing at the woman, reluctantly get out of the car to help.  The woman is infected with the zombie virus and takes a bite out of Fake Ted Nugent.

Horror movie hysterics ensue, which takes our trio to a local movie theater, the first place they could get to for help when Alienated’s car won’t start.  This brings us to the second trio of yokels: Movie Theater Assistant Manager (Chris L. Clark), his girlfriend, Shift Manager (Ashley Young) and Some Little Girl (Alexa Davidson).  Now that we have our six survivors, let the zombie siege begin!

Not that you’ll be too sad if any of the characters die once the zombies surround the theater.  I wasn’t.  I just didn’t care.  The acting comes off as marginal and a little self-conscious.   I attribute part of this to start and stop shooting schedule, possible inexperience on the part of the director Gary Ugarek in handling actors, and mediocre dialogue.  It’s not that the acting is bad, as such, but that all the deficiencies taken together create weak characters.

The story, as you have seen, is not very inventive.  In his capacity as a writer, Gary Ugarek gives us a bland story populated with people I would want to strangle.  In the case of the Fake Donald Rumsfeld, this is probably a good thing, in the case of Douchey McWhiteguy and the other principal characters, this is not so good.

The zombie effects were uneven.  Some were detailed and impressive, others just a bit of grease paint.  For the most part they looked like the sort of zombies that you’d see at a really good “haunted house” attraction at Halloween.  Their movement was a little inconsistent.  For those who care about such things, Deadlands 2: Trapped has both running and limping style zombies, which will make everyone sad – or happy depending on whether or not you’re a “the glass is half full” sort of person.

The original music was interesting.  It reminded me of music John Carpenter writes for his own movies, only less dated.  It was a nice touch.

From the snarky tone I’ve taken in this review you’d probably guess that I didn’t like this movie.  You’d be wrong.  Deadlands 2: Trapped is definitely better than the sum of its parts.  Again, I will lay this at the feet of Director/Producer/Writer Gary Ugarek.  Whatever strikes he had against him going into this, whatever difficulties he had to overcome, in the end he and his crew were able to scrape it all together and make an entertaining zombie movie.

I look forward to the next Deadlands installment.

Staring:

Jim Krut
Joseph D. Durbin
Chris L. Clark
Josh Davidson
Ashley Young
Corrine Brush

Screenplay:
Gary Ugarek

Director:
Gary Ugarek

The Short Review:

I’ve seen things: wolf men, snake people, cat people, there are pig people, dogs surgically made into men, a sheep man, goat boys, and even mole people, but Eel Girl? That seems like a shocking choice. Yes, I went there. I’m aware that punning is the lowest form of humor. That’s why you’re the only person who actually reads this blog (Hi, Mom!).

The idea of an Eel Girl is certainly interesting. The title suggests a certain level of campiness, but it doesn’t turn to be the case. Far from being the sort of schlock fun, Eel Girl is played as a straight Sci-Fi horror story. Set in a defense research lab, two scientists are beavering away, doing whatever it is that scientists do in defense research labs. One of the scientists is called away for a meeting, leaving the other scientist alone in the observation room – against protocol. Alone – the scientist remotely opens a door in the chamber adjoining the observation room allowing Eel Girl to enter. She has a strange hold on him. Can he resist?

The effects here are top notch as you would expect from Weta Workshop. On the other hand, the music is so bad it’s distracting. You can see it here.

Staring:
Julia Rose
Euan Dempsy
Robyn Paterson
Nick Blake

Screenplay:
Paul Campion

Director:
Paul Campion

Pre-ramble:

Zombie movies are more often than not an exercise in remaking Dawn of the Dead.  The zombies show up, the survivors barricade themselves up and eventually cause their own destruction.  To make a good zombie movie you need to add in a few surprises or put a new spin on it in a fun and creative way.  When Dan O’Bannon remade Dawn, he remade it as a zombie comedy.  He also had Linnea Quigley dance naked on a tombstone and called it Return of the Living Dead.  That all worked for me.  Later, Danny Boyle remade Dawn of the Dead, calling it 28 Days Later.  His version of Dawn was set in England and had running zombies who are not dead.   Awesome.  Zack Snyder’s Dawn remake was actually called Dawn of the Dead and most of it took place in a shopping mall just like the original.  He had different characters, running zombies and a zombie birth scene.  Wow!  Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s version of Dawn of the Dead was a romantic comedy called Shaun of the Dead.  It had traditional limping zombies, striking a nostalgic chord with fanboys like me.

Bad zombie movies on the other hand just mindlessly stagger through the stations like a zombie waiting to be dropped with a headshot.  Most zombie movies fall somewhere in the middle – enter ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction

The Skinny:

Frida Abbas (Janette Armand) has returned home to Port Gamble, Washington from Princeton University.  Her father Ali Abbas (Ali Hamedani) only wants her to finish school and marry a nice boy from a good Iranian family.  That last bit would be a little strange if it were not for the fact that Frida’s family is from Iran, and not Iraq, as most everyone she meets tends to think and make into an issue.   Frida just thinks of herself as an average American girl.  All she wants to do is settle back into her normal life in her hometown.

While Frida is having awkward moments with her father and the neighbors,  Tom Hunt and his boyfriend Lance have come to Port Gamble to have an awkward moment of their own.  Tom, like Frida, is a native of Prot Gamble, but instead of coming home from college, he’s planning on coming out of the closet to his domineering mother.

There is also an amusing subplot involving the mayor and the minister.

Yes, this movie makes a political statement, but not in a dreary, preachy way like you’d get from a clown like Rush Limbaugh or in the uncomfortably confrontational way like you get sometimes from Michael Moore.  No, the politics are played for laughs with sophomoric tone, in the vein of Dead Alive meets Revenge of the Nerds.  There will be those who are going to complain about having, “Some political message rammed down their throats, when all I want to see is a zombie movie.”  Quit your whining and get over it, Glenda.  Nobody is ramming any thing down anyone’s throat here.  And if you don’t like it there are many other zombie movies.

Much of the humor derived from the mocking American cultural ignorance, paranoia and homophobia.  To that end there are several characters that by word or deed embody these elements.  To filmmaker Kevin Hamedani’s credit these characters, though necessarily one dimensional, are never treated with contempt.  Though ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction bills itself as a “political zomedy” it sensibilities are more expansive.  There is a bit of dark slapstick humor.    It worked for George Romero and Peter Jackson.  It works here too.

Not only does the humor work, but so do the zombie and gore effects.  I’ve been saying that a lot lately.  So much so that I’ve begun to wonder if my standards for zombie effects are set too low.  You see, back in the day, there weren’t that many zombie movies.  If we were lucky maybe ten or so a year.  Of that ten or so zombie movies, there was maybe one or two that was watchable.  Now there are between forty and fifty zombie movies every year, and at least a fourth of them are going to be quality productions with two or three really excellent films standing atop the zombie hill. The baseline is much higher now than it was even ten years ago, so much so that even the weaker entries now have fairly good effects.  ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction certainly follows the upward spiral with its zombie effects.  It also has something gore-wise that I’ve never seen in a zombie movie before: a zombie peeling a guy’s face off and eating it like a people flavored fruit roll-up.  It’s gross, a bit campy and happens quickly.  The violence and action through the whole movie is reminiscent of 1980′s horror films.  I like good practical effects and ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction certainly brings it.

ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction is paced like a comedy rather than a horror film.  There is no ratcheting up of tension over the course of the movie, instead there are scenes of horror scattered throughout the movie, and though a little camp, these bits are quite effective. Comedy and horror are two the more difficult assignments an actor can get.  Both are,  in large, a matter of timing.  Kevin Hamedani takes his cast back and forth between the two fairly well.  I would discuss specific scenes to illustrate what I’m talking about, but that would spoil it.

There wasn’t a lot of room here for subtle, nuanced performances.  That’s just fine.  I’m just here to be entertained, laugh and maybe grossed out a little.   There were no weak links in the cast.  Janette Armand as Frida is the character who carries one thread of the story.  I found her fairly engaging and sympathetic, the same holds true for Doug Fahl as Tom Hunt, who has returned home “come out” to his mother, and Cooper Hopkins as  Lance Murphy, Tom’s very “out” boyfriend.   I’ve known couples like that and though the characters are played largely for laughs, at their core they ring true.  I especially enjoyed Russell Hodgkinson as Joe Miller, whose descent into paranoid hysterics was both satirical and silly.

ZMD:Zombies of Mass Destruction certainly had some wonderful horror and comedy moments but it didn’t seem to flow very well as a larger story.  The characters were not strong enough and there weren’t enough jokes to keep it going, at least as a comedy.  The plot of a zombie contagion is not novel idea.  It’s been done many, many times.  I’m fine with that, but ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction, as a zombie movie, doesn’t do anything especially interesting with it.

Staring:
Janette Armand
Doug Fahl
Cooper Hopkins
Bill Johns
Russell Hodgkinson
James Mesher

Screenplay:
Kevin Hamedani
Ramon Isao

Director:
Kevin Hamedani

The Short Review:

I was sold by the title: Night of the Hell Hamsters.  It sounds so promising, the mix of hamsters and horror.  It’s from these incongruities that greatness is sometimes born.  There was a nagging little voice in the back on my head telling me that the title was going to be the best thing about the movie.  It was probably shot by two teenagers using their Mommy’s new Flip camcorder, the voice said.  It’s going to be five minutes of some kid covered in catsup, running around screaming, with a stuffed toy duct tapped to his neck as heavy metal music blares in the background.  It’s going to suck.  With a nervous hand, I clicked my mouse and started the movie, wordlessly praying for God to have mercy on my soul.

Night of the Hell Hamsters is only about fifteen minutes long;  filmmaker Paul Campion and his crew makes the best of their short time.  The story opens with a teenage girl babysitting for a couple who are out for the evening.  After getting the kids off to bed she invites her boyfriend over.  He’s promised to bring an Ouija board for that evening’s entertainment, but doesn’t in the hopes they will have to find something else to do – heh-heh.  Annoyed, the girl improvises her own Ouija board and tells him, in no uncertain terms, that he’s getting nowhere with her until he starts taking the whole thing more seriously.

Inadvertently, they unleash the forces of darkness.  A vicious demon possesses the bodies of the family’s pet hamsters.  Is it good? That depends on whether or not you think that The Evil Dead with hamsters would be good – I do.

Paul Campion and his crew are clearly professionals.  This is defiantly not something made by a couple of kids screwing around with a camcorder and posting it Youtube.

You can see it in its entirety  here:

Staring:

Stephanie Ratcliff
Paul O’Neill

Screenplay:
Paul Campion

Director:
Paul Campion

Pre-ramble:

Imagine this: a movie where zombies meet the crew from Alien, only it’s not the crew from Alien, but a sort of like the crew from Alien.  They also have an android  Lance Hendriksen Impersonator.  Next add in an all-girl crew of beautiful, but murderous, space nurses –  in identical miniskirts; then drop in the green orb from Heavy Metal and have all the space ships made of plywood and drywall.

It sounds better than it was.

The Skinny:

We join the crew of the good ship Pandora on their way back to Earth.  The ship’s captain, Rubini (David P. Johnson), is dead and his body has been placed in something that looks like a tanning bed with a little window.  Everybody is sad about that – about Rubini being dead – not about the tanning bed thing.  The crew are probably still in the denial stage of grieving over Rubini’s death, which might explain why they are acting mutinous towards the acting captain, Darian Holloway (Alexis Zibolis).

The corpse of Rubini is not their only passenger.  They also have Thanatos, the jolly green orb they’re smuggling back to Earth to sell on the black market as a power source. This plan, like many great plans, is sent awry by the flying monkeywrench of fate.  This particular monkeywrench comes in the form of a distress call from the Diana, a damaged vessel drifting in space and filled with sexy space nurses led by Kyra (Noelle Perris), the space nurse supreme.  Kyra and her crew of murderous space nurses decide to take the Pandora and in the process one of the evil space nurses gets spattered with glow stick juice from Thanatos, sparking space zombie mayhem.  Will Kyra and Holloway join forces to meet this new terrifying threat?  Will the space zombies kill everyone on board?  Ah, you’ll have to watch the movie because I’m not going to tell you.  I will say that the plot does get a little twisty.

So what did I think of Plaguers?  Well, it took me three tries to get through it, so I wouldn’t say that it’s a stellar film, even though it’s set in outer-space. Get it?  Stellar.  Outer-space.  Urgh.  Let’s get to it:

The acting ranges from amateurish to mediocre.  Steve Railsback, as the Lance Hendriksen Impersonator, is the biggest name in here and his performance is terrible.  I know the guy can act.  I’ve seen him in other things.  He was great in Helter Skelter and he even once won a Golden Globe, for duck’s sake. So what went wrong?  I dunno.  Maybe they should have just splurged and gotten the real Lance.

The other standout was Paige La Pierre.  Her character, Sadie, threatened to kill and torture everything that came within her reach.  She was irritating to the point that I wanted to kill her.  If making me want to slap her into silence is what she and director Brad Sykes were going for, then she deserves an Oscar.

Mediocre acting isn’t a deal killer for me.  I understand that an actor’s performance can be hampered by a lack of talent, bad directing or poor sound (The sound in Plaguers is fine, I was just using that as an example).   I can keep up the suspension of disbelief unless the acting is really bad.  The acting here wasn’t anywhere near bad enough to take me out of the movie.

Why did I have to make three attempts to watch Plaguers? What kept taking me out of the movie?  I’ve given this some thought and have come to the conclusion that the sets were a major problem.  They didn’t look like the interior of a space ship should, at least I didn’t think so.  They looked more like some sort of underground bunker.  Yeah, I could get past the acting, the mediocre dialogue and the fact that I didn’t like any of the characters, but the sets were, I think, the last straw.  I also thought that having the characters use guns was a bad idea.  Nothing says “This is not happening in Space” like the sudden appearance of a .38 revolver.

Was there anything about Plaguers that was good?  Yes.  The monster effects were good – really good, in fact.  I was watching this movie, trying to stay focused so I can write an honest review, when suddenly: POW!  Gnarly, gross zombie effects grab my attention.  If Plaguers filmmaker Brad Sykes was shooting for good 1980′s style practical monster effects, that is what his people gave him – in spades.  I enjoyed the monster and make-up effects in Plaguers way more than the effects in some other movies I’ve seen lately <cough> Underworld </cough>.

It’s not fun to give a negative review for a movie that tries so hard.  It’s like stomping a puppy, an evil mutant zombie puppy, but a puppy none-the-less.  I’ve heard interviews with Brad Skykes, he seems like a nice guy with a passion for making movies and clearly a lot of work went into this picture, but Plaguers really misses the mark.  Even though the make-up effects were great and Sykes did a good job presenting those effects, everything else conspired to make this movie difficult to watch.  Movies, in spite of any particular failing, should always be fun to watch.  Plaguers fails the fun test.

Staring:
Steve Railsback
Alexis Zibolis
Bobby James
Noelle Perris
Paige La Pierre

Screenplay:
Brad Sykes

Director:
Brad Sykes