If I may risk incurring the wrath of countless Shawshank lovers everywhere: The Mist is the best of Frank Darabont's three Stephen King adaptations to date. Although myself unfamiliar with the source material in each of these cases, the reason for this has less to do with the abrupt change in genre than with The Mist's relatively minimalist plot, one focusing more on the behavior of a particularly epoch of humanity than on larger dramatics and thus less likely to attract the kind of superficial, syrupy direction that rendered the director's preceding works so vanilla in their effect. The Mist uses similar touches but to appropriately B movie effect; although only incidentally similar to John Carpenter's underrated The Fog, the film knows its influences, homaging the director in an early reference to his own remake of The Thing. After a torrential thunderstorm the likes of which is rarely seen, a small, seemingly typical American town is cut off from its basic utilities. David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and his son Billy (Nathan Gamble) travel to the local supermarket to pick up food and supplies, and it is during that a strange mist engulfs the town, reducing visibility to near zero and bringing with it a substantial level of dread. A bloody man runs into the store as the fog encroaches screaming of "something in the mist," and one customer who attempts to flee via his parked car can be heard screaming in the distance. After a back-room encounter with monstrous tentacles that kills one of the employees (an event seen by only a handful of people), the refugees slowly split into three factions: those who believe nothing is truly wrong, those who know something monstrous - even supernatural - lurks beyond their vision, and those who believe the mist is the wrath of God upon them, the final judgment day.
Although likely to appeal more to some than others based purely on their ideological particulars, King's nihilistic tale of how people respond to one another after the safeguards of society have been removed is alternately appropriate and disheartening in its nihilism, the former for its accuracy and the latter for its repeated use of shortcuts to make its points. As the totally bonkers Mrs. Carmody, Marcia Gay Harden lends enough conviction to the religious zealot to make the character believable in the moment, if only just; her hatred-in-the-name-of-love self-righteousness so one-note and extreme that it exists less as a character trait than as a plot justification. Fortunately, then, the film makes up for its sometimes-skimpy allegory with all-and-all physical terror, transcending traditional B movie trappings in its presentation of its various creepy-crawly monstrosities as a literal plague. The special effects are wanting in only a technical sense, their kinda-cheesy guilelessness making them something of a modern equivalent to King Kong: easy to dismiss at first but downright terrifying if you buy into their charms. Darabont showcases the film's horrific elements not with any sort of traditional build-up and climax, but with a more casual sense of montaged unease, with scoreless sequences of many things happening at once, none of them pleasant and most of them downright terrifying for the squeamish (one moment in particular - in which a seemingly tiny insect reveals its true size - momentarily induced me with something akin to turrets syndrome, much to the amusement of my surrounding audience). The Mist culminates with a harrowing look at what may as well be the end of the world - entrenched in the titular smoke, it's as if the surviving characters have found their way to heaven only to discover it a hell in sheep's clothing - and though one gets the sense that it may be taking the path of nihilism purely for the sake of wrenching our guts into a knot, its effectiveness is altogether impossible to shake.
American Gangster shares more than a passing structural resemblance with Malcolm X, another epic length Denzel Washington headliner. Like Spike Lee's hugely ambitious biography, Ridley Scott's much lavished period piece is a work that - like its antagonistic main character - wants it all, only to get very little in the end. The film is impressive only in technical, superficial ways; the recreations of 1970's Vietnam and New York City never want for believability but the whole of Scott's undertaking threatens to topple over from the sheer narrative and stylistic unruliness of it all. In an attempt at self-validation, the film proudly states its based-on-a-true-story status right out of the gate, only for the following 150 minutes to suggest a pretentious, all too self-conscious attempt at one-upping the cinematic mythology of Scarface and Heat all rolled into one. Denzel Washington is Frank Lucas, an NYC-based heroine dealer who upsets the market when he decides to eliminate the middleman from his business, traveling to the Vietnam jungles in person to acquire the raw goods, untouched and undiluted. Flipside is Russel Crowe's do-good narcotics cop Richie Roberts, who struggles to remain straight amidst both a crooked police force and the strains of an ensuing child custody battle. American Gangster explores the labyrinthine connections - personal, political, professional - that connect these two individuals in their respective paths, with Roberts looking to bust Lucas and the many (both criminals and cops) to whom he bears ties, but its expositional meanderings never rise above a sense of both tedium and emptiness. Scott seems convinced of his material's irrevocable importance, an angle that dogs every pseudo-pretentious swipe at elevating such into the realm of American myth. American Gangster loads up the screen with all the goods from any Grand Theft Auto game but it fails to find any deeper meaning, relevance, or even excitement amidst it all; it would be unfair to compare the film to Scarface (their stylistic aims are on opposing ends of the spectrum), but one can't help but think of Brian De Palma's great work of pop art during American Gangster's more testing stretches. Perhaps most disappointing, though, is Washington himself, who, while masterful even during Malcolm X's most overbearing moments of indulgence, brings next to nothing to his character here aside from that required by the script - basically, a lot of faux-macho, gentlemanly posturing punctuated by angry staring, shouting, and brow-furrowing. (Frank Lucas is angry. You won't like him when he's angry.) Crowe isn't much better off, although given the skimpy material at hand it's difficult to blame either actor. The film's best scene, then, comes when the two confront each other one-on-one. Its quality could be the result of the two actors finally being allowed to play off one another, or it could be the fact that it comes near the tail-end of this lifeless stretch of empty craftsmanship. Take your pick.
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.
If I may risk incurring the wrath of countless Shawshank lovers everywhere: The Mist is the best of Frank Darabont's three Stephen King adaptations to date. Although myself unfamiliar with the source material in each of these cases, the reason for this has less to do with the abrupt change in genre than with The Mist's relatively minimalist plot, one focusing more on the behavior of a particularly epoch of humanity than on larger dramatics and thus less likely to attract the kind of superficial, syrupy direction that rendered the director's preceding works so vanilla in their effect. The Mist uses similar touches but to appropriately B movie effect; although only incidentally similar to John Carpenter's underrated The Fog, the film knows its influences, homaging the director in an early reference to his own remake of The Thing. After a torrential thunderstorm the likes of which is rarely seen, a small, seemingly typical American town is cut off from its basic utilities. David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and his son Billy (Nathan Gamble) travel to the local supermarket to pick up food and supplies, and it is during that a strange mist engulfs the town, reducing visibility to near zero and bringing with it a substantial level of dread. A bloody man runs into the store as the fog encroaches screaming of "something in the mist," and one customer who attempts to flee via his parked car can be heard screaming in the distance. After a back-room encounter with monstrous tentacles that kills one of the employees (an event seen by only a handful of people), the refugees slowly split into three factions: those who believe nothing is truly wrong, those who know something monstrous - even supernatural - lurks beyond their vision, and those who believe the mist is the wrath of God upon them, the final judgment day.
