Fuck hyperbole – George A. Romero's debut film Night of the Living Dead may be the purest horror film ever made. Only the memories of those who were first there during its unveiling can attest to just how revolutionary a creation it was, simultaneously redefining the rules and capabilities of the medium while also forging an entirely new subgenre that – if the recent success of a third Resident Evil film and the upcoming remake of Romero's own sequel Day of the Dead are any indication – remains alive and well today (no pun intended). Even during my first, now hallowed viewing experience, I knew what the zombies were and the general "rules" surrounding them; the reactivation of the body via some viral infection or radiative force, the eating of the flesh of the living, the fact that those bitten by a zombie would ultimately become one themselves, and the killing of the undead through the destruction of the reanimated brain. These qualities have long since been absorbed into horror culture at the same level as Frankenstein and Dracula, the fact of which attests to Night of the Living Dead's timeless potency as one of the genre's most formidable exercises. Although among my most re-watched films, it never fails to evoke the same chills time and time again. Romero would go on to more brilliant and complex works, but in its own direct way, Night of the Living Dead represents unsurpassable perfection.
Kneading its murky imagery into a tsunami of terror over the course of an agonizing hour and a half, Night of the Living Dead focuses primarily on suggestion over action, the tangible violence and onscreen conflicts complimented by a foundation of perpetual, mysterious dread, of normality imploding on itself. A day trip to visit the grave of their father turns into a living hell for Barbra (Judith O'Dea) and her brother Johnny (Russell Streiner), who happen into the middle of the outbreaking zombie plague just as it begins, with any explanation for the sudden terror besieging them amounting to nil. Johnny taunts Barbara over her childhood fear of the cemetery, only for the wandering man in their midst to actually have been already "coming to get her" in the first place. Night may seem overeager to send shivers down its viewers spines but the film works precisely as a validation of our deepest childhood fears, from what we're unable to see in the dark to the general strangeness abound in much of our everyday bric-a-brac. Romero's minimalist cinematography borrows a page from Polanski in its diagonal framing, often suggesting an ethereal landscape of blacks and grays melding into each other, not unlike some dense fabric from which the monsters of our dreams come for us at our most vulnerable. The lack of visual distinction may be the film's most powerful attribute; like the splotchy paint strokes of a surrealist work, our imaginations work overtime to "fill in" the gaps, without our even realizing it.
Romero denies having intended any racial commentary in his character's power struggle, but it's actually the final series of unfortunate events that solidify the work as one of 60's activism rooted in social unease. Ben (Duane Jones) and Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman) duke it out not as black man and white man but as entangled might and pride, and it is in its observation of people interacting under the strains of unimaginable duress that Night of the Living Dead becomes most universal. It's downright impossible to not recall 9/11 as our human protagonists, safe for the time being in their boarded-up country house, huddle around a television waiting with baited breath for the next nugget of information about the unfolding chaos around them. Along with my virginity, I'd give damn near anything to watch the film again for the first time, totally ignorant not only of its own narrative progression but of all things zombie. Horror films have become more technically gruesome and forcefully shocking in the past forty years, and indeed, some have surpassed the film in scares, if not in aesthetic potency. No amount of technical nuance, however, could ever hope to rival Night's sinister lurk through the subconscious. From the subtle voyeurism of its opening credits through its impossibly bleak conclusion, it subjects us to the kind of unrelenting nightmare we only wish we could wake up from.
Much has been written about George Romero's Dawn of the Dead – more, perhaps, than any other horror film ever made, given its much-deserved critical/cultural standing and expansive opportunities for academic investigations. Night of the Living Dead was a hit upon its initial release but its success came slowly through word of mouth on the nickelodeon circuit. Ten years later, Dawn of the Dead was ready to capitalize on its predecessor's already extensive influence, and thus a brilliant film was granted the luxury of finding its audience immediately. I myself have seen the film around a half dozen times or so over about ten years, first renting it sometime during my pre-adolescence, after having been blown away by the bleak, unflinching terror that was Night. My initial experience with Dawn remains something of a blur; gore and blood abounded, for sure, and given both my age and the still-potent trend setting nature of the film, my sense is that it was something of a sensory overload (and to think it was on a scratchy old pan-and-scan videotape).
Very clear, though, is my memory of the film's most infamous piece of dialogue; though I myself am not as huge of a supporter of the film as many are (though a near-masterpiece, it is easily my least favorite of Romero's original trilogy), I believe it contains the finest single moment in the director's zombie pantheon. Fleeing the metropolitan areas overrun by the exploding zombie populace, our protagonists land their helicopter at a shopping mall in search of food and supplies, only to find the place overrun with the mindlessly wandering undead. Wonders Francine (Gaylen Ross), "What are they doing? Why do they come here?" With a dry wit that even he may not be privy to, her boyfriend responds: "Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives." Even at the age of ten, I recognized the implied criticism of meaningless reliance on commodity to define oneself, even if the concept itself was temporarily beyond my articulation.
Watching the film once again, Romero's carefully calculated deconstructions on social woes of the time seem most brilliant in their simultaneously identifying the film as a distinctly American work rooted in the cultural anarchy of the 1970's as well as one packed with universal truths on the human condition, borders of time and place notwithstanding. The former packs the greatest punch in the third-act war between the main protagonists holed up in their shopping mall fortress and the military convoy that overruns them (bringing the zombie population flooding back in), stealthily evoking not simply the tensions between pacifist movements and more aggressive social orders of the time, but any scenario in which men turn on each other in the face of greater disorder (in other words, look at any historical timeline and pick your example of choice). The latter, then, is one implicit in the passive social hierarchies throughout Romero's screenplay, particularly amidst relationships and connective tissues so obvious they tend to remain hidden in plain view. In a prolonged television debate meant to inform viewers on how to handle the crisis at hand, a lone scientist stresses the importance of exterminating the dead "without emotion." How fitting, then, that the soldiers who underestimate the zombies – treating them more like disposable hunting targets worthy of ridicule than a lethal force to be reckoned with – are generally those who find themselves being torn limb from limb.
Romero's staging of these sequences is deliberately jarring in their sense of physical placement and spacial relationships, a quality that often renders his montages aggravating and underwhelming in the moment, only to improve immeasurably in a more contextualized retrospect. The opening sequence of a television station in disarray is a nearly unsurpassed example of cinematic crisis in the moment, while the subsequent raid on a zombie-infested apartment complex is by turns overwhelming in its chaos (two words: exploding head) and necessarily off-putting in its perpetual state of confusion. Romero's framing of social ills via his rotting, walking metaphors is ingenious but it's the more subtle, unspoken statements that register with the greatest force. Along with Peter's (Ken Foree) passive rip on America's mallrat culture, a personal favorite touch comes late in the film, after our characters have locked off their place of residence and cleared it of any danger, now lavishing themselves with unnecessary material goods galore while the world goes to shit beyond their decorated walls. Francine, decked out in makeup and channeling heroines of the silver screen with her sexy six-shooter, is briefly juxtaposed with an identically lavished mannequin (the moment may very well be her inner self-realization), plasticine and utterly devoid of anything human. This lies at the core of our character's moral reawakening and the reclamation of their identity apart from the material. In other words (to quote Marylin Manson), without the threat of death, there's no reason to live at all.
Like an ugly duckling, Day of the Dead took some time to get the love it deserved (and even then it has remained a black sheep amongst its brethren) – a scenario not uncommon to works of art that tell people what they simultaneously need to know and want not to hear. The film was – and to a large extent, remains – a victim of its own implicit place in film history; like the occasionally artful summer blockbuster, Romero’s third "Dead" entry is routinely examined and dismissed less for its own qualities than its “failure” to conform to the expectations unfairly assigned to it sight unseen, here as a zombie movie sequel indebted to two highly lauded works come before. Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead were both brilliant and easily among the greatest horror films ever made, but that Day of the Dead doesn’t follow the expected trilogy arc of capping off its saga with all-out climactic spectacle is hardly an inherent strike against it. Part of this degrading misconception lies in the fact that Romero’s original vision was cut short by budgetary restraints over issues with the increasingly more powerful MPAA rating system, the final result being far from the originally conceived "Raiders of the Lost Ark with zombies", and gore hounds subsequently decrying the relative lack of visceral bloodshed (regardless of the fact that, during its brief moments of splatter, Day features some of the sickest zombie action ever filmed). Similarly, Day is – in the popular sense of the term – a decidedly anti-audience pleaser. Set primarily underground during what appear to be the final death twitches of mankind, the film is quick to dispatch with any practical ideas about escape or happy endings. Welcome to the suck.
It is hardly to their discredit that both Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are rather accessible in their social diatribes layered upon physically tangible plots of humans survivors struggling to overcome. Whereas those films commented externally on the world around them, Day of the Dead is also a work of deeply internal ruminations, a film that assumes our flaws and, intrinsically, our imminent mortality (whether at the hands of flesh-eating ghouls or each other), and searches for the silver linings amidst what otherwise appears to be insurmountable hopelessness. The remaining survivors of Dawn of the Dead took off in a helicopter already low on fuel, unsure of what awaited them next. Day of the Dead begins with a small cadre of armed survivors looking for more of their kind, traveling up and down the Floridian coast in their own running-on-fumes whirlybird. The situation has only continued its downward slope; according to the estimates of Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty), the dead now outnumber the living approximately 400,000 to 1. Any chance of killing them off is long since fucked; surviving, then, requires a two-pronged approach of re-evaluating our own definition of socialized living and stopping the zombies’ instinctive drive to eat us, rather than stopping the zombies themselves. Unlike Night's evocations of racism or Dawn's attack on consumerism, Romero's zombies here aren't terrorists or AIDS or any single meaning to be interpreted. To this point, my colleague Eric Henderson summarizes Romero’s matter-of-fact approach so perfectly that I simply must recount it here (kudos to him, too, for his brilliant review of the film, which can be largely thanked for my current involvement with the online film community). “With Day of the Dead, Romero is through fucking around with allegory.”
The audience happens upon this quickly thinning group of survivors long after the metaphorical shit has hit the fan, in effect stripping Day of the Dead of the more typical human drama familiar to its genre, replacing it with its own choice existential probing. Not long ago, a group of scientists and military men were haphazardly thrown into a hole in the ground by the increasingly desperate government, in hopes of their finding a cure for the out-of-control zombie epidemic. Their shelter is an abandoned mineshaft locked away from the besieged surface – as one character tellingly puts it, a “fourteen mile tombstone with an epitaph no one will bother to read.” Littered with financial records and shambled vehicles, it is our decrepit society swallowed up by mother earth in an attempt to rid itself of our viral existence. God takes on a very real presence in the film – the zombies a modern flood and our embittered protagonists an unwilling Noah – and, like that biblical tale, Day of the Dead has its own dove and olive branch, though they admittedly take some rooting around to find. Like Kubrick, Romero has been called cynical, even misanthropic, but so too is his portrayal of man’s inhumanity to man unblemished realism lined with a sincere and genuinely optimistic hope for those who emerge from the ashes. In tone, Day of the Dead is his 2001: A Space Odyssey, we but children taking our first steps, stumbling along the way, growing stronger with that which does not kill us.
In genre, however, Romero’s masterpiece is of a radically different equation; rooted primarily in the dark side of 50’s sci-fi earnestness, Day of the Dead is complicated by its pot boiler psychological dwellings. As pointed out by many – usually in a negative light – its characters are largely of the with-us-or-against-us breed, good or bad, heroic or villainous. Here, mankind has been whittled down to the simplest of its elements, each clinging desperately to the order of the old world and the structure – however destructive – provided by a social chain of command. Romero’s anti-militaristic diatribe, though, is but a surface decoration to the film's approximation of 80’s anxieties, and it is no coincidence that the film’s tyrannical soldiers and commanding officers are all of the strictly Caucasian and heteronormative persuasion. As the zombies outnumber the humans, so too does the status quo crush down upon the female, the black, the Spanish, the eccentric, the queer. 12 Angry Men dealt similarly in characters-as-representations but its straight-faced drama apparently made such walking metaphors legitimate in the eyes of the critical community. Forget them; Day of the Dead litters its understandably bickering personas and heady physical spaces with nuances and suggested depths galore, waxed gloriously by John Harrison’s criminally undervalued, sublime musical accompaniments. The first two acts of the film play out as a series of pushes and pulls between conflicting human interests, not unlike religious groups squabbling over he said/she said bullshit while the bigger picture hovers obviously and ominously over their heads. The final bloodbath, then, is not unlike the final judgment day followed by paradise – or a lack thereof.
The film’s many unspoken joys, however, come from the path to this suggested destination. The commanding Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato) has gone apeshit at the apparent lack of progress made by the scientists under his care, their unstable working environment and almost total lack of resources notwithstanding. The most promising work comes from the research of the aforementioned Dr. Logan (amusingly called Frankenstein by the rest of the characters), although the soldiers – dick-obsessed and thuddingly literal-minded – are unable to see it. Of his many zombie specimens (rounded up and leashed by the soldiers for his experiments), it is the endearing Bub (Sherman Howard) who holds what may be the key for mankind’s survival. If Dawn of the Dead was Romero’s zombies-as-people shtick at its most nihilistic, then Bub is that film’s spiritual antithesis, an essentially reborn human literally learning to walk and talk again for the first time. Interaction with everyday items such as tape recorders and telephones reveals lingering memories and even – after a tense encounter with the asinine Rhodes – a retained capacity for moral judgment (here, even a zombie knows an asshole when it sees one). Indeed, the film’s characters are predictable in the sense of who will live and who will die, but naysayers of this point often fail to see how these respective paths mirror their individual commitment to or abandonment of a crumbling social order.
Like Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead begins with a character surfacing from the depths of a nightmare, here the leading Sarah (Lori Cardille), whose status as the lone female amongst so many hormone-raging, semen-backed-up males making her an easy emotional point of access for the audience (small critical tangent: could not Day of the Dead – with some minor technical tweaking – easily be the “mineshaft gap” sequel to Dr. Strangelove?). Repeatedly waking up from one surreal nightmare into another, Sarah’s prolonged escape mirrors our own collective social mires, our protagonists ultimately ascending from the hellfire into a heavenly light that purifies them of their penchant for self-destruction. Bub, meanwhile, establishes the first threads of civilized behavior by overcoming of his instinctive barbarity, while the nearsighted Rhodes – in one of the pinnacle villianairy dispatches in all of cinema – runs his empty-headed cockery into the deadest of dead ends. Day of the Dead attacks this central theme of human behavior ruthlessly, almost silently, turning it over time and again like a Rubik’s cube. This deconstruction is so encompassing that the climactic explosion of zombie mayhem – revealing and awesome though it is – is practically an afterthought.
A first time viewer might be forgiven for thinking Evil Dead II a work of impossible expectations. About twenty minutes in, the film has achieved so fierce a stylistic velocity that it seems about to drop over dead, as if it had overdosed on caffeine and gone into overdrive during its highly energized death rattle; its brilliance, then, comes in the form of its being able to sustain such delirious energy for an additional hour after this point of apparent exhaustion. The Evil Dead remains the stronger film if only for its relatively straightforward take on the same scenario, but this sequel/remake is something of a masterpiece unto itself; with a substantially larger budget at his disposal, director Sam Raimi essentially remade the film that jumpstarted his career, largely cutting down on the horror quotient and instead recasting the tale as one of frightful slapstick. Laughs notwithstanding, however, the film is just as unforgiving as its darker predecessor; viewers with heart conditions may want to keep their thumb near the pause button, lest their own health be put at unnecessary risk.
At the films outset, the slate has been wiped clean – in essence, the original Evil Dead never happened as far as this cinematic reality is concerned. Ash (Bruce Campbell) once again finds himself besieged by supernatural forces during his intended getaway time in a secluded mountain cabin, with demonic spirits wrecking his escape route and quickly breaking down the doors to his ramshackle shelter. No sooner than his girlfriend has been zombified than additional soon-to-be victims show up at his pathetic fortress: two archaeologists researching the malevolent Book of the Dead that resurrected the evil spirits in the first place, and two naïve locals hired to lead them to the cabin. In comparison to the minimalist plot of the original, these elements function as little more than decorations to the narrative, although they afford the necessary outlets for the indulgences of style that make up Evil Dead II’s haywire genius. The film isn’t so much postmodern as it is anarchy captured in a bottle, with every batshit crazy sight gag serving to further deconstruct its chosen genre trappings.
Such Tex Avery-inspired whimsy takes on many forms in Evil Dead II’s seemingly endless visual barrage, although none may be more delirious than a physically collapsing Ash forced to reckon with his own possessed hand, both as a still-attached extremity and, later – thanks to his ever trusty chainsaw – as a detached limb with a life of its own. Evil Dead II’s tendency towards self-references might have been knock worthy were the film not so regularly on the money; truly, Ash may be the grooviest of modern horror heroes, particularly with his makeshift chainsaw-arm and boom stick in hand. Such everything-and-the-kitchen-sink aesthetics, however, don’t prevent the film from maintaining the modest B movie craftsmanship of its predecessor, as Evil Dead II isn’t afraid to leave things a little rough around the edges. Such imperfections – like the roughly hewn projection effects of the final act, as well as some sketchy stop motion zombie animation – instill the film with creative, soulful fingerprints, while the sheer volume of highly noticeable continuity errors, whether intended or not, become a running gag all to themselves. Ultimately, the film is so impressive that it’s structural indebtedness to the enjoyable but inferior sequel Army of Darkness comes as something of a disappointment, if only because the open-ended conclusion is not unlike the tiniest leak in a wonderfully overstuffed bag of goodies.
(AKA The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, Don't Open the Window.)
Although the social relevance of Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is likely to have had greater impact (and well-earned shock value) during its initial release, its intelligence in approximating the cultural conflicts of the day has since earned it the quality of timeless relevance, even if the film itself is relatively unknown compared to many of its 70's horror brethren. Two young people en route from London to the countryside are united in their heretofore separate journeys after a chance (albeit slight) collision disables one of their vehicles; suffice to say, their subsequent attempts to find their way about put them in precisely the wrong place at the wrong time. A pit stop to ask for directions sees the initial implementation of a new piece of machinery on a nearby farm; the device, channeling ultrasonic radiation capable of covering a radius of several miles, neutralizes the insect and parasite population by irritating the critters' nervous systems to the point where they kill each other off. Unbeknown to all (and strictly according to this film's brand of science), the nervous systems of recently deceased humans share similar qualities with such lower life forms, here reanimated and immediately turned into murderous beasts with a cannibalistic hunger for their living counterparts.
As dead bodies begin piling up about the humble countryside, the local law enforcement is quick to blame the two youngsters, who always happen to be present at each new crime scene and who - unfortunately for them (in a deeply ironic manner of speaking) - always manage to escape unharmed and without either witnesses or evidence to back up their innocence. Beneath the tangible zombie carnage unfolding on the screen, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is a potent exercise in radical/conservative tensions; the police chief, wary of the anti-establishment youth suddenly in his midst, is quick to blame them for the Manson-esque murders soon as look at them, knocking them for their "long hair and faggoty clothes." Our passively hippie protagonists, then, wage a layered battle: themselves versus the walking dead who want to tear out their innards and eat their faces, their progressive values versus the stubborn traditions of the authorities, and their naturalism versus the destruction wrought by modern technology. No moment of this multifaceted conflict is more potent than when a zombie attempts to break down a door safeguarding our protagonists, wielding a giant cross as a battering ram. Accused of Satanism, these youth make no proclamation to religion, the film's siding with them suggesting a skepticism towards any higher power amidst such unneeded hell on earth.
The method by which Let Sleeping Corpses Lie fuels its supernatural narrative remains a bit of a stretch but the film justifies itself by remaining unwaveringly true to its chosen brand of logic; in one particularly creepy scene, we learn that the nervous systems of infants are susceptible to the infecting radiation as well (it's a hospital nurse who learns this fact the hard way). Similarly are the characters occasionally thick-headed to the point of irritation (a not uncommon trait to a wide portion of the genre), but so too are the archetypes they deliberately embody. Even if judged on style alone, the film would be a triumph; though not much different from your typical lurching creeps, these zombies wheeze and moan like no other, a simple audio gimmick that is blatantly manipulative but absolutely creepy, not the least for its relative subtlety. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie artfully builds its atmosphere of spiritual (and social) unrest with its gliding cinematography, and the thrills pile up faster than any of its potential flaws or abandonments of logic. Though no Halloween or Carrie, this little gem is not unlike an undiscovered wine, long ripening and ready to be savored.
Despite the strongly emphasized exoticness its Haitian scenery, The Serpent and the Rainbow may be Wes Craven's most pedestrian film. This says a lot about a director who has defined his career largely through the presentation of everyday scenery perverted by the unexpected and the supernatural, from Freddy Kreuger's creepy distortion of his surroundings to the tight, uncanny claustrophobia of the seemingly innocuous Red Eye. This 1988 deviation deals with horror of a more singularly supernatural kind: how many of its bizarre events are tangible, as opposed to imagined terrors duking it out with a hypnotized reality? Such material would seem to befit Craven's surrealist sensibilities but the film never rises above a merely quotidian perspective; it stands more than a leg up from the condescending, desaturated color palates and cultural reduction of globe-hopping junk like The Last King of Scotland but its bourgeois form wants for mystery or intrigue. In the original Nightmare on Elm Street, we saw Freddy's wake of destruction, but it was his often unseen, wholly felt presence that worked the film's wonders. The Serpent and the Rainbow negates such potential through its disinterested aesthetic, and generally forgets the old adage that less can be more.
In traditional folklore, the earth was represented by a serpent and the heavens a rainbow, with all creatures dying somewhere between the two. Man's soul, however, allows him greater suffering than that which exists in the physical world, and it is this crux upon which the film builds itself and quickly falls stagnant. Bill Pullman is Dennis Alan, an American medical researcher sent to Haiti to investigate the apparent reanimation of the dead that has been documented by the locals; one man, known to have died and been buried over a decade prior, had just recently been photographed alive as could be. Dennis' investigations find him quickly involved in both the local radical movement against the oppressive government as well as voodoo practices that blur the line between reality and imagination - or, quite possibly, the physical world and that of the afterlife. Only sporadically does Craven effectively showcase these unearthly elements, and often time incidentally at that (such as the visual blackout when Dennis finds himself buried alive); most of the time, the film suggests and overly decorated haunted house, its art direction excessive to the point of implausibility, its literal evocation of the supernatural disappointingly leaden and unimaginative. Many of these flaws are relative but they nonetheless thirst for personality. From Pullman's clumsy narration to the complete lack of context for the narrative's central political conflict, the film amounts to little more than a lethargic tour guide.
Sam Raimi's grueling debut feature toys with the viewer not unlike its own doomed characters, simultaneously playful and merciless. Although the initially obvious, almost over-the-top channeling of genre conventions (the creaking porch swing, ominous thunder and lightning to matching visual cues, the full moon blotted out of the sky by encroaching clouds) suggests little more than a jokey frolic through haunted house territory to come, it is this sly take on the material that allows the film to slowly turn into a nightmarish Jackson Pollock composition come alive before the audience even knows what hit them. Constructed on a minimal budget over the course of several years, Raimi's film is fiendish in its alternation between the perspective of predator and prey; even when the audience assumes the viewpoint of the film's roaring, malevolent spirits, the primal immediacy of these handheld shots totally disarms any notions of physical space or safety. Eli Roth might get his rocks off from literally torturing the audience but his chickenshit exploitation schlock knows not of such savagery.
Such off-the-cuff filmmaking befits material that has all but become horror legend over the past quarter century, itself indebted to countless tales come before it from all mediums of the genre. A weekend getaway with several college buddies ultimately sees Ash (Bruce Campbell) fighting for his life when unseen forces in the woods become alive and attack their secluded cabin; Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) senses something wrong after they discover the bizarre Book of the Dead in the cabin basement but her fellows scoff at any perceived notion of danger. It isn't long, then, before all hell is raining down on the cabin, with roving spirits infecting its occupants, turning them into zombie-like menaces bent on destruction. Raimi's full-frame compositions make the most of his probing wide-angle shots, with everything from the eerie excesses of his Guignol indulgences to Campbell's inimitable face mugging the camera accruing an extravagantly nightmarish quality that never wants for a few more dozen gallons of blood. The film seems lightweight but its thrills quickly become a pervasive force to be reckoned with; cheesy effects often appear ready to burst at the seams but Raimi's eye for lighting and audio/visual augmentation make for some of the most grotesque, prolonged sequences of unadulterated terror every shown in a theater, from one particularly demonic death rattle to Cheryl's literal rape by the thorny vegetation outside of the besieged cabin. Nearly unparalleled, The Evil Dead's no-holds-barred resourcefulness places it among the masterpieces of the genre.
Occupying that unfortunate space between the not-quite-painful atrocity and the so-bad-its-good spectacle of disaster, The Dead Pit instead stuns with its ineptitude around every corner without ever giving in to the trashy joys potentially affording by its bottom-of-the-barrel decor. To hell with being nice: this film is junk of the barely watchable kind, and recommended only to viewers with blood alcohol concentrations well above the legal driving limit. The right mindset can make even the most rancid movie enjoyable in a backwards, jeering manner, but The Dead Pit is virtually unforgivable in its glaring menace. Michael Bay may be reprehensible but at least his films are watchable in the technical sense of the word; the makers of The Dead Pit shouldn't be blamed for the obviously minimal budget at hand, but their complete ignorance to any style outside of the film's synthetic haunted house masturbation suggests deliberate intent to harm the audience. Incidentally enough, the film takes place in a mental hospital, and after experiencing something that makes The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies look good by comparison, such a locale may be just the respite one needs.
Ramshackle as it is from one moment to the next, the film actually has a somewhat discernible plot amidst its borderline nauseating imagery (seriously, try to not become disoriented by the roving hallway shots). Dr. Ramzi (Danny Gochnauer) is a brilliant surgeon whose genius has slowly given over to inhumanity and madness, and has taken to torturing and killing patients in his attempts to conquer death. To save both his life and his career, Dr. Swan (Jeremy Slate) kills Ramzi and leaves him to his hidden basement tomb ("Cask of Amontillado" style), where the reclusive doctor is quickly forgotten. Twenty years later, Swan encounters an amnesiac patient (Cheryl Lawson) spouting delusions about an evil surgeon and "the people in the basement," a prophecy that quickly comes to pass. Thanks to its cheapo videowork and synthetic score redundant of every other B horror flick of the 80's, The Dead Pit achieves a kind of hallucinatory madness in its drawn-out climax; the zombie makeup looks like shit but the grain is so artlessly heft that it's hard to tell the difference. Too bad, then, that the total sense of visual, narrative, and logical disorder prevents any of these bare-bones aesthetics from working in a way not akin to razor blades followed by lemon juice. The uniformly thankless and irony-free performances even strip the moments of gratuitous nudity of their campy would-be joys, while the cameraman seems to have perfected his ability to shoot every scene from the worst possible angle. One character, in a moment of self-sacrifice, exits not unlike James Cagney in White Heat; with about ten minutes to go before the end credits, he took the easy way out.
Note: Thanks go to my love Shannon for providing me with this hard-to-find gem of an inclusion. Anyone who has thus far enjoyed my output should personally thank her for her profound tolerance/support of my cinephilia. I adore you.
Shaun enjoys a simple kind of life: a shift on the job, a round of video games with his roommates, a brew at the local pub. It takes the near-destruction of society by the arisen legions of the undead (not to mention his long-delayed dumping by an embittered girlfriend) to wake this chap up to his ingrained apathy and dissatisfaction in life. Shaun of the Dead takes the basic premise of any number of self-betterment tales and sets it amidst one of the horror genre's most tried-and-true formulas, the result being a film that is at once plainly obvious and remarkably sharp-witted, the latter mostly thanks to the film's utter honesty in its exhibition of the former. Initially, this would seem to upset the very root of its satire, immediately connecting the metaphorical dots in presenting its alive-and-well human protagonists as nearly indistinguishable from the rotting zombies threatening to eat their faces. The alternating laughs and revelations, then, stem not from these correlations (which have grown increasingly more difficult to present without lending to tedium, Romero's brilliance be damned), but from their given acceptance and the subsequent attempts to overcome their damning accuracy. In this most apocalyptic of genres, Shaun of the Dead is not unlike a ray of unexpected sunshine - even if it has a little red on it.
Though leagues apart in their comedic tendencies, the film shares a spiritual kinship with 1999's Office Space, with both Ron Livingston's Peter Gibbons and Simon Pegg's Shaun striving to overcome their reliance on The Man amidst socially-reinforced oppression. Shaun, a man so passive and unaware that he can hardly walk down the block to the convenience store without tripping over himself, is himself stuck in a rut of personal insecurity and employment-based woes; while Ron found his personal freedom through an admonishment of superficial workplace responsibilities, Shaun discovers himself via whacking zombies in the head with a cricket bat. By means of modestly creative framing patterns and editing schemes, Shaun of the Dead milks its chosen dissatisfied-people-as-zombies shtick for all its worth (all the while throwing in a few choice homages to boot, this viewer's personal favorite involving the plan to rescue Simon's mother, the deliberately named Barbara), and though not all of its gags work as intended - a bit where four protagonists impersonate the living dead so as to pass through a crowd of zombies, unnoticed, fails purely for its total abandonment of reason - there's seemingly no limit to Simon Pegg's hilariously inane facial expressions. The genuinely undead help to pry this zombified laborer from the dead-end lifestyle he's come to accept for himself, and Shaun of the Dead, though not without its rough patches, evokes this skewering satire with a rambunctious attitude worthy of the most pointed gadflies.
Gleefully tossing aside any perceived notions of good taste, Re-Animator established its maker as a premiere genre master in the same vein that Blood Simple and The Terminator announced the Coen Brothers and James Cameron to the world. Stuart Gordon's foray into the outer limits of life, death, and heads carried about by their decapitated former bodies is a nearly operatic exercise in splatter, hilarious and horrific all at once and utterly without apology. Though its button-pushing manipulations of sex and violence pale in the wake of the past 22 years worth of cinema, its raunchy sincerity remains a force to be reckoned with; although very much a black comedy, Re-Animator doubles as a touching love story delivered with equal levels of seriousness, the two qualities constantly pushing at one another with an electric fusion of energy. As if afraid he'd never be able to make another film, Gordon pulled out all the stops, the result being a dauntless work achieved only through the naivety of it being a practically impossible film to make in the first place. Too add audacity to boot, Richard Band's "original" score echoes Bernard Herrmann's arrangements for Psycho around every corner, appropriately complimenting both the learned compositions at hand as well as the many cinematic texts that Re-Animator throws into the viewers face at lightning speed.
The emboldened young medical student Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) arrives at Miskatonic University (a fictional school common in horror tales, first created by H.P. Lovecraft in his here-adapted tale "Herbert West-Reanimator") after a less than desirable ending to his studies in Switzerland. Though the epitome of professionalism, his pomposity is quickly at odds with the faculty of his new school, whose work he considers close-minded and outdated; his mission, slowly revealed, is to conquer "brain death" by providing life to deceased bodies well after the heretofore accepted point of no return. After a brouhaha with a resuscitated body sees the Dean of Admissions (Robert Sampson) killed (only to be reanimated as a raving lunatic), Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale) begins to interfere in West's experiments, in hopes to acquiring his secrets and claiming them for himself. Meanwhile, Megan (Barbara Crampton) - daughter of the Dean and fiance-in-secret to West's roommate Dan (Bruce Abbott) - suspects foul play, and works with Dan to uncover Dr. Hill's motives.
Though Herbert West remains the most iconic element of Re-Animator's postmodern indulgences - with neon green syringe in hand, no less - it is actually the oppressed relationship between Megan and Dan that provides the film with its much-needed emotional core, one that is ransacked by chance, evil schemes and misguided bouts of love. Gordon preludes their plights with touching moments of young love, although there is nary a doubt as to their imminent inclusion in the events ahead. Re-Animator's romanticism is genuine but understandably prone to complications of the supernatural kind; when Dr. Hill orders a walking cadaver to kidnap Megan - over whom he has held an unhealthy obsession for some time - the subsequent torture she finds herself subjected to is likely to derange any viewers sense of their physical self, gender notwithstanding. West's actions may borderline on the insane but his sense of right and wrong is ultimately in the right place, his ultimate fate continuing in the lexicon of mad scientists gone awry. Re-Animator's set-up is so delicious it threatens to diminish its payoff simply by comparison, with the ultimate explosion of zombie mayhem defined more by the energy of its performers than its sense of spectacle. In its best moments, the film itself practically leaps off the screen.
As one of the last zombie productions before George Romero revolutionized the genre with Night of the Living Dead, and as the only work of the genre ever made by the infamous Hammer production company, The Plague of the Zombies is a prime example of routinized filmmaking done right. Sir James Forbes (André Morell) - a renowned professor and medical practitioner - receives word from his long-time colleague Dr. Peter Thompson (Brook Williams) concerning the strange deaths taking place in his remote village, and subsequently travels there with his daughter Sylvia (Diane Clare) to investigate the inexplicable happenings. Townsfolk have been dying left and right, apparently from total lack of physical cause; upon further investigation, the coffins of the departed are discovered to be empty one and all, and no sooner than the latest victim of this unseen plague is laid to rest is his decaying body reported walking about. The film establishes this scenario with grim efficiency, its dense scenery populated by creepy background/foreground contrasts and a perpetual sense of unease seemingly ingrained into the landscapes. These developments are predictable in the technical sense of the word but the film approaches them with an earnestness that offsets their familiarity; Plague of the Zombies is no tour-de-force, but its investment in its material is commendable.
Along with its simple yet propulsive plot, the film unfolds as a series of intriguing contrasts: between life and death, male and female, tradition and modernity, science and voodoo. As is largely typical of the genre, it is ultimately revealed that the undead are used for slave labor, here put to work in local tin mines and beaten as they carry out their grim duties beneath the earth. Their master - having mastered voodoo practices during his time abroad in the Caribbean - uses his methods both to raise the dead and torture the living. (It amuses me to no end how far the antagonists of horror films are willing to go to acquire cheap labor; are reasonable working hours and medical plans that much of a burden to bear?) The film's visual palate remains both formal and earthy, lending an unsettling tone of moral decay bound to infect anyone unwary enough of the danger that abounds, while one choice sequence employs a disjointed style that emphasizes the otherworldliness of its life-after-death spiritual conflict. The whiff of mystery that hangs over the proceedings is not unlike the lid on a boiling pot, with the narrative uncoiling at a teasing, deliberate pace. Plague of the Zombies hardly touches upon virgin territory but its meaty indulgences are full of life and excitement, inviting the audience to share in the character's sense of investigation and discovery. Among the ranks of whodunit B horror films, this one stands out.
When it comes to the scope of cinema, there's all sorts of distinctions to be made. In terms of quality, there's bad, good, good bad, and bad good (just for starters), and truly committed cinephiles quickly come to know the superior joys of a good kung fu film as opposed to the posturing of wannabe Oscar dreck. Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a good bad bad movie, or something like that. This is a series that thrives - or fails to - entirely on craft and the efficiency thereof, its ineptitude and contrivances often quite necessary to its indulgences into visceral goodies, while its general lack of formal quality is worn on its sleeves like a badge of honor. The same goes for the 2002 original, a film enjoyed by several of my colleagues though not by myself, its sporadic (often unintentional) amusements notwithstanding. The point of distinction here, then, is that Resident Evil: Apocalypse is utterly shameless whereas its predecessor tried to play things with a straight face; ultimately, it is not unlike cinema as concession stand junk food manifest. You can practically see the popcorn "butter" running off the screen.
The Umbrella Corp. remains up to no good. After the underground viral breakout in the first film, the intended quarantine doesn't hold (surprise), with the infected zombies escaping to the surface where the innocent civilians of Raccoon City unknowingly await. Alice (Milla Jovovich) returns, more deadly and nimble than ever, her genetic structure having been tampered with by the Corp. after her being captured at the end of the first film. Soon, the entire city is locked down and set for quarantine, and it's up to her and a small band of survivors to locate the daughter of an already evacuated scientist, who will in return provide them all with transportation out of the city. The settings for these proceedings suggest an amped-up version of Escape from New York's titular locale, with the cityscape nearly swallowed by a sense of polished, ominous dread and the nighttime sky so black that daylight may as well never come. There's practically no art to these images (note the hilariously choppy slow-motion employed throughout), but their raw effectiveness as pure visceral gratification more than makes up for the film's general reliance on idiocy to further its plot.
In his 2004 review, Roger Ebert (who thought the movie "an utterly meaningless waste of time", which, in a way, is correct) cautioned parents, "If you encounter teenagers who say they liked this movie, do not let them date your children." As a teenager in college, I disliked the film, but now in my early adulthood I feel more privy to its joys, which simply require that one accept them on their own mindless terms. Alice, though totally lacking in character or nuance, is the original Terminatrix (although I would prefer Khristanna Loken any day of the week), only partially human but wholly ass-kicking superwoman. Resident Evil: Apocalypse's inanities are largely of the relative kind, so which ones are forgivable will depend on the particulars of each viewer (for my money's worth, yay to protagonists stupid enough to walk through a graveyard during a zombie outbreak, nay to those too stupid to shoot an oncoming mutant in its fully-exposed head). Some of the films clichés are too straight edged - like the overtly British daughter whose personality provided the model for the deadly computer system in the first film - and thus offset the balance between braindead fun and cool extravaganza. More often than not, though, Resident Evil: Apocalypse sets a high-water mark for trashy comic book adaptations. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
This is the second post in a three-part contribution to Matt Zoller Seitz's Close-Up blog-a-thon, running October 12-21 at The House Next Door.
I'll speak only briefly about this chosen sequence, if only because I fear that my words will fail to do it justice. In short, this culmination of Samantha Morton's unspeakably brave performance in the criminally underrated Code 46 is among the most stunning things I've yet experienced in my still-young cinephilia. Sorry, Mrs. Swank - time to hand back that Oscar.
It would seem to be a natural human desire to revisit a loved one after their having departed this world. In They Came Back (Les Revenants), virtually everyone in the world is suddenly confronted with this notion as a full-blown reality when 70 million of the recent dead (more or less everyone to die in the past ten years) rise from their graves, a little slower and a little colder (their body temperature being five degrees lower than normal) but otherwise in full health. The word “zombie” is never mentioned but all the same the living begin to suspect the intentions of the “returnees”; are they truly themselves, walking and talking like they used to, or are the simply mimicking the behaviors of their former lives, perhaps as a mask to some darker conceit? It’s a mark to writer/director Robin Campillo’s singularity that They Came Back only incidentally recalls the works of Romero (the shots of the slowly returning dead marching through the city streets eerily recalls the opening of Day of the Dead), for his film is one of primarily intangible horrors. The living dead may not be an immediate threat, but outside of their tucked away graves they remain a constant reminder of our imminent mortality.
In different hands the film could have easily been a satire, but Campillo knowingly plumes the humorous aspects of this scenario without losing sight of these ethereal ruminations. Officials needn’t worry about body counts when the dead return, just unemployment, for the returnees wish to go back to their former lives almost as if they’d never left them. Research is inconclusive but the dead seem connected by an invisible communication system, while any attempt to converse with them regarding their death or the time since then proves futile – they seem only able to function through the details of their past, their bodies continuing to live but their spirits locked away in some irretrievable time capsule. The living, all the while, strive to cope with this profound event, with husbands returning to their wives and children returning to their parents, the grieving process begun anew in an unnatural infusion of emotions across the spectrum. Campillo regards the isolation of these souls with breathtaking long shots, while the use of infrared cameras to differentiate between the living and the returnees allows for some otherworldly evocations of this newfound example of “us” and “them”. His camera seems to deliberately circle around death, examining it from every angle. They Came Back’s narrative doesn’t deviate far from the initial establishment of these developments but its exploration speaks volumes as to the existential necessity of our ability to differentiate between life and death (with apologies to Terry Shiavo). Here, the living may ultimately be the true zombies, while the dead seem to have been better off wherever it was they came back from.
Kneading its murky imagery into a tsunami of terror over the course of an agonizing hour and a half, Night of the Living Dead focuses primarily on suggestion over action, the tangible violence and onscreen conflicts complimented by a foundation of perpetual, mysterious dread, of normality imploding on itself. A day trip to visit the grave of their father turns into a living hell for Barbra (Judith O'Dea) and her brother Johnny (Russell Streiner), who happen into the middle of the outbreaking zombie plague just as it begins, with any explanation for the sudden terror besieging them amounting to nil. Johnny taunts Barbara over her childhood fear of the cemetery, only for the wandering man in their midst to actually have been already "coming to get her" in the first place. Night may seem overeager to send shivers down its viewers spines but the film works precisely as a validation of our deepest childhood fears, from what we're unable to see in the dark to the general strangeness abound in much of our everyday bric-a-brac. Romero's minimalist cinematography borrows a page from Polanski in its diagonal framing, often suggesting an ethereal landscape of blacks and grays melding into each other, not unlike some dense fabric from which the monsters of our dreams come for us at our most vulnerable. The lack of visual distinction may be the film's most powerful attribute; like the splotchy paint strokes of a surrealist work, our imaginations work overtime to "fill in" the gaps, without our even realizing it.
Romero denies having intended any racial commentary in his character's power struggle, but it's actually the final series of unfortunate events that solidify the work as one of 60's activism rooted in social unease. Ben (Duane Jones) and Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman) duke it out not as black man and white man but as entangled might and pride, and it is in its observation of people interacting under the strains of unimaginable duress that Night of the Living Dead becomes most universal. It's downright impossible to not recall 9/11 as our human protagonists, safe for the time being in their boarded-up country house, huddle around a television waiting with baited breath for the next nugget of information about the unfolding chaos around them. Along with my virginity, I'd give damn near anything to watch the film again for the first time, totally ignorant not only of its own narrative progression but of all things zombie. Horror films have become more technically gruesome and forcefully shocking in the past forty years, and indeed, some have surpassed the film in scares, if not in aesthetic potency. No amount of technical nuance, however, could ever hope to rival Night's sinister lurk through the subconscious. From the subtle voyeurism of its opening credits through its impossibly bleak conclusion, it subjects us to the kind of unrelenting nightmare we only wish we could wake up from.
