Some movies carry with them a sense of legend that escalates them in quality past the film’s real achievements.  Return of the Living Dead is such a film.

Director Dan O’Bannon is himself something of a legend.  He is most known for his screenwriting and character development, making a name for himself in films such as Alien and Total Recall.  And yet it is  silly little zombie flick O’Bannon directed in 1985 that cemented his name in horror movie history among die-hard fans.  O’Bannon only directed two films during his career, one of which was a zombie spoof called Return of the Living Dead.  It is cheesy, over-the-top, and filled with every element one would expect to find in a mid-80’s horror film.  You know – perfect.

The film is a heavy spoof on Romero and this original Night of the Living Dead.  The U.S. army is to blame in this one, producing a chemical agent that brings dead things back to life.  When a few barrels of this stuff accidentally gets shipped to a medical supply company (conveniently located next to a mortuary, crematorium, and cemetery), it creates a recipe for disaster.  The manager of the supply company, Frank,  shows his new warehouse employee, Freddy,  a young rebel, the aforementioned barrels and accidentally releases the fumes from the container in the process.  Not only does every dead thing in the medical supply company come back to life, including dogs cut in half for universities to study, but the cemetery begins to unleash the living dead.  Add to the mix a gang of 80’s styled friends who are coming to pick up their buddy Freddy.  This is a real beauty of a group as depicted through their clever names:  Spider, Trash, Chuck, Casey, and Scuz.  All these guys provide the necessary collection of humans for the newly resurrected zombies to feast on.  Frank and Freddy attempt to keep things under wraps as long as they can, but soon there is a frenzy of zombification and mayhem.  The only way for the government to lock down the problem is by sending in a nuclear strike on the peaceful little town.

Return of the Living Dead certainly has some memorable characters, such as “Tarman”, the first zombie unleashed by the chemical.  If you enjoy zombie films, then it seems near impossible not to appreciate ROTLD.  Yes, the dialogue is hokey, the plot is ridiculous, and the effects are way over the top – but this is a satire.  Then, right in the middle of the the silliness, O’Bannon throws in some effective scares and shocks that would stand up to any zombie movie out there.  It is a nice mixture of comedy and art.

I can’t put my full weight behind ROTLD, but if you enjoy horror and enjoy zombies, then what are you waiting for?  Take a look.

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Quarantine 2 has one of the odder trips to the screen in recent memory and much of that journey turns off hardcore horror fans.  The original Quarantine was a near shot-for-shot remake of the excellent Spanish zombie film REC.  Quarantine shared so much of the original film’s vision and style, and came so closely on the heels of REC, that horror fans were up in arms.  “Why does Hollywood think we are so stupid we can’t appreciate a film with subtitles?”  It didn’t help that there were a number of solid foreign horror films getting the Hollywood makeover about that time.  Quarantine became a lightning rod for the negativity.   Now, Sony Pictures and director John Pogue bring us a sequel, and it isn’t based on the Spanish film REC 2 but is, instead, an original sequel to the US remake.  What a mess.  Expectations for the film dropped even lower when Sony decided to release the film direct-to-video and not even give it a token theatrical run.  I enjoyed the first film, and I thought in some ways it improved on REC, though it wasn’t as good a film overall, and I went into my viewing of Quarantine 2 with as open a mind as possible given the film’s history.  What I discovered was a solid low-budget “zombie” movie with a unique, interesting setting.  It isn’t ground-breaking by any means, but Quarantine 2 is definitely worth the price of a rental.

Quarantine 2’s plot runs in parallel with the events in Quarantine, but that isn’t obvious at the start of the film.  The film opens by introducing us to two flight attendants who are on their way to the airport for a flight.  The two characters are one-hundred percent cliché (one is a bit easy, the other has a father who tried to pressure her into being a pilot), but they are attractive and likeable enough to make for good protagonists (and potential zombie fodder).  Once on the airplane, we are introduced to one cliché character after another: a kid with divorced parents who is flying between them and trying to appear tougher than he is; an elderly woman and her Parkinson’s stricken, wheelchair bound, husband; an aggressive businessman who won’t turn off his cell phone; a portly passenger too fat to fit in the standard seatbelt, another older woman with a cat in her handbag, and a few more not worth mentioning.

The only passenger of any real interest is an elementary school teacher carrying a hamster cage.  Now, anyone who has seen the first film will know that the “hamsters” (and the cats for that matter) are going to be important.  The teacher is quickly revealed to be the male protagonist as the horror elements in the plot are introduced.  Those events are pretty predictable in light of the first film’s plot, but the setting is novel enough to build up tension and suspense.  Hey, it’s a zombie outbreak on a plane.  It would be hard to make that boring.

And Quarantine 2, even after it leaves the nicely claustrophobic plane and moves into an abandoned airline terminal (which is still novel but really could just be any nearly-empty warehouse),  isn’t boring.  There is a good deal of suspense, a little mystery, and a healthy amount of gruesome deaths.  Anyone who is not totally turned off by the film’s ancestry* should find it to be an enjoyable horror film.

* Speaking of the animosity out there in the horror community, I find it interesting that this film has an 83% positive rating from critics on Rottentomatoes.com but only a 4.5/10 average from the users at IMDB.  Considering that it is pretty rare for a low-budget horror film to have a positive critical response, I have to think the regular viewers responses are a little skewed because of the whole REC/Quarantine controversy.

Before a single word is written about the 1986 B-film classic Night of the Creeps, it is imperative that the career of writer and director Fred Dekker is acknowledged as one of the more unfortunate stories in horror movie history.  Dekker is an immensely gifted artist who created two of the most enduring and fan loved genre films of the 80’s – Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad.  Today, both of these films enjoy a massive cult following and have been highlighted in various horror conventions over the years.  As they say, hindsight is always 20/20, and I have yet to hear a single producer, director, or actor in the movie industry say anything other than the confident brilliance Dekker brings to a film project.  However, money rules the day in Hollywood.  Both Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad were box office failures.  The failure of Robocop 3 sealed the deal.  There is little argument, even from those within the movie studios, that the poor return at the box office had nothing to do with Dekker’s ability to direct and everything to do with the incredibly inept marketing strategies employed by the studio.  Case in point, the tag line for The Monster Squad was “You know who to call if you have ghosts, but who do you call if you have monsters?”  Wow, that is horrific.  Much more could be said, but this reviewer mourns the early departure of what I consider to be a superb director and talent in the horror industry.  Enough time has elapsed; a studio needs to give Dekker another chance.

Night of the Creeps is a perfect blending of about every B-film ingredient you can think of.  Aliens, zombies, sororities, a two-fisted cop, parasites, college humor, cryogenic labs, and gore are all beautifully mixed together.  Dekker refers to his film as placing all his favorite elements in a blender and hitting puree.  It is done tongue-in-cheek and yet has a serious tone.  It is filmed unmistakeably in the style of the 80’s and yet is not overly campy.  This is horror at its best.

The film begins with a strange UFO and alien scene where an experiment of some kind is launched from the spaceship down to planet earth.  The year is 1959 and a couple of sweethearts see what they mistaken to be a falling star.  The boyfriend finds the capsule and several slug like creatures infect him.  At the same time, the girlfriend is chopped up by an escaped homicidal maniac.  Yep, that is one heck of an awesome beginning.

Cut to the present age where we meet and begin to follow two college roommates, Chris Romero (Jason Lively – tough to see him as anything other than Rusty Griswold) and J.C. Hooper.  By the way, that “J.C.” is short for John Carpenter and you can probably figure out the Hooper and Romero names.  J.C. is a crippled who walks with two crutches and is on the prowl to help his best friend Chris score with the love of his life, Cynthia Cronenberg (yep, Cronenberg – seeing a pattern here?).  In order to accomplish that feat, they figure joining a fraternity is in good order.  Their orientation task?  To steal a cadaver and leave it on the front steps of a rival fraternity.  When the two friends set out to accomplish their goal, they find their way into a cryogenic lab where a frozen dude, who just so happens to be the infected guy from 1959, is encased in carbonite (or something like that).   You can guess what happens.  Chris and J.C. thaw out the corpse and the slugs are back on the loose!

Enter the best character of the film, Detective Ray Cameron (a nod to James) who is the coolest cop to grace the silver screen except maybe for Joe Hallenbeck.  Ray Cameron is beautifully played by Tom Atkins, perhaps my favorite character actor of all time.  “THRILL ME!”  Those are the words used by Cameron when answering a phone or walking into a crime scene.  Anyway, Cameron was the cop on the scene in 1959 when the girl was hacked to pieces (who just so happened to be his ex-girlfriend).  He begins to make the connection to the present day situation.  Meanwhile, pandemonium is running wild as more and more college students become infected by the slugs, turn into zombies, and produce more slugs.  Unfortunately, J.C. meets his demise, but not before he learns the secret to killing the creeps – fire.

Eventually the film boils down to an entire fraternity being turned into zombies while on the way to pick up their dates at the sorority house.  This leads to some of the most epic scenes imaginable as you have a bunch of college dudes in tuxedos walking around as zombies.  After Ray Cameron busts into the sorority house to save the day, he delivers what is possibly the best line in horror movie history:

“I have good news and bad news girls.  The good news is that your dates are here.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“They’re Dead!”

Flame throwers, shotguns, lawn mowers, and all kinds of fun inhabit the last 20 minutes of the film as Chris and Cynthia fight their way out of trouble.

As you can tell by now, I love this film.  But it is far from perfect.  Some of the scenes are beyond believable, even for B-film horror, and the cheese factor at times goes pretty high, which is of course intended, but probably goes overboard on occasion.  Much of the dialogue is strained and you may find yourself rolling your eyes at specific scenes in order to get through them.  But all of this happens with the greater good always at hand.  Dekker manages to maintain a small piece of sincerity in the film, especially in scenes such as Chris listening to J.C.’s recorded final message and Ray’s speech on finding his ex mutilated.

Steven Spielberg is all over the place in Night of the Creeps.  There is, of course, a blatant spoof of the beach scene when Cameron sees his girlfriend rise out of the water, complete with the cuts being signaled by people walking past him.  There are more subtle tributes as well, such as when the camera zooms on Cameron’s face while the background moves in the distance when he sees the ax-murderer turned zombie.  That Dekker was influenced by Spielberg’s brilliance is putting it mildly.

Thankfully, Night of the Creeps is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray in a wonderful edition, complete with terrific behind the scenes footage and interviews.  I really don’t like the cover art for the DVD however.  In its original release, the movie went through several different poster and art changes, the best by far being the zombie dressed in a tuxedo holding a bouquet of roses.  If you have never seen Night of the Creeps, then by all means click the link below and buy it now!

Click Here to purchase Night of the Creeps

“REC” is the abbreviation seen on a video camera screen while recording, so it should be obvious going in that this Spanish horror film is in the hand-held, shakey cam tradition that first gained fame with The Blair Witch Project.  Unlike that film and its many imitators, [Rec] eschews all of the other bare-bones, amateurish elements from BWP in favor of a tight, beautifully simple plot and plenty of old school scares.   [Rec] is also a zombie/killer virus film that does that genre just as well as it does the found footage genre.  My only real issue is with how the film explains the outbreak, but, to be fair, I’d always prefer the cause of a zombie outbreak to be mysterious.

[Rec] follows a young reporter assigned to do a puff piece on the local fire department.  It opens with the kind of standard chit-chat with the firemen that we would expect from a news magazine piece, but when the station gets called out, things begin to go bad quickly.  They arrive at the scene to find that the emergency is that an old lady in the apartment building has gone a bit crazy.  Before long, she is attacking and ripping the flesh from one of the policemen on the scene.  By the time the crew gets the wounded policeman downstairs, they find the building surrounded by police and under quarantine.  So there is your basic premise—a small group of residents locked in an apartment building with zombie-like creatures.

Once the action gets started, [Rec] barely pauses to give the characters or the viewers time to breath.  Despite seeing the action unfold from through a camera lens, we are witness to some solid special effects, lots of gore,  and beautifully framed set-pieces.  I was especially impressed with a scene where the characters have to rush past a zombie handcuffed to a staircase railing.  It would have been so easy for that scene to become impossible to follow, but it is handled perfectly here.

Of course, the camera goes through the same shakiness and oblique angles that we often get in these films, but I was always able to focus on the action and follow the physical elements of the plot.  To accomplish this, our brave cameraman is often shooting in a way that makes no logical sense (like shooting our protagonist while being stalked by a zombie in a dark room—I’m pretty sure I’d have that night vision trained on the thing that was trying to eat me).  This concession was made in order to make the film easier to follow and to keep the protagonist central to the story, so it is hard to complain much about it.

During the films climatic scenes, we learn what has caused the outbreak.  The theological explanation for the zombie outbreak is just as ridiculous as George Lucas using metachlorian count to explain a Jedi’s use of The Force in the Star Wars prequels.  Wait a minute—make that more ridiculous than metachlorians, especially when one factors in the explanation for why the disease control people have locked down the building.

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Dead Meat is an Irish horror film (Ireland makes horror films?) distributed in America by Fangoria/Gorezone distribution.  The movie is, essentially, a zombie movie about a heavily mutated strand of mad cow disease that begins turning human beings into mad, flesh eating cannibals.  I will say upfront that I enjoyed Dead Meat and was impressed with some very unique imagery in the midst of what is certainly a worn out sub-genre.   Yet, the film could have been so much more.

The story begins with a major nod to George Romero as a young couple, Helena and Martin, are in their car and literally run into a guy on the side of the road.  Come to find out, the guy has decaying skin and seems to be dead.  Before Helena and Martin can get the gentleman to a hospital, he comes alive and begins gnawing on Martin’s neck, leaving Helena to run off seeing help by herself.  She makes her way to a cottage where soon afterward, Martin attacks her, now in zombie mode himself.  She cleverly dispatches of Martin by attaching a vacuum tube to his eye and turning on the machine.  Fun.

Helena runs for her life and ends up bumping into Desmond, the shovel toting gravedigger (actually, he bumps into her and saves her from being run over by a car).  Desmond is one of the coolest characters I have seen in a while, making unbelievable use of a shovel and carving himself out almost as a superhero.  Together, the two try to find a way out of the danger, bumping into more and more zombies.  Finally, after a brief visit to Desmond’s home, they run into two more unaffected humans, Cathal and Francie.  Although reluctant at first, Cathal eventually gives Helena and Desmond a lift in their car (and a little girl named Lisa, but we won’t worry about her.  She doesn’t last long).  After their car gets stuck in the mud, they are forced to fend off all kinds of threats, including a cow!  The movie ends with Cathal and Desmond succumbing to the massive onslaught of zombies when they try to take cover in some old ruins.  Helena survives when a group of “zombie hunters” shows up.  She is placed in the back of a truck and crammed in with dozens of other survivors.  A wooden door is shut and the screams of the living, now trapped as if they were dead, are heard from inside as the truck starts down the road.

This movie almost needed to be sub-titled.  Obviously, set in Ireland, the characters are speaking English, but the accent is so strong that I had to strain to make out the dialogue.  The film perfectly captures the essence of what a stranded day in the middle of Ireland might look like, offering beautiful views of the Irish country side and portraying the varying shades of brown that we would expect for that geographic location.  This coupled with the staggering, quick movements of the walking dead create an eerie combination.  Dead Meat is simply a survival film, where the action starts immediately and does not relent until the end of the movie.  There are some great visual kills and the gore is plentiful.  Plus, McMahon offers some twists to the typical zombie themes, providing some neat ideas that I had never seen.  For example, at one point Helena and Desmond are terrified to see they are surrounded by zombies.  Yet, the undead never move in for the kill.  They realize that this particular group of zombie are asleep (standing up) and if they are quite enough, Helena and Desmond can simply walk past them unharmed.  Then, there is the incredible kill scene while the group is trapped in the car.  It is so wonderful that I dare not give it away here.

I also like how Dead Meat provides a solid and very believable source to the zombie infestation.  It is not a stretch at all to think that an outbreak of mad cow disease, which is not unusual in Ireland, could have devastating effects on humans.  Whereas most zombie films just ignore the cause of the infestation, Dead Meat tackles it head on, which is refreshing.

The film is certainly not without its problems.  First, the editing is mediocre at best.  Continuity is a problem with Dead Meat and it brings down the overall quality of the film just a notch.  Most of these issues seemed to be somewhat manageable in the editing room.  The action sequences would be great – great – great – then “ooh, that looked awful.”  Helena, at the beginning especially, seems to just be somewhat out of sorts that her boyfriend is now a rabid zombie trying to kill her.  The reactionary elements in Dead Meat may be the weakest part of the film.  Also, the soundtrack is sketchy, leaving the already difficult accents even more difficult to understand.

I enjoyed this film.  Coming in at only 1 hour 17 minutes, it is a quick and easy watch and worth every second of it.  If you like zombie and gore, then take a look.

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Tombs of the Blind Dead is a Spanish horror movie directed by the legendary Amando de Ossorio and is part of his famous “Blind Dead” collection of which there are four films:  Tombs of the Blind Dead, Return of the Blind Dead, Ship of Zombies, and Night of the Seagulls.  Created on a shoestring budget with limited to no budget for special effects, Tombs of the Blind Dead cemented Ossorio as a brilliant director with a creative spirit.

The movie is about a group of three friends, two of which are female and have a relationship that goes back several years to college, who discover that a love triangle can literally be a deadly thing.  When Virginia White realizes that the guy she is crushing on has a flirtatious attitude toward her best friend, Betty, she decides to take drastic measures.  During a train ride to a local vacation spot where the three were going to enjoy some relaxation, Virginia suddenly jumps off the train with her sleeping bag.  Betty and Roger watch from the moving train as their friend makes her way through a field toward an old, abandoned monastery.  Unfortunately for Virginia, this is the monastery where 13th century Templars were on a quest to secure eternal life by drinking blood from virgin women and offering them as sacrifices.  Put to death for their actions and hung from trees so that birds could pluck their eyes out, the Templars were nevertheless able to secure their immortality by returning from the grave every night at the ringing of the monastery bells.  From there, the story moves from Virginia’s death at the hands of the undead to the ensuing investigation and increased carnage.

Watching this film was a real treat for several reasons.  First, Ossorio’s creativity shines in the movie as he provides some clever working of the camera I have not seen in any other zombie/undead film.  For example, because the Templars had their eyes plucked out during their punishment, they are only able to move in on their prey by sound.  One victim picks up on this weakness of the zombies and stops dead in her tracks.  The ploy is working and the Templars lose her for a moment.  But then the soundtrack slowly builds on the sound of the poor girl’s heartbeat.  She is scared to death and the racing of her heart is enough for the Templars to once again pick up the scent.  To add punch to the scene, Ossorio moves his camera slowly into the heart area of the victim’s chest as the soundtrack continues to increase in volume.  It was a beautiful scene.  The setting of the monastery is also effective and comes across, to some degree, similar to the look of Dracula’s castle in Hammer’s Horror of Dracula.  Finally, Ossorio does quite well with what limited resources he has to work with.  Although the film is certainly not a gore-fest, it does provide a nice array of gruesome death and torture scenes.

Of course, a film like this has plenty of flaws.  The acting is brutal to watch as is much of the dialogue.  The love triangle plot at the beginning was pretty lame and for some reason they threw in a strange flashback to a lesbian encounter between Virginia and Betty during their college years which was completely pointless.  Some of actions taken by the victims toward the end of the film defy any logic whatsoever.  Add to that a incredibly awful subtitled film, 1/3 of which was not readable because it blended in with the film, and you have plenty to overlook while watching.

But, it really is pretty easy to overlook.  I finished the movie and was impressed with what I had seen.  I look forward to checking out the remaining three films in the series.

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No, I am not going to review every single episode of the new The Walking Dead series on AMC.  But, I thought the first couple were fair game to provide my thoughts and commentary.  Here is a brief review of the second episode.

It was wonderful.  Perhaps even better than the first.  This was in part due to a brutally strong performance by Michael Rooker, perhaps the greatest character actor to ever live.  That name might not ring a bell to many of you, and yet all of you have seen him.  In episode 2, he plays Merle Dixon, a redneck tough guy who has a streak of white supremacy about him.  Rooker’s portrayal of Dixon served as a potent reminder that a world overrun by zombies is not enough to wipe away the inner human darkness in all of us.  At this point in the story, what are we most concerned with?  We find ourselves worried about the relationship between Rick-Shane-Lori.  We find ourselves disgusted by the racial insensitivity in the group, and yet rooting that the handcuffed Dixon makes it out alive.  We come alongside Rick with our compassion for Wade, the zombie who was cut up and used as rotting flesh to make their escape.  And in the back of our minds we are still concerned for the father and son who had lost their wife/mother and were struggling to survive emotionally and physically.  Oh, and somewhere in there is the worry of being eaten by zombies.  But in two episodes the story and the characters are so strong that the actual “eaten by zombie” issue is last on the list.  Truly incredible.

To highlight the point of human destructive issues and our unfortunate and incredible ability to “”eat” ourselves as humans, episode finds Rick and Glenn walking down the streets of Atlanta covered in zombie guts so that the real zombies could not smell them.  Unless you are radically incapable of recognizing sub-text in literature, the picture here is strikingly clear.  For a moment, Rick and Glenn blend in perfectly with the rest of the zombie world.  Again, The Walking Dead asks the question:  Who are the real zombies?

I am hard pressed to find a single fault in episode 2.  I am sure they are there and perhaps some of you can help me out.  All I know is this – I can’t wait till Sunday.

The entire horror community had been waiting for months and months for the premiere episode of The Walking Dead on AMC.  The Walking Dead is the hugely successful and thought-provoking comic book series depicting the difficulty of human relationships interwoven with a world overtaken by the undead.  I have yet to meet a horror movie fan who does not love the Robert Kirkman comic book.  So what about the first episode of the television adaptation?

As with any television series, a review of simply the premiere episode does not and cannot speak for the series as a whole.  Any successful television series works its way into finding the right combination of character development, interaction, and storyline.  In other words, actors “settle in” to their character sometimes weeks or months into a series, so judging The Walking Dead series as a whole just from the initial episode is not possible and this review will not attempt to make that kind of a correlation.  Having said that, we can still talk about how well the impact of the first episode came across and even discuss some comparisons with the comic book without judging too quickly the series in its entirety.

I have intentionally refrained from reading any other critical review of the first episode of The Walking Dead so that I can be unswayed by my assessment of it.

The opening 5 minutes were the weakest of the hour and a half premiere.  After wandering through a sea of deserted cars, Rick finds a little girl holding a teddy bear.  When she turns around, he sees that she is a zombie and shoots her in the head.  Cut to Rick and Shane having a discussion in a cop car.  First of all, there was no real sense of what the initial scene with the little girl was all about (except to preview for the viewers that brain splatter and gore will be a part of this series; the effect looked terrific).  I thought perhaps it was a dream sequence or just a creative way to introduce the series.  Upon reflection, I think it was the latter.  However, for someone who is not familiar with the series, the characters, and the plot (like my wife who actually watched most of the show with me), this was a confusing beginning.  She was under the impression that the world was already infested with zombies, as seen by the first interaction with the little girl, and did not make the connection that when we cut to Rick and Shane in the cop car, we are at a time previous to zombie infestation.  I think the opening could have been smoothed out a bit in that way.

Also, once we reach the cop car with Rick and Shane, the dialogue is forced and way too intentional.  Instead of letting some of the details of their friendship and of Rick’s relationship with Lori (his wife) develop throughout the story, they cram it into a overly long and somewhat boring conversation to begin the episode.  It reminded me of the long, famous explanation at the end of Hitchcock’s Psycho, the only part of that film to ever come under critical criticism.

With those two comments about the opening aside, the remainder of The Walking Dead was a home run.  Andrew Lincoln’s portrayal of Rick Grimes is spot on, as is Jon Bernthal’s depiction of Shane.  The zombies look absolutely phenomenal, rivaling if not beating any full length zombie movie I have ever seen.  The shots toward the end of the film in downtown Atlanta were breathtaking.  And, as mentioned above with the opening scene, the gore effects are gorgeous.  We actually get to see horse’s guts being eaten!

But for me, it was the clear direction that the filmmakers went with in the first episode that gives me hope that this will be an incredibly worthy series to follow.  That clear direction is the weightiness of the story.  The first episode makes clear that this is a story about very difficult times and very difficult human emotions, perfectly making the balance between the threat of the undead and the horrendous emotional response that the living must endure.  Already we are wrestling with how to respond to loved ones who have come under the curse of being re-animated.  In a strikingly powerful scene, one gentleman is working up the courage to put his beloved wife, who was a “walker”, out of her misery, while Rick was showing heart-felt compassion to a zombie crawling through the grass.  He says to the zombie, “I’m sorry this happened to you.”  In this way, The Walking Dead is forcing us to remember that these zombies were once people who were loved, who had a purpose, and who will never again have the chance to live out the dreams of their life.  Personal reflection then causes us to ask the hard question:  How many of us are living the life of a zombie even though we are still among the living?  Have we stopped pursuing life, embracing the joy and opportunity that comes with this gift?  It screams that we “gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”

The episode ends with a nice moment of tension where Rick, almost to the point of committing suicide, is trapped inside a tank on the streets of Atlanta, GA.  A voice is heard on the tank’s radio asking if Rick is “comfy” inside the tank.  Who is the voice?  How does the voice know Rick is in the tank?  Those questions will be answered in the next episode.

So here’s hoping that The Walking Dead enjoys some success and can continue to tell the story of zombies and humans and how the two go hand-in-hand.

“Are we worth saving?  You tell me.” – Debra Moynihan

With those concluding words of narration, Diary of the Dead rolls credits.  It is a question that permeates the brilliant storytelling of famed horror director George Romero in this 5th entry of his critically acclaimed Dead series.  A struggle for power, an insatiable desire to fulfill a perceived life purpose, and a misunderstood destination of safety all provide a thought-provoking 90 minutes of zombie mania.

Diary of the Dead is not a typical sequel in the Dead series, but rather documents a separate story during the initial outbreak of the original Night of the Living Dead movie.  In other words, the timeline follows the same chronology of the original 1968 film even though the immediate setting of Diary of the Dead is in the 21st century.  As this group of young people are struggling with zombies and one another, we can imagine a boarded up house on a farm somewhere in PA where Ben and Barbra are fighting for their lives.  Several references to the original film are made, including the reuse of the original newscast from NOTLD.  Romero himself called this entry a “rejigging of the myth.”

As always, Romero is masterful with zombies and remains in this reviewer’s eye the heavyweight champion of all things zombiefied.  This particular story follows a group of young Pitt film students who are creating a horror movie when the outbreak strikes.  Since documentary is Jason Creed’s first love, he decides to carry his trusty Panasonic camera with him at all times and capture the events of the developing real life horror story.  Along the way, another camera is picked up allowing for two different camera angles of the action.  We learn at the beginning of the movie that Jason’s girlfriend, Debra, compiled the film together so that people would know the truth.  Oh, she also added music and sound effects because she “wants you to be scared.”  Unfortunately, the film at times loses its grip because of the consistent and occasionally tiresome use of the documentary style.  That is one of very few complaints I have with the movie.

In typical Romero fashion, we are immersed in the struggles of the core group of people as they in turn are struggling with survival.  Deeply embedded in DOTD is the universal desire to fulfill our life passion, which almost certainly involves a certain amount of assumed power.  For Jason, the consuming desire to capture the “real” story of the outbreak is convincingly explained to Barbra as the only way they might be able to save lives.  However, Jason’s true motives are revealed when he repeatedly refuses to put down the camera in times of desperate need, choosing instead to film the ending of human life at the hands of the zombies rather than save a human life, which is of course the explanation he provided for the filming in the first place.  In this way, Jason is no different than the living dead.  They know only one thing – to seek out and consume living human flesh.  Jason’s passions close his mind to any reality other than getting the shot on film.  Romero once again reminds us that the line between zombie and human is not as broad as we might think.  Debra, during her overdub narration of the finished documentary, blatantly explains this truth by asserting, “it is us vs. them.  The problem is that they are us.”

Another interesting sub-theme that was consistently placed throughout the dialogue was the realization of the supernatural in the chaotic events.  At one point, a character sarcastically screams that unless you are Jesus Christ you “don’t stand up and walk around after you are dead.”  Another use of narration by Debra insists that “God had changed the rules and we were following along.”  The movie makes clear that a world beyond mere materialism is known by all people in all places, yet even that inner knowledge cannot keep us from pursuing the riches of materialism.  At one point the group seeks refuge in a large garage where a band of friends had looted the entire city and hauled it all to one central location.  Proud of their accomplishments and their acquisition of stuff, they were unwilling to even let the group fill their tank completely with gas.  Finally, they were able to say “look at all the stuff we have.”

In the last 2 minutes of the movie, as the remaining 3 characters are talking with one another, an older professor looks in the mirror as the sun is rising.  The dialogue that ensues is wonderful:

Debra:  Things always look better in the morning.
Andrew:  Not to me. Mornings bring light. I prefer the darkness. It’s easier to hide in the dark.
Tony:  You know, Professor? I actually get the… the mornings. They show you for what you are, instead of what you think you are.
Andrew:  Inelegantly phrased, Mr. Ravello, but accurately put. Mornings… and mirrors. I despise them. Mornings and mirrors only serve to terrify old men.

We all prefer the darkness, it is indeed easier to hide.  On this point of dialogue, it is hard to imagine that Romero did not have John3 in mind:

“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.  Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.  But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”

Are humans worth saving?  Absolutely.  And yet because of our own love of darkness, not all will be saved.

First off I would like to thank my wife for attending this feature with me. She hates “my kind of movies,” so thanks baby. Now on to the presentation. The Crazies is apparently a remake of a 1973 Romero film by the same name. I myself have never heard of it, but I plan to try and rent it at a later date. I have read other written reviews of the ‘73 flick and it was seemingly very politically driven ( more later ). The current version stars Timothy Olyphant as a sheriff of a small farming town. Radha Mitchell plays his doctor wife and Joe Anderson plays his loyal deputy. These are the characters the movie focuses on through the course of their perils. The opening scene shows the peaceful little town on the first day of baseball season and the town is enjoying the game when all of a sudden like five minutes into the movie the events get rolling. A man supposedly the town drunk, which we learn later, comes out of left field, literally, with a shotgun. The sheriff is forced to confront him all the while noticing that he appears drunk or not right with a crazy look in his eyes. Just like in the trailer the sheriff shoots him dead. The autopsy comes back and the guy is not drunk and the mystery begins. More people start to act ” not right ” and one man is seen by the doctor. He then proceeds to repeat himself to the doctor so she wants to send him to the closest big city (remember this) Cedar Rapids for a cat scan. This is where things start to go nuts. The man who saw the doctor indeed has problems and the first attempted scare happens. Really there are some creepy moments in this film that have you tense, but the scares are hard to come by. Which this is a zombie/infected flick and to me they are more about gore (more on this later also) and tension and the chase or escape moments than scares anyway. I suppose the genre of HORROR spans all of this and not just films with scares even though the film has several weak attempts at some. From here on out more townsfolk keep doing odd things, and out of the blue on a gut hunch the sheriff decides something isn’t right. Then some guys are out in the swamp of Ogden Marsh and find a parachute and the dead pilot submerged in the bog. The sheriff and his deputy investigate, and the deputy recalls a local hearing a big crash in the night so off they go to investigate. Turns out there was a plane crash in the marsh, and in one of the cooler visual scenes in the movie, they set out and find the plane in the murky water of the bog. This is where the movie lets you on to the big secret. The government plane had some stuff on it and it’s bad for everybody. I have read in other reviews, as mentioned before, that the original has a politically charged theme in regard to government. This is that tie in, but the 2010 version doesn’t take it that far. They let you know through the movie that big brother is watching, but it’s not an anti gov. movie. As for the comparison I will let you know when I see the original.

After the plane is found the sheriff and his deputy determine that the plane is contaminating the water that the town drinks and that is what is causing everybody to become CRAZY. The government finally comes in and tries to segregate everybody according to who has a fever. Apparently this is the first sign of the infection. Earlier on the viewer is made aware that the sheriff’s wife is pregnant, which in turn cause her to have a fever and hence she is assumed infected and taken from her husband. After this there is another one of the creepy scenes. If you watched any of the trailers you saw the person dragging the pitchfork through the hospital, well this is it. I was pretty excited to see some good gore here, but it was a little of a letdown. I was expecting a crazy dude just going off and stabbing person after person and blood oozing, guts dripping, eyeballs flying, arms loped off, brains spilling—– sorry I got a little carried away, but the point I am trying to make while the scene was well shot and kinda creepy, I expected gore. In my opinion zombie movies need some gore and this version of The Crazies didn’t have enough for me. From here on out the movie is more of a survival story where the sheriff has to save his wife and escape. The couple along with the trusty deputy run around, mainly from the government and some crazies here and there, and have a neat little run in with some crazies at a car wash. They are trying to get to the government exit point where they plan on hopping onto a bus and going happily off into the sunset. More problems arise and if this review is sounding a little redundant that is because that is how this movie goes. Find a safe place and whoa, wait it aint safe here. Anyway without spoiling the ending which isn’t all that much of a twist, the sheriff and his wife escape and the loyal deputy makes a not so dramatic-dramatic choice.

I’m not sure what that is, but see the movie and you will understand that you saw it coming. The last frame of the movie shows the sheriff and his wife walking off into the sunset and a government satellite picks up the couple heading to Cedar Rapids and declares an emergency quarantine protocol. If you see the movie you will see that that is going to be bad news.

All in all this was not a bad movie. I would have personally liked to see more gore, which I think by the reviews of the ‘73 original it has more. There was nothing new or ground breaking in it either. Timothy Olyphant is one of my favorite actors with a great role in Deadwood as coincidentally the sheriff, and as agent 47 in Hitman. Here he does a pretty good job, but there wasn’t a whole lot to work with as far as script. As for the costars, all did a good job being scared, frightened, surprised, but you could have put me and my wife in the roles and the outcome could have been sufficient. I put the mediocrity of this movie on the director whose vision of the movie was different than what I would have preferred, which is kinda strange in that Romero was a producer on the film. In the end I would save this as a renter on a cold October night.