Film Freak Central

TIFF '20: Get the Hell Out; Nomadland; David Byrne's American Utopia

GET THE HELL OUT
**/****
starring Bruce Hung, Megan Lai, Tsung-Hua To, Chung-wang Wang
screenplay by I-Fan Wang, Shih-Keng Chien, Wan-Ju Yang
directed by I-Fan Wang

NOMADLAND
***/****
starring Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linday May, Swankie
written for the screen and directed by Chloé Zhao

American Utopia
***/****
directed by Spike Lee

by Bill Chambers Have the ticking time bombs the world is sitting on and TIFF's significantly reduced slate resulted in the 2020 iteration of the festival--the COVID-19 TIFF, the pre-election TIFF, the world's-on-fire TIFF--being programmed with increased political fervour? Three of the four films I've so far watched at TIFF 2020 suggest that's the case in their topicality, though I will allow that the silliest of these, Taiwan's Get the Hell Out, would not resonate nearly as much as it does were it not for these unremovable pandemic goggles I wear now, which transform everything old and new into ironic commentary on this moment in history. Get the Hell Out begins in medias res after a (sigh/jerk-off motion) zombie outbreak in parliament, then backtracks to show how the headstrong Hsiung (Megan Lai) was literally muscled out of office for refusing to endorse a chemical plant that will contaminate the environment with the rabies virus. She manipulates a lovestruck security guard with chronic--and portentous--nosebleeds named Wang (Bruce Ho) into running in her place, hoping to use him as a sock-puppet against her misogynistic former colleagues. Alas, he has his own cock-eyed agenda, and so the plague proceeds apace. Trapped in the parliament building, Hsiung and Wang are forced to fend off hordes of cannibalistic MPs as well as their nefarious rival, Li (Chung-wang Wang), the movie's nominal Trump stand-in.

TIFF 2019: Atlantiques

Atlantique
***/****
starring Mama Sané, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré, Nicole Sougou
screenplay by Mati Diop, Olivier Demangel
directed by Mati Diop

by Angelo Muredda Working from her own 2009 short Atlantiques, first-time feature director Mati Diop makes a bold impression with Atlantics. An elegant film that will hopefully lose the ungainly subtitle "A Ghost Love Story" by the time it makes its way to Netflix (where it's bound in the coming months), it's an awfully strong directorial calling card with a distinctive rhythm and point of view, its tactility and sensuousness evoking the work of Diop's former director and mentor Claire Denis without losing its own youthful verve.

The Dead Don't Die (2019)

½*/****
starring Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Near the end of Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die, Centerville police chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray)--probably named after legendary everyman actor Cliff Robertson just because--intones to his deputy Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver)--probably named after legendary Formula 1 driver Ronnie Peterson just because--that Jim Jarmusch is a dick. He's responding to Ronnie's revelation that Jim has let him read the entire script while only letting Cliff read certain scenes. Luigi Pirandello did shit like this in his exhausting, wall-breaking, self-referential stuff. He believed the actor would inevitably break with the text and so, in his most famous play, "Six Characters in Search of an Author", he has them reject their script and question their existence. A forerunner to the Theatre of the Absurd, Pirandello was held in some esteem (and met with an equal amount of suspicion) by Mussolini--you can read into the rebellion of his fictional characters from their fictional circumstances a hint of his true allegiances. It's timely, given our current fascist circumstances, for Jarmusch to evoke Pirandello, I guess, and other modern examples like Daffy Duck's "Duck Amuck" short and Grant Morrison's "Coyote Gospel" one-shot in the late-'90s Vertigo run of "Animal Man" support the playwright's case for immortality. But it's hard to get too excited when the execution is this pleased with itself. The conceit (much like when Moriarty became sentient on the Holodeck in that one episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation") is ever in danger of pomposity and self-parody. Jarmusch, who already mucks around in narrative grey areas--such as conceiving of a poet/bus driver named Paterson who lives in Paterson, NJ and reveres a book of poetry by William Carlos Williams called, that's right, Paterson--doesn't need to get so granular about it. The Dead Don't Die plays an awful lot like Jarmusch explaining Jarmusch to a slow child.

Pet Sematary (1989) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Dale Midkiff, Fred Gwynne, Denise Crosby, Brad Greenquist
screenplay by Stephen King, based on his novel
directed by Mary Lambert

"Machado would have traded every word, every poem, every verse he ever wrote for one more hour with his beloved. And that is because when it comes to grief, the normal rules of exchange do not apply, because grief transcends value. A man would give entire nations to lift grief off his heart, and yet you cannot buy anything with grief. Because grief is worthless."
-Jefe (Rubén Blades), The Counselor

by Bill Chambers A VICE UK review of the recent Happy Death Day 2U came in for a shellacking on social media because of a click-baity tweet suggesting it was the "first" slasher movie about grief, a claim that only demonstrated a lack of expertise while making a sacrificial lamb of Happy Death Day 2U (which scarcely benefited from the bad-faith attention). Neither the headline nor the subheader of the review itself is as boldly specious, but there in the body of the piece is this: "Christopher Landon's latest, Happy Death Day 2U[,] might be the first slasher that actually centers on dealing with grief." (The headline--"'Happy Death Day 2U' Is More About Grief Than Horror"--nevertheless bothers me, too, incidentally: grief is horror.) So often accused of cynicism because they're formulated to maximize a body count, slashers are engineered to comment on the capricious nature of existence, and the best ones seize on this to acknowledge the toll of loss on the survivors (Black Christmas (1974), Rob Zombie's Halloween II)--while even the most mediocre ones tend to have a killer motivated by a deep and incurable sorrow (see: The Toolbox Murders (1978), the first Friday the 13^th).

Pet Sematary (2019)

*½/****
starring Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, Jeté Laurence, John Lithgow
screenplay by Jeff Buhler, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The best adaptations understand the totality of an author's work, while the worst try to drag something kicking and screaming from one medium into another, largely incompatible, medium. The famous Frank Zappa quote--writing about music is like dancing about architecture--applies, except that it is possible to dance about architecture if you're a brilliant dancer and understand the essence of the architecture you're taking as inspiration. I think Zappa knew that, being Zappa. I like to believe he actually meant that it's possible, but hard. Stephen King's Pet Sematary is exceptional. I reread it for the first time in thirty-three years before watching the new adaptation from co-directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer. I remember, as a child of thirteen, the visceral fear of those last twenty pages or so (and the hot sex scene); now I'll remember it for the extraordinarily observant and sensitive portrayal of grief and loneliness in the novel's first couple-hundred pages. Indeed, the first sentence, talking about how men sometimes meet the man who should have been their father in the middle of their lives, immediately reduced me to tears. Both the Lambert and the Kölsch/Widmyer adaptations focus on the twenty-page payoff, not the two-hundred pages of poetry.

Evil Dead 2 (1987) [The Book of the Dead Limited Edition] - DVD|4K ULTRA HD + BLU-RAY + DIGITAL

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

Evil Dead II
Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn
****/****
DVD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
4K UHD - Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley
screenplay by Sam Raimi & Scott Spiegel
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw More a remake with yuks than a sequel, Sam Raimi's astonishing Evil Dead II is a kitchen-sink splatter flick inspired by the drive-in spam-in-a-cabin tradition and leavened by an unhealthy fascination with The Three Stooges. Leading man and crash-test dummy Bruce Campbell (Bill Chambers referred to him once as "brick-jawed," and I can't improve on that, literally or figuratively) turns in a legend-making, career-defining performance, re-imagining his Shemp, Ash, as a man of stage-melodrama, white-hat resolve who comes of age upon discovering his knack for slaying the undead. The great unspoken peculiarity of siege classics like George Romero's Night of the Living Dead is that there is somehow always discovered a hero who's biologically hardwired for the task of staying alive in the face of great demonic hordes. The crux is that it's unspoken no longer in Raimi's "Dead" trilogy (the third instalment the out-and-out comedy Army of Darkness), which, by the end, becomes a rags-to-rags fable about a retail clerk repelling an army of Harryhausen skeletons laying siege to a medieval castle. In its way, this is as canny a satire of the consumer/clerk relationship as anything in Dawn of the Dead.

The Evil Dead (1983) [The Book of the Dead Limited Edition] - DVD|4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/****
DVD - Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
4K UHD - Image A Sound A- Commentary A-
starring Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManincor, Betsy Baker
written and directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw The Evil Dead defies wisdom: It's an ultraviolent horror film made on a nothing budget (rumoured to have been in the neighbourhood of three-thousand dollars) that still manages to produce an enduring and brilliant performance and demonstrate (like a Dario Argento shocker) that gore, if it's perverse enough, can be the beginning and the end of horror. The product of Bruce Campbell's hilariously physical turn, of Sam Raimi's genius in fashioning dazzling camera moves, and of an uncredited Joel Coen's flair at the editing table, The Evil Dead bristles with life and joy. It is a testament to how bliss and the spark of inspiration can elevate a film of any budget in any genre from routine to sublime.

Fantasia Fest '18: One Cut of the Dead

***/****
written and directed by Shinichiro Ueda

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It begins with a young woman (Yuzuki Akiyama) running for cover in an abandoned factory, but lo, her zombie boyfriend (Kazuaki Nagaya) proves inescapable, and sinks his teeth into her neck as she tells him she loves him one last time. Then a director (Takayuki Hamatsu) yells cut and proceeds to berate his actress for still not being realistically devastated after 42 takes. When he storms off in a huff, the actors commiserate and the makeup woman (Harumi Shuhama) chimes in with a little lore about the factory involving medical experiments on the dead. On cue, a "real" zombie appears, setting in motion a bloody chase through the studio and nearby woods as cast and crew unleash their inner Ash and struggle to evade the contageous bite of the infected. Lasting 37 minutes and unfolding as a "single" shot, this is a dumb but energetic sequence indebted as much to the climax of Children of Men as to any zombie movie (though particularly Romero's--the undead are a nostalgic mint green). And then credits roll, and One Cut of the Dead flashes back one month earlier to the inception of what we just saw: a (fictitious) one-off for Japan's Zombie Channel, also called "One Cut of the Dead" because it was shot live without any editing.

The Mummy (2017)

*/****
starring Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis, Russell Crowe
screenplay by David Koepp and Christopher McQuarrie and Dylan Kussman
directed by Alex Kurtzman

by Walter Chaw It took me a while but it finally clicked about an hour into Alex Kurtzman's hilarible The Mummy that the whole thing wasn't a really bad movie, but a really bad videogame in bad-movie form. It has the same alternating cadence of leaden exposition drop, interminable and hideously- animated/performed cut-scene, and standard FPS-strictured gameplay culminating in a boss fight. Envisioned as the launch for Universal's "Dark Universe" franchise (in which the pantheon of classic Universal Monsters are given gritty action reboots, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style), it finally functions as a first-generation "Resident Evil" port in which the dialogue, for what it's worth, was written in Japanese, translated into English, and performed by 64 pixels stacked on top of each other. Awkward doesn't begin to describe the desperation with which all involved try to seductively reveal/hide their Dark Universe™ Easter eggs while hobbling from one big, button-geeking, CGI-hobbled moment to the next. Look, behind those dust zombies: it's Dr. Frankenstein's lab!

The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) + Logan (2017)

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS
***/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close, Sennia Nanua
screenplay by Mike Carey, based on his novel
directed by Colm McCarthy

LOGAN
****/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Richard E. Grant, Dafne Keen
screenplay by Scott Frank & James Mangold and Michael Green
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Movements start this way, with one or two events that could be thought of as coincidence in response to some greater trend in our culture, perhaps--or, more likely, in response to some greater corruption. I've long referred to movies, especially genre movies, as indicator species in our cultural swamp. They're the first to show evidence of introduced toxins; at minimum, they're the first major art form to disseminate warnings widely. Jordan Peele's sleeper hit Get Out is just the latest in a recent spate of pictures that have caught the zeitgeist. Test the theory: would it have been as popular in another time? Movies are not unlike Percy Shelley's "dead thoughts... Like wither'd leaves" carried on divine winds to quicken new births. It's a florid reference to justify an unpopular concept. Not religious in any way, I find sublimity in the idea that human hands work in concert sometimes, and the close study of their products can provide insight into the world as it is, not simply as it was. Find in James Mangold's Logan and Colm McCarthy's more or less contemporaneous The Girl with All the Gifts (hereafter Girl) complementary, near identical concepts executed in largely the same way--proof for me of a body politic reacting in concert to poison. As grim as they are (with Logan actually verging on vile and mean-spirited), they are nonetheless to me evidence of at least some collective immune response. Artifacts of resistance left for the anthropologists. Despite their apparent nihilism, they are proof, as referenced explicitly in Girl, of hope.

Swiss Army Man (2016) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

by Walter Chaw Bridging the gap between Charlie Kaufman movies, the Daniels' Swiss Army Man is one high-concept conceit carried through to every possible ontological end. It veers, dizzily, between slapstick scatalogical comedy and poignant existential philosophy, doing so with the sort of invention generally credited to silent-film clowns. Open with Hank (Paul Dano), shipwrecked, about to hang himself when he notices the corpse of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washed ashore. He looks for signs of life. There aren't any, save the rapid decomposition that's causing Manny to fart. A lot. Manny's farts carry Hank back to civilization, in fact, in a trailer-spoiled motorboat sequence that would be indescribable were it not right there. Like so many things in the film, it's not clear that this is "actually" happening or just a fantasy of Hank's before dying. By the middle of the picture, it's apparent that challenging the border between the cinema real and the cinema imagined is the point. If it destroys that conversation, it allows for a better one about the nature of friendship and honesty, whether it's possible to ever truly be open with another human being and, if it is, whether it would be something welcomed or rejected. Unconditional acceptance is a charming romantic fantasy, but that's all it is.

Scarecrows (1988) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A+
starring Ted Vernon, Michael Simms, Victoria Christian, Richard Vidan
written by Richard Jefferies and William Wesley
directed by William Wesley

by Walter Chaw Terrible in that plucky way that earnest shoestring products can be terrible, William Wesley's Scarecrows has a few memorable gore moments and a lot of bad dialogue, execrable performances, and senseless exposition. I saw this movie on VHS in high school as part of my weekend ritual of renting a shelf and staying up all night shotgunning the dregs. This led to a few remarkable discoveries, of course--and it led to discoveries like this as well. The hook of Scarecrows is a strong one, taking the somehow-underutilized image of the scarecrow in the horror genre and making a grand bogey of it, but the result is essentially a zombie-cum-spam-in-a-cabin flick featuring a paramilitary group fresh off a heist engaged in a supernatural backcountry rigmarole. Still, the film's greatest crime isn't a bad premise but that it's boring. Really boring. Mainly it's boring because every character acts like an idiot at all times, making it hard to muster much in the way of stakes. That's also why Scarecrows isn't scary or tense, and because I think it wasn't long enough and they ran out of money, there are tons of filler close-ups of scarecrows just sort of, you know, hanging there. Kuleshov or something.

Swiss Army Man (2016)

***½/****
starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

by Walter Chaw Bridging the gap between Charlie Kaufman movies, the Daniels' Swiss Army Man is one high-concept conceit carried through to every possible ontological end. It veers, dizzily, between slapstick scatalogical comedy and poignant existential philosophy, doing so with the sort of invention generally credited to silent-film clowns. Open with Hank (Paul Dano), shipwrecked, about to hang himself when he notices the corpse of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washed ashore. He looks for signs of life. There aren't any, save the rapid decomposition that's causing Manny to fart. A lot. Manny's farts carry Hank back to civilization, in fact, in a trailer-spoiled motorboat sequence that would be indescribable were it not right there. Like so many things in the film, it's not clear that this is "actually" happening or just a fantasy of Hank's before dying. By the middle of the picture, it's apparent that challenging the border between the cinema real and the cinema imagined is the point. If it destroys that conversation, it allows for a better one about the nature of friendship and honesty, whether it's possible to ever truly be open with another human being and, if it is, whether it would be something welcomed or rejected. Unconditional acceptance is a charming romantic fantasy, but that's all it is.

The Dungeonmaster (1984)/Eliminators (1986) [Double Feature] - Blu-ray Disc

Ragewar
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Richard Moll, Leslie Wing, Jeffrey Byron
written by Allen Actor
directed by Rosemarie Turko, John Carl Buechler, David Allen, Steven Ford, Peter Manoogian, Ted Nicolaou, Charles Band

ELIMINATORS
**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Andrew Prine, Denise Crosby, Patrick Reynolds, Roy Dotrice
written by Paul De Meo & Danny Bilson
directed by Peter Manoogian

by Bryant Frazer Shout! Factory's program of disinterred but well-preserved artifacts from producer Charles Band's genre-flick factory Empire Pictures continues with this platter of aged cheese. I'm generally resistant to nostalgia and suspicious of claims that anybody's low-budget crapfest is so bad it's good, but the twofer on offer here is surprisingly engaging, juxtaposing a sloppy but fast-paced horror anthology with a silly but earnest action pastiche in a celebration of a bygone age of guileless indie filmmaking. While some of Scream Factory's excavations from that era are simply depressing (The Final Terror, anyone?), this highly-derivative double feature makes up for its lack of artistry with a generous helping of vintage latex creature masks, boggling non sequiturs, and 1980s signifiers that generate--at least for movie buffs of a certain age and proclivity--a strong sense memory of sticky floors, stale popcorn, and battered 35mm projection.

Hell of the Living Dead (1980)|Rats: Night of Terror (1984) [Blood-Soaked Double Feature] - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

Virus
*/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B
starring Margit Evelyn Newton, Franco Garofalo, Selan Karay, Robert O'Neil
screenplay by Claudio Fragasso, J.M. Cunilles
directed by Bruno Mattei

Rats - Notte di terrore
*½ Image C- Sound B Extras B
starring Richard Raymond, Janna Ryann, Alex McBride, Richard Cross
screenplay by Claudio Fragasso, Hervé Piccini
directed by Bruno Mattei

by Bryant Frazer It's quite possible there is no better-known director of truly terrible genre movies than the late Italian filmmaker Bruno Mattei. Though I've not seen any other Mattei films, I feel comfortable making that assessment based solely on the "blood-soaked double feature" assembled here by the B-movie mavens at Blue Underground. By any rational measure, Hell of the Living Dead and Rats: Night of Terror are cheesy barrel-scrapings, budget-starved and blandly offensive horror counterfeits. But by the standards of Mattei's oeuvre--which also includes nunsploitation, Nazisploitation, women-in-prison flicks, and mondo-style "documentaries"--they are the cream that rises to the top of the milk. Unless you're willing to make a case for his nunsploitation flick The Other Hell, or maybe one of the early Nazi sexploitation pictures, these two films seem to form the cornerstone of Mattei's reputation, such as it is, among genre buffs.

Fantastic Fest '14: Wyrmwood + Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead

WYRMWOOD
**/****
directed by Kiah Roache-Turner

Død Snø 2
***/****
directed by Tommy Wirkola

by Walter Chaw Zombie movies are pretty played-out by now, strung out to the point of zombie romances, but I feel like there's room, yet, for innovation. Alas, neither Kiah Roache-Turner's Wyrmwood nor Tommy Wirkola's Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead does much to reinvent the wheel, although both seem to know and appreciate their sources. Start with Wyrmwood's faithfulness to the frenetic vibe of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, stirred in with some of the costuming and road-play of the "Mad Max" series, in its tale of a zombie invasion that leads to the partnering-up of Barry (Jay Gallagher) and Benny (Leon Burchill). When Barry's sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey) gets abducted by an evil Save the Green Planet! extra and sent along an endless highway with newly-developed powers, it's up to Barry and Benny to splatter a couple hundred zombies to save her bacon.

Night of the Comet (1984) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

click any image to enlarge

½*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B
starring Robert Beltran, Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Geoffrey Lewis
written and directed by Thom Eberhardt

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's a quote from the seventh season of "The Simpsons" that applies to the problem before us where Bart, happening on a "Schoolhouse Rock" thing and learning from Lisa that it's one of "those campy '70s throwbacks that appeals to Generation X-ers," says, "We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little." If there were, and if it had, we might've avoided the current rage for hipsterism--if the Joss Whedons of the world (and David Cranes and so forth) had found themselves casualties in some hostile jungle setting, then would this current youth generation have adopted, ironically, that last generation, and would people like me at my tender age of 40 be fuelling demand for hale distribution/archival companies like Shout! to produce exhaustively-supplemented HiDef releases of garbage like Thom Eberhardt's excruciating Night of the Comet? Look, I'm not immune--I wrote an entire monograph (200+ pages, no kidding) on Steve De Jarnatt's Miracle Mile that, in my defense, was more memoir than anything else (or is that more disclaimer than defense?). Still, I'll proclaim to my grave that Miracle Mile has substance, while Night of the Comet has none. The first and greatest danger of nostalgia is that having grown up with certain artifacts, we treat them like family and tend to love them unconditionally, as family does. This affection doesn't mean that junior isn't a grinning idiot, however, because at least in this instance, he is. And I'm a strong believer that if one of your family members is a grinning idiot, it's actually your job not to inflict him or her on other people.

Day of the Dead (1985) [Divimax] - DVD|[Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

****/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras A
BD - Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Richard Liberty
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Far from the weak sister that critics and fanboys have branded George Romero's conclusion to his zombie trilogy, Day of the Dead is at once the most hopeful and the most melancholy of the trio while falling short of the stark satirical perfection of the first (Night of the Living Dead) and the bloated satirical imperfections of the perhaps over-celebrated second (Dawn of the Dead). In fact, I find Day to be the equal of Dawn in almost every way and to exceed it in terms of its alacrity--its relative tightness in the development of its ideas about the nature of man unfolding against the backdrop of a rise of a new society. The obvious precursor to the zombie mythos is the Christian faith, with its saviour a zombie installing a new order (covenant) with its key ritual dedicated to a celebration the eating of the saviour's flesh and blood: a literal consumption of the Host that incorporates into its rite terms of infection and contagion. In fact, Day of the Dead, of the three, seems the most serious in exploring that spiritual/thaumaturgical connection with the introduction of what is essentially a demigod--an offspring of thought and body in the same way that Christ was meant to be God made flesh in all its weakness--in the form of the much-reviled Bub (Howard Sherman).

World War Z (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster's World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks's cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks's I'll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z--something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could've been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh's Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn't gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

6 Souls (2013) + Dead Souls (2012) - Blu-ray Discs

6 SOULS (a.k.a. Shelter)
**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Julianne Moore, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Jeffreey DeMunn, Brooklyn Proulx
screenplay by Michael Cooney
directed by Marlind & Stein

DEAD SOULS
½*/**** Image C Sound B Extras C
starring Jesse James, Magda Apanowicz, Bill Moseley, Geraldine Hughes
screenplay by John Doolan
directed by Colin Theys

by Walter Chaw The best scene in the surprisingly-not-awful 6 Souls happens in a toothless hinterland, up yonder in them thar hills, 'round campfires and lean-tos and a wilderness of patchy facial hair, where forensic psychologist Cara (Julianne Moore) meets a Granny Holler Witch (Joyce Feurring), who is just indescribably awesome. She's like a refugee from The Dark Crystal--the very incarnation of Aughra, blind but seeing through an albino familiar (Katiana Davis) as she performs psychic surgery, sucking up souls with her mouth and depositing them in a jar she calls "shelter." Indeed, it's such an awesome scene that it shows up how perfunctory the rest of Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein's 6 Souls is; how the idea of a demon jumping bodies (like The Evil Dead, yes, but more like Fallen) can look very much like an early-'90s mid-prestige thriller and therefore not anything interesting or special. A shame, as the talent assembled for the piece is exceptional--Moore, certainly, along with the always-fabulous Jeffrey DeMunn as Cara's dad Dr. Harding. It's his fault that Cara gets involved with psych-patient Adam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who, in the process of manifesting multiple bad-accent theatre personalities, also seems to be manifesting their physical traits (like paralysis, say, and bad acting, too). Turns out it ain't science afflicting our man Adam, but you knew that already.

Lifeforce (1985) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

click any image to enlarge

**/****Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May
screenplay by Dan O'Bannon & Don Jakoby, based on the novel The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Bryant Frazer The early 1980s must have been a weird time to be Tobe Hooper. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had made him one of the most notorious directors in the world, and Poltergeist vaulted him onto the A-list. He would have been on top of the world if not for an extended controversy over that film: Poltergeist was produced by Steven Spielberg, and there were widespread rumours that he actually directed it, too. Hooper denied it and Spielberg issued oddly-worded statements that permanently muddied the waters. Whatever the truth of their collaboration, the controversy was a blow to Hooper's reputation. His Texas Chain Saw felt almost like outsider art--raw and twisted, it was the antithesis of the burnished Spielberg style. Poltergeist, on the other hand, was the very quintessence of a Steven Spielberg film, from its familiar suburban family in distress to its richly-detailed mise en scène‎. If Hooper really did direct it, it doesn't say much for his authorial voice that he left virtually no discernible fingerprints on the final product.

World War Z (2013)

**/****
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster's World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks's cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks's I'll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z--something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could've been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh's Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn't gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

This Is the End (2013)

**½/****
starring James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel
written and directed by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg

by Angelo Muredda Whatever its dramatic hiccups, This is the End can at least boast that it's one of the better full-length adaptations of a trailer. In 2007, Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel starred in a 90-second sizzle reel--co-scripted by Rogen and Superbad collaborator Evan Goldberg--about their efforts to stay alive amidst an unspecified global catastrophe. As scrappy comedy skits go, "Jay and Seth versus the Apocalypse" was pretty good, a charming riff on the actors' schlubby personas as well as a pitch for more time and a bigger budget to drive home their unlikely survival story. The trouble with This Is the End, a funny but belaboured riff on that premise, is that it's still trying to close the sale long after the project's been greenlit, ingratiating itself to an audience already on board. In their joint directorial debut, Rogen and Goldberg show a knack for characterization but seem anxious about where to go from there, squandering a gifted ensemble in a procession of spotty "what if" scenarios that don't resemble a movie so much as a glimpse into a celebrity edition of charades in Judd Apatow's basement.

Warm Bodies (2013) - Blu-ray + Digital Copy + Ultraviolet

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Rob Corddry, John Malkovich
screenplay by Jonathan Levine, based on the novel by Isaac Marion
directed by Jonathan Levine

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer The American zombie movie was born in October 1968 with the release of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, and it's a measure of how subversive that film and its sequels truly were that zombies only became palatable to the major studios in 2004, when a kid named Zack Snyder stripped Dawn of the Dead of its original class-conscious, anti-consumerist premise--inverted it, even, by making a zombie movie that pandered to the shopping-mall multiplex crowd rather than ripping into it. Given its success, it's hard to believe it has taken almost another ten years for the sub-genre to be completely transformed by a Hollywood establishment that's turned so timid and equivocal in its thrill-seeking ways that it begrudges even the zombies their killing sport. Yes, somebody somewhere decided that what zombies really need, more than forty years on, is a redemption story. Director Jonathan Levine doesn't put a stake through the heart of the sub-genre, quite, but he does something that might be worse. With Warm Bodies, he's made the first middle-aged zombie film.

ParaNorman (2012) - Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Chris Butler & Sam Fell
directed by Chris Butler

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) can see and speak with ghosts, which, if you squint a little, is only a metaphor for the kind of sensitivity that, in a boy, will invariably lead to about a decade of being brutalized by his disconnected male peer group. (Everything will change once he invents Microsoft or Pixar.) Norman's chief tormentor is barely-verbal Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, already past his sell-by date); his shallow and image-obsessed teenaged sister with a heart of gold™ is Courtney (the awesome Anna Kendrick), who has the hots for the captain of the football team, pre-verbal Mitch (Casey Affleck); and Norman's best friend, whether he likes it or not, is Mitch's weird, fat little brother, Neil (Tucker Albrizzi). The first problem of ParaNorman is that, in its rush to be sensitive to intelligent outcasts like Norman and Neil, it dehumanizes and mocks its tormentors, robbing them of the depth and complexity that would have resulted in a better film than this beautifully-wrought, entirely predictable package. (It's like a jack-in-the-box made by Faberge.) The only moment in which one of these "inside" characters is given any kind of depth (it's Mitch) is used as a sort of sitcom punchline that doesn't lend the moment gravity so much as it continues the road of taking sloppy aim at an easy target.

Night of the Living Dead (1990) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image C- Sound B Extras B
starring Tony Todd, Patricia Tallman, Tom Towles, McKee Anderson
screenplay by George A. Romero, based on the screenplay by John A. Russo and Romero
directed by Tom Savini

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. George Romero's Night of the Living Dead is a watershed: a quintessential drive-in/B-movie that demonstrated without equivocation how horror/exploitation pictures are often "indicator species" in the cultural swamp--the ones that most quickly, most effectively locate the toxins in the ecosystem. Appearing in 1968, Night of the Living Dead addressed the rise of televangelism in its legion of communion-taking, slow-walking white people; predicted the generation gap (alongside Rosemary's Baby) and a spate of evil-children flicks that appeared in the early-'70s; and spoke to the Civil Rights war in its blithe casting of black actor Duane Jones and not-so-blithe murder of his character by a posse of hillbilly vigilantes in the final frames. There's something super-charged in the image of Jones holing up in a farmhouse with whiter-than-white, meeker-than-meek Barbra (Judith O'Dea), something explosive in the social microcosm represented by survivors trying, unsuccessfully, to work together to affect their escape from what's really just a metaphorical threat. The movie resonated then; it resonates still.

Conquest (1983); Contraband (1980); Zombie (1979) - DVDs|Zombie (1979) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

CONQUEST
½*/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring Fabio Testi, Marcel Bozzuffi, Ivana Monti, Guido Alberti
screenplay by Ettore Sanzo and Gianni de Chiara
directed by Lucio Fulci

Luca il contrabbandiere
**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Fabio Testi, Marcel Bozzuffi, Ivana Monti, Guido Alberti
screenplay by Ettore Sanzo and Gianni de Chiara
directed by Lucio Fulci

by Walter Chaw There's something decidedly uncinematic about the films of Lucio Fulci (excepting Don't Torture a Duckling and Four of the Apocalypse, which actually sort of rock). If not for his fascination with gore effects and his propensity for casting irritating children in irritating children parts, it'd be hard to find anything to separate his work from the grindhouse ghetto of, say, Jess Franco. As it is, the stilted claims at auteurism (he's known as the master of eye violence, mainly for a few juicy bits from The Beyond and Zombie) do more, perhaps, to relegate his work to a sort of camp gulag: the Siberia of legitimate cinema, where adolescent tools congregate for midnight showings armed with irony and a crippling baggage of disdain and contempt. I liked "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and believed that I liked it because I was sophisticated; in time, you realize that you like it because you're an officious prick who sort of gets off on mocking movies. I think a lot of people would argue that this is the role of the film critic, but I'd offer that a critic--a good one--loves film so much that he or she is offended when a movie is terrible. There's no real joy in defiling altars, particularly when they're your own.

The Return of the Living Dead (1985) - DVD (2002) + Collector's Edition DVD|Blu-ray + DVD

***/****
'02 DVD - Image B+ Sound B Extras A
'07 DVD - Image B+ Sound B Extras A
BD - Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Mathews
written and directed by Dan O'Bannon

by Walter Chaw Sort of a cross between Dawn of the Dead and Valley Girl, Dan O'Bannon's hysterical The Return of the Living Dead most resembles in the final analysis O'Bannon's own cult favourite Dark Star, directed by John Carpenter. Both pictures exist in an insular environment, both skewer genre and societal mores, and both, oddly enough, have something of a political conscience. Positing that Night of the Living Dead was based on a true story and that the remnants of that zombie conflagration have been stored in barrels accidentally shipped to the Uneeda Medical Supply Company (where goofy stock manager Frank (a fabulous James Karen) carelessly starts the horror cycle), The Return of the Living Dead turns a satirical eye on Reagan's hawkish heart, the sprung logic of Italian zombie movies, and John Hughes's brat-pack films.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) [Special Edition] + Deathdream (1972) - DVDs + Uncle Sam (1997) - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury
screenplay by George Axelrod, based on the novel by Richard Condon
directed by John Frankenheimer

Dead of Night
***½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
starring John Marley, Lynn Carlin, Richard Backus, Henderson Forsythe
screenplay by Alan Ormsby
directed by Bob Clark

UNCLE SAM
**½/****
DVD - Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
BD - Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Isaac Hayes, Bo Hopkins, Timothy Bottoms, Robert Forster
screenplay by Larry Cohen
directed by William Lustig

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As the zeitgeist is one of those things we tend to discuss in the past tense, you have to wonder whether it's a vacuum or a barometer. In other words, the point at which culturemongers finally lunge at a craze is usually once it's begun shrieking its death rattle, and yet a post-mortem of said craze invariably divulges a complex tapestry of art and politics, the ascription of happenstance to which seems preposterous. Our own Walter Chaw brilliantly observes in recent omnibus reviews pairing Love Me If You Dare with Valentin and Dodgeball with Napoleon Dynamite that leitmotifs are emerging at the box office free of predetermination, and I myself got a faint chill when I became cognizant of having consecutively watched the upcoming DVDs of John Frankenheimer's 1962 The Manchurian Candidate, Bob Clark's 1972 Dead of Night (a.k.a. Deathdream), and William Lustig's 1997 Uncle Sam. The Manchurian Candidate is getting reissued because MGM wants to piggyback the P&A for this summer's star-studded remake, Dead of Night because it's a perennial cult fave, and Uncle Sam because Lustig owns the company; three separate objectives, then, for putting out three different pictures all concerning shell-shocked war veterans bringing the violence home with them. Considering the length of time it must have taken to prepare these beautifully mastered, supplement-rich discs, that they coincide with not only each other but also the cooling of patriotic fervour (coupled with the spontaneous theatrical release of Michael Moore's anti-Dubya Fahrenheit 9/11) is like getting the rare privilege to see the forest for the trees.

Pontypool (2009) - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly
screenplay by Tony Burgess, based on his novel Pontypool Changes Everything
directed by Bruce McDonald

by Jefferson Robbins Few things give me the willies like the sublimation of self. The idea that my essential me-ness could someday drain away and be lost--to injury, dementia, what have you--makes me shudder. At the extreme, there's the fear that some invading force, a me supplanted by a not-me, might subjugate my personality. Little wonder that Brian O'Blivion's monologue in Videodrome about communicating with his own brain cancer, or almost any mind-control scenario scripted for comics by Grant Morrison, can set me cringing.

The Last Man on Earth (1964) - DVD

***/**** Image B- Sound C Extras D
starring Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart
screenplay by Logan Swanson & William F. Leicster, based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
directed by Sidney Salkow

by Walter Chaw If the execution of The Last Man on Earth, Sidney Salkow's adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, is sometimes clunky, the ideas contained therein seem prescient at least, profound at best. Disowned by Matheson and oft-derided as slow-moving, it's actually an exceptional film in an exceptional year for film, a beautiful, occasionally stunning piece about loneliness and alienation. I wouldn't call it a metaphor, but as a bleak emotional landscape--Eliot's "The Wasteland" committed to genre schlock--it boasts of an intimidating gravity. Take the scene where titular plague survivor Dr. Morgan (Vincent Price) refuses to turn over his freshly-dead wife (Emma Danieli) to an army crematorium crew, endeavouring instead to bury her in the woods. His act of love is rewarded that night with her undead corpse paying him a visit. Yes, the pacing is off, leaving the shock of a shambling loved one to be milked properly in four years' time by George Romero and his Night of the Living Dead, yet the duration of the attack by itself underscores the horror and revulsion of the dearly-departed now up and walking. Veteran television director Salkow isn't very good, it's true, but DP Franco Delli Colli (Strip Nude For Your Killer), on one of his first films, provides beautiful, empty tableaux littered with car husks and burning pits fed with the corpses of the baddies Morgan stakes in the daytime.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
***/****
DVD - Image B Sound C+ Extras B
BD - Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Ray Lovelock, Christine Galbo, Arthur Kennedy
screenplay by Sandro Continenza & Marcello Coscia
directed by Jorge Grau

by Walter Chaw Without having to squint much, you could see the hero of Jorge Grau's The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, art-dealing Easy Rider hippie George (Ray Lovelock), trying to deliver the airplane propeller his spiritual brother, David Hemmings' mod-photog from Blowup, buys in tribute to form over function midway through Antonioni's counterculture classic. Instead, George is trying to deliver the sister of the fatal fertility juju from Arthur Penn's Night Moves through titular Manchester into the green countryside on the back of his too-cool motorcycle. He's thwarted initially by the bumper of maiden fair Edna (Cristina Galbo), then by the hungry undead stalking the countryside in search of meaty sociological metaphors, then by an ossified Scotland Yard dick (Arthur Kennedy). Luckily, there's plenty of allegorical beef for everyone, as Grau paints a vivid picture of Mod Madness in steady, deteriorating orbit around the entropy and hedonism of the time--sprinkling it liberally with a disdain for dictatorships Grau no doubt nursed whilst working under the heel of Francisco Franco's regime.

Night of the Creeps (1986) [Director's Cut] - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jason Lively, Steve Marshall, Jill Whitlow, Tom Atkins
written and directed by Fred Dekker

by Walter Chaw A childhood favourite, Fred Dekker's Night of the Creeps generally underscores the danger of revisiting childhood favourites with a jaundiced eye; this and his sophomore feature, The Monster Squad, show that Dekker was rejected from the USC and UCLA film schools for a reason. I realize it's all supposed to be a cozy, funny-scary homage to the terribleness of low-budget B-movies as a genre unto themselves, but the picture is terribly edited and disastrously paced--the very things that effectively kill both comedy and horror. Unconvinced? The first misstep might be its choice to leave a charming, 1950s-set black-and-white prologue in favour of a faux-Hughesian '80s fandango that, like most of the era's mainstream teen dramas not made by John Hughes, lacks an ear for how we actually talked, and insight into how we actually felt. In any case, it's hopelessly incongruous to go from Ozzie & Harriet to leg-warmers and Wall of Voodoo, resulting in something that isn't a spoof of bad filmmaking so much as an example of it. Night of the Creeps joins The Goonies for me as one of those cult classics I just can't wrap my head around. I remember sort of loving it when I was twelve, meaning only that twelve-year-olds are idiots.

The Val Lewton Horror Collection - DVD

CAT PEOPLE (1943)
****/**** Image B Sound C+
starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph
screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Jacques Tourneur

THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph, Ann Carter
screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Gunther V. Fritsch and Robert Wise

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)
****/**** Image C Sound B-
starring James Ellison, Frances Dee, Tom Conway
screenplay by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray
directed by Jacques Tourneur

THE LEOPARD MAN (1943)
***½/**** Image C- Sound B-
starring Dennis O'Keefe, Margo, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell
screenplay by Ardel Wray, based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich
directed by Jacques Tourneur

THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943)
****/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell, Kim Hunter
screenplay by Charles O'Neal and DeWitt Bodeen
directed by Mark Robson

THE GHOST SHIP (1943)
***½/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Richard Dix, Russell Wade, Edith Barrett, Ben Bard
screenplay by Donald Henderson Clarke
directed by Mark Robson

THE BODY SNATCHER (1945)
***½/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Daniell, Edith Atwater
screenplay by Phillip MacDonald and Carlos Keith
directed by Robert Wise

ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945)
*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer
screenplay by Ardel Wray & Josef Mischel
directed by Mark Robson

BEDLAM (1946)
*½/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Boris Karloff, Anna Lee, Billy House, Richard Fraser
screenplay by Carlos Keith and Mark Robson
directed by Mark Robson

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNINGS IN EFFECT. It's not too much to speak of Val Lewton as the American Jean Cocteau. An enigmatic figure with his hand, like Cocteau, in more than one media (a novelist, he often did uncredited work on the screenplays for his films), the movies produced under his RKO watch are a repository of dream sleep, enough so that an overview of his key pictures--something made possible by Warner's rapturous DVD collection of his horror fare--uncovers a treasure trove of indelible nightmare images. Where Cocteau affected a studiedly casual mien and came to film in his sixties, however, Lewton (who died at 47) seems the product of financial expediency and, perhaps more impressively, stamped the products of his hand despite roadblocks placed in his way. Yet the similarities are striking: Above and beyond the dreamscapes affected, there's a common fascination with masks and false identities; an obsession with budding sexuality turned subtly aberrant; and a cycle of seduction tied to corruption in the move from innocence to experience. I see in these recurrent themes a man fascinated by the blinds that men throw before them to deny the unknowable tides governing their emotions and actions. It's that illusion of civilization that informs Lewton's pictures; the horror of them is in the ripping away to expose the insect underneath.

Zombieland (2009)

½*/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
directed by Ruben Fleischer 

by Walter Chaw Bad by every measurable, objective standard, Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland is a shining, sterling example of what happens when a bunch of idiots get together with their asshole high-concept and proceed to make an abominable hash of it. It's a conversation halfwits have: what would happen if you married the teen romance with the zombie flick? The problem being that Fleischer and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick don't have much of a grasp on what it is about teen romances and zombie flicks that are interesting in the first place. It's the right choice, casting the poor man's Michael Cera, Jesse Eisenberg, in his second "-land" movie of the year (after the fantastic coming-of-age flick Adventureland); it's entirely the wrong choice to have Eisenberg provide film-long voiceover narration that takes the piss--without the benefit of wit or trenchant observation--out of zombie flicks before dropping him in the middle of that old familiar wistful love intrigue. The object of his desire is a fellow survivor of an apocalyptic zombie plague, Wichita (Emma Stone, deee-lish), who is traveling with little sis Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). Ohio (Eisenberg), meanwhile, has hooked up with Woody Harrelson's redneck-with-a-heart-of-gold Tallahassee--yes, if these characters are actually named after the places from which they hail, they have some 'splainin' to do. Our four ragamuffin protags proceed through the long middle of the movie with no zombies in sight, alone with reams of smug, moronic, self-satisfied dialogue that has as the basis of every punchline how much of a virgin pussy is Ohio, and how much of an inbred thug is Tallahassee.

Resident Evil: Degeneration (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
animated; screenplay by Shotaro Suga
directed by Makoto Kamiya

by Bryant Frazer One of the more obnoxious trends in current filmmaking and distribution is the move towards cheapjack fansploitation movies. Masquerading as original, feature-film content, these low-budget theatrical and home-video releases are little more than expansive knock-offs of an existing, lucrative property that function as extended promos for yet another upcoming instalment of said franchise. In other words, they're commercials, bought and paid for by the very fanbase to which they're marketed. Not so long ago, we saw the theatrical bow of a decidedly sub-par feature animation, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, whose only reason for existence was its function as a come-on for the already-in-production Cartoon Network series. Then there's Resident Evil: Degeneration (henceforth Degeneration), an extended videogame cut-scene created to flog the upcoming release of AAA console title "Resident Evil 5". Taking place in the Capcom videogame's universe and filling in the narrative gap between "Resident Evil"s 4 and 5, it has nothing to do with the popular live-action film series starring Milla Jovovich.

Day of the Dead (2008) + Lost Boys: The Tribe (2008) [Uncut Version] - DVDs

DAY OF THE DEAD
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Mena Suvari, Nick Cannon, Michael Welch, Ving Rhames
screenplay by Jeffrey Reddick
directed by Steve Miner

LOST BOYS: THE TRIBE
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Tad Hilgenbrinck, Angus Sutherland, Autumn Reeser, Corey Feldman
screenplay by Hans Rodionoff
directed by P.J. Pesce

by Walter Chaw As I'm an avowed fan of George Romero's severely underestimated Day of the Dead, imagine my unsurprised chagrin when über-hack Steve Miner's remake of Romero's third zombie outing falls far nearer in quality to Tom Savini's dishonourable remake of Night of the Living Dead than to Zach Snyder's better-than-the-original Dawn of the Dead. A mess from conception to execution, the picture's first misstep is to turn the splatter effects over to cheap-o CGI phantoms and allow the ridiculous cardboard stencils played by Mena Suvari and--horrors--Nick Cannon to run roughshod. The soul of Romero's flicks--of all good zombie flicks--lies in their social awareness and in the ultimate feeling that whatever chills and thrills enjoyed along the way, it was all a metaphor for something more interesting than an end-of-days high concept.

28 Weeks Later (2007) - DVD

****/**** Image N/A Sound A Extras B
starring Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Idris Elba
screenplay by Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, E.L. Lavigne, Jesús Olmo
directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Walter Chaw It's phenomenal. Where 28 Days Later... was saddled with ambition that exceeded its reach and, in Danny Boyle, a director who not only disdained the genre but has otherwise proven himself a grade-A tool as well, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's sequel 28 Weeks Later is brutally graceful in its vision of a nuclear family's dissolution as the metaphor for a broader, collective unrest. The triumph of the picture, though, is that it's as succinct and eloquent as a heart attack; as a parable of the Iraq War (popularly called "The War in Iraq," a subtle semantic distancing technique particularly trenchant to this discussion), it's all about aftermath and occupation. It's impossible to not compare it to the years and tens of thousands of fatalities since the declaration of "mission accomplished" when the picture begins with the reassurance that everything's peachy in dead-as-a-doornail England. Repatriation and reconstruction have begun six months after the outbreak of the first film's "rage virus," reuniting two kids, Tammy (future superstar Imogen Poots) and Andy (Harry Potter-named Mackintosh Muggleton), with their tightly-wound da', Don (Robert Carlyle). In an end-of-the-world opening in what only appears to be night (it's the first of several brilliant reversals), we see how a fissure develops in Don's marriage to wife Alice (Catherine McCormack), and of how that stress fracture becomes the foundation for the rest of the picture's relationships and politics.

TIFF '07: George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

***/****
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Bill Chambers The problem with 2005's Land of the Dead is that it could've been made by virtually anybody at virtually any time. While I imagine that George A. Romero, stalwart hippie that he is, has an anticapitalist streak a mile wide, that picture's "eat the rich" trajectory ultimately felt like a rather flimsy pretext for Romero to resume chronicling social change through the prism of his precious undead. Given that the "Dead" films have typically had long incubation periods, it's surprising to see Romero return to the well so soon, but then it was probably best to hit the reset button post-haste. George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead does just that in more ways than one: Here, Romero disentangles himself from the cul-de-sac of a zombie-human détente by starting from scratch in the present tense, making this the Casino Royale of the series.

The Devil's Rain (1975) - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, Tom Skerritt, William Shatner
screenplay by James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, Gerald Hopman
directed by Robert Fuest

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Devil's Rain is like a bad song you can't get out of your head. It isn't a successful film, or even a particularly good one, but it's made with sincerity, verve, and an understanding of the horror genre's potential for kinetic filmmaking and potent allegory. Moreover, it isn't a cheat--this isn't just another cheap cash-in on the "Satan" craze of the 1970s. The last thing director Robert Fuest and screenwriters James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, and Gerald Hopman are looking to do is take your money and run. And though this is largely a trend of the mid-to-late-'80s onward, they aren't looking to vindicate their reputations by condescending to the material, either. I actually feel a little protective of The Devil's Rain; its failure is one more of incompetence than of cynicism, and that's really rather reinvigorating in an age where self-consciousness reigns supreme in horror films both good (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) and bad (See No Evil).

Sundance '07: Fido

*/****
starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, Dylan Baker, Tim Blake Nelson
screenplay by Dennis Heaton, Robert Chomiak, Andrew Currie
directed by Andrew Currie

by Alex Jackson The first five or ten minutes of Fido are pretty terrific. Therein, an educational film depicts the "zombie wars," a time during the Forties in which space-dust turned our dead into zombies. The living won the ensuing conflict; and with the invention of the domestication collar by mega-corporation Zomcom, the zombies could be made to serve man. This movie-within-the-movie is in Academy ratio and grainy black-and-white, and when it finishes a grade-school teacher turns on the lights and the image expands to a 'scope tableau of a classroom glowing with bright candy colours. The film is a triumph of cinematography and set design--every detail feels just right. But then another ten minutes go by and we realize that all that is supporting the film is a thin one-joke premise. Fido seems to be a satire of 1950s suburbia, but what is it saying? Are the zombies supposed to be Communists (they are taken as the spoils of war and the film gets a lot of mileage out of Cold War paranoia)? Blacks in a system of pseudo-slavery in the segregation-era South (the zombies are all menial labourers)? Dogs (the titular Fido is a zombie our hero, young Timmy Robinson, befriends, setting the stage for a lot of cheap and easy "Lassie" jokes)? The three things appear to have something in common, but Fido doesn't quite connect the dots to offer one clear satirical perspective. The film also lacks much in the way of internal logic. For instance, the zombies are very bad at their jobs; they stumble and shuffle, are easily distracted, and have difficulty figuring out simple tasks. Why would the nation be so adamant about keeping them alive to work in jobs they can barely perform? And how does it enjoy the affluence of the 1950s if most blue-collar positions are filled by unpaid zombie labourers? A great deal of the humour comes from the juxtaposition of suburban bliss with a blithe acceptance of death: most of the kids have had to kill their zombefied parents and their recess is for target practice. The gag never moves towards making a statement about America's love affair with firearms and violence, though, instead staying on the superficial level of light absurdity. Fido isn't a bad film, exactly--it's just excruciatingly vapid.

Henry II: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1998) + Tales from the Crypt Presents Ritual (2002)

Henry Part 2
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound D Extras D
starring Neil Giuntoli, Rich Komenich, Kate Walsh, Carri Levinson
written and directed by Chuck Parello

RITUAL
*½/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Jennifer Grey, Craig Sheffer, Daniel Lapaine, Kristen Wilson
screenplay by Rob Cohen and Avi Nesher, based on the screenplay for I Walked with a Zombie by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray
directed by Avi Nesher

by Walter Chaw John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is that rare exploitation film that at once transcends and wallows in the ugly strictures of its sub-genre. A commentary on itself by dint of its honesty and intelligence, it lives and dies by the irony that despite the extremes to which it goes in its imagining and depiction of atrocity, it succeeds mainly through the quality of its reserve. It's maybe the first realistic-seeming film about a serial killer in that any prurient satisfaction one derives from the events depicted therein one suspects is entirely due to the angle of twist to one's own shadow. It's both a personality and an endurance test--and at the end of it we're left feeling as though we've witnessed some kind of emotional documentary about the psychic toll of murder on the societal organism. At its heart, it's an experiment in collectivism where the individual is tested against the insurgent: the body politic challenged to cohere against an anarchist. The power of Henry is that it engenders something like hope--an almost naïve belief that the humanity represented by the audience will identify with the dregs of society because said dregs, likable in no other way, are being preyed upon by something other than human. And humans, no matter how irredeemable, are still the "home team," as it were.

Clueless (1995) [Whatever Edition] + Dead & Breakfast (2005) - DVDs

CLUELESS
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-
starring Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd
written and directed by Amy Heckerling

DEAD & BREAKFAST
**/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Ever Carradine, Portia de Rossi, David Carradine, Bianca Lawson
written and directed by Matthew Leutwyler

by Walter Chaw Clueless is the pinnacle of a certain kind of smarmy teensploitation/Classics Illustrated vogue that saw Shakespeare (10 Things I Hate About You) and, in this case, Jane Austen (i.e., Emma) squeezed through the sausage mill of swatch-guards and Prada bags. It's the Shrek school of satire: mythological creatures made to act out master-plots in unfunny, unimaginative ways in stock mythological landscapes. In place of literal trolls, find euphemistic trolls in Alicia Silverstone and Brittany Murphy, posed opposite one another as after/before shots of one-trick lightweights. (So light is Silverstone, in fact, that her most recent attempted comeback was essentially as this character ten years later in NBC's prophetically-named "Miss Match".) The only interest in watching this relic in its new, ten-year anniversary "Whatever Edition" (also prophetically-named) is in trainspotting current sitcom stars in what, in retrospect, is a piece of work every bit as smug and self-loathing as Pretty Persuasion or Saved!.

Evil Dead II (1987) [The Book of the Dead Limited Edition] - DVD

a.k.a. Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn
****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley
screenplay by Sam Raimi & Scott Spiegel
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw More a remake with yuks than a sequel, Sam Raimi's astonishing Evil Dead II is a kitchen-sink splatter flick inspired by the drive-in spam-in-a-cabin tradition and leavened by an unhealthy fascination with The Three Stooges. Leading man and crash-test dummy Bruce Campbell (Bill Chambers referred to him once as "brick-jawed," and I can't improve on that, literally or figuratively) turns in a legend-making, career-defining performance, re-imagining his shemp Ash as a man of stage-melodrama, white-hat resolve who comes of age upon discovering his knack for slaying the undead. The great unspoken peculiarity of siege classics like George Romero's Night of the Living Dead is that there is somehow always discovered a hero who's biologically hardwired for the task of staying alive in the face of great demonic hordes. The crux is that it's unspoken no longer in Raimi's "Dead" trilogy (the third instalment the out-and-out comedy Army of Darkness), which, by the end, becomes a rags-to-rags fable about a retail clerk repelling an army of Harryhausen skeletons laying siege to a medieval castle. In its way, this is as canny a satire of the consumer/clerk relationship as anything in Dawn of the Dead.

George A. Romero's Land of the Dead (2005)

*/****
starring Simon Baker, Dennis Hopper, Asia Argento, Robert Joy
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw The weakest entry in George Romero's zombie quadrilogy by a long shot, the Toronto-lensed Land of the Dead loses the grit and familiarity of Romero's native Pittsburgh while managing to be every bit as awkward and allegorical as one of his trademark undead. The original concept for Day of the Dead was to have hundreds of trained zombies fighting one another in a post-apocalyptic landscape, a statement--and an eloquent one, as is, or was, Romero's practice--on war being an essential state of man that got scrapped due to budgetary concerns. With the success of films like Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later..., and the remake of Romero's own Dawn of the Dead, though, the primogenitor of the genre was given a respectable budget, the boon of CGI, and relatively free reign to continue a trio of films (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead) that besides spawning a legion of Italian knock-offs, were themselves gory, scary, and razor sharp.

Shaun of the Dead (2004) + A Dirty Shame (2004)|A Dirty Shame - DVD

SHAUN OF THE DEAD
***½/****
starring Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis
screenplay by Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright
directed by Edgar Wright

A DIRTY SHAME
**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+
starring Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville, Chris Isaak, Selma Blair
written and directed by John Waters

by Walter Chaw Shaun of the Dead isn't a spoof, it's a traditional zombie film introduced as a romantic-comedy and infected with a sly British-cum-"The Simpsons" intelligence and sensibility. Director Edgar Wright, who co-wrote the film with star Simon Pegg, made his mark with a smart, hilarious Channel 4 comedy series called "Spaced", a show that bears comparison to "The Family Guy" in its pop-culture genius and frequent fantasy non sequiturs. The genesis of Shaun of the Dead appears to be an episode of "Spaced" in which Pegg, having an unfortunate trip, hallucinates himself shooting hordes of zombies. That the picture is born from a joke on a television show offers endless possibilities for interpretation, best among them the tidy read that television is still the best means towards auto-zombification.

Species III (2004) [Unrated Edition] + Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) [Special Edition] - DVDs

SPECIES III
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras C
starring Robin Dunne, Robert Knepper, Amelia Cooke, J.P. Pitoc
screenplay by Ben Ripley
directed by Brad Turner

RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr, Thomas Kretschmann
screenplay by Paul W.S. Anderson
directed by Alexander Witt

by Walter Chaw There used to be only two avenues for women in the modern, post-Black Christmas horror genre: they could be the bimbo at the end of the machete, or the virgin wielding one at the end of the movie. After rape/revenge stuff like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45 (and, ultimately, Aliens), though, it became possible for women to be men from the first frame of their ordeals instead of incurring steady masculinization throughout the course of some torturous, highly structured pursuit. What made Roger Donaldson's Species (1995) so interesting is that it transformed the woman's biological urge into the sui generis of the premise: The bad guy in Species was a bad girl named Sil, and Sil wanted to mate really bad (and really badly). But just like her brothers in slasherdom (Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger), that will-to-fuck is largely unrealized--enough so that most academic reads of this horror subgenre involve the acting out of priapic males unable to reach climax through a variety of phallic substitutes. This is acknowledged in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 as Leatherface's titular dick runs out of gas between a girl's legs--and the would-be victim knowing the score strokes it anyway, soothing his bruised male ego.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) - (Off Color Films) DVD

****/**** Image F (colorized)/C- (b&w) Sound C Extras F
starring Judith O'Dea, Duane Jones, Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman
screenplay by John A. Russo
directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw George A. Romero's drive-in shocker is not only one of the most important independent and genre films of all-time, but also a dead brilliant civil rights metaphor featuring an unfortunately enduring rarity: a strong, virile, uncommented-upon African-American lead. The casting of Duane Jones came about, according to legend, mainly because Jones was the best actor any of the filmmakers knew. Say what you will of Night of the Living Dead, if you see no other ways that this seminal picture casts a long shadow, it casts a long one by just this merit-based example. The culmination of a lot of themes and trends in the American cinema at that time, the film features neighbour-suspicion, fear of children, fear of provincial National Guardsmen, and the creeping dread that the world may be ending because our government is run by assclowns and nepotists. It's a testament to the undertow of this text (or a testament to how short-sighted we are as a nation) that it still works in the same way over thirty-five years later. But Night of the Living Dead is more than just a devastating metaphor for the class struggle, for the rising tide of suspicion and corruption that tore a chasm through the middle of the United States: it's a tightly-edited, claustrophobically-framed horror film that retains, along with its relevance, its ability to startle and appall.

Director of the "Dead": FFC Interviews Zack Snyder

March 28, 2004|Supplanting that other zombie movie (the at least twice as gory The Passion of the Christ) at the top of the box-office charts last weekend, Dawn of the Dead compelled me to request a phone interview with its director, Zack Snyder. I should amend that I was driven not by pressing questions, but by that flicker of fanboyism I'd thought long-extinguished; I was stunned to have liked the film, just as I was stunned to have enjoyed Marcus Nispel's remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Nevertheless, it strikes me that in a day of high production values and sophisticated action editing, the personal horror films of the Seventies are being re-imagined as self-aware takes on the slick formula and stainless steel look of Aliens from a decade later. There's even a Carter Burke character in the new Dawn of the Dead.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

***/****
starring Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer
screenplay by James Gunn
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw Heretical to even suggest it, I'm sure, Zack Snyder's remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead surpasses the original in any number of ways. It gives the idea of consumerism run wild the short shrift that it deserves (and the cynicism that an intervening quarter-century demands), touching on the original's explanation of the zombies' affinity for the shopping mall and the human heroes' delight at their newfound material wealth before becoming a bracing action film that, like Marcus Nispel's reworking of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the source of which didn't need updating as much as Dawn arguably did), is more firmly entrenched in the James Cameron Aliens tradition than the Seventies institution of disconcerting personal horror film. There's nothing like fat on the bone of this picture (something the original can't claim), providing a canny demonstration of how comedy and satire can work without descending into slapstick (no pies in zombie faces this time around), and of how great performances and smart direction can craft a piece that honours its origins while significantly upping the effectiveness of its themes and premise.