Tuesday, November 21st, 2006
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Horrorthon Posts / Horrorthon Reviews
The zombies are better. There’s no question about that.
Day started very strong, with the helicopter-level view of the blasted-out landscape and the much-improved zombies staggering around. The subsequent portion introducing the setup in the underground base was intriguing and suspenseful, and the mad doctor trying to “domesticate” the zombies (having tacitly given up on solving or understanding the underlying problem) was an interesting concept.
But the movie started to lose my interest about halfway through, when the scenery-chewing Joe Pilato starts laying down his ultimata to everyone. It wasn’t so much tht the narrative cohesion got sloppy (although it did, for the first time in a Dead picture, in my opinion) but the complete stupidity of the military personnel grated on me as being simply not plausible. Romero (like Stephen King) has proven himself as having a masterful skill at conveying how panic and disorder overtakes the discipline of human behavior, and he showed this brilliantly in the first two movies, but here, it seemed to fall flat. Compare the solders in The Stand, throughout the entire first third of the book, in the “Ray Flowers” sequence as well as in the underground base, to see a vastly superior handling of the same idea.
The freaked-out soldier who sabotages the elevator and lets the zombies in made no sense to me. It seemed like pure plot device. In general, the behavior of everyone in the movie was bothering me. How far along in the zombie crisis do you have to be before you get this level of anarchy and chaos? It’s interesting that Day of the Dead came out a year before Aliens, since the two movies have a more than passing resemblance (with the group of ineffectual military types and the tough female civilian who out-classes them in various ways). But the soldiers in this movie make the soldiers in Aliens look like the world’s most perfect commando team—and the whole point of Cameron’s movie is that the military order breaks down almost immediately and it takes a civilian mind to organize them into a fighting force that has some kind of a chance. Captain Rhodes and his cronies are miserably stupid fools, and come off like reluctantly conscripted bums rather than the kind of trained personnel you’d find in circumstances like these.
I liked “Bub” until he got angry over “Frankenstein’s” corpse, because I just felt that was really pushing it. If they’re that smart, intrinsically, the entire premise starts to wobble and come apart. I’ve watched the climax of Dawn a few times and the final ten minutes of Stephen’s (“Flyboy’s”) existence (like the last minute of David Naughton’s werewolf-life, where it seems for a moment that he recognizes Jenny Agutter before jumping towards her) is heartbreaking and shocking at the same time. Stephen retained just enough of his marbles to tear through that wall they’d built, which (like almost everything in Dawn) resonates with symbolism and tragedy and horror. “Bub’s” confrontation with Captain Rhodes was of the far-more-conventional “just deserts” variety, designed to get the audience cheering as an unlikable character gets his.
Other points:
1) There weren’t nearly enough “good guys” coming back as zombies! In fact, were there any? It seems to me that that’s the whole point (or at least a major portion of it), just like in vampire movies. I kept waiting for one of the two murdered male scientists to come out of the woodwork, but they never did.
2) Can you really tear someone’s skin off with your fingernails? Or decapitate a man just by giving his head a good yank? Can a human body be pulled apart like that, just using one’s fingers? The zombies aren’t super-strong or anything; that’s proven every time a live person shoves them away or hits them with a plank to immobilize them. But, somehow, they manage to completely disembowel and dismember living people with just a few pawing motions. (Captain Rhodes in particular comes apart about as easily as a badly-made sandwich.)
3) In general, the visual production wasn’t nearly as fine as it was the last two times around. Granted, the Savini effects were vastly superior (despite the “easy-open” people mentioned above) but the compositional flair and masterful cutting rhythms of the first two movies seemed much more mediocre here.
4) When someone’s spraying machine gun fire at a crowd of advancing zombies (and, inevitably, going “Yeeaarrghh”), why don’t they spray the bullets at the zombie’s heads rather than across their midsections, which doesn’t even slow them down?
5) The entire world has been overrun by zombies and the movie has to resort to dream sequences to scare me? Maybe I’m overreacting but I hate surprise dream sequences. (I mentioned Aliens, which has its own unnecessary dream sequence at the beginning). There’s just got to be better ways to scare me than that. (I give a break to An American Werewolf in London because the dream sequences are so good, and because they convey something important to the story.)
6) So it’s November 4th. (Final shot of the film.) So what?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is basically the kind of thing I was expecting from Romero movies in general (before I saw the first two zombie pictures): a series of set pieces designed to show off Tom Savini’s talents at making anatomy come messily apart. I think the people who say “no thank you” to this kind of movie are picturing something like this.
By contrast, I have to emphasize again just how brilliant and innovative (and meaningful) the first two movies are. Night and Dawn are landmarks, each deserving its place in cinema history in its own way. This movie is something altogether different. Yes, we get more of the story, and the essential concept (underground bunker where they’re desperately trying to solve the problem) is sound, but a little more Andromeda Strain and a little less Friday the 13th would have made a tremendous difference.
Friday, November 17th, 2006
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Horrorthon Posts
I’m posting this because it’s absolutely horrifying, and because it’s germaine to the site: critics of horror movies and violent video games etc. are constantly remarking that violent entertainment “desensitizes” people to actual violence. I say bullshit (and always have) and I offer as a case in point the just-posted You-tube video of the UCLA tasering incident, in which an American college student with a muslim-sounding name and dark skin is tasered by campus security once he’s been handcuffed. The video (which I offer without the slightest trace of “voyeuristic intention” as Magenta put it in Rocky Horror) still has me shaking, because the screams are real.
It’s different when it’s real. Even we, who enthusiastically devour bloody movies at the rate of hundreds a month (if we get to pick the month) understand this. Link to the YouTube video.
“Here’s your fucking Patriot Act!” he screams. Absolutely terrifying.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006
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Horrorthon Posts
I’m not sure what kind of Horrorthon post this is—whether it’s a review or just a normal post like we do when it’s not October—but I just read Stephen King’s Cell and I wanted to talk about it and see if any of you fine gentlemen had read it.
As far as Horrorthon’s recent posts, what’s especially germaine about Cell is that King openly acknowledges a rather large debt to George A. Romero, whose “Dead” movies are clearly the major influence here. King has a habit of sheepishly admitting his source material by having the characters talk about it (like, say, the group in ‘Salem’s Lot comparing the English teacher dude to “Van Helsing”) and in Cell we have quite a few references to Dawn of the Dead and once nice reference to Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, which Cell also resembles quite strongly (in a very good way).
Obviously I have nothing but good things to say about Spielberg’s brilliant and terrifying ode to H. G. Wells, which seems to become more of a masterpiece every time I watch it or think about it. (I recommend the essay in The New York Review of Books on Spielberg; I’ll find the link later, if I feel like it.) But I want to also add that I just watched Night of the Living Dead (which I’d seen, long ago, a couple of times) and then Dawn of the Dead, which is stunning, brilliant, unique, amazing. I had never seen if before and I’m just astonished at how good it is, and the wonderful way it incorporates all the best elements of 1970s cinema. It’s so good that I have to re-orient my thinking about horror fiction and horror movies in general, and, of course, that’s where Cell comes in, because if anyone’s going to use George A. Romero to re-orient their thinking about horror fiction, why not have it be Stephen King?
Spielberg, King, Romero, H.G. Wells: these authors and many others are all dancing around a central idea which is clearly a vital armature of horror: that which has been called “apocalyptic fiction” or “dystopian fiction” (although the first term is more accurate: “dystopian” sci-fi tends to drift in the direction of, “Okay, it’s after a big nuclear war” etc. etc. and we all immediately fall asleep because the only remaining cultural value of that train of thought might be Charlton Heston kneeling in the sand, bellowing).
I have an essay by J. G. Ballard (British sci-fi author; wrote the semiautobiographical Empire of the Sun) (more Spielberg) about apocalyptic fiction, wherein he presents an essentially Freudian or Jungian analysis about dreams and destruction and the point at which the infant learns to tell the difference between itself and the rest of the universe: Ballard argues that sci-fi writers blow up the Earth or whatever because they tap into an impulse that precedes this development—a pre-Coopernican tantrum that brings down cities in flame, if you will. I prefer to think that the point of it all isn’t tantrums but adult people; the strength of Dawn of the Dead and War of the Worlds (Spielberg or Wells) and The Stand and Cell is the examination of the human soul, pushed past all conventional modes of psychic endurance into a rarefied atmosphere of hyper-intensified emotion and meaning. If it’s all gone, then what’s left? Characters in apocalyptic fiction are our surrogates or proxies, answering these questions for us so that, when we awaken into reality and look out the window at the un-interrupted, normal fabric of reality, it looks a little different, hopefully in an enlightening way.
There’s another appealing level of meaning here in that the protagonist of Cell is an author of graphic novels—and this isn’t just an amusing character detail: it’s actually quite vital to the plot.
Anyway, Cell is probably the best King I’ve read in a long, long time (certainly better than any of his “grumpy old jerks in Maine and the troubled writer who’s getting on in years but remembers Vietnam” efforts). I haven’t read the last three Dark Tower volumes, although that’s really an entirely different brand of vodka (as Danny Ocean would say). It’s great to read a King novel in which he’s dishing up the blood and gore and violence and fear without apologizing for it or trying to win the Booker Prize again (although he deserved it). It’s great to read a King novel that doesn’t completely fall apart two thirds of the way through—one for which he clearly sat down beforehand and figured out what the hell he was trying to do. The beginning of Cell may be a bit rusty, and I wasn’t too hopeful going in (especially since I believe almost all of Everything’s Eventual to be re-fried garbage) but boy, does he get his mojo working along the way.
Have any of you gentlemen read this book? I’d love to go into more detail about it. (And, by the way, DON’T GIVE AWAY THE ENDING OF DAWN OF THE DEAD because I decided to put off watching the final, undoubtably shocking and incredible 35 minutes of the movie in order to read Cell, which was probably a good idea. You can’t double-dip this stuff; it doesn’t work.)
I’ll leave you with the excellent frontispiece epigraphs from Cell, which are vintage King:
The id will not stand for a delay in gratification. It always feels the tension of the unfulfilled urge.
SIGMUND FREUD
Human aggression is instinctual. Humans have not evolved any ritualized aggression-inhibiting mechanisms to ensure the survival of the species. For this reason man is considered a very dangerous animal.
KONRAD LORENZ
Can you hear me now?
VERIZON
