Tag Archives: zombies

Quarantine

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Quarantine movie poster

 

Quar­an­tine, remade by direc­tor John Erick Dow­dle (co-written with brother Drew) from the Span­ish movie REC (2007), fol­lows in the now-firmly estab­lished hor­ror faux­men­tary tra­di­tion. Pre­vi­ous entries Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, and Clover­field are all osten­si­bly com­prised of found footage recov­ered from cam­eras found at the scenes of hor­rific dis­as­ters. Quarantine’s only wrin­kle is that, unlike its pre­de­ces­sors, this pre­tense is not explained as such on screen. Quarantine’s con­ceit is that we’re watch­ing raw footage, edited in-camera, aban­doned by the late char­ac­ters them­selves. There are no implied, unseen sur­vivors that picked up the pieces.

Clover­field (read The Dork Report review) never pro­vided a con­vinc­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal moti­va­tion to explain why its cin­e­matog­ra­pher would keep his cam­corder run­ning through­out his des­per­ate flight from toxic alien crea­tures swarm­ing across Man­hat­tan. A much more intel­li­gent exam­i­na­tion of an obses­sion to cap­ture every­thing on video came from the less expected source of none other than the zom­bie god­fa­ther him­self, George A. Romero. His under­rated Diary of the Dead (read The Dork Report review) fea­tures a group of young film stu­dents with pre­ten­sions to becom­ing great doc­u­men­tar­ian film­mak­ers, and what bet­ter sub­ject to doc­u­ment than their own first-hand expe­ri­ences dur­ing a zom­bie out­break? Although Clover­field had sig­nif­i­cantly greater bud­getary resources at its dis­posal to cre­ate eerily real­is­tic images of Man­hat­tan crum­bling beneath the feet of a Godzilla-like mon­ster, Quar­an­tine fol­lows in the more mod­est foot­steps of Diary of the Dead in striv­ing for greater psy­cho­log­i­cal realism.

Scott Percival in Quarantineground floor, com­ing up

In story terms, the jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for Quarantine’s char­ac­ters to keep film­ing con­tin­u­ally evolve as their cir­cum­stances worsen. Like Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (read The Dork Report review), Quar­an­tine fea­tures mem­bers of the press as main char­ac­ters. The first full 12 min­utes are devoted to reporter Angela Vidal (Jen­nifer Car­pen­ter) and cam­era­man Scott Per­ci­val (Steve Har­ris) shoot­ing a tele­vi­sion news seg­ment on a local fire depart­ment. By the time an emer­gency finally arrives and the duo hitches a ride along to the scene, we’ve become fully endeared to the bub­bly, spunky reporter and the charm­ingly filthy fire­fight­ers. As the rou­tine inves­ti­ga­tion turns into a con­fronta­tion with a feral-seeming elderly woman, Angela senses the oppor­tu­nity to score some sen­sa­tional footage. It’s clear she fan­cies her­self a more seri­ous reporter.

Later, as the elderly woman is revealed to be patient zero for a new highly con­ta­gious dis­ease, the Los Ange­les Cen­ter for Com­mu­ni­ca­ble Dis­ease quickly quar­an­tines the build­ing, cut­ting off all their com­mu­ni­ca­tions and falsely report­ing to the pub­lic that it has been evac­u­ated. The trapped ten­ants are a ran­dom assort­ment of Los Ange­lans: an opera tutor and his hot young live-in pro­tégé, a vet­eri­nar­ian, a clean­ing woman, a mom and her baby (whom we meet again near the end of the film, in hor­ri­fy­ing trans­formed fash­ion), toy dogs, an immi­grant cou­ple, and… what’s miss­ing? That’s right! If this is L.A., where are all the unem­ployed actors?

Build­ing man­ager Yuri (Rade Serbedz­ija) keeps con­ve­niently remem­ber­ing exits (includ­ing a back door and a base­ment entry to a sewer), but all are blocked. By this point, Angela has mor­phed into a right­eous cru­sader want­ing more footage as proof of the city’s out­rage against jus­tice and human rights. But when the virus spreads to most of the peo­ple trapped in the build­ing, the power goes off, and panic truly sets in, Angela’s moti­va­tions switch to pure sur­vival. The cam­era now only proves use­ful as a source of light, and any­thing cap­tured on video hap­pens by chance as they fran­ti­cally nav­i­gate through the cor­ri­dors. Then, in true hor­ror movie fash­ion, things get even worse. In a scene rival­ing the nail-biting base­ment sequence in Silence of the Lambs, Angela and Scott find them­selves bar­ri­caded in a pitch-black attic with their camera’s lamp bro­ken. The remain­der of the movie is seen through the green­ish haze of their night-vision filter.

Jennifer Carpenter in QuarantineIn true hor­ror movie fash­ion, Angela (Jen­nifer Car­pen­ter) sheds lay­ers of cloth­ing through­out her ordeal

While Quar­an­tine may seem to tip its hat to hor­ror tra­di­tion as pro­tag­o­nist Angela sheds lay­ers of cloth­ing over the course of her ordeal, the movie is actu­ally quite sub­ver­sive in show­ing her lose her spirit. Atyp­i­cally for a hor­ror movie pro­tag­o­nist, she is no plucky sur­vivor that defeats the men­ace. She pretty much just breaks down.

Quar­an­tine may be yet another in a long line of zom­bie flicks, but I would argue its true genre iden­tity is as an urban night­mare. Clover­field relived 9/11 in the form of another Godzilla and its highly toxic babies, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Mimic envi­sioned swarms of giant cock­roaches breed­ing in aban­doned sub­way sta­tions. Quar­an­tine touches on another deep anx­i­ety of urban dwellers: a viral con­ta­gion born of city filth. The entire out­break plays out in the con­fines of an aging ten­e­ment build­ing (with what seems to be a cloth­ing sweat­shop hid­den in the back), a place many city slick­ers might rec­og­nize as home.

What made Quar­an­tine the most fright­en­ing for me in par­tic­u­lar was not the gore or the booga-booga scare fac­tor, but rather the dis­turb­ing plau­si­bil­ity of its fic­tional dis­ease. In real­ity, all we hear about are the dan­gers of dis­eases like HIV jump­ing from bush­meat to humans, and the avian or swine flu incu­bat­ing in impov­er­ished nations where peo­ple live in close quar­ters with ani­mals. What about those of us liv­ing in devel­oped, sup­pos­edly civ­i­lized cites, full of dogs, roaches, rats, and yes, a cer­tain num­ber of crazy nutjobs?

A hyper-evolved form of the rabies virus is the most plau­si­ble pseudo-scientific expla­na­tion I’ve yet heard for zom­bies, espe­cially com­pared to the vaguely described Venu­sian radi­a­tion in Romero’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead (read The Dork Report review). Like the “super­flu” in Stephen King’s The Stand and the dis­tilled “rage” virus in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, this strain of rabies was genet­i­cally engi­neered by a lone ter­ror­ist holed up in the attic of the ten­e­ment. An omi­nous clue is dropped halfway through the film about an unaccounted-for ten­ant liv­ing in the attic. When we finally meet him, he appears to have been infected for quite some time. Blind and ema­ci­ated, he scram­bles around in the total dark­ness of his for­mer home and lab­o­ra­tory (scat­tered with dis­gust­ing med­ical pho­tos and news­pa­per clip­pings about Dooms­day Cults). The creepy fig­ure is played by the unusu­ally tall and slen­der Doug Jones, most recently seen as the Sil­ver Surfer in Fan­tas­tic Four and Abe Sapien in Hell­boy. I worked on the offi­cial web­site for Guillermo Del Toro’s mar­velous Pan’s Labyrinth, for which Jones was inter­viewed about his expe­ri­ences play­ing The Faun and The Pale Man; for some­one that so typ­i­cally plays mon­sters, he’s a super-nice, funny, and charm­ing dude. I skimmed through the bonus fea­tures on the Quar­an­tine DVD, and it’s a cry­ing shame that he appar­ently wasn’t interviewed.

In place of a musi­cal score, Quar­an­tine fea­tures a com­plex sound design built around an eerily creak­ing, groan­ing old build­ing. It also for­goes other stan­dard movie plea­sures, being a grue­some, depress­ing, and pun­ish­ing expe­ri­ence. In that respect, it’s sim­i­lar to how the nau­se­at­ingly (lit­er­ally) bleak Blind­ness (read The Dork Report review). In con­trast, the sub­lime Chil­dren of Men (read The Dork Report review) is the rare movie night­mare set at the brink of the end of human­ity that nev­er­the­less car­ries a spark of uplift and hope.

Offi­cial movie site: www.ContainTheTruth.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle Part 5: Diary of the Dead

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The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle

Wel­come to The George A. Romero Zom­bie Cycle Film Fes­ti­val. Join The Dork Report in revis­it­ing all five canon­i­cal episodes in the orig­i­nal epic zom­bie saga:

Diary of the Dead movie poster

 

This is not an opin­ion you’re likely to find any­where else on the inter­net, but we here at The Dork Report are pre­pared to argue that Diary of the Dead is the best of the entire George A. Romero zom­bie cycle so far. It sports the best spe­cial effects, is the least repet­i­tive or trigger-happy, and is a wel­come return to the focused social satire of the first (Night) and sec­ond (Dawn) installments.

Curi­ously, Diary of the Dead is the first to break the con­ti­nu­ity of Romero’s ongo­ing story of soci­ety in zom­bie melt­down. The first four films fol­low a rough chronol­ogy: Night of the Liv­ing Dead depicts the ini­tial wave as seen by a small group caught in a coun­try farm­house. Dawn of the Dead takes place a few weeks later, show­ing the break­down of cities (and even the media). Day of the Dead fea­tured an iso­lated group sur­viv­ing in iso­la­tion as the world was long since over­run by the undead. Land of the Dead shows the ulti­mate gated com­mu­nity fall to an evolved zom­bie horde. But Diary of the Dead is a return to the early days of the out­break, a more fer­tile ground for sto­ry­telling: you never get tired of human char­ac­ters wit­ness­ing such hor­rors for the first time.

Diary of the DeadSav­ing the human race, one non­fic­tion doc­u­men­tary short sub­ject at a time

The rules are still the same: sim­ply, the dead don’t stay dead. The zom­bie epi­demic is not due to a plague or virus, which was the potent con­tri­bu­tion of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later to the zom­bie genre. Arguably, Romero’s con­cept is more bleak. A virus might be mit­i­gated or even cured, but if any­body, any­body at all, that dies will revive as a unin­tel­li­gent car­niv­o­rous mon­ster that feels no pain and never tires, it can­not be stopped. If human­ity is to some­how regroup and sur­vive, it will for­ever have to burn or decap­i­tate any­one that ever dies.

Diary of the Dead opens on a group of Uni­ver­sity of Pitts­burgh film stu­dents mak­ing a tongue-in-cheeck mummy movie in the woods of Penn­syl­va­nia, under the guid­ance of alco­holic Pro­fes­sor Maxwell (Scott Went­worth). Many of these kids are priv­i­leged, but judg­ing from the events of Romero’s other zom­bie films, we know that the lux­u­ries of the rich are of lit­tle worth against the liv­ing dead. Obvi­ously none of these movie afi­ciona­dos have ever seen a zom­bie flick. One of them, Eliot (Joe Dini­col), wears Coke-bottle glasses in an appar­ent homage to Romero’s famous spec­ta­cles. Bud­ding direc­tor Jason Creed (Joshua Close) looks down his nose on the com­mer­cial hor­ror genre, and has the not-so-secret ambi­tion to become a doc­u­men­tary film­maker. But Jason gets his chance to do both, as he doc­u­ments their their flight from a real-life plague of zom­bies. Jason’s footage, later com­pleted by girl­friend Debra (Michelle Mor­gan) com­prises a film within a film: “The Death of Death.”

Diary of the DeadRomero’s scathing indict­ment of our bro­ken health care sys­tem, or just some more zom­bie gore?

In a world in which nearly every­one car­ries a cell­phone cam­era around in their pocket, “shoot me” can have a dif­fer­ent mean­ing than you usu­ally hear in zom­bie movies. With a batch of young film­mak­ers doc­u­ment­ing a real-life tale of hor­ror using new portable video tech­nol­ogy, Diary of the Dead super­fi­cially resem­bles Clover­field (read The Dork Report review). One of Cloverfield’s most telling moments showed a group of New York­ers instinc­tively react­ing to the hor­ri­ble sight of a chunk of the Statue of Lib­erty hurtling into the mid­dle of a street by whip­ping out their cell phone cam­eras and tak­ing pic­tures to trans­mit to their friends. But Diary of the Dead’s true inspi­ra­tion is actu­ally a bit older; it rips off the basic plot of The Blair Witch Project, in which a batch of stu­dent film­mak­ers set off to shoot a hor­ror film in the woods and acci­den­tally stum­ble onto the real thing. Clover­field became increas­ingly implau­si­ble as the flee­ing teenagers cling to their cam­eras through­out their tra­vails. In con­trast, Diary of the Dead sur­pris­ingly sports more believ­able psy­chol­ogy than Clover­field, con­stantly ques­tion­ing its char­ac­ters’ com­pul­sion to doc­u­ment every­thing. Indeed, it’s one of the biggest themes of the movie.

Diary’s mix of themes also includes the return of the media as a promi­nent pres­ence for the first time since Night and Dawn. In what I felt was one the film’s only dra­matic mis­steps, the char­ac­ters first learn of the zom­bie break­out via radio (really? radio? in an age of instant text mes­sag­ing?), and are con­vinced of the incred­i­ble news reports a lit­tle too quickly. But per­haps their imme­di­ate accep­tance of what the voices of author­ity tell them is one of Romero’s points.

Two char­ac­ters in Dawn of the Dead were mem­bers of the tra­di­tional media of broad­cast news. But in this case, some­thing only pos­si­ble in the 21st cen­tury inter­net age, the Diary of the Dead kids are able to become part of the medium itself. Jason starts out as a frus­trated doc­u­men­tar­ian mak­ing a silly com­mer­cial mummy film, but given the chance he chooses to doc­u­ment. As cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists, they edit their footage on lap­tops and post to YouTube and MySpace. They also down­load other clips from around the world, pro­vid­ing the film with what are basi­cally a series of short vignettes. They watch as U.S. SWAT clean out zom­bies from an apart­ment com­plex, and as coun­ter­parts on the other side of the globe doc­u­ment an over­run Japan. One of the spook­i­est clips is a brief shot from the point of view of a truck dri­ving under a bridge from which some­one has hung them­selves. After the truck cab jos­tles the corpse, it starts to move.

Three radio mono­logues were voiced by hor­ror genre lumi­nar­ies Guillermo Del Toro (whose ghost story Devil’s Back­bone shares some ele­ments of the zom­bie genre), Simon Pegg (who paid homage to the genre as com­edy with Shawn of the Dead), and Stephen King (bril­liant as a heart­land evan­gel­i­cal preacher: “Get down on your &$#@ing knees!”). There’s also a funny bit fea­tur­ing a badass Amish guy, who’s deaf but handy with a scythe and dynamite.

The end­ing to this very short movie (a lit­tle over 90 min­utes) is a bit abrupt. But given that it is nar­rated by Debra, it is pos­si­ble she has sur­vived beyond what we’ve seen, long enough to release “The Death of Death” in some form, per­haps after humans have reclaimed the planet. One might imag­ine Diary’s premise would lend itself to a lower bud­get than the grandiose Land of the Dead, which starred actual stars like Den­nis Hop­per and John Leguizom­bie — sorry — John Leguizamo. But Diary sports a big­ger cast, more loca­tions, and even more accom­plished CG, so it can hardly have been cheaper to make.

Offi­cial movie MySpace page: www.myspace.com/diaryofthedead

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle Part 4: Land of the Dead

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The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle

Wel­come to The George A. Romero Zom­bie Cycle Film Fes­ti­val. Join The Dork Report in revis­it­ing all five canon­i­cal episodes in the orig­i­nal epic zom­bie saga:

Land of the Dead movie poster

 

George A. Romero’s spo­radic zom­bie flicks are some­times decades apart in pro­duc­tion, but nev­er­the­less form a chrono­log­i­cal sequence telling the story of the down­fall of soci­ety from every angle. Night of the Liv­ing Dead (1968) is set in the early days, with a few ran­dom civil­ians trapped in a farm­house. Dawn of the Dead (1979) zooms out a lit­tle to see what’s going on in cities and sub­ur­bia, and Day of the Dead (1985) exam­ines a final remain­ing pocket of sur­vivors months into the plague. Land of the Dead opens some time after the zom­bie epi­demic has swept the world, and the sur­viv­ing dregs of human­ity have retreated behind the for­ti­fied walls of the ulti­mate gated com­mu­nity, a city dubbed Fiddler’s Green. Romero has used each of his zom­bie films to satir­i­cally artic­u­late some social com­men­tary, and here his tar­gets seem to be big busi­ness and class war­fare. Another pos­si­ble alle­gor­i­cal tar­get is the Israel / Pales­tine con­flict. Have humans walled the zom­bies out, or walled them­selves in?

A man named Kauf­man (Den­nis Hop­per) has set him­self up as mayor/president/king of Fiddler’s Green. Kauf­man is very much a busi­ness­man along the lines of Don­ald Trump or Michael Bloomberg, so here Romero seems to equate big busi­ness with total­i­tar­i­an­ism. Kaufman’s machi­na­tions ensure that his sup­posed safe haven is actu­ally a highly tiered class soci­ety. The rich live in high-rise com­fort while the under­classes starve in skeezy street-level slums. We know soci­ety is truly depraved when caged go-go dancers are the only form of entertainment.

Eugene Clark in George A. Romero's Land of the Deadwet zom­bies smell like wet, uh, zombies

In the world out­side, the zom­bies have long since eaten all humans within reach, and have noth­ing left to do but stand around. Despite the big bud­get, there only seem to be about a dozen of them. Some have returned to old rou­tines: work­ing gas sta­tions, push­ing shop­ping carts, and bang­ing tam­bourines. Dawn of the Dead showed zom­bies instinc­tu­ally drawn to the shop­ping mall (a new Amer­i­can inno­va­tion at the time) like pil­grims to Mecca. But Land of the Dead Goes fur­ther and sug­gests they have even greater pow­ers of logic, and can feel actual emo­tions such as vic­tim­iza­tion. Their leader Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) is soul­ful and sym­pa­thetic like Bub the zom­bie from Day of the Dead.

Kauf­man sends min­ions Riley (Nathan Fil­lon) and Cholo (John Leguizamo) out into the infested waste­lands, in car­a­vans of heav­ily armored vehi­cles. They dis­tract the “stench” (the deroga­tory term of choice for the undead) with fire­works as they loot for food and valu­ables to cart back to stock Kaufman’s larders in Fiddler’s Green. Riley and Cholo are old friends since fallen out, and their rela­tion­ship pro­vides the one gen­uinely funny bit of dia­logue: happy-go-lucky Cholo tells the per­pet­u­ally dour Riley: “Didn’t I tell you not to bang chicks with worse prob­lems than you?” That’s not bad advice, actually.

The intel­li­gent zom­bies, appar­ently feel­ing dis­en­fran­chised, orga­nize and mount an attack on the city. Any­way, Riley and Cholo finally become dis­il­lu­sioned about Kaufman’s utopia. Together with Slack (Asia Argento, daugh­ter of Dario Argento, who col­lab­o­rated with Romero on Dawn of the Dead), they try to escape for the imag­ined safe haven of Canada (as if they think they are merely dodg­ing the draft and not the twin threats of plague and humanity’s own venal over­lords). In true Romero fash­ion, the vil­lain­ous Kauf­man also hap­pens to be a racist, shout­ing epi­thets at the zomb­i­fied Cholo (John Leguizom­bie?) as he comes to kill him. If there ever were a point in human his­tory when race will have truly become irrel­e­vant, this ought to be it.

Dennis Hopper in George A. Romeros' Land of the DeadDen­nis Hop­per as the mayor from hell, or is that the mayor OF hell?

I don’t think Romero and his zom­bie films would be remem­bered with­out the racially charged end­ing of Night of the Liv­ing Dead and the pointed satire of con­sumerism found in Dawn of the Dead. But if he had started out with some­thing as unfo­cused as Land of the Dead, he prob­a­bly wouldn’t have been. Romero admits to Par­al­lax view he didn’t fully work out the anal­ogy: “I have to tell you that even when we started to shoot, I was wor­ried that this isn’t quite clear. Who are the ter­ror­ists, is it Cholo and his gang or the zom­bies? And it gave me a lit­tle pause, but we had to start shoot­ing because we had the money. I’m being per­fectly hon­est, I have to sit down and re-analyze it and fig­ure it out. Some­times you just run on instinct.” Even the round­table of hor­ror afi­ciona­dos on InternalBleeding.net agree that the movie is “not scary, but really gross.”

Land of the Dead obvi­ously has the biggest bud­get of all of Romero’s zom­bie cycle so far, and remains the only one with well-known stars. But it is only super­fi­cially “bet­ter” than its pre­de­ces­sors, fea­tur­ing big­ger names and more tech­no­log­i­cal pol­ish. As is the case with many a Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tion, raised finan­cial stakes bring a low­er­ing of stan­dards and dimin­ish­ing returns: more money in, more shit out. A “some time ago…” pro­logue mon­tage illus­trates for the slower mem­bers of the audi­ence what zom­bies are all about. Per­haps the movie stu­dio exec­u­tives were pitch­ing the film to audi­ences beyond the usual hor­ror genre ghetto already versed with the zom­bie genre.

Offi­cial movie site: www.landofthedeadmovie.net

Homepageofthedead.com’s exten­sive archive of Land of the Dead info

Must read: The Light That Failed: George Romero’s Dead Rock On by Kath­leen Mur­phy; and George Romero Sur­veys the Dead by Sean Axmaker, both on Par­al­lax View

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle Part 3: Day of the Dead

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The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle

Wel­come to The George A. Romero Zom­bie Cycle Film Fes­ti­val. Join The Dork Report in revis­it­ing all five canon­i­cal episodes in the orig­i­nal epic zom­bie saga:

Day of the Dead movie poster

 

Day of the Dead (1985) is the third episode in George A. Romero’s con­tin­u­ing tale of civilization’s col­lapse in the event of a global zom­bie epi­demic. This and the big-budget Land of the Dead (2005) are tied for the worst entries in the series. What makes the first two (Night and Dawn) of merit is their sur­pris­ingly acute social satire, but here Romero loses his crit­i­cal focus in favor of gore and gen­eral unpleas­antry with lit­tle redeem­ing value.

After the ini­tial wave of undead in Night of the Liv­ing Dead and the col­lapse of cities and sub­ur­bia in Dawn of the Dead, Romero now jumps still for­ward in time. Sev­eral months into the zom­bie plague, a dozen humans hud­dle iso­lated in an under­ground bunker. Their fortress is suf­fi­cient to pro­tect them from the bar­bar­ians out­side the gates, but they have lost radio con­tact with the out­side world. They make occa­sional sor­ties to nearby cities via heli­copter, but encounter noth­ing but more hordes of zom­bies. For all they know, they are the last humans on the planet.

Lori Cardille in Day of the DeadWhen there’s no more room in hell, zom­bies will break through the sty­ro­foam walls

The dis­parate batch of sur­vivors in Night of the Liv­ing dead was essen­tially a cross-section of civ­i­liza­tion, but Romero nar­rows his focus here onto the mil­i­tary and sci­en­tific worlds. The humans trapped under­ground include three sci­en­tists, two civil­ians, and seven sol­diers. All of them are slowly los­ing their minds save for level-headed sci­en­tist Dr. Sarah Bow­man (Lori Cardille), valiantly research­ing a cure. As is now cus­tom­ary in Romero’s zom­bie flicks, Sarah is an atyp­i­cal pro­tag­o­nist for a hor­ror movie. The most capa­ble and sane char­ac­ter in Night of the Liv­ing Dead was a black man (Duane Jones), a huge deal for movies of any genre in 1968, and still rare now. Sarah is a woman, another social group his­tor­i­cally sub­ju­gated by soci­ety, not to men­tion typ­i­cally reduced to scream­ing eye candy in hor­ror movies.

The nerve-wracking 28 Days Later (2002), direc­tor Danny Boyle’s con­tri­bu­tion to the zom­bie genre, bor­rowed this sce­nario of an iso­lated batch of male sol­diers act­ing with­out com­mand, sur­rounded on all sides by hos­tile forces, and locked in a fortress with only one woman. Not sur­pris­ingly, things get ugly. To a one, the sol­diers are despi­ca­bly racist and illog­i­cal. But leader Cap­tain Rhodes (Joe Pilato) is actu­ally cor­rect about one key fact of their sit­u­a­tion: the head sci­en­tist they have been ordered to defer to is indeed totally mad. Dr. Matthew “Franken­stein” Logan (Richard Lib­erty) is more inter­ested in domes­ti­cat­ing zom­bies into slaves than he is in either cur­ing (as Sarah is try­ing to do) or erad­i­cat­ing them (as, nat­u­rally, the sol­diers would have it). His star lab rat is a cap­tive zom­bie dubbed Bub (Sher­man Howard). The chained and tor­tured Bob is sur­pris­ingly sym­pa­thetic, pos­si­bly even moreso than hero­ine Sarah. He’s also the first instance in Romero’s movies of an intel­li­gent, self-aware breed of zom­bie we won’t see again until twenty years later in Land of the Dead. But nei­ther film makes much of the con­cept of zom­bies as a new life form, as opposed to the clas­sic remorse­less adver­sary typ­i­cal for the genre.

Sherman Howard in Day of the DeadBub Zom­bie wants his MTV

As dis­cussed in The Dork Report’s review of Night of the Liv­ing Dead, one key aspect of the zom­bie genre that has fueled its con­tin­u­ing appeal over the years is that a plague is a great lev­eler. Every­one is vul­ner­a­ble to dis­ease. Every­one is equal after death (or is that undeath?), be they male or female, rich or poor, of any race. And for the sur­vivors, once soci­ety breaks down (and it always does when the undead walk the streets), all the money and crea­ture com­forts in the world become irrelevant.

Must read: Home­page of the Dead’s com­plete Day of the Dead archives, includ­ing the orig­i­nal script

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle Part 2: Dawn of the Dead

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The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle

Wel­come to The George A. Romero Zom­bie Cycle Film Fes­ti­val. Join The Dork Report in revis­it­ing all five canon­i­cal episodes in the orig­i­nal epic zom­bie saga:

Dawn of the Dead movie poster

 

Zom­bie god­fa­ther George A. Romero waited more than a decade to cre­ate Dawn of the Dead, the first sequel in his zom­bie cycle that would even­tu­ally num­ber five (soon to be six) install­ments. Night of the Liv­ing Dead was mar­keted under the tagline “They won’t stay dead,” which beau­ti­fully told audi­ences all they needed to know. Still, the mar­ket­ing teams behind Dawn of the Dead were able to find room for improve­ment and crafted the even more mem­o­rable “When there’s no room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.” Gone is the clas­sic oxy­moron “Liv­ing Dead.” Now and for the rest of Romero’s zom­bie movies, the foes are known sim­ply as “The Dead.”

Dawn of the Dead doesn’t fea­ture any char­ac­ters from the orig­i­nal film (unsur­pris­ing, as none of them made it through alive), but there’s no rea­son why it can’t be seen as tak­ing place about three weeks after the onset of the same plague wit­nessed by an iso­lated bunch of peo­ple in the Penn­syl­va­nia coun­try­side in the orig­i­nal film. This time around, we open in Cen­ter City Philadel­phia, as a dif­fer­ent batch of sur­vivors nobly keep a tele­vi­sion sta­tion oper­a­tional as soci­ety slowly col­lapses about them. Con­di­tions even­tu­ally break down in the stu­dio as well, and two of them self­ishly escape to seek safe ground via heli­copter. As they lift off, note the best image of all Romero’s zom­bie films: in the back­ground, lights eerily switch off floor-by-floor in a sky­scraper. In a rare case of art­ful restraint on Romero’s part, his cam­era lingers on the scene just long enough for it to register.

Dawn of the Deadbring­ing new mean­ing to the phrase “shop ’till you drop”

The team of sur­vivors includes two con­trast­ing pairs. Pilot Steve (David Emge) is the weak link in the group, while sta­tion man­ager Gaylen (Francine Parker) is the heart and brains. Two very dif­fer­ent SWAT com­man­dos throw their lot in with these civil­ians: the diminu­tive but ath­letic and enthu­si­as­tic Roger (Scott H. Reiniger), and the tall, quiet, and seri­ous Peter (Ken Foree). But together, the two sol­diers are more than the sum of their parts and man­i­fest lead­er­ship qual­i­ties. Echo­ing the social sub­text of the orig­i­nal film, race becomes irrel­e­vant (Peter is black and Roger is white) and the two become fast friends.

David Emge, Francine Parker, and Ken Foree in Dawn of the DeadGaylen, Steve, and Peter in their con­sumerist paradise

The four set down upon the roof of a sub­ur­ban shop­ping mall, a rel­a­tively new Amer­i­can inven­tion in 1979. They purge it of lin­ger­ing zom­bies and turn it into what is equal parts fortress and par­adise. It is here where one real­izes that Dawn of the Dead is prob­a­bly the most openly satir­i­cal of all Romero’s zom­bie movies. It’s impos­si­ble to miss the cri­tique of our mate­ri­al­ist con­sumer soci­ety, as these sur­vivors glee­fully take what­ever they want off the racks, for free. Even the stoic com­man­dos are thrilled by the oppor­tu­nity to go on an unlim­ited shop­ping spree. They live off fine wine and canned caviar as the bar­bar­ians are lit­er­ally at the gate. You know it’s the end of the world when shop­ping mall muzak is the sound­track for our heroes’ sys­tem­atic mass zom­bie slaugh­ter and corpse col­lec­tion. Infa­mous Ital­ian hor­ror direc­tor Dario Argento com­posed the sound­track as well as served as script consultant.

Scott H. Reiniger in Dawn of the DeadRoger is not a morn­ing per­son, it seems

Unfor­tu­nately, Dawn of the Dead fiz­zles with a weak end­ing, espe­cially com­pared to the piti­less con­clu­sion of Night of the Liv­ing Dead. Inter­nal strife and the zom­bie hordes assem­bling out­side are not their only prob­lems. A rag­tag car­a­van of road­war­rior sur­vivors arrive and dis­rupt the stale­mate. But the cen­tral con­sumerist satire still res­onates enough for the movie to have been effec­tively remade in 2004 by direc­tor Zack Sny­der, with­out Romero’s involvement.

Fan site: www.dawnofthedead.net

Must read: Inter­nal Bleed­ing Zom­bie Week ’08

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle Part 1: Night of the Living Dead

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The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle

Wel­come to The George A. Romero Zom­bie Cycle Film Fes­ti­val. Join The Dork Report in revis­it­ing all five canon­i­cal episodes in the orig­i­nal epic zom­bie saga:

Night of the Living Dead movie poster

 

I haven’t had the plea­sure of see­ing what is now rec­og­nized as the first zom­bie movie ever made: White Zom­bie (1932), star­ring none other than Bela Lugosi. But arguably, George A. Romero’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead (1968) is the actual zom­bie urtext. It pre­ceded the first of its four offi­cial sequels by almost a decade, but laid down the defin­i­tive tem­plate for the great flood of deriv­a­tives, remakes, homages, and ripoffs to come. Night of the Liv­ing Dead is in the pub­lic domain, and can be legally down­loaded for free from Archive.org.

If there is any doubt as to the endurance of the genre, check out Wikipedia’s com­pi­la­tion of over 300 zombie-themed fea­ture films. Zom­bies thrive online in the open-ended zom­bie nar­ra­tive Zom­bieAt­tack slowly unfold­ing on Twit­ter, and in online shrines to the undead like AllThingsZombie.com. Max Brooks has cor­nered the lit­er­ary zom­bie field with his books The Zom­bie Sur­vival Guide (2003) and World War Z (2006) (the first a dis­pos­able tri­fle, but the sec­ond a grip­ping tour de force). Zom­bies have invaded the Mar­vel Uni­verse comics, ironic t-shirts, and hacked road­work signs in Austin.

Night of the Living DeadBraaaaaaaaaaaaaains!

One may won­der about the men­tal health of such obses­sive zom­bie fans, but now that The Dork Report is host­ing a Romero Zom­bie Cycle film Fes­ti­val, I must now count myself among them. Also, the word “zom­bie” is just kind of fun to say. Zom­bie, zom­bie, zom­bie. Per­haps sens­ing the recent spike in the zom­bie zeit­geist, Romero him­self has picked up the pace of his zom­bie cycle, adding fresh new entries in 2005 and 2007, with yet another planned for the near future.

What exactly is the appeal? The basic zom­bie con­ceit is uncom­pli­cated. Indeed, the Night of the Liv­ing Dead mar­ket­ing tagline “They won’t stay dead!” pretty much says it all. Sim­ply, any and all dead peo­ple (no mat­ter what the man­ner of their expi­ra­tion) will inevitably come back to life as unthink­ing, unfeel­ing, car­niv­o­rous mon­sters. There’s some­thing pure to Romero’s orig­i­nal con­cept, with­out the com­plex­i­ties added by later zom­bie sto­ries. Hor­ror and sci­ence fic­tion blog io9 posits that war and social upheaval cor­re­late with spikes in zom­bie movie pro­duc­tion. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), for­ever retooled the zom­bie con­cept for a world obsessed with con­ta­gious dis­eases (SARS, AIDS), and the essen­tially ani­mal­is­tic bad­ness of human nature (tor­ture, ter­ror­ism). Boyle’s zom­bies don’t want to eat; they are just plain mad.

Night of the Living DeadThis is how you do The Mon­ster Mash

Romero’s zom­bies have some rudi­men­tary intel­li­gence and are able to open doors, employ sim­ple tools like blud­geons, and are afraid of fire. But they have no rem­nants of their for­mer mem­o­ries or per­son­al­i­ties, and exist only to sup upon the liv­ing. Com­mon to nearly every zom­bie tale is that an epi­demic effects a break­down of soci­etal order, be it on a micro (such as the clas­sic hor­ror movie sce­nario of a few sur­vivors locked in a farm­house in Night of the Liv­ing Dead) or macro scale (wit­ness the total col­lapse of civ­i­liza­tion in Brooks’ novel World War Z). There’s a basic pes­simism inher­ent in the genre; every­thing we regard as human is frag­ile. Faced with zom­bie hordes, the liv­ing turn on each other, cut and run, or totally shut down.

Romero & John A. Russo’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead screen­play includes some pseudo-scientific tech­nob­a­b­ble con­cern­ing a return­ing space probe con­t­a­m­i­nated with radi­a­tion from Venus, but for all intents and pur­poses the ori­gin of the phe­nom­e­non is irrel­e­vant to the story. Later zom­bie films would intro­duce the con­cept of a blood-transmitted virus, but it is irrel­e­vant here whether or not any vic­tim is con­t­a­m­i­nated by a germs or extrater­res­trial radi­a­tion. Merely dying is all it takes to become a mon­ster. In a way, Romero’s orig­i­nal con­cep­tion of the zom­bie, absent of any plague metaphor, is the bleak­est of all vari­ants. Human soci­ety will be for­ever changed in a world in which even those that die nat­u­rally will have to be decap­i­tated before they revive as beastly ghouls.

Duane Jones in Night of the Living DeadBen (Duane Jones) greets the undead hordes

Like all of Romero’s zom­bie flicks, Night of the Liv­ing Dead is set in the Pitts­burgh, PA area (except Day of the Dead, which is the odd one out for many rea­sons to be dis­cussed in the forth­com­ing Dork Report review). The open­ing sequence is set in grave­yard lit­tered with Amer­i­can flags, per­haps meant as a silent allu­sion to the vast num­bers of fresh corpses being sent back from the Viet­nam War. A ran­dom assort­ment of sur­vivors bar­ri­cade them­selves in a farm­house. Romero tells Parallax-view.org that the cast and crew actu­ally lived in that farm­house while film­ing: “We had no bread. We were lit­er­ally sleep­ing out of that farm­house, chop­ping ice out of the tank behind the toi­let bowl in order to wash our faces, and we were tak­ing baths out in the creek.”

In the best hor­ror movie tra­di­tion, we have a cross-section of soci­ety with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of every gen­der, age, class, and race: a trau­ma­tized woman, a young cou­ple, a clas­sic nuclear fam­ily, and a lone black man. For all intents and pur­poses, their var­i­ous social stand­ings are erased as they all must unite to defend them­selves against a com­mon foe. Ben (Duane Jones) proves him­self the most intel­li­gent, sane, and capa­ble of the bunch. But the humans can barely agree on any­thing, and expend most of their energy on infight­ing. One sus­pects that they wouldn’t be able to get along even with­out the zom­bie hordes assem­bling outside.

Night of the Liv­ing Dead is noto­ri­ous for remain­ing unrated by the MPAA, proudly show­cas­ing a con­sid­er­able amount of gore (and even a lit­tle nude zom­bie der­rière) unprece­dented in 1968. But I think it’s fair to say that the true rea­son the movie is remem­bered as more than a cheapie hor­ror flick is its African Amer­i­can pro­tag­o­nist. Of supe­rior intel­li­gence and matu­rity than every­one else, he alone (spoiler alert!) sur­vives while the rest of the gang self-destructs. But unbe­knownst to him, author­i­ties have mobi­lized to sweep the coun­try­side in order to exe­cute any and all sham­bling zom­bies. It’s impos­si­ble to ignore this group’s resem­blance to a lynch mob of the white male estab­lish­ment, bear­ing scythes and hunt­ing rifles. Given this sce­nario, one might pre­dict the pow­er­ful, racially charged end­ing. In an inter­est­ing styl­is­tic choice, the final sequence is told as a pho­tomon­tage, a series of still images show­ing us the tragic after­math of what hap­pens when the sup­pos­edly civ­i­lized “liv­ing” are given free reign to indulge in their bloodlust.

Free down­load: Archive.org

Must read: Inter­nal Bleed­ing Zom­bie Week ’08

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Omega Man

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The Omega Man movie poster

 

Now that’s a good intro: Robert Neville (Charl­ton Hes­ton) cruises through an empty city with the top down. It’s eerie, but he seems happy, groov­ing to jazz from his onboard 8-track cas­sette deck. But sud­denly! Screech! Ka-pow! He brakes, pro­duces a machine gun and fires at a fleet­ing humanoid sil­hou­ette. A strik­ing mon­tage fol­lows of a des­o­lated, deserted city.

Hes­ton was once known as a lib­eral, and here his char­ac­ter enter­tains an inter­ra­cial romance (with afro-licious Ros­alind Cash) no more com­mon in movies now than it was in 1971. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s now impos­si­ble to take Hes­ton seri­ously, thanks to Phil Hartman’s clas­sic mock­ery on Sat­ur­day Night Live and to Heston’s own Alzheimer’s-fueled descent into right-wing senility.

Charlton Heston in The Omega ManAl Gore can take my gun from my cold, dead hands

Inter­est­ingly, Heston’s oeu­vre is dom­i­nated by dystopian sci-fi: Planet of the Apes, The Ωmega Man, and Soy­lent Green form a tril­ogy of apoc­a­lyp­tic despair. Remakes of Apes (by Tim Bur­ton) and Ωmega (Wil Smith’s I Am Leg­end) made him nearly obso­lete even before he died. Can Soy­lent Green (which is, inci­den­tally, much bet­ter than its rep­u­ta­tion sug­gests) be far behind?

Com­pared to the bes­tial vam­pires that pop­u­late I Am Leg­end, the crea­tures in The Ωmega Man are an intel­li­gent, religous cult. They don’t attack Neville with tech­nol­ogy (like, say, shoot him) sim­ply because they choose not to.

Charlton Heston in The Omega ManIs the last man on earth man enough?

As for enter­tain­ment in a time before VHS, the last man alive on earth is stuck with what­ever hap­pened to be in the the­aters at the time; he screens the con­cert film Wood­stock over and over. As for The Ωmega Man’s own music, the orches­tral jazz pop score is not just out­dated, but bizarrely inappropriate.

The cru­ci­fix­ion pose at the end is a bit much. I didn’t expect much sub­tlety, but that’s lay­ing it on a bit thick.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Shaun of the Dead

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Shaun of the Dead movie poster

 

For most of it, I thought for sure Shaun of the Dead was a four-starrer, but it lost its way at some point. I’m not sure exactly of the tran­si­tion point, but I felt that the tone had changed too dras­ti­cally by the time the char­ac­ters were trapped in the pub (in other words, I had stopped laugh­ing). Until that point, I was totally lov­ing it, par­tic­u­larly a newscaster’s descrip­tion of the zom­bies as “sham­bolic.” It became a bit nasty and grim (sons blow­ing their undead mum’s brains out), and then veered back to whimsy at the end. But all that said, it’s remark­able that despite all the humor, satire, and melo­drama, it’s still an honest-to-goodness zom­bie movie.

Did you spot the vir­tu­ally word­less cameo by Arthur De– I mean, Mar­tin Freeman?