Dead Alive (1992)

If I had seen Peter Jackson’s film, “Dead Alive,” in 1992 and been told that Jackson would go on to direct 3 “Lord of the Rings” movies that would weigh in at a hefty 9 or so hours and make a gazillion dollars plus spawn a New Zealand tourist industry where people went to see the sets and locations where the film was made, I would have never believed you.

“Dead Alive” is a hilarious zombie movie, having more in common with Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” Tom & Jerry cartoons and Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” than the psuedo-profundity of Romero’s Zombie films. To give you an idea of the aesthetic: In one scene a zombie baby gets slapped in the face with a frying pan and the pan malforms into the shape of the baby’s face — bonnnnnnng!!! It makes me wonder if between making “Dead Alive” and “LOTR,” Jackson had a brain transplant.

I don’t know what to call this film, but “slapstick horror comedy” comes close. The film starts with an explorer meeting a messy end while capturing a ‘Sumatran Rat Monkey.’ The rat monkey is shipped off to a zoo in New Zealand (where we later learn that the Sumatran Rat Monkeys are the result of tree monkeys being raped by plague infected rats). Lionel, a timid momma’s boy, slips out of the house to go on a date at the zoo with a Spanish girl named “Paquita” who works in the local grocery. Paquita’s elderly grandmother has done a card reading and convinced Paquita that Lionel is destined to be her one true love, so, despite an unpromising beginning to their relationship, she pursues Lionel with enthusiasm. Lionel’s mother, however, does not approve and follows them to spy on the couple and attempt to break up the relationship. Is it important that I tell you that this takes place in the 1950s New Zealand? So Lionel wears a sweater vest. Poodle skirts, petticoats, pompadours and rhinestone studded glasses abound.

While attempting to spy on the couple, Lionel’s mother is bitten on the arm by the Sumatran Rat Monkey (which looks like a naked muppet rat with a skin condition… see pic at left) and she demands that Lionel take her home to care for her. Lionel blows off Paquita and rushes home to care for his mother but her wound becomes infected and begins spurting pus that looks like melted raspberry sorbet.

His mother dies only to rise again as a zombie and kills the nurse as she is attempting to explain to the hapless Lionel that he is now an orphan. Now Lionel has 2 zombies to take care of… which he attempts to hide in the basement of his home and ‘keep down’ with tranquilizers… but they keep escaping and making more zombies. A dead clergyman zombie impregnates the nurse zombie and she gives birth to a baby zombie that looks like an evil Howdy Doody doll. Things continue on in this vein until Lionel is reunited Paquita and they are forced to battle the zombies together.

One needs to understand that half of the film, ‘Dead Alive,’ consists of slapstick battles with zombies involving lawn mowers, food processors, meat cleavers and other household items employed as weapons against an ever-growing horde of zombies. Thousands of gallons of blood (that looks like tomato paste) are spilled and body parts fly all over the place. Zombie entrails crawl across the floor or snake up Lionel’s pant leg like boa constrictors. In the final battle with “Mother” (she has now grown to gigantic size), Lionel is actually sucked back into her womb at one point. I suppose some people would find it very disgusting but it is not even remotely realistic. If gore were a regular part of the Muppet Show, it might look something like this.

I enjoyed the movie but need to warn viewers that it is a lowbrow splatter comedy where the film maker goes well beyond the frontiers of ‘good taste.’ In one scene, Lionel takes the baby zombie to the park in a baby carriage where he ends up kicking it like a football, ramming it’s head into a steel pole, etc., as horrified onlookers gasp. I’m not sure everyone would find playful ‘child abuse’ to be in good taste.

Zombie (aka Zombie Island, Zombi 2) movie Review

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

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.

The Crazies (1973)

The other night I watched George Romero’s 1973 film, “The Crazies.” This is perhaps (un)happy circumstance, because the next day a non-fictional group of crazies descended upon the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to demand that our socialist president let (the Christian) God back into our lives while reducing taxes on the wealthiest 10%… and many of them were wearing tricorner hats adorned with tea bags and star spangled T-shirts. Or something like that.

Cheap political potshots aside, I really wanted to like this film (it has always been on my “to watch” list; I just never got around to it). I haven’t yet watched the 2010 remake with the same name in which the previews feature a demented man dragging a garden fork around in a particularly menacing manner.

I find myself enjoying Vietnam war era films a lot more these days — perhaps because they hearken back to a time when US society was dominated by a fairly bitter cultural schism and there was a fear, in the back of the minds of many, that as a society we had become too “soft” or permissive and were under attack from within (which pretty much seems to be Glenn Beck’s schtick in a nutshell; ha ha… “nutshell!”). The parallels of social unrest and the themes of a culture war in films of the 60s and 70s are interesting to me because I see some similar expressed fears in the current media stream.

Situations created by fear and mistrust that spiral out of control had been themes in Romero’s Night of The Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), so it’s not surprising to see them in “The Crazies.” But, unfortunately, for a lot of reasons, “The Crazies” just doesn’t work very well.

“The Crazies” begins with a farmer who lives outside a small farm in Pennsylvania going mad and setting fire to his farm. One cut scene later, we are then introduced to David, a volunteer fireman, and his girlfriend/fiance Judy (a nurse) as well as ‘Clank,’ David’s buddy and a fellow volunteer fireman. David and Clank set off to fight the fire as Judy rushes to the office of the local doctor to help care for the children of the dairy farmer who survived the fire.

Judy is astounded to find the doctor’s office invaded by soldiers in tyvek suits and gasmasks. It turns out that a few days earlier, a plane carrying a supply of some sort of a top secret biological weapon codenamed “Trixie” had crashed nearby and the agent/virus had made it into the water supply. We are told that the ‘Trixie’ virus kills some people and drives others insane. The doctor, worried because Judy is pregnant with David’s child, gives her a shot to help protect her and has her hide a syringe and a vial of the resistance drug in her pocket so she can inoculate David.

At some point we get to see “Colonel Peckham,” point man for the operation, putting his socks and underwear into a garment bag while talking on the phone about the ‘Trixie’ situation. He is ordered to go to the infested village and get the situation under control. Meanwhile, bombers are being scrambled into the air to nuke the Trixie town from above if needed. There are a lot of fists pounding desks and “Goddamnits” while some government bureaucrats and army men argue what to do.

There are various scenes of tyvek clad soldiers fighting crazy villagers. One soldier gets stabbed to death with knitting needles by someone’s grandmother.

Colonel Peckham arrives and sets up a perimeter guard; anyone caught trying to leave is to be detained or shot. David, Judy and Clank are captured by Tyvek clad soldiers and her supply of the resistance drug is confiscated. They manage to escape, taking Artie, a middle aged man, and Lynn, his daughter, with them and hide in a country club. Artie and Lynn, both now crazy, have incestuous sex. Clank, who is also increasingly crazy, discovers this and beats up Artie. Artie is later discovered dead, after having hung himself. Lynn, the teenager, wanders outside and is shot by soldiers. David, Judy and Clank run off after having another shootout with the soldiers.

At some point, an irascible scientist who worked on the original Trixie virus is brought to the town in hopes of being able to develop an antidote. He finally manages to do so, but, frustrated by the slow process needed to verify his identity over the phone, he decides to just hoof it over to Colonel Peckham, taking the antidote with him. He is mistaken as a “crazy” by some soldiers and forced into the local high school (where they are attempting to quarantine the crazies). Inside the high school, he is pushed down some stairs by some crazies and falls to his death. The antidote is destroyed.

David, Judy and Clank manage to ambush a few soldiers and disarm them, but Clank (full blown crazy now), kills the prisoners while David is trying to get them to tell him what they know. Judy opines that David must have a natural immunity because he is not crazy. Clank goes gonzo and starts shooting soldiers in the woods, finally getting shot himself. Judy, now showing signs of being crazy, wanders into the crossfire between some crazed civilians and soldiers and is also killed. David, his spirit broken, is captured and led away.

The movie ends with Colonel Peckham being congratulated over the phone by some stuffed shirt bureaucrat at his success in having contained the outbreak. Peckham seems depressed at how badly things have turned out. The film ends with him boarding a helicopter because there has been another outbreak in another town, and, as the new “Trixie containment” expert, he is needed to try and contain it.

Like many of Romero’s films, the ‘messages’ of whom to trust and mistrust are a bit too heavy handed for my taste, but I can’t decide if that is a factor of the awkward dialogue or lack of character development. I try not to judge the production values of films from this era too harshly (budgets were a fraction of what they are now and there was very little in the way of post-production effects available at any price in 1973), but many of the edits and portions of the sound in the film could have been much better. One of the real problems with “The Crazies” is that they try to pack too much into one story. The discussion of what the virus is and how it got into the town require a lot of exposition by the town doctor and military officers. Stylistically, I think most horror or action films have moved away from explaining what is happening as much through the characters on the screen discussing whatever problem confronts them, so perhaps I too jaded by the more modern storytelling of films like 28 Days Later, but there are places in which “The Crazies” really kind of plods along. The film switches back and forth between three stories (1st is the story of Judy, David and Clank; 2nd is the story of Colonel Peckham and 3rd is the shorter story of the doctor and his antidote) and I wonder we (as an audience) would have been better served by concentrating on just one story. I also find that characters in Romero films tend to be pretty thin as far as showing the audience their motivation. Granted, horror and sci-fi are genres where character depth and development tend to be pretty thin as a rule, but Romero always makes gestures towards developing his characters and then just leaves his principle characters as people who can be summed up in a single sentence.

I enjoyed the film and would watch it again (if I didn’t have so many things already in my queue and not enough free nights to watch them). I’d be curious to see how the remake of “The Crazies” compares to the original, but the previews of the 2010 version make it look more like a zombie/slasher film than the original.