Zombie (aka Zombie Island, Zombi 2) movie Review
Posted: May 18, 2011 Filed under: movies, zombies 3 Comments
Spoilers:Okay, this 1979 movie by Italian director Lucio Fulci is variously known as ‘Zombie” or “Zombie 2” or “Zombie Island” or other names… and I don’t know if the different titles are different edits or what … but it is a mid-budget late 70s zombie flick that is very entertaining (despite some bad dubbing and sound problems, at least in the version that I saw).
It has plenty of gore, blood that looks like red poster paint, actresses who go topless, an underwater fight between a zombie and a shark (sheer genius! Bravo, Lucio!) and lots of worms and maggots crawling out of zombie eye sockets.
The movie starts with an unmanned yacht drifting into NYC harbor. The Trade Center Towers figure prominently into these shots… and I’ve noticed that older pictures of NYC with the WTC still standing always give me pause. Two of NYC’s finest board the vessel where one of them is killed by a fat disgusting rotting guy that was hiding below decks (this is a zombie, but I guess the cops don’t know it). The other cop unloads his revolver into the zombie (striking it in the chest) and it falls overboard.
The police interview a blond woman with big eyes named Anne (Tia Farrow) because the yacht belongs to her father. She says she hadn’t heard from dad since he took off for the islands on his yacht with friends. She hooks up with a newspaper reporter named Peter (played by a balding Ian McCulloch) and they find a note aboard the yacht from her father in which he says that he is on the island of Matool after having contracted a strange disease. Peter and Anne board an airplane to fly down to the islands.
Meanwhile, in the coroner’s office, an officious doctor berates his long suffering assistant over the state of the instruments and the corpse of the police officer killed aboard the yacht lies on the table. The corpse begins to twitch menacingly.
Anne and Peter arrive in the islands and convince another couple (Hairy Brian and Sexy Susan) who have a boat to help them find the island of Matool.
Meanwhile, on Matool, things are going from bad to worse. The island is afflicted by a plague of zombification — natives keep showing up at the hospital, dying, and then turning into zombies at which point the doctor shoots them in the head with his revolver. If all that were not bad enough, the doctor’s wife is a lush and a mean drunk. The doctor leaves for his work at the hospital and his wife throws a wine glass at him as he goes, calling him a “BASTARD!”
In the best tradition of the zombie flick, the bitchy woman has a gory demise. Zombies break into the house and she hides in the bedroom, piling furniture in front of the door. One of the zombies smashes an arm through the wood of the door and drags her by the hair till her eyeball gets impaled on a sharp splinter of wood filmed in ‘ouch-o-vision.’
Our four friends in the boat finally make it to Matool. On the way, Sexy Susan goes scuba-diving and is menaced by a shark. In trying to hide from the shark, she discovers a zombie wandering around on the sea floor. Luckily for her, the zombie and the shark begin to fight each other and Susan is able to scramble aboard the boat. The shark slams intot he boat in frustration and damages the propellor. Uh oh. They fire off some flares and the island of Matool sends someone out to tow them in.
The doctor delivers his condolences to Anne on the death of her father and asks them to go to his house and check on his wife. The gang borrows the doctor’s land rover and drives up to the house where they discover zombies eating the missus. In their frenzy to get back to the hospital, they run off the road and destroy the jeep so they have to hoof it back to the hospital through zombie infested woods. At this point they discover that you can only ‘kill’ a zombie by destroying it’s head and Sexy Susan ends up becoming zombie meat. There are some nice scenes of zombies rising from the ground in an old graveyard.
Brian, Peter and Anne finally make it to the hospital (an old chuch) with lots of zombies shuffling after them. The few remaining humans make their stand here, chucking Molotov cocktails and shooting zombies in the head.
There is more… and Peter and Anne do eventually escape the island on Brian’s crippled boat with a zombified Brian locked up below, but a radio message from the mainland says that zombies have invaded NYC. Remember that zombified cop in the morgue? The final scene shows zombies swarming across the pedestrian walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Amusingly, despite the fact of a zombie outbreak, the Manhattan/Brooklyn traffic continues unabated.
The zombie fighting the shark and the doctor’s wife’s eyeball getting impaled on the splinter of wood are highlights of the film. Many of the zombies, however, have an unconvincing ‘paper-mache’ look to them, although the wriggling worms and maggots added to their costumes help the ick factor. Unintentionally humorous moments include one of the characters suddenly bending over and picking up a conquistador’s helmet that is just lying on the ground and saying the equivalent of, “Gee, whiz, would you take a look at this ancient Spanish helmet?” The shockingly well preserved corpses of conquistadors (400+ years in the ground and they are still wearing shirts, pants and shoes) then rise up and eat his girlfriend.
French Film Snobbery and Zombies in Paris
Posted: May 8, 2011 Filed under: movies, zombies 2 Comments
Sometimes a shitty French film is better than a shitty American film. Such is the case with the 2009 movie, ‘La Horde,’ (which I discovered translated into English as, not surprisingly, “The Horde”). “The Horde” has everything you could want (except aliens or sex): zombies, gunplay, people sneaking up and down dingy, claustrophobic hallways, lots of cursing and gallons of blood.
I find myself wondering why I enjoy low-to-midrange budget foreign horror movies more than their American counterparts — perhaps it is just because I am reading subtitles and thus feel like the film is automatically more highbrow? Or maybe I just find some of the horror conventions more entertaining when they are given a slightly different take by someone from another culture? Or maybe I’m comparing apples and oranges… perhaps as an American I get access to every piece of shit that the American film industry craps out whereas only the better French examples make it to my Netflix queu through a winnowing process where French film distributors decide that there is no point in exporting some pieces of Franco-film merde because they won’t make back the cost of subtitling them. That last one is probably the reason why. Or I’m a pretentious know-nothing who thinks a film is automatically ‘better’ because it came from the land of Goddard and good desserts.
The Spanish film “Dagon,” while hardly a masterpiece, was a lot more entertaining to me than most of the Lovecraft adaptations made in the US — go figure.
Part of what entertains me in the samples of ‘exploitation’ French cinema is that the French audience seems to be more willing to allow themselves to be visually entertained even at the expense of verismilitude. There are often scenes of absolutely entertaining acrobatic fighting that defy all common sense, gravity and tactics in some of these films that are, none the less, really entertaining to watch. Speaking of which, has any French film maker made a horror/action flick that combines zombies and parkour? And if not, why not? I can think of few things more entertaining than watching lithe acrobats leaping gracefully from facade to parapet like graceful hip-hop angels while salivating earthbound zombies thrash and moan and clamber over one another as they reach for the delicious human morsels that always dance out of reach.
But enough about that. You came here to read about ‘The Horde’ so I better get to it. The film starts with the funeral of a Parisian police detective. We learn from conversations between the widow and four other detectives that the policeman was killed by a gang of drug dealers whom they had been investigating. The cops swear that they will get revenge and decide to make an ‘unofficial’ and off the books raid on the tenement where the drug dealers hang out.
Cut to a fucked up concrete tenement block at night. Our four cops sneak up to the tenement wearing ski masks and carrying weapons. Despite the fact that one of them has moral reservations about behaving like they are ‘above the law,’ it is made clear that they are out for blood and don’t intend to make arrests — they want to kill the people who killed their comrade. They meet the building’s “super” (in French he is called a ‘concierge,’ which makes me chuckle) who brandishes a shotgun and tells them that the building is condemned and mostly vacant and which floor the dealers can be found on. 
They proceed upstairs and begin wiring the door with explosives. The drug dealers can be heard talking inside. Suddenly everything goes pear shaped. The “concierge” shows up and ‘wants to join their team’ and screws everything up — the drug dealers shoot through the door (badly wounding one of the cops) and suddenly the concierge is dead and the cops are prisoners of the drug dealers.
These drug gang seems to have modelled itself on the U.N. because there is at least one of every minority group known to be in Paris in the gang. The gang is led by a pair of Nigerian brothers and has a Czech, one or two Arabic or Armenian looking guys, at least one Frenchman and a Roma as members. Whenever anyone refers to the Roma’s nationality, the subtitles translate it as ‘Carny’ which is hilarious since it makes me think of the scruffy guys who set up and tear down roller coasters for travelling carnivals rather than gypsies (which is what I assume what the person who wrote the subtitles intended).
As the drug dealers try to decide what to do with the cops, one of them goes apeshit and shoots a prisoner with a bag over his head whom they had been interrogating when the cops arrived. We never see this guy but apparently he was the cop’s informant/snitch. While they debate what to do and shoot one of the cops in the leg to show how serious they are, the “I’m sure he was dead” snitch comes running into he room, bleeding all over the place, and kills a couple of the drug dealers while they pump an unbelievable number of bullets into his zombified body.
Everyone is pretty freaked out by this and they lose a few more gang members to the newly minted zombies (all of whom get up a short time after having been killed and attack the group). The survivors all run (or hobble, in the case of the guy who was shot in the leg) up to the the roof where they see jets bombing Paris and hordes of zombies swarming around the building. Uh oh. They agree upon a temporary truce in order to escape the building and the zombies.
In making their way back down to the ground floor, there are several entertaining and acrobatic fights, including a particularly exciting display of one-Carny-versus-two-zombies pugilism. This is where the French horror films get it right. In order to be entertained, it is not necessary that the fight be ‘realistic’ as long as it is frenetic and exciting. I am not really certain how one gypsy won a fist fight with two zombies in a corridor, but his fists and elbows and feet were flying and kicking and snarling and the zombies kept coming back for more and just before the fight began to get tedious they got him onto the other side of the door and took the action elsewhere.
At some point after losing a few more members they hook up with one of the building’s former residents: an old, comically fat and insane war veteran who is joyfully killing zombies in the hallway with a fire axe. The veteran gives them pear brandy and tries to nonchalantly chop off one of the gypsys’ legs because it has an infected zombie bite on it. While in his apartment we get the only ‘context’ for the zombie outbreak… a brief and blurry TV news clip tells of zombie outbreaks all over the city and refugees being evacuated to an army base.
The veteran tells them that the (now zombified) concierge was a gun nut so they travel downstairs to loot his collection. I don’t know what French firearms laws are like or how much money the superintendent of a condemned building would realistically have to devote to his illegal gun collection, but they go into his shitbox apartment and somehow procure pistols, a submachinegun, a 50 caliber machine gun, a machete and (I assume) a fuck of a lot of ammo for all of these weapons because for most of the rest of the film they are blasting away with these weapons.
The interesting thing about guns in these French horror films is that they don’t run out of bullets until the plot requires another cast member be sacrificed to the ravening hordes of zombies by an untimely end of supply of bullets. In a particularly entertainingly choreographed scene, one of the cops lets the rest of the gang escape by first charging into a gang of zombies like an American footballer, then climbing on top of a car and shooting them until he runs out of bullets, then hacking at them with a machete until the machete is torn from his grasp and finally punching them until they drag him down in a swirling mass of bloody hands and open mouths. This seems to take a really long time and it doesn’t seem like the zombies are really trying that hard to actually get him even though they outnumber him by about 8,000 to one. It is completely over-the-top ridiculous and their moves are more tightly syncopated than a Lady Gaga video but at the end I wanted to clap because it was all so entertaining.
I’ve probably given away too much already… but in any zombie movie it is kind of a given that the survivors are going to get their numbers whittled down until there are just a few left and heads will be exploded by shot gun blasts or beaten in with frying pans and this film is no different.
Was it a ‘good movie?’ No. But it was entertaining. And sometimes that just has to be enough.
A to Z: R is for RATS!
Posted: April 20, 2011 Filed under: A to Z, adventures, aldeboran, misc, monsters, movies 6 Comments
R is for Rats!
Does anyone else remember the movie, “Ben,” with theme song sung by a very young Michael Jackson? Jackson was still black and still had a nose at that time, which made his involvement in a movie about telepathic killer rats all the more ironic since I remember seeing pictures of human corpses who had apparently been nibbled on by rats (the rats often eat the noses first — was Jackson’s future noselessness predicted by his involvement with the Ben theme song?).
If you don’t know, ‘Ben” was a movie from the 1970s and a sequel to a movie called ‘Willard.’ I barely remember the Willard movie… but I recall that ‘Ben’ was a film about a boy who had a pet rat he named ‘Ben.’ Ben was also a super intelligent telepathic rat who could control swarms of other rats. Scenes from the film included actors covered in fake blood thrashing around among tame rats who were probably trying to lick the peanut butter off of the actor’s bodies as stage hands off camera threw rats at them.
In Aldeboran, there are several kinds of rats. The houses, ships and barns of humankind are home to Norway rats, brown rats, black rats and other mundane vermin.
Of slightly greater concern are the ‘trench rats.’ These are bigger, bolder and more agressive than ordinary rats and tend to attack in swarms, making ‘rat catcher’ a full time job in the major cities like Eord.
Of slightly greater concern than trench rats are the ‘dungeon rats’ or ‘giant rats’ or ‘Sumatran rats.’ These are the big, hairy fuckers that have 1d4 hit points and who wander up and down the corridors of most dungeons. They serve as food for goblins and adventurers who forgot their iron rations… and dead goblins and dead adventurers often serve as food for Sumatran rats… ah, the circle of life. Why people on the world of Aldeboran refer to ‘Sumatran rats’ as ‘Sumatran’ when there is no Sumatra on this world is a mystery that the sages cannot answer. Similarly, there are ‘french cut’ green beans, ‘french fries’ and ‘french kissing’ in Aldeboran, but there is no ‘France.’ Go figure.
Mutant varieties, including albinos, have been encountered and the albino variety are sought after for their valuable pelts. Even more worrisome than the Sumatran Rats (which are bad enough, really), are the really fucking big rats. Some call these “Really Fucking Big Rats” or “Monster Rats” or “R.o.T.S.” (Rats of Tremendous Size). These can range in size up to 8-10 feet from nose to tail. The larger ones can bite a man’s hand off at the wrist. Do not fuck with them.
Rumors also persist of rats who have been altered or magically enhanced or mutated (or perhaps just blessed by the gods) and may have human-like intellect and build enormous ‘shadow cities’ beneath the earth where they have kings of their own and plot one day to conquer the surface dwellers, but this really must be nonsense. That just does not seem remotely plausible!
from Ben:
A young Michael Jackson wearing a terrifying pair of pants sings the theme song (warning: pablum alert!):
A to Z: J is for Jermlaine
Posted: April 11, 2011 Filed under: A to Z, aldeboran, movies 5 Comments
Jermlaine are little evil bastards, that, as far as I know, first appeared in Gygax’s ‘D1’ adventure, “Descent into the Depths of the Earth.” At least that is where they first came to my attention. Unfortunately, they never got the play time they probably deserved. They are tiny, evil little things… maybe about a foot tall. They live in caves and passages and wait for clueless adventures to come trudging along. When the idiotic big folk stumble into a Jermlaine ambush, they find the tiny creatures are sabotaging their gear, stealing their stuff, tripping them with cords, setting their hair on fire, etc. There is something fun and brilliant about attacking players with tiny, sneaky nasty little creatures that will always employ hit and run and sabotage. The ‘jermlaine’ always reminded me of the monsters from a 1973 television movie called “Don’t be afraid of the Dark.” I saw that movie when I was a kid… and it scared the bejeezus out of me… the “Jermlaine” in the movie are tiny, evil, pointy-headed people who live in the walls and enjoy tormenting the woman who inherits the house where the Jermlaine live. I think they even killed someone and were always setting traps and then disappearing whenever anyone other than the woman they were torturing came around so they all thought she was going crazy. Since it was made in 1973, they didn’t have CGI to do the special effects, so, if I remember right, they would shoot actors in evil ‘Jermalaine’ costumes with giant props (like huge scissors that the Jermlaine might use as a weapon) and then cut that in with the regular sized actors interacting with the normal size props. Both the ‘jermlaine’ and the actors who portrayed the humans seldom appeared in the same shot together; they had to tell more of the story through cutting and implied relationships through editing. I don’t think the little creatures in the film were ever given a name, so ‘Jermlaine’ is probably Gygax’s invention, but I feel certain the inspiration for the creature (right down to the pointy head) was borrowed from the TV film. I found the trailer for the original film on You Tube:
Irreversible (Movie)
Posted: December 1, 2010 Filed under: art, movies, reviews 1 Comment
Irreversible (2002), by Gaspar Noe, has been on my ‘need to watch’ list for a long time and I finally got around to seeing it last week. Fair warning: if you don’t speak French, you will have to read subtitles… and some have found it to be an excessively brutal and disturbing film.
I don’t really know how to describe the film, other than to say that it presents the narritive of a woman being raped and brutally assaulted and then her boyfriend and a former lover attempt to take revenge on her rapist, but the entire story is told in chunks that are ordered backwards… so first we see the two main characters (Marcus and Pierre) being taken out of a gay S&M nightclub with the uncompromising name of ‘Rectum’ by the police — Marcus is on a stretcher and Pierre is in handcuffs. The next scene ‘chunk’ shows what happened right before that: Marcus and Pierre are searching the nightclub for a man known as ‘le Tenia.’ They find the man they think is ‘le Tenia’ and a fight ensues… Marcus gets his arm broken in the fight and Pierre beats the presumed ‘le Tenia’ to death with a fire extinguisher. Bit by bit, the film maker presents the story in chunks, each ‘chunk’ coming in reverse chronological order, so we see Pierre and Marcus discover that Alex has been raped as she is carried away by ambulance workers on a stretcher, we see the rape, we see the events at the party they attended that led up to Alex wanting to leave early, etc.
Not only is the film in reverse chronological order, but the scenes themselves are all composed of a single ‘take’ where the camera roves around at random at the beginning, then gradually settles on the main characters. The scene where Alex gets raped and then beaten into unconsciousness in a pedestrian underpass by ‘le Tenia’ is about 10 or 12 minutes long and appears to have been filmed with a single camera that just moves to follow the events (I subsequently discovered that many scenes were digitally ‘stitched’ together to make them appear as one long scene, but, if so, the effect is seamless). At the start of each scene the camera is moving around as if simply spinning freely through the air, showing the ceiling, the floor, the room, etc., in a manner that almost makes the viewer nauseous — I thought the director ‘overdid’ that particular effect, although with each scene the ‘free camera’ effect got less and less wild and shorter and shorter, so I suppose Noe was intending to show us how events had ‘spun further and further’ out of control as they progressed.
The film has been criticized for being excessively violent and disturbing, especially for the graphic rape scene and the scene where Pierre bashes in the head of the man he (wrongly assumes) assaulted the woman, Alex. Graphic sex and violence in films, however, are not deal breakers for me and while I feel it innappropriate to say that I ‘enjoyed’ the film (‘enjoy’ does not seem to be the right word), I found it very effective and would reccomend the film. I found the film making interesting enough, and the little details of the character’s lives compelling enough that I want to eventually watch it again. Not one for ‘family viewing,’ however.
Aside from what I thought were the excessively long ‘wandering eye’ camera shots, my only other complaint was that in one portion, a scene where ‘le Tenia’ held Alex down on the floor of the pedestrian underpass while beating her face with his fists didn’t quite look real to me. ‘Le Tenia’ appeared to be striking the air right next to the actresses’ face and the sounds of the impact were unconvincing… as if they were dubbed in. Obviously I don’t expect the actress to really be beaten into a coma in order to make the film convincing, but given how ‘hyper real’ everything else in the film appeared, a small detail like this really stood out as a flaw. Perhaps the beating didn’t work for me because I wasn’t prepared to accept the scene as ‘real.’ I don’t know.
I’m going to have to beg the question whether or not the violence in the film is ‘gratuitous’ or not, simply because I don’t know that I accept the majority’s definition of ‘gratuitous sex and violence.’ In the case of Irreversible, however, I think the director made a conscious decision to make certain scenes as explicit and disturbing as possible. Since the violence comes early in the film, and afterwards we only see what leads up to it, the film is much more about observing the events in these people’s lives that led up to this horrible series of encounters.
The Human Centipede (film review)
Posted: November 20, 2010 Filed under: movies, stupidity, wierd stuff 3 Comments
Every once in a while you see a movie that is so awful you want to stop watching, but a weird kind of fascination, the same kind of fascination that makes you want to look at traffic accidents, keeps your eyes on the screen. “The Human Centipede” is such a film.
This film got 5.1 stars (out of 10) on IMDB… which is my opinion is about 4.1 stars too many. The real problem with the movie is that it is so stupid. Unfortunately, it’s not stupid enough to be funny, or interesting, or campy or even noteworthy — it’s just stupid.
The film starts off bu introducing us to a German doctor, Dr. Heiter, in his car by the side of the road. The actor who plays Heiter looks like what one might get if one mixed equal parts Christopher Walken and Klaus Kinski. Dr. Heiter is sitting in his Mercedes by the side of the road looking at a picture of three dogs (who are standing in a row; each dog appears to have his snout in the ass on the dog ahead of him, but, hey, they are dogs, they sniff each other’s butts all of the time, right?). Dr. Heiter looks sad and crazy. A semi pulls up behind him and the truck driver gets out to go take a shit in the bushes. Dr. Heiter follows him with a rifle (later we find out that the rifle fires tranquilizer darts).
Cut to two American girls in a hotel, gabbing with a third girl on the phone. They announce that they are going out to a club in hopes of meeting up with a boy one of them met earlier. One of them is getting directions from the concierge on the room phone and it becomes clear that she is not the sharpest knife in the block.
In the next scene, the girls are driving around, lost in the woods and they get a flat tire. An old, bald, fat and disgusting guy who is driving around at night in his undershirt smoking and looking for people to harass comes up and sexually harasses them in German, but they don’t understand until they look up “ficken (fucking)” in their German/English dictionary. They ignore him and he drives away. They decide to walk through the woods at night in their mini-skirts and high heels. It starts to rain and, after getting lost and having their mascara run down their cheeks, they see a light in the distance. They run up and bang on the door. The door opens, and, hello! It’s Herr Doktor Walken, err, Heiter!
Heiter is really weird and rude but they come in and he promises to call the rental car company for them. Heiter has a house that is a DWELL reader’s wet dream with lots of wood and white but has a large painting of Siamese twin fetuses on the wall. While pretending to call the car service, Heiter puts two pills in two glasses of water and gives them to the girls. The ditzy girl falls asleep as the other girl realizes they have been drugged and tries (and fails) to get away. She passes out and Heiter is triumphant.
Cut to a room in Heiter’s basement. The girls awaken and discover that they are tied to beds in a hospital-like room. The Dutch truck driver from the beginning of the film is tied to a bed as well. Doctor Heiter announces that the two girls are a “match” but the truck driver is not a match and uses a syringe full of drugs to kill him. He his later shown burying the body in his garden. Nearby is a gravestone marked, “My beloved 3 dog.” They show that gravestone several times… along with the creepy art in Heiter’s house that all seems to deal with Siamese twins.
Heiter goes out with his tranquilizer gun and returns with a Japanese man. Everyone other than Heiter is freaked out and screaming about what a rotten fuck Heiter is. Using overhead transparencies that look as if they were drawn by a 12 year old, Heiter explains that he was the foremost surgeon specialized in separating Siamese twins, but he has retired from that and now wants to create a living work of art. He explains that he joined three dogs together, ass to mouth, to form one long creature… but it died (hence the grave) and now he wants to replicate the experiment with three humans. He will start by cutting the tendons in their knees (so they can’t stand) and removing the teeth and lips from the second and third person and the anuses from the first and second person. He will then sew them all together, forming a creature with a single intestinal tract: “the human centipede.” And, yes, that drawing on the right, with “food goes in here and poop comes out there”
is really what Heiter shows them to explain how it will work. As the evil and totally fucked-up Heiter is administering anesthesia, the one slightly less stupid American girl gets away. Heiter chases her around and she sneaks back downstairs and gets her friend. As she is trying to drag her unconscious friend to safety, Heiter nails her with the tranquilizer gun.
Then there is a montage of Heiter pulling out teeth and slitting buttocks and knees. Eventually they wake up and are disturbed to discover that Doktor Heiter has succeeded in making them into a ‘human centipede,’ but, instead of being terrifying, it just looks silly. All three actors are wearing bandages on their knees and bandages that look like diapers and each actor’s head is bandaged to the ass of the actor in front of them. I just looks stupid and fake. I hope the actors were not farting in each other’s faces during the filming.
At this point there 
is still about half an hour left and we get to see Heiter training his centipede to crawl around and fetch the newspaper. At one point, the Japanese man apologizes because he has to shit and he can’t hold it in because Heiter removed his sphincter… so, apologizing in Japanese, he shits in the mouth of the woman who is sewed to his ass and she can’t help but shit in the mouth of the woman who is sewed to her ass… and, ladies and gentlemen, we have just arrived at this film’s big moment. Yep. This film exists to give the director a “plausible” reason to have people being forced to shit in other people’s mouths. Fortunately, we don’t really have to see anyone eating shit… the actors just grimace and make gagging noises as Heiter crows, “Feed her, yes… feed her!” Did I mention that at some point Heiter donned jack boots and picked up a riding crop? The director, Tom Six of Holland, is a master story teller (that was me being sarcastic).
There’s more (including a visit by two of the most incompetent detectives in Germany), but I think you get the point. I would tell you not to watch it, but at this point, if you have read this far, you are probably saying to yourself, “It can’t really be as stupid as he says it is; I must see for myself…” Go ahead. Watch it. But afterward you will want those 92 minutes of life back.
Let me say in advance, “I told you so.”
Descent 2 review
Posted: November 8, 2010 Filed under: movies, reviews Leave a comment
I didn’t see the original ‘Descent,’ but bouts of insomnia coupled with a Netflix membership that allows me to watch some of the netflix catalog online results in a situation where I end up seeing some films that I might otherwise have never rented. Descent 2 is (obviously) a sequel to the 2005 Descent movie and apparently takes place shortly after the events of the first film.
Descent 2 is a good (but not a great) horror film, but if you are a ‘Dungeoncrawl’ enthusiast, you might want to rent it just to see some of the rather effective claustrophobic underground scenes where something is stalking a group of humans who have set out to rescue another group of spelunkers who have gotten lost in a maze of underground caves.
The film begins with a bloodied woman named Sarah wandering into a wilderness road somewhere in the rural US (perhaps in Appalachia?) and nearly being hit by a passing truck. After law enforcement is informed, it is determined that this woman (who is in a state of shock) is the member of a group of spelunkers who entered a cave several miles away(thus, she is a survivor of the events of the first Descent movie). Another team has been searching the cave system with some urgency; time is running out for the missing cavers. Not all of the blood on Sarah’s clothes is her own; the sheriff suspects she may have attacked her partners. An abandoned mine is known to be in the area in which Sarah was found; the rescue team speculates that if Sarah got out through the mine, perhaps they can find her companions by entering the cave system through the mine. A local whose grandfather worked in the mine tells them that the old miners spoke of having found a link to a series of seemingly endless caverns in the course of their diggings and a group of miners entered the caves to explore but were never heard from again. The sheriff, his deputy, an expert caver and his two assistants all enter the mine. Although Sarah claims to be unable to remember anything, the Sheriff insists on taking her along, perhaps because he thinks she will be able to help them retrace her steps to her lost comrades.
Of course, it all goes screwy. After finding a video camera lost by the first expedition, they review the tape and see the first group being attacked by something or someone in the caves. Things go from bad to worse; Sarah panics and runs off, the group gets split up and soon the would-be rescuers are in need of rescuing themselves.
The caving scenes are quite effective at portraying the claustrophobia and confusion of getting lost in a cave where unknown enemies may be lurking, making this good inspirational material for the dungeoneering crowd. The characters are not particularly memorable or well developed, but they seldom are in horror so that should come as no big surprise. The film ends, like most horror movies, somewhat ambiguously; thus the producers have the possibility of a ‘Descent 3‘ on the table.
I was entertained enough that I will probably hunt down the original Descent movie for watching, although I suspect it would probably be more fun to watch them in order.
The Crazies (2010)
Posted: October 29, 2010 Filed under: movies, reviews, zombies 2 Comments
Long time readers of this blog may remember that I previously wrote about George Romero’s 1973 film, “The Crazies.” Romero’s original film was a movie I liked, but I had to admit that it was pretty flawed. I usually have a knee-jerk reaction against remakes, but the 2010 remake of “The Crazies,” by director Breck Eisner is, I think, better than the original.
The basic plot remains the same. The inhabitants of a small, friendly and close knit town in Iowa start going crazy and killing each other. It is eventually revealed that a chemical weapon, code-named “Trixie,” has found it’s way into the water supply. We see the story unfold through the eyes of a leading male, his pregnant wife and his best buddy. The US military arrives and tries to “contain the situation,” but the military’s solution is ultimately ineffective and the situation spirals out of control.
Eisner’s version improves on Romero’s film because Eisner shows us rather than telling us. Romero’s film had a lot of situations in which people like military officers and scientists would talk to each other and thus reveal what was going on. There were also three or four simultaneous story threads and the film switched back and forth between all of them. Eisner spends 99% of his time with the small town’s Sheriff, David Dutten, and we find out things as he finds them out, leading to a lot more suspense and the feeling of a mystery being slowly revealed. The Romero version of “The Crazies” centered around a pair of fire fighters and a nurse; the new version has substituted the sheriff and his deputy for the fire fighters and the town’s doctor, Judy (who is the sheriff’s spouse and pregnant with their first child). Eisner does away with all of the military officers and scientists that populated Romero’s film; the military enters the film early but remains as a group of soldiers in camouflage and gas masks throughout the story. Rather than telling us through lengthy conversations that the “Trixie” chemical/drug got into the town water supply from a crashed military plane, the director shows us by having a rash of people acting erratically infect the town, then a trio of duck hunters find the corpse of a pilot in the swamp, then the sheriff and his deputy find the ruined plane, and then finally the sheriff puts it all together when he figures out that the people who started to get sick first live closest to the water tower, thus they probably drank the contaminated water first.
I can more easily forgive Romero’s lower production values and am not sure that Eisner needed to resort to make-up effects to let us know who was “crazy” and who wasn’t (Romero didn’t use make-up on his “crazies,” he just had them act crazy, which I think might have made the film even creepier — as it is, the ‘crazies’ in Eisner’s version look all wrinkled and bloody-eyed, like zombies). But Eisner’s version really pared down the story to the essential elements. In addition, Eisner’s bigger 2010 budget allowed him to get better acting talent than Romero was able to afford for his 1973 version.
Moorlocks attack!
Posted: October 27, 2010 Filed under: monsters, movies, music Leave a commentRoger the GS mentioned Grimlocks over at Roles, Rules and Rolls. I love the old circa 1960 movie of Well’s “Time Machine” with the blue morlocks and their too perfect hair… it really gave me the creeps when I saw it back in the 1970s (probably on the local network back in St. Louis which showed a lot of horror and sci-fi movies). I barely remember the 2002 version of the same story, although I love the way the moorlocks lope along the tunnels in the above clip.
Original movie clip is below:
Gah! Legion (2010) Movie Review
Posted: October 24, 2010 Filed under: monsters, movies 1 Comment
Sometimes the best parts of a movie are all in the trailer. Such is the case with 2010’s film, Legion, directed by Scott Stewart. The premise of the film (God has grown sick of the humans, and so has decided to wipe them all out) is one I found appealing, and in the previews there was a shot of an ice-cream truck driver who turned into a gangly weird creature straight out of Oz (which delighted me)… and the creepy old lady who bit a man’s throat out was good for a laugh… but where do you go, narrative-wise, once you opened up the giant can of whoopass that is “the end times”?
Unfortunately, Legion takes itself a little too seriously. Archangel Michael (yes, he is a character in this film) is a good angel who has been cast out of the “angel corps” or whatever and falls to earth in LA where he cuts off his wings (why is not explained… if I had wings like FUCK ALL would I cut them off… wings are bound to be useful (as Gabriel later proves)). He raids a toy warehouse which is filled with SMGs and rocket launchers (OK, I guess the toy warehouse is supposed to be a front for gun smugglers) and steals a cop car after one of the cops gets ‘possessed’ and tells him that the rest of heaven is coming for him (Michael) — and they may have mentioned ‘the child’ who is mankind’s only hope. That child gets mentioned (a lot) later. It seems that angels (or spirits of some kind) can possess some of the “weaker willed” humans and use them to do bad things that our angry God wants done. After taking care of this situation, Archangel Michael takes off in the 
cop car with a trunk full of weapons.
Cut to a shithole diner/truckstop on the edge of nowhere in the desert. Here we meet the diner’s embittered owner (played by Dennis Quaid), his son ‘Jeep’ (who has a heart of gold), the cook, Percy, and a dysfunctional family consisting of a bitchy mother, a loudmouth father and emo/sexually promiscuous daughter. The family is passing through but their car has broken down. The young waitress, Charlie, is very pregnant but the father of the baby is out of the picture and it’s made painfully obvious that the son of the diner’s owner, “Jeep,” dotes on her. Why he is named after an off-road vehicle is not clear. A black guy/gang banger (who turns out to be a stand-up guy who wins the respect of others) comes in, wanting to use the phone. He’s lost and can’t get a signal on his cell.
Well, just when you think that this is going to become a film where loveable misfits are tossed together by circumstance in an out-of-the-way desert truckstop (like “Bagdad Cafe,”), things start getting weird. An old woman pulls up, enters the cafe, orders a steak and, after inquiring about the baby’s due date, starts calling Charlie the waitress nasty names and telling her the child will die.
The old woman goes berserk and bites the throat out of the loudmouth husband and then scuttles across the ceiling as Quaid shoots at her with his 20 gauge and Percy the cook hits her in the face with an impressively hurled frying pan. Black guy/gangbanger pulls out a Glock and drops the old lady. They are all still freaked about this when Archangel Michael pulls up and explains that Charlie is going to give birth to the savior of mankind, but God is sending his servants to kill the child so they better board up the diner and hunker down and try to save the child.
At this point the movie becomes more like a cross between “Assault on Precinct 13” and “Night of the Living Dead.” Led by Michael, the good guys fortify the diner. The angels send waves of weird possessed losers/cannon fodder whom the good guys mow down with all of the weapons Michael brought with him. Eventually Archangel Gabriel shows up. Unlike Michael, he still has his wings and has a neat trick where when someone shoots bullets at him he can brush the bullets away with his wings.
I don’t want to give any spoilers beyond this point other than to say that eventually the day is saved and even God doesn’t seem like such a bad guy after all. I don’t mind that the film is probably “theologically unsound.” But the degree to which it takes itself serious kind of busts it for me. If you saw the preview, you have the gist of what the movie is like. Unfortunately, there is not a lot more to it.