Body Count: Volume 2

I was recently asked to write a horror script that would be produced by a local group that’s trying the Sam Raimi/Robert Rodriguez means of raising money for real features by making schlocky b-pictures as a revenue source. They’re hell bent on producing a zombie picture because everyone seems to have a boner for zombies these days. I also recently wrote an article in praise of Robert Kirkman’s bleak-as-hell but amazing zombie horror comic, The Walking Dead, and in the process of putting it all together, it occurred to me that even though I had spent 1,500 words praising the weight of the book’s setting, characterizations and art, I was absolutely sick to death of zombies. Aren’t you?

I posed the question to my Twitter pool. Have zombies jumped the shark? Rather, if you follow Lucio Fulci’s logic, have zombies eaten the shark? The net result was a casual dismissal of the notion of zombies getting old. As bored as I am with dreary apocalypse stories and gory but silly riffs on the Dead Alive (aka Braindead) routine, there’s still a ravenous legion of fans out there that will watch anything zombie related. My ho-hum review of the recent Norwegian hype festival, Dead Snow, stoked the ire of many zombie fans who couldn’t believe that I wasn’t balls out ecstatic over it because, hey! Nazi zombies, dude! You love zombies!

This is, in fact, inaccurate. Everyone assumes that because I run a website dedicated to horror movies (another inaccuracy), that I’m automatically dedicated to the genre because they happen to be the flavor of the month, or decade depending on how you look at it. There are certainly reasons for zombies being so popular now. Waves of social and cultural symbolism bring certain monsters in and out of fashion all the time, but the zombie and everything that it represents has a certain post-industrial revolution vibe that will forever be relevant. Rampant, mindless consumerism, our innate mob mentality and an ever widening generation gap that threatens to consume the establishment are a series of concepts that have been around since the 60′s and are more or less here to stay. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we, as horror fans, have to tolerate the sea of cut-rate bullshit that saturates the present horror market. Even George Romero can’t seem to pull out anything fresh or original these days and he’s the guy who started this whole mess! Did you actually see Diary of the Dead? What the fuck was that all about? Land of the Dead practically punches you in the face repeatedly with its ham-fisted message about class warfare! There’s a festering pit of garbage out there with its hand in the cookie jar, a whole cottage industry of zombie horror or zombie-derivative horror that has its merits but is mostly a flawed old whore.

I find myself occasionally captivated by a fresh take on the very tired formula and even though my belief is firm that all the good zombie movies have been made, I’m always happy to find myself proven wrong from time to time when I find something that I haven’t seen before. Case in point, Shaun of the Dead. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg genuinely understand the zombie movie. They made a movie that was, at its heart, a love story and put the focus, for the most part, on the lengths that Shaun would go to win back the love of his girlfriend, Liz. The zombies were simply a catalyst for a series of extremely funny situations and a means of getting from Shaun and Ed’s apartment to the Winchester. And somewhere in the third act, the movie loses the funny and becomes an actual zombie horror movie.

If you look hard enough online, you can find a pilot for a TV show that nearly had a network run called Babylon Fields, which put people in a situation similar to The Rapture where suddenly the dead came back to life but rather than clawing at your doors and windows with a hunger for your flesh, these corpses only meant to resume their old lives. It was a clever cash-in on the popularity of scripted genre-oriented dramas dominating networks right now but it was also far too abstract and morbid for the average Nielsen Family.

Original twists on the zombie aren’t necessarily locked in to television and movies, either, people. Three websites are offering Joe User an opportunity to be a part of the production and allowing the mob to steer the plot of a larger story in whatever direction they choose. Lost Zombies (link to www.lostzombies.com), who just won best community website at the recent South By Southwest interactive festival allows anyone who wants to to jump in and submit their man on the street videos of the zombie apocalypse in action. Nation Undead (link to www.nationundead.com) throws aside the notion that this is real and asks you to submit fictional narratives that work within a system of rules based on where in the country you base your movies. Finally, if you have the artistic touch and feel like animating, Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated (link to www.notldr.com) is an animated remake, shot for shot, using the original film’s soundtrack of George Romero’s classic movie. Methods of animation range from traditional cell animation to puppets to a segment made with the Half Life 2 sandbox, Garry’s Mod.

Zombies probably aren’t going anywhere any time soon but the ease with which the movies are made and the fantasy shared by so many people to make their own zombie movie means that we are going to be inundated with trash made by people who have no business making movies. There’s good zombie media out there, it just means that you have to dig deeper to find it.

End rant.

Bryan White
Editor, Cinema Suicide
bryan@cinema-suicide.com
@CinemaSuicide on Twitter
http://www.cinema-suicide.com

Horror. The much maligned, hard partying, estranged uncle of cinema. Being the reasonably presentable professional that I am by day, it often shocks people that I, a man in his thirties of above-average intelligence devotes such a large portion of his free time mentally cataloguing some of the worst movies ever committed to celluloid and video tape. Be they actual bad movies by definition, which I make no secret of my love affair with, or movies that once you see them, you can never unsee them, for instance the recent French ‘pregnant woman in peril’ shocker, L’Interieur. The point I’m trying to make in such a roundabout way is that it’s easy to dismiss horror based entirely on its mainstream representatives and hordes of jackasses paying out the nose at horror cons for Misty Mundae’s autograph.

In spite of wave after wave of remakes from a studio system bankrupt of all creativity and harboring a deep contempt for the genre that makes them so much god damn money, not to mention a legion of fans who have enough fishnet and Insane Clown Posse shirts to ensure that they never wear the same outfit twice, horror is a very layered, complex and often challenging genre. And you don’t necessarily have to sit through Guy Maddin movies to find them. I blog often and have such a big mouth that I’ll evangelize the intellectual properties of horror movie x to just about anyone who will listen. As a matter of fact, it’s too late for you, you’re knee deep in said evangelism.

You don’t necessarily have to look far to find a horror movie that won’t insult your intelligence, unless you’re out for that sort of thing, which sadly, I sometimes am. I could spend time talking up the arthouse qualities of the extremely creepy Turkish vampire movie, Karanlik Sular, but it can be a bit difficult to track down (Onar Films has it) but you may not be into the great internet hunt for hidden treasures like I am. You may just want to find something that you can throw on your Netflix queue right now. To sate that desire, I recommend the following features.

Day of the Dead
Director: George A. Romero
1985
These days, Romero is practically a household name and if you’re as sick of the persistent zombie wave dominating low-budget horror today as I am, you have this man to blame. Romero did zombies on tiny budgets and made it look easy but what set his indies apart from the dreck of the status quo was a signature quality of social examination in his movies. Beginning with 1968′s Night of the Living Dead, Romero weaved a subtext of social anxiety that is no stranger to the genre but had never been handled before with such grace and subtlety. By 1985, Romero had honed his craft to the point that the message was still there, but what, exactly, he was trying to point out by way of gory zombie movie became ambiguous. Day of the Dead is an examination of American culture circa 1985. Namely, the cultural argument between the right and the left. What many forget is how close we were to doomsday during the Reagan years and it’s no accident that the movie takes place during humanity’s last days. What could possibly be the last handful of survivors ironically living in a nuclear missile silo spend their time fighting with one another over each side’s proposed solution to their problem. Critics of the movie point out how talky Day is and they’re right. For a Romero zombie movie, following up the action-packed comic book of Dawn of the Dead (truth be told, Day follows Creepshow), features mostly people yelling at one another and very little time is spent shooting zombies but we’re talking about stimulating horror. Of Romero’s zombie movies, I find myself going back to this one time and time again. Not only is it the most interesting and thought provoking of the four movies to me (Diary of the Dead is reboot) it’s also the nastiest with the most explicit violence to grace a Romero zombie movie thus far. The bar has never been higher.

Videodrome
Director: David Cronenberg
1983
A good intellectual shocker needs to do one thing more than anything else. It needs to remain relevant year after year and Videodrome, though certainly dated, has a message about the media that matters now more than ever. Not only is Videodrome David Cronenberg’s finest moment it’s one of the sharpest explorations of fantasy, reality and the line where the two blur. Make no mistake, the movie is completely disgusting and extremely confusing, to boot, but both of these are deliberate and necessary elements. It features a solid dose of Cronenberg’s patented body horror but what you’re really supposed to be wondering is at what point does television begin dictating reality? The proliferation of cable in the early 80′s meant a huge wave of options in entertainment and today we have 100 times the options our parents had back then. We live saturated in media, particularly channels broadcasting fresh content 24 hours a day. Namely, news channels and it is evident that no matter the network, each one is spinning the news to become infotainment. It not only cheapens the information coming at you but it mutates the message and dumbs the news down by explaining everything to you. Though James Woods jams a videotape into the pulsating vagina in his abdomen and later shoots a man with a cancer bullet, Videodrome holds your head under the water while you take all of this in. It’s absolutely grotesque and obscure but a powerful movie that asks an awful lot of its viewer.

Let The Right One In
Director: Tomas Alfredson
2008
Not all the good horror came out in the 70′s and 80′s. As a matter of fact, one of the freshest, most stimulating horror flicks I caught in a very long time hit the world stage in ’08. Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of the novel Let The Right One In was bathed in hype as the movie made the festival rounds and for good reason, it is one of the most challenging, troubling movies that I have ever seen. On the surface it looks like two things. It’s either a vampire movie or a very violent teen romance. Beneath the surface, though, is a complicated, deeply disturbing feature that doesn’t pack all the horror into a simple monster movie. There’s plenty of vampire attacks in this movie but the horror doesn’t end there. It wraps a bitter sweet love story in tragedy, isolation and suffering. It presents the questionable relationship between 12 year old vampire Eli and her caretaker Hakan and then asks you to consider Oskar’s role in all of this as the credits roll. Are they actually in love? Is she a manipulative animal? When will Oskar kill for the first time? It’s an uneasy flick that asks an awful lot of difficult questions. It is distinctly European and as such asks a lot more of the viewer than one of its American counterparts might. Let The Right One In is presently on the remake block because hey, everybody hates subtitles, right? Catch this one before American studios compromise everything that made the original Swedish version such a powerfully haunting movie.

- Bryan White

Body Count: Volume 14

I was recently asked by Horrorblips to chime in on a debate subject that they occasionally ask of their busiest syndicated bloggers. Last time they asked me which of the summer’s horror movies I thought would perform best at the box office and I took the opportunity to slag on Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake sequel since as much as I dislike Rob Zombie and as awful as I’m sure his movie will be, it’s going to kick ass at making money. Yesterday they hit me with yet another opportunity to deal the dirt to Rob Zombie and I just couldn’t pass it up. The question was a simple one with only one correct answer. Sure, they thought they were asking a nice open ended question for discussion, but they’re just being naive because when they ask whose Michael Myers was scarier, John Carpenter or Rob Zombie, the only logical answer any sane person could provide is John Carpenter. If you say Rob Zombie, you’re wrong. I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but you’re wrong.

I gave them a quick opinion about it but I really felt as though it would make a nice topic for the B-Count because the movie is due in theaters shortly and I also haven’t filed a new Bodycount in quite some time. I’m also a die-hard fan of John Carpenter and I love Halloween, Carpenter’s model for the inevitable slasher movie wave of the early 1980′s. I also have rather strong opinions of Halloween and along with The Film Fiend, had one of the first reviews of the remake to hit the web. Rob Zombie fans were unhappy with my review, which was a wishy washy Polyannaish look at a movie that I later deemed to be a fatal piece of shit. Believe me, I will separate and weigh the ingredients, shortly, as to why I feel that way. But let me start with the positive.

As if I really need to explain why Carpenter’s Michael Myers is the superior Shape… Let’s cast aside the obvious trump card that Carpenter’s Myers is the original and assume that both exist in the same continuity. Let’s also ignore the numerous sequels. I’m a purist and we really need to compare apples to apples here.

If there’s one thing that appeals to me about Carpenter’s Michael Myers, it’s the simple fact that he has no driving motivation. As far as we know, Myers was wired wrong from the start. His family seems to be your typical suburban nuclear family. We can make no asusmptions about them because they’re in the movie for a very brief spell, but there is nothing about them to suggest that the Myers home is a sociopath factory. There is no talk of abuse, neglect or alcoholism. Michael could be anyone you know. The Myers family could be the people who live next to you and that’s where I find most of my anxiety. There could be a brutal, unfeeling spree killer living right next to you and until he strikes, you’ll never suspect it. There is cold, efficient evil living in the ‘burbs and it has a face just like yours until it covers that face with a crude mold of William Shatner and hits the streets looking for victims without much in the way of criteria to qualify you as their victim. This is good stuff and part of the point Carpenter is trying to make with the movie. All these notions of morality and punishment that people wheel out in the face of every slasher movie when the virginal final girl faces down the killer in the end are unfounded.

Rob Zombie’s Shape, however, is the product of a culture that over-analyzes everything. Zombie pins a Freudian back-story on Michael that does a few things that are worrisome. For a guy whose entire career is saturated in evil, a cross between drive-in horror movies and true crime novels, Rob Zombie can’t seem to accept the possibility that some people are just born evil. He also calls on us as viewers to sympathize with Myers because his mom was a stripper, her boyfriend an abusive drunk and his sister a negligent slut. We were supposed to feel somehow vindicated when Michael finally snapped and made them all pay while accompanied by a classic Nazareth track. Every fan of slasher movies has a favorite killer but we don’t root for them because of some tragic past that we somehow identify with, we root for them because their movies have them creatively dispatching and cutting to ribbons a gallery of ditzy coeds. No one feels bad for Jason Voorhees because he saw his mother decapitated and no one certainly feels any sympathy for Freddy Krueger, a child murderer that was originally scripted to be a pedophile. So why should I give a shit about Michael Myers? I don’t want to shed a tear for him. I want to be afraid of him and Rob Zombie’s Shape just doesn’t scare me.

Each version of Myers is stacked with super powers. It’s just that one director equipped him with measure in order to sow some tension and terror into the movie. He’s always right behind you even though it looks like he never breaks into even so much as a brisk walk. There’s also the matter of taking a couple of bullets and falling out of a window where he gets up and manages to strike again. True, it’s preposterous but when compared to Rob Zombie’s version of Meyers, this scrawny kid who spends his childhood, adolescence and a portion of his adult life in a cramped cell in a psychiatric hospital where he is shown making a variety of masks and not once shown working out, we’re supposed to believe that he magically grows up to be a pro-wrestling grade behemoth capable of breaking steel chains? That’s just stupid.

Though, it took me a thousand words to explain to you the obvious, John Carpenter’s Michael Myers is the winner of the fight. Neither killer is particularly believable but Carpenter is a filmmaker and a storyteller and made all the right moves to deliver a standout killer in the model for slasher movies to come. Rob Zombie is just a horror movie fan that, thanks to a successful career in rock, suddenly found himself in the position, with the influence and funds to fulfill his teenage fantasy of pretending to be John Carpenter. The end product of his fantasy was a poorly scripted and acted movie that is even more embarassing when compared, side-by-side, to the original.

Glass Eye Pix has been hanging around for a while with a bunch of pictures in development for what seems like forever and now it would seem that many of these movies are finally coming to the fore all at once. House Of The Devil is now making festival rounds, Satan Hates You is just on the horizon and I Can See You is coming to DVD, shortly. Their production ethic is something that all independent producers should aspire to and because of said ethic, they’re on their way to becoming the model of the contemporary independent production house with some of the most original movies I’ve ever seen.

From a young age, Arthur Blake was robbing graves with his partner, Willie Grimes and they garnered quite the reputation around town. The problem is that as the movie begins, they’re answering for their crimes. Among them, an erronious accusation of murder that lands Willie in the guillotine, shortly thereafter sans head. Arthur is up next, but he is first being visited by a priest who will document his last confession. His confession includes details of his grave robbing exploits that begjn with simple bodysnatching but somehow leads to a world of vampires, zombies and aliens and a rivalry with a group of super criminals called The House Of Murphy.

I Sell The Dead just can’t go wrong. It’s a solid black comedy with what is one of the best scripts of the year interpreted by an inspired cast that includes Glass Eye captain, Larry Fessenden as Willie Grimes, Dominic Monaghan of Lord of the Rings and LOST, horror legend, Angus Scrimm of the Phantasm series and Ron “Hellboy” Perlman. Operating on the budget of your average low-budget picture, I Sell The Dead wears what little resources it has with style. Pulling off a proper period picture, particularly on this scale, is often hard to do with little money and where it substitutes actual sets for Victorian looking CGI, it does well. At times, it deliberately looks like it may have been torn from a comic where at others, it looks as though Hammer Films has had it’s hands all over it. Though changing up wildly in theme from scene, I Sell The Dead maintains a consistent Gothic Victorian tone.

It’s funny, too.

Don’t be fooled. Comedy is hard and the people who are good at it are being paid handsomely to make you laugh at unfunny people. It’s the rarest treat when a good laugh comes out of the low budget scene as low budgets often mean pandering to the lowest common denominator and the people producing them often feel that there is no higher art than a good fart joke but I Sell The Dead’s already tight script is packed with good laughs delivered by a cast that you may not expect practiced comic timing from. They’re not selling you Evil Dead 2 here, but when it’s funny, it’s funny and that’s harder to do than you might think, particularly when the writer/director is best known for visual effects and has only written one other script. Director Glenn McQuaid’s future is bright and Glass Eye Pix is better off for having him on the roster.

Often I like to balance my raves with a little criticism when it comes to these reviews, but I’m at a loss with I Sell The Dead. I suppose some of the CGI effects at times look like CGI but even the adequately budgeted trash out of Hollywood is struggling to give their computer generated effects the authenticity of practicals. The occasional knife to the head contained here sticks out like a sore thumb, but that’s really where the criticism ends. I Sell The Dead was an extremely pleasant surprise, for my money and further evidence that the best in genre films isn’t due to come out of a major Hollywood studio any time soon. It’s also proof that the horror genre isn’t dead or dying. It’s quite alive and the real creativity is in the hands of forward thinking writers and directors who are making movies with whatever they happen to have in their wallets at the time. I Sell The Dead, of course, isn’t that low budget, but it shows how far you make your money go on a good, original idea and a tight script.

Coffin Joe was spawned from the mind of director Jose Mojica Marins in the early 60′s from one of his own nightmares and he used Brazil’s greatest cultural fears to rise to infamy. His story is simple. Coffin Joe is the undertaker in a small, superstitious village. When he’s not terrorizing the town or delivering drunken sermons to a congregation of headstones in the cemetery about the failure of God and uselesness of morals, he’s persuing his ultimate goal of immortality by impregnating his ideal woman, one of perfect beauty and a philosophy that matches his own. Anyone who gets in his way can count on a grisly death. Marins’ latest, Embodiment of Evil, is the finale of the Coffin Joe trilogy, a legacy of horror that spans five decades.

Joe has served a full term in prison for murder and is being released. Forty years has passed and he has to get back to his quest for immortality. He is picked up by his hunchback assistant, Bruno, and taken to the favelas of Rio De Janeiro to find that a group of deviants have dedicated themselves to aiding Joe on his ongoing quest. Along the way, Joe upsets the local mob of the favela and runs afoul of the cops. Simultaneously, the captain whom he blinded in one eye and the son of the priest he murdered at the end of This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse, the original ending that is, are looking for him to get their righteous revenge. Joe and his minions manage to find several women as candidates for Joe’s unholy conception and along the way, torment and mutilate everyone who stands in their way.

Allegedly this is the last of the Coffin Joe movies. Marins is old, after all, and the last entry in the series, the official entry, that is, was in 1967, so timely this is not. Each movie in the series was supposed to be the last one with Coffin Joe meeting his demise but he always managed to come back for more. Yet, in spite of its ambiguous ending, Embodiment Of Evil sends Coffin Joe out on a high note,  if this is to be the end. Marins put on the cape and hat, originally, because he felt that none of the actors he brought in to play the part could really pull it off without camp. He had a definite vision in mind for Coffin Joe and it took him no time at all to make the character his own. Because of that and in spite of years of absence, Marins slips into the role with the greatest of ease and winds up ranting and raving just like he did in the 60′s.

There will no doubt be some discussion about the degree of violence on display in Embodiment of Evil. Many will argue that the movies of the 60′s were never about the violence and that Coffin Joe’s appeal was all about the unmatched atmosphere in those movies, and while the violence of Embodiment of Evil is even acting on a level above Hollywood gore, the Coffin Joes of the past were staggeringly gory for their time. So it’s only natural for a modern Coffin Joe movie to set a nastier pace, and nasty is on the menu. Marins is playing for keeps with what will most likely be the last appearance for Coffin Joe and they go all out. We’ve got Joe flaying women, men suspended through hooks in the flesh of their backs, auto-cannibalism, necrophilia, scalping and a sex scene that puts the bloody shenanigans of Angelheart to shame. Marins makes use of Rio’s native body mod community as the actor hung from hooks is not a special effect, this is an actual suspension as is the scene where the man sews the lips shut on a woman, hence the latex gloves which shouldn’t be necessary in Hell. The gore is off the charts, people, and it looks really good. Coffin Joe, even at the height of his popularity, was bankrolling movies on pocket change but this time around we get some solid horror special effects.

On the downside, Coffin Joe movies have a tendency to repeat their themes and Embodiment of Evil is no different. This is just an update of the mythology, you’ve seen this Coffin Joe movie if you’ve seen either of the others. This time, however, nothing is censored. You get all the gore and blasphemy but at a cost. The unfortunate side effect is that Joe’s simple quest to find a woman to carry his son is drawn out over ninety gruelling minutes that seem to be little more than a vehicle for Joe and cronies to carve people up and it seems to be much longer than it needs to be.

The end result is atmospheric and gruesome. Joe is back with a bang and after such a long absence, it only goes to show that Coffin Joe is the character that Jose Mojica Marins was put on this earth to play. He’s still, even in his old age, extremely intimidating and the movie tosses in many elements from past Coffin Joe movies, such as the ghosts of dead (presented in black and white) coming back to haunt Joe. It’s difficult to figure out who to root for, as well. Joe and his posse are so flagrantly evil but the police and criminals of the favela have nothing to redeem them. They seem like the sort of corrupt assholes who deserve to be decapitated and dismembered. But how do you cheer for a guy who cuts the skin at the back of a woman’s head so that he can peel her scalp up over her skull?  Even at ninety minutes, it feels a little long but the creativity of the gore is enough to turn this movie into a tour of degradation. If this is to be Marins’ swansong, this was a hell of a way to retire.

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As it would go, a pack of attractive Norwegian med students retreat to the arctic circle for your average horror movie set up. They seem to occupy the only cabin for miles around, their cell phones don’t work, it’s miles to civilization and there’s only one snowmobile. They’re supposed to meet their friend, who owns the place, but she never turns up. Her absence may have something to do with a gaggle of unfrozen Nazi zombies, left over from the Einsatzgruppe, a particularly nasty detachment of soldiers whose job it was to rob and murder Jews during the occupation. Inevitably, the zombies run wild on the students and its a maddening dash to survive amid gallons of blood and gore and wave after wave of hungry anti-semitic zombies.

Dead Snow somehow manages to commit more horror movie cliches in its entire running time than an entire decade of Hollywood produced horror movies. There is absolutely nothing new to see here and just when you think it couldn’t possibly be any more contrived, writer/director, Tommy Wirkola, stocks his movie with a character whose entire reason for being is to prove to you, an audience that may be marginally familiar with horror movies, that Wirkola knows what he’s talking about and has license to make the last word on zombies. He name checks and references movies that each one of us has been intimately familiar with since we were 12 years old. Wirkola is a part of a film school feedback loop that absolutely must be stopped at all costs. It would not surprise me in the least if I were to find out that picked up stakes and moved to Austin, Texas, and started cameoing in movies by Tarantino and Eli Roth. Rather than bring to you an original picture with a fresh take on zombies, Wirkola satisfies his teenage fantasies of being Fulci, Raimi and Tarantino all in one. He’s a fan first and a filmmaker second, which is unfortunate because he’s a good filmmaker with an eye for a beautiful shot. Dead Snow, being the cinematic bad idea in motion that it is, is actually a very well made movie with a tight pace. It’s just too bad that everything herein has been seen before in far better movies.

Wirkola’s cast is none too remarkable, either. They’re all your typical victims in waiting and keeping them straight is difficult since there are so many and not one of them is particularly interesting. I often found myself wondering if Actor X on the screen had just been disemboweled five minutes prior only to realize that this is actually Actor Y and he just looks a little like the dead guy. And what’s the point of keeping track of everyone since once the ball starts rolling, they’re all going to die anyway? Am I right? I can sense that many of you right now are thinking that I’m some kind of spoil sport and that I should probably take this a little less seriously because, hey, it’s just a zombie movie, right? Maybe I should relax a little. There’s plenty of good gags, actually. One hilarious joke involving a molotov cocktail and a scene where a bite victim solves his problems by severing body parts. There’s also a substantial pile of inestines and severed limbs to be found. For all of Wirkola’s storytellng flaws, he figured he could liberally toss around the gore in Peter Jacksonian proportions and get away with it and if that’s all you’re out for, you won’t be let down.

Unfortunately, if you’re like me, you’ve seen a lot of zombie horror movies lately that strive to be nothing more than celebrations of bifurcation and offer you nothing more for your movie going dollar than buckets of blood and scenery lifted out of older, much better movies. Wirkola may as well just have painted his frames pop-up video style to point out which movies he lifted his scenery from. See guys, this one is from Dead Alive and this baby is taken straight ouf of Shaun of the Dead. Oh! And did you hear that? I just dropped a reference to Friday the 13th. Aren’t I savvy? I can hear you now, “Say it ain”t so, Bryan. It’s Nazis and zombies, dude! They’re like chocolate and peanut butter!” While that may be the case, Shock Waves did a much better job of it. And about those Evil Dead comparisons, can them. The end of the movie is an almost direct ripoff of John Carpenter’s The Fog.

Bryan White

Editor, Cinema Suicide

bryan@cinema-suicide.com

@CinemaSuicide on Twitter

http://www.cinema-suicide.com

Bryan White
Editor, Cinema Suicide
bryan@cinema-suicide.com
@CinemaSuicide on Twitter
http://www.cinema-suicide.com

I often take a lot of flack for citing this as a quality haunted house movie, as iconic as it is, but most people think it’s a piece of shit. But I’ll also be the first to point out that this legendary ghost story about the Long Island house with a demonic presence is a total fabrication. Jay Anson’s book, allegedly nonfiction, was written during a very hot time for the paranormal. The 1970′s was rife with ghost stories, ancient astronauts and ESP. Universities had real paranormal investigation teams, the government sunk billions into paranormal programs to keep pace with The Soviet Union, so people were primed for ghost stories. The DiFeo murder house, however, was not haunted as told by George and Kathy Lutz. It was abandoned because George’s buiness and mental health had deteriorated. But I digress. The ’79 Amityville Horror is absolutely packed with chilling scenes that often come across as a series of vignettes scattered through a movie of pieces and parts. Some work, some don’t but it rarely works as a whole. Plus that house is a seriously creepy design.

Like The Amityville Horror, The Entity is based on an actual haunting case. A single mother reports being abused and raped repeatedly by an unseen force in her home. Her children are tossed around violently, as well. She enlists the help of a University paranormal team to document and assist in ridding the home of the spirit. The Entity is absolutely chilling in parts and paces itself very well, but the third act takes this turn for th absurd that is amazing in its insanity. It takes huge leaps of faith and logic in how the plot is resolved but it’s one of those pictures where the studio most likely thought that a downbeat ending would kill it at the box office and the script has giant demonic spirits being frozen in liquid nitrogen.

Director, Michael Winner has street cred. He’s a working director with an impressive resume. How do you follow up the kick ass Charles Bronson vigilante vehicle, Death Wish? Why, with a creepy as hell haunted house movie about a woman living in an apartment building that is also the gate to hell. Cristina Raines plays an overworked fashion model that moves into an apartment building occupied by some seriously twisted people. Burgess Meredith plays her ultra creepy neighbor and John Carradine is unspeaking, unmoving blind priest who is the titular Sentinel. This is a downright frightening movie that has all the right moves. It’s all about atmosphere and freakish behavior rather a parade of shocking visuals. It builds slowly and releases the tension at just the right time for maximum creeps. It is still, to this day, one of the spookiest movies I’ve ever seen, one of the rarest executions of a proper horror movie.

Bryan White
Editor, Cinema Suicide
bryan@cinema-suicide.com
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In 1962, Italian filmmakers Cavara, Jacopetti and Prosperi shot and released a new kind of documentary. They shot footage of foreign cultures and their strange customs, some of it violent, all of it meant to shock. They called it Mondo Cane and it came to represent a sort of western cultural slumming. Mondo Cane was massively popular at the box office and naturally it was responsible for huge wave of imitators. The Shocking Asia series and the Faces of Death movies were a product of this, but oddly enough, the public thirst for bug eaters and stone-age jungle tribes extended into fiction and an entire subgenre was born out of the Mondo popularity.

The cannibal idea went mostly silent for several years but came screaming back to life with Ruggero Deodato’s, Last Cannibal World. Deodato would make his mark several years later with Cannibal Holocaust, which is considered to be the king of castle, but in a lot of ways, Last Cannibal World is far harder. The rules had not yet been established so cannibals were in a state of anything goes, and they did. Last Cannibal World is among the nastiest movies ever made, featuring the necessary cannibalism, torture, sex and rape. It was originally intended to be Lenzi’s follow up to The Man From Deep River but the Italian film industry is a very fluid beast and things are always changing. This wound up in Deodato’s hands. Deodato, still early in his career and best known for poliziotteschi movies, pulled out all the stops to lay down the early boundaries for cannibals, which are few. It stars Ivan Rassimov and Me Me Lai, also from The Man From Deep River but is about the survival, capture and torture of the star, Massimo Foschi. The gore is explicit and constant. Nearly a third of the movie is without a word of dialog and is a string of absolutely rotten sadism. Of my search for the most offensive horror movies ever made, Last Cannibal World is among the most intense.

Lenzi would come back to cannibals with the tepid Eaten Alive, notably stealing the Me Me Lai death scene from the movie he was supposed to direct, Last Cannibal World. Eaten Alive is hardly noteworthy and is deeply ironic as the wildly popular category that Lenzi had founded had since surpassed his abilities, mostly at the hands of Deodato who, in 1980 would unleash another sick vision of cannibalism with a movie that was a genuine anomaly among the Italian exploitation set. Cannibal Holocaust, an impossibly sickening movie is not only a genre clasic but it’s a genuinely good movie with an original idea that was way ahead of its time. The Blair Witch Project would later on lift its found footage device and would come to define a certain Cinema Verite style that directors today use to paraphrase the current internet narcissisism. But back then, Deodato took the cannibal formula and infused it with a message that more or less shakes it finger at us, the viewers, wondering who is more savage: The loincloth wearing savages or the civilized people who watch this sort of mayhem? As the story goes, an anthropologist descends into the amazon, searching for the remains of a lost documentary group. He manages to strike a peace with the cannibals and recovers their only remains, canisters of film containing the footage of their fates, just desserts for abusing the tribes. By this point in the cannibal canon, the ground rules had been thoroughly developed and this one has it all. There are several scenes of sickening animal killing, torture, rape, castration and so on. It is the blueprint by which all cannibal movies are made. There wasn’t much more room for this group of films to grow, which explains why the films to follow Cannibal Holocaust were pale imitations that pushed the limits of violence and depravity but not much else.

Lenzi would come back to cannibalism one last time with the oh-so wrong Cannibal Ferrox. Cannibal Ferrox aka Make Them Die Slowly tells a story that is so familiar to cannibal movies by this point and it also borrows kill scenes from other cannibal horror movies. Anthropologist and her ditzy friends shack up with drug smugglers on the run and naturally run afoul of the normally peaceful local Amazon tribes. Naturally it leads them being eaten, but it also leads the required castration, a scene where the top of a man’s head is chopped off and a woman (Tisa Farrow, sister of Mia) is hung from hooks through his breasts, perhaps the film’s trademark scene. But it’s by this point in the cannibal story that the only flicks left were godawful imitations, like the fucking terrible Jess Franco flick, Devil Hunter. There would be some minor innovations in imitators such as Cannibal Apocalypse, which stars John Saxon and John Morghen as Vietnam vets with a contagious hunger for flesh, but otherwise, cannibals had run out of steam by 1983.

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Bryan White
Editor, Cinema Suicide
bryan@cinema-suicide.com
@CinemaSuicide on Twitter
http://www.cinema-suicide.com

Body Count: Volume 6

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I bought a region free DVD player nearly ten years ago when I decided that I had had enough reading about particularly sweet editions of movies being released in foreign markets. These days it seems like just about everything released everywhere finds its way to Region 1 DVD but it wasn’t that long ago that I had to opt for VCD bootlegs of whatever it was that I wanted to see coming out of Asia because there wasn’t a distributor in North America that would pick up something like Battle Royale. So I was left with no choice. Then the tides turned. You still can’t get a real Region 1 version of Battle Royale, but I don’t even worry about that any more since I bought an awesome Tartan tin box edition of it when I visited The UK. But I digress. These days just about every movie that makes the rounds on the film festival circuit finds its way to Region 1 because somewhere, somehow a market for foreign genre films came from out of nowhere in North America. Or maybe we had always been here.

FRANCE
So speaking of France, I might as well start with them since I’ve been in love with the land of baguettes and imperial conquest for the last several years. France has managed to cast its net pretty wide as far as genre movies go. Originally known for the French New Wave, which would in turn inspire the American New Wave in the 70′s, France has transformed itself into a genre movie powerhouse, beginning with some extremely high octane action pictures written and produced by Luc Besson. But Alexandre Aja would soon come along and introduce a new brand of horror that was far more extreme than anything happening on the global stage at the time. I’m talking of course about Haute Tension. Say what you want about that movie. Tell me how the ending ruined the whole thing for you and I’ll explain to you how you probably misunderstood it. It’s a grisly piece of stalk and slash that would open the floodgates for even sicker, even more extreme pieces of misanthropy. There was the French riff on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Frontier(s) which made even jaded old me squirm in my seat followed by the equally horrific and compelling A l’Interieur (released in North America by Dimension Extreme as Inside), detailing the ordeal of a pregnant woman and her attacker, a woman who feels that the baby is rightfully hers. To this day, it stands tall as one of the rarest examples of a movie that shocked me to the core, a piece of film so deeply disturbing that I live with the conflict of enjoying it through and through while never wanting to see it again in my life. Recently, the big hype horror picture out of France is Matryrs, a sickening meditation on suffering and revenge.

NORWAY
I really only know a few things about Norway. I know that it’s pretty cold, the sun goes down for as long a freakin’ month there, Vikings are sweet and it is the birthplace of the most confrontational form of music I have ever heard. I speak of Black Metal. It turns out that Norway is quickly becoming a horror movie destination and it’s surprising to me that it has taken them so long to catch up. I think the earliest mention of horror out of the land of the midnight sun was the aforementioned Cold Prey, a reasonably routine exercise in the slasher genre that led to the inevitable sequel, Cold Prey 2, available now in a boxed set. Neither film is particularly strong but as you’ll see with Dead Snow, the Norwegians aren’t aiming particularly high so much as they’re just trying to keep up with the Joneses. Dead Snow captured the imagination of horror fans around the world with a series of excellent promotional stills, some cool posters and a premise that no one ever seems to get tired of. Nazis. While the end result is often expected to be a play on Evil Dead, it’s actually a lot closer to John Carpenter’s The Fog. Still, it’s hilariously gory and genuinely funny even it feels very familiar. Rounding out Norway is Rovdyr. What would a foreign market’s expansion into horror be without someone trying their hand at the usual Texas Chainsaw Massacre bag? Rovdyr isn’t exactly a play on the Tobe Hooper classic, but it apes all of its best moves and is another particularly nasty horror movie that expresses precisely how close we are to armageddon if even Norway is producing gritty, ultraviolent horror movies.

THAILAND
Much for the same reason that I was attracted to France, I found my way to Thailand. Back around 2004, Thailand burst on to the martial arts scene with Tony Jaa in Ong Bak, a stupidly simple story upon which some of the most punishing stunt scenes I have ever seen were draped. It wasn’t long before I began to look into what else the nation had and what I found was a remarkably robust horror scene that was unique to Thailand because of some particularly strange cultural superstitions. As even Japan seemed to be tiring of little ghost girls with long hair in their faces, Thailand hit the foreign market with Shutter, a movie that takes the conventions of Japan’s Ringu and twists them to put the vengeful spirit in photographs rather than video. It’s a movie that has its moments but does very little with the formula to make it its own. However, I’m fairly certain that I have never seen anything quite like the Art of the Devil series of movies. Though Thailand is a nation full of buddhists, there is still a strong belief throughout the population that black magic is very real and that anyone can use it for great rewards and dire consequences. In Art of the Devil 3, a woman out for revenge uses black magic to punish a family that wronged her. What follows is a distinctly Thai take on American torture porn and features some of the most creative gore that you’re likely to ever see. Finally, there is The Coffin, an stupendously creepy horror movie that seizes the Thai superstition that lying in a coffin will extend your life by playing dead. You have been warned. Only paranormal weirdness can come of that.

Bryan White
Editor, Cinema Suicide
bryan@cinema-suicide.com
@CinemaSuicide on Twitter
http://www.cinema-suicide.com

Body Count: Volume 2

I was recently asked to write a horror script that would be produced by a local group that’s trying the Sam Raimi/Robert Rodriguez means of raising money for real features by making schlocky b-pictures as a revenue source. They’re hell bent on producing a zombie picture because everyone seems to have a boner for zombies these days. I also recently wrote an article in praise of Robert Kirkman’s bleak-as-hell but amazing zombie horror comic, The Walking Dead, and in the process of putting it all together, it occurred to me that even though I had spent 1,500 words praising the weight of the book’s setting, characterizations and art, I was absolutely sick to death of zombies. Aren’t you?

I posed the question to my Twitter pool. Have zombies jumped the shark? Rather, if you follow Lucio Fulci’s logic, have zombies eaten the shark? The net result was a casual dismissal of the notion of zombies getting old. As bored as I am with dreary apocalypse stories and gory but silly riffs on the Dead Alive (aka Braindead) routine, there’s still a ravenous legion of fans out there that will watch anything zombie related. My ho-hum review of the recent Norwegian hype festival, Dead Snow, stoked the ire of many zombie fans who couldn’t believe that I wasn’t balls out ecstatic over it because, hey! Nazi zombies, dude! You love zombies!

This is, in fact, inaccurate. Everyone assumes that because I run a website dedicated to horror movies (another inaccuracy), that I’m automatically dedicated to the genre because they happen to be the flavor of the month, or decade depending on how you look at it. There are certainly reasons for zombies being so popular now. Waves of social and cultural symbolism bring certain monsters in and out of fashion all the time, but the zombie and everything that it represents has a certain post-industrial revolution vibe that will forever be relevant. Rampant, mindless consumerism, our innate mob mentality and an ever widening generation gap that threatens to consume the establishment are a series of concepts that have been around since the 60′s and are more or less here to stay. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we, as horror fans, have to tolerate the sea of cut-rate bullshit that saturates the present horror market. Even George Romero can’t seem to pull out anything fresh or original these days and he’s the guy who started this whole mess! Did you actually see Diary of the Dead? What the fuck was that all about? Land of the Dead practically punches you in the face repeatedly with its ham-fisted message about class warfare! There’s a festering pit of garbage out there with its hand in the cookie jar, a whole cottage industry of zombie horror or zombie-derivative horror that has its merits but is mostly a flawed old whore.

I find myself occasionally captivated by a fresh take on the very tired formula and even though my belief is firm that all the good zombie movies have been made, I’m always happy to find myself proven wrong from time to time when I find something that I haven’t seen before. Case in point, Shaun of the Dead. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg genuinely understand the zombie movie. They made a movie that was, at its heart, a love story and put the focus, for the most part, on the lengths that Shaun would go to win back the love of his girlfriend, Liz. The zombies were simply a catalyst for a series of extremely funny situations and a means of getting from Shaun and Ed’s apartment to the Winchester. And somewhere in the third act, the movie loses the funny and becomes an actual zombie horror movie.

If you look hard enough online, you can find a pilot for a TV show that nearly had a network run called Babylon Fields, which put people in a situation similar to The Rapture where suddenly the dead came back to life but rather than clawing at your doors and windows with a hunger for your flesh, these corpses only meant to resume their old lives. It was a clever cash-in on the popularity of scripted genre-oriented dramas dominating networks right now but it was also far too abstract and morbid for the average Nielsen Family.

Original twists on the zombie aren’t necessarily locked in to television and movies, either, people. Three websites are offering Joe User an opportunity to be a part of the production and allowing the mob to steer the plot of a larger story in whatever direction they choose. Lost Zombies (link to www.lostzombies.com), who just won best community website at the recent South By Southwest interactive festival allows anyone who wants to to jump in and submit their man on the street videos of the zombie apocalypse in action. Nation Undead (link to www.nationundead.com) throws aside the notion that this is real and asks you to submit fictional narratives that work within a system of rules based on where in the country you base your movies. Finally, if you have the artistic touch and feel like animating, Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated (link to www.notldr.com) is an animated remake, shot for shot, using the original film’s soundtrack of George Romero’s classic movie. Methods of animation range from traditional cell animation to puppets to a segment made with the Half Life 2 sandbox, Garry’s Mod.

Zombies probably aren’t going anywhere any time soon but the ease with which the movies are made and the fantasy shared by so many people to make their own zombie movie means that we are going to be inundated with trash made by people who have no business making movies. There’s good zombie media out there, it just means that you have to dig deeper to find it.

End rant.

Bryan White
Editor, Cinema Suicide
bryan@cinema-suicide.com
@CinemaSuicide on Twitter
http://www.cinema-suicide.com

Horror. The much maligned, hard partying, estranged uncle of cinema. Being the reasonably presentable professional that I am by day, it often shocks people that I, a man in his thirties of above-average intelligence devotes such a large portion of his free time mentally cataloguing some of the worst movies ever committed to celluloid and video tape. Be they actual bad movies by definition, which I make no secret of my love affair with, or movies that once you see them, you can never unsee them, for instance the recent French ‘pregnant woman in peril’ shocker, L’Interieur. The point I’m trying to make in such a roundabout way is that it’s easy to dismiss horror based entirely on its mainstream representatives and hordes of jackasses paying out the nose at horror cons for Misty Mundae’s autograph.

In spite of wave after wave of remakes from a studio system bankrupt of all creativity and harboring a deep contempt for the genre that makes them so much god damn money, not to mention a legion of fans who have enough fishnet and Insane Clown Posse shirts to ensure that they never wear the same outfit twice, horror is a very layered, complex and often challenging genre. And you don’t necessarily have to sit through Guy Maddin movies to find them. I blog often and have such a big mouth that I’ll evangelize the intellectual properties of horror movie x to just about anyone who will listen. As a matter of fact, it’s too late for you, you’re knee deep in said evangelism.

You don’t necessarily have to look far to find a horror movie that won’t insult your intelligence, unless you’re out for that sort of thing, which sadly, I sometimes am. I could spend time talking up the arthouse qualities of the extremely creepy Turkish vampire movie, Karanlik Sular, but it can be a bit difficult to track down (Onar Films has it) but you may not be into the great internet hunt for hidden treasures like I am. You may just want to find something that you can throw on your Netflix queue right now. To sate that desire, I recommend the following features.

Day of the Dead
Director: George A. Romero
1985
These days, Romero is practically a houshold name and if you’re as sick of the persistent zombie wave dominating low-budget horror today as I am, you have this man to blame. Romero did zombies on tiny budgets and made it look easy but what set his indies apart from the dreck of the status quo was a signature quality of social examination in his movies. Beginning with 1968′s Night of the Living Dead, Romero weaved a subtext of social anxiety that is no stranger to the genre but had never been handled before with such grace and subtlety. By 1985, Romero had honed his craft to the point that the message was still there, but what, exactly, he was trying to point out by way of gory zombie movie became ambiguous. Day of the Dead is an examination of American culture circa 1985. Namely, the cultural argument between the right and the left. What many forget is how close we were to doomsday during the Reagan years and it’s no accident that the movie takes place during humanity’s last days. What could possibly be the last handful of survivors ironically living in a nuclear missile silo spend their time fighting with one another over each side’s proposed solution to their problem. Critics of the movie point out how talky Day is and they’re right. For a Romero zombie movie, following up the action-packed comic book of Dawn of the Dead (truth be told, Day follows Creepshow, but I mean zombie movies), features mostly people yelling at one another and very little time is spent shooting zombies but we’re talking about stimulating horror. Of Romero’s zombie movies, I find myself going back to this one time and time again. Not only is it the most interesting and thought provoking of the four movies to me (Diary of the Dead is reboot) it’s also the nastiest with the most explicit violence to grace a Romero zombie movie thus far. The bar has never been higher.

Videodrome
Director: David Cronenberg
1983
A good intellectual shocker needs to do one thing more than anything else. It needs to remain relevant year after year and Videodrome, though certainly dated, has a message about the media that matters now more than ever. Not only is Videodrome David Cronenberg’s finest moment it’s one of the sharpest explorations of fantasy, reality and the line where the two blur. Make no mistake, the movie is completely disgusting and extremely confusing, to boot, but both of these are deliberate and necessary elements. It features a solid dose of Cronenberg’s patented body horror but what you’re really supposed to be wondering is at what point does television begin dictating reality? The proliferation of cable in the early 80′s meant a huge wave of options in entertainment and today we have 100 times the options our parents had back then. We live saturated in media, particularly channels broadcasting fresh content 24 hours a day. Namely, news channels and it is evident that no matter the network, each one is spinning the news to become infotainment. It not only cheapens the information coming at you but it mutates the message and dumbs the news down by explaining everything to you. Though James Woods jams a videotape into the pulsating vagina in his abdomen and later shoots a man with a cancer bullet, Videodrome holds your head under the water while you take all of this in. It’s absolutely grotesque and obscure but a powerful movie that asks an awful lot of its viewer.

Let The Right One In
Director: Tomas Alfredson
2008
Not all the good horror came out in the 70′s and 80′s. As a matter of fact, one of the freshest, most stimulating horror flicks I caught in a very long time hit the world stage just last year in ’08. Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of the novel Let The Right One In was bathed in hype as the movie made the festival rounds and for good reason, it is one of the most challenging, troubling movies that I have ever seen. On the surface it looks like two things. It’s either a vampire movie or a very violent teen romance. Beneath the surface, though, is a complicated, deeply disturbing feature that doesn’t pack all the horror into a simple monster movie. There’s plenty of vampire attacks in this movie but the horror doesn’t end there. It wraps a bitter sweet love story in tragedy, isolation and suffering. It presents the questionable relationship between 12 year old vampire Eli and her caretaker Hakan and then asks you to consider Oskar’s role in all of this as the credits roll. Are they actually in love? Is she a manipulative animal? When will Oskar kill for the first time? It’s an uneasy flick that asks an awful lot of difficult questions. It is distinctly European and as such asks a lot more of the viewer than one of its American counterparts might. Let The Right One In is presently on the remake block because hey, everybody hates subtitles, right? Catch this one before American studios compromise everything that made the original Swedish version such a powerfully haunting movie.

Bryan White