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Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

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Residentevil Zombos Says: Fair (but only because I like Milla Javovich)

Watching the lissom Alice (Milla Jovovich) adroitly manhandle automatic weapons only goes so far to entertain in this unending series of flying bullets, flying kickassery, and flailing plotlines, padded with relentless undead and increasingly inane T-Virus mutations. Paul W. S. Anderson’s unending slow-motion, freeze-frame interruptions to the CGI action are almost as annoying as the numb-thumping soundtrack that rocks on, oblivious to its purpose. Resident Evil: Afterlife is as glossy as a MySpace page and as dramatically rendered.

An NRA supporter’s dream–mine, too– of seeing an army of tightly-clad Alice clones rapid-firing their way through the evil minions of the Umbrella Corporation, and countless slobbering undead, lasts only as long as the CGI budget allows. After that it’s up to the original Alice to fly around in her two-seater plane looking for survivors.

An impossible crash landing on the roof of a maximum security prison introduces a few more characters for us to play with. Oh, sorry, this isn’t the interactive game, just the uninvolving movie: I keep forgetting. There is the sports star (Boris Kodjoe), the expendables for the monster attack scenes, the feisty and determined Claire (Ali Larter), the nasty producer who you know is going to screw everyone because he just wants to go home (Kim Coates), and the mysterious military guy they’ve locked up (Wentworth Miller).

With that amazing kind of luck that only happens in bad scripts and Resident Evil movies, an arsenal of heavy-duty firepower has been left behind by the army, but access to it is submerged under the water that’s now flooding the lower levels of the prison. I won’t spoil your fun–this movie does its best to do that already–but my favorite slacker hack of bad scripting, the air vent big enough to crawl or drive through, comes to the rescue as T-Virus nasties begin piling up.

The biggest nasty wears a sack over his head and wields a meat tenderizer and axe combo that is as big as that air vent I mentioned. No explanation is given–and I suppose none is really expected at this point–for this nine-foot mutant showing up at the prison gates. He winds up in the shower with Alice and Claire (but not like that). Anderson’s action-interruptus slow-motion kills the excitement anyway.

The Umbrella Corporation’s evil mastermind (Shawn Roberts)–he wears black and tauntingly slicks his hair back–shows up for the finale. He’s ingested some T-Virus himself and tries to put the bite on Alice. More action-interruptus ensues.

You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned the 3D. That’s because there is nothing to say about it. Its use in this movie is as pointless as everything else.

The Last Airbender (2010)
Gasping For Air

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the last airbender

Zombos Says: Fair (watch the animated series instead)

When everyone kept mispronouncing Aang’s name in The Last Airbender I realized M. Night Shyamalan was holding true to form, which means once again he exhibits his propensity toward ponderous, preachy, hubris-driven moviemaking. It’s the kind of moviemaking that comes from writing and directing inwardly for one’s self and not outwardly to others. George Lucas is the king of hubris-driven moviemaking (the best episode in the Star Wars series, The Empire Strikes Back, was not directed or scripted by him). I now crown Shyamalan the prince and heir apparent.

The Last Airbender (really Avatar: The Last Airbender, but possible confusion with James Cameron’s Avatar led to “Avatar” being dropped from the movie’s title) is based on an American anime series filled with engaging, colorful characters living in a mystical world divided into Four Nations according to the four elements of Air, Earth, Water, and Fire. These nations include the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Air Nomads, and the Fire Nation. Within each of them are gifted individuals who can manipulate the natural element of their nation using martial arts-like movements: they are called Airbenders, Earthbenders, Waterbenders, and Firebenders respectively.

Keeping a peaceful balance between each Nation is the Avatar, a person who’s been reincarnated many times and the only one who has the ability to bend all four elements with mind-blowing power when his (or her) Avatar Spirit state is awakened. When the Avatar goes missing, the Fire Nation conducts a military campaign to subjugate the Water and Earth Nations. Fearing the reincarnation of the Avatar within the Air Nation, Fire Lord Sozin has it destroyed and its people killed. The series ran for three seasons on Nickelodeon. Shyamalan begins with Book One: Water from Season One, when the Avatar, missing for 100 hundred years, returns to stop the Fire Nation and restore harmony to the world.

Young Aang (Noah Ringer) is the Avatar. Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) of the Southern Water Tribe free him from a ball of ice, where he’s been trapped in suspended animation, protected by his Avatar Spirit state after getting caught in a tumultuous storm. Katara and Sokka, after a long-winded and unnecessary explanation of the spiritual nature of their world and the significance of the Avatar, accompany Aang on his quest to learn manipulation of Water, Earth, and Fire in preparation for fighting the Fire Nation. Prince Zuko (Dev Patel), ostracized and disfigured by his tyrannical father, Fire Lord Ozai (Cliff Curtis), for speaking out of turn, is obsessed with restoring his father’s approval by capturing the Avatar.

What makes the animated series endearing, charming, and just plain groovy fun to watch is the interplay between its characters, their humor mixed with serious situations, and the overriding spirituality—a mix of 1960s Psychedelic Movement, Eastern Religions, and New Age riffing—that imbues its story with
purpose and contextual sensibility. The combination of American cartoon and anime styles creates a unique visual playfulness and verve that is never overly
dark in tone or preposterous in its unfolding. None of these endearing qualities made it into this live-action movie, which is ponderous to tears and burdened with tedious voice-over explanations and lengthy exposition crumpling the sparkling creativity of the animated series.

Shyamalan’s casting choices do not fit their animated counterparts well at all. Acting ranges from wooden to pretentious: Katara is a smart, confident, go-getter in the anime; here she’s awkward, uncertain, and burdened with clumsy dialog; Sokka, lighthearted and Jim Carrey-styled improvisational in the anime is rendered here broodingly serious and a killjoy; Aang, the pivotal character who’s aangst over facing his Avatar responsibilities and his fear of causing harm through his unbridled anger when in the Avatar state providing room for emotional growth in the anime, tempered by his boyish spirit of adventure, can’t muster a strong presence here. Look at any still picture of Noah Ringer as Aang and you will see no chi energy emanating from his posturing. He has the Avatar tattoos and glider staff but that’s all. Appa is a big fuzzy plush toy of flying bison perfection (Aang rides him through the clouds), but we don’t see much interaction between Aang and his cherished Appa, although they are practically inseparable in the anime.

The showdown between the Fire Nation’s armada of ash-belching ships and the Northern Water Tribe is rendered incomprehensible for anyone who hasn’t seen the animated series, and near gibberish for those who have.

The movie is missing important bridging scenes for what eventually wound up onscreen and a key dynamic of Aang’s involvement, a more plausible reason for why he traveled to the Northern Water Tribe in the first place, is pushed to the side. Shyamalan’s insistence on drawn-out movements to bend anything
exaggerates those motions to absurdity, and his action-stopping slow-motion overuse during battle scenes undermines their intensity and suspense. When Aang finally enters his Avatar state to combat the armada, this live-action confrontation appears anti-climactic when compared to the similar animated
sequence, where his destructive power is rendered more awesomely than shown here. The movie’s texture is dark with bright colors muted. Even the flares of fire are dull and lifeless, and do not convey a sense of heat. Critics have noted the retro-fitted 3D version is even darker. I watched the 2D version and it is
pretty murky.

As a fan of the anime series I’m disappointed in this confused, overly complicated, and pedantic adaptation. As a movie critic I can say that for a movie version of the anime’s spiritual journey, one filled with wonder and energy, this first movie in a potential series does little to emotionally involve us and gives even less to wonder at.

Unless you’re wondering what I’m wondering—and it’s not to find a duck and a hose at a 7 Eleven—I’m wondering how a heavy-handed director, with a lately spotty track record, is given a movie that requires a touch as light as air.

That’s what I’m wondering.

Jonah Hex (2010)
The Spell is Broken

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Jonah Hex

Zombos Says: Fair (read the comic series instead)

I miss Doctor Miguelito Quixote Loveless (Michael Dunn), the diminutive villain with grand schemes on the 1960s television series The Wild Wild West. He was a villain to reckon with, one far above John Malkovich’s burlap sack portrayal of renegade madman Quentin Turnbull in Jonah Hex. Loveless devoted his creatively criminal and misguided scientific genius to endless schemes embellished with his weapons of mass destruction, gleefully challenging government agent James West to stop him each time they crossed paths.

Paths are crossed in Jonah Hex, but they don’t seem to head in any sensible direction. They meander around with the artlessness of that silly Wild Wild West movie with Will Smith, then saunter a well-trod vengeance trail much like The Outlaw Josey Whales, and finally stop plumb cold at the usual quest-between-mundane-here and mystical-there with less force than The Crow.

A weapon of mass destruction, created by Eli Whitney no less, figures prominently. They always do. Mysterious glowing balls of fire provide the triggering mechanism for larger balls of fiery, explosive material. Turnbull does a dry run of the weapon’s capabilities by blowing up a small town just after church services. He threatens to blow up the nation’s capital on the centennial celebration for July 4th. President Grant (Aidan Quinn) conscripts Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) into hunting down Turnbull and ending the madman’s grand scheme. The bad blood between Hex and Turnbull goes back aways: Turnbull killed Hex’s family in retribution for Hex causing the death of his son.

Something truly weird happens in this movie and I’m not referring to Megan Fox.

Yet.

A flashback done in comic book format explains, sort of, how the Indians helped Hex survive to become the I-talk-to-the-dead-bounty-hunter-badass wanted by the law. Watching the colorful but limited animation (it brought to mind those Marvel Super Heroes cartoons in the 1960s) I wondered Did they run out of budget? Was this movie originally planned as animation? Why suddenly eschew perfectly good live action for a graphic novel on screen? Why not pepper this lengthy backstory as flashbacks throughout this leisurely-paced movie to make it less onerous?

I thought about this until “I don’t play house” Lilah (Megan Fox) and Hex hook up for a bedtime social visit. Then I started thinking Why is she in this movie? Beauty to his ugliness? She doesn’t have much to do, or much to say, or much to act on. Brolin has even less to work with, but he does have a nifty ability to talk to the dead. He just grabs hold of a moldy corpse and it springs to life. But he needs to talk fast because the fresher the corpse, the faster it starts to immolate into ashes. Aside from Hex’s orneriness, this appears to be his best and only mystical ability.

Red-tinted fever-dream flashes of him fighting Turnbull around a coffin with a crow sitting on its lid are the only other mystical touches. They don’t make sense, but touches they remain. Eventually Hex talks to enough dead people to find Turnbull. Before he meets his nemesis, he stocks up on the usual badass tricky gunnage that can deliver high explosive impact and flailing bodies flying asunder with minimal effort. He gets it from this movie’s equivalent of James West’s gadget-buddy Artemus Gordon.

Hex and Turnbull and Lilah square-off on an ironclad ship in Independence Harbor as it speeds toward the capital with its deadly weapon preparing to fire. Union soldiers pull up alongside in their version of the ironclad Monitor and ask Turnbull to kindly surrender his weapon of mass destruction and stop being such a damn nuisance. While they wait for his reply, he locks and loads and blows them out of the water in a shower of little ironclad pieces. I was hoping for a better reenactment of the Battle of Hampdon Roads.

The one thing they got right in this movie is when Hex whistles for his horse to come to him.

At least his horse knows what to do..

Survival of the Dead (2010)
Romero Without Bite

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survival of the dead Zombos Says: Fair

Survival of the Dead is a silly zombie movie when it shouldn’t be and a terrible zombie movie when it should be terrifying. Revisiting threadbare plot themes, George Romero’s once fearsome and unstoppable horde have become as bothersome as pesky mosquitoes in need of swatting when they get too close, and his always quarrelsome living survivors, not surprisingly, are still quarreling.

Only this time he’s put them all on Plum Island and split the survivors into two feuding Irish homesteads headed by Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) and Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Walsh). Seamus wants to keep the deadheads tethered or herded like cattle until a cure can be found. Patrick wants to shoot the rotters and be done with it. Almost everyone dresses, rides horses, and shoots guns like this is a Western; but it isn’t, although an Old West zombie story might have been more engaging. A zombie riding horseback is even lassoed by a cowboy. I halfheartedly wanted to see the cowpoke heat up a Melody Ranch branding iron and tag the zombie. It would not have made much sense but neither does much of this movie.

Eschewing the grittier and more grotesque Tom Savini-styled makeup effects that made zombies and their habits more revolting and terrifying back in the day (although this storyline does take place a few days after the plague starts), Romero instead enhances the de rigueur skull-splitting with assorted CGI-flavored dispatches including the cranium plop, the flare gun incendiary noggin’ (which reminded me of Jim Carrey’s Ghost of Christmas Past in Scrooge), and the Looney Tune pop-eyed popper (I was disappointed no accompanying awhooozah! horn sounded when those pupils popped).

Romero’s zombies don’t look much the worse for being undead here. They continue to shuffle about everywhere, on land and in the water, but he directs Survival like he’s planing a piece of wood when he should be gouging deep splintery notches in it instead. Survival’s zombies lack bite: Romero prefers to make them loved ones gone bad instead of ravenous fiends looking to tear chunks of flesh from living bodies and play slinky with intestines. This may serve his story but turns his ubiquitous monsters, the same ones he fostered into popular culture, into slow moving hazards his characters avoid on the road to survival, but not too hurriedly. Survival’s deadheads would fit comfortably into the undead and not very scary crowd at the Monroeville Mall Zombie Walk.

Sarge (Alan Van Sprang) and his small band of soldiers turned mercenaries, last seen in Diary of the Dead, provide most of the action. One soldier on guard duty watches a late night show poking fun at zombies on his laptop. Another one, Tomboy (Athena Karkanis) masturbates to kill time. They come across a group of hunters who have put CGI zombie heads on spikes for fun. Irritated by that, Sarge kills all of them except for Boy (Kevin Bostick), who shows them a YouTube video with Patrick O’Flynn extolling the fresh air and safety of Plum Island. I wonder if he has a Facebook page? They decide to go there and travel to the docks in an armored truck. After finding a million dollars locked away in the truck, they agree it’s worthless given the current situation (the zombie plague, not the recession); but Boy still manages to keep the key.

It’s a lucky coincidence the banished Patrick and his small band of followers are at the docks when Sarge pulls up. Over bullets and zombies, and occasional flashes of Romero’s wit for dry humor–one man fishing keeps catching zombies, and a stick of lighted dynamite is fortuitously dropped into a zombie’s grasping fingers–Patrick and the soldiers make their way to a ferry and sweep it clean of infestation. They power up the engines and head to Plum Island.

The tension does not pick up with this shift in fire power. Romero doggedly undermines it with his feuding patriarchs squaring off on the dietary habits of the deadheads, another you-were-infected-weren’t-you? zombie in the making, an inconsequential twist, and a banal approach to showing it all. A few scenes of flesh and organ eating are for perfunctory consumption only. Zombies placed in the barn’s stalls like cattle provides a whimsical touch, but Romero’s unique ability to balance his story’s importance between living and undead falters here. In Survival of the Dead the living are caricatures of people and the deadheads are imitation zombies.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Not a Dreamy Remake

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Freddy KruegerZombos Says: Fair

Look, here’s the thing in a nutshell: if you’re going to do a remake, reimagining, reboot, or whatever you’d like to call it, you better come to the table ready to ante up big and play it for all it’s worth. Otherwise, why bother?

Freddy Krueger may be properly dressed in his signature striped sweater, brown Fedora, and nasty blade glove, but he has nowhere to go in this unimaginative reimagining of Wes Craven’s original nightmare. Under a deathmask’s worth of immobilizing rubber makeup (although I admit it appears more medically correct), Jackie Earle Haley’s perpetually pouting face made me pine for Robert Englund’s glistening bald pate, leering, spongy flesh-burned face, and his manic, gleefully malicious dream-devil-in-the-boiler-room enthusiasm.

The outrageous, lethally-twisted dream intrusions that are the hallmark of this franchise are put to bed in Samuel Bayer’s cardboard standee version of Freddy, where winking consciousness between Elm Street’s dreamland and wakefulness is less important than an almost back to back line-up of dead-teenager-walking kill-fests, escalating the body count while decreasing emotional involvement from us for those being stalked. This is a painting by numbers, pretty to look at (it’s well photographed by Jeff Cutter), but rote in its execution of mayhem: there is no sizzle when we should feel the burn as much as child-molester Fred Krueger did.

Ironically, the interpersonal perquisites of cell phone, too many close-ups of Google-like search engine queries, and a victim’s anguished YouTube-delivered solilocam cry for help, distance Freddy’s victims from each other—and from us—by substituting the more intimate sleep-over vigil shown in the original film, when Tina, Nancy, and Glen fret over their shared nightmares, with a modern digital one that trades the popcorn closeness for laptops and no-doze medications. While Freddy’s potential victims share a forgotten connection from having attended the same preschool, their relationships are made weaker because of this digitized distancing, rendering them less supportive of each other and easier prey for their tormentor. Which is good for Freddy because, being less creative in his attacks in this remake, he doesn’t do much beyond making sparks when he scrapes his blades against the pipes.

Again and again and again.

At least Nancy remains his favorite little girl. But this Nancy (Rooney Mara) is not 1984’s Nancy (played by the feisty Heather Langenkamp). Here she puts up a less-spirited fight against Freddy and spends more time searching the Internet for information and sketching her nightmares instead of trying to save her friends. Where Craven drove his story through the battle of wills between Nancy and Freddy, escalating the stakes through an ambitious series of special effects to add urgency and nightmarish uncertainty, writers Strick and Heisserer use the slow revelation of Freddy’s nastiness with children as their primary driver, eschewing the giddily insane, booby-trapped confrontation between Nancy and Freddy for repetitive, almost static, boiler room scenes of Freddy looking ominous and victims looking scared. Fans can debate the merits or demerits of this changed dynamic, but this remake’s less dreamland, more rational approach keeps the story as rigid as Haley’s burn makeup.

As a fan of horror movies, and yes, the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, I can tell you this movie is a disappointment because it takes from the original storyline but doesn’t seem to understand it. Freddy is here, his victims are here, lots more technology use—and no weird-looking hairdos—are here, but the nightmarish invasion of one’s dreams is missing; the menace that sparked the first entry in this franchise is missing; 1984’s spirit behind the envelope-pushing special effects is missing.

This is one boring movie when it should have sizzled.

Now, if they had Johnny Depp play Freddy instead…?

The Grudge 2 (2006)

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Grudge 2

Zombos Says: Fair

The vengeful ghost in The Grudge 2 is a yūrei–definitely. Telltale signs are the long black hair that hangs disheveled, and the dangling; you know, the twisting, floating–sort of lopsided walk–most J-Horror apparitions do when staring you down, or just before they ring your neck into a pretzel. And those wide-eyed, gray-skinned ghosts definitely haunt a particular place. No, wait a minute. They do tend to leave the house a lot, even in The Grudge, and in this sequel they’ve hopped all the way over to Chicago. So they are now haunting two places at once. There’s nothing about yūrei haunting two places at once. Damn. And what’s with that little gray boy that meows like a cat, and the cat that doesn’t meow at all?

The Grudge 2 is a bit confusing at first. Director Takashi Shimizu weaves his continuing tale of blind rage and death between three plotlines: three school girls in Japan dumb enough to go into that house; Aubrey Davis (Amber Tamblyn) traveling to Japan to find out why her sister (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is accused of murder and arson; and a romantic relationship in Chicago that escalates into darkness, witnessed by a frightened young boy.

The opening breakfast scene jars you to attention, but before you can say “We should have gone to IHOP,” we cut to Japan and three school girls–one Japanese, two American, and all three heading for a major bad hair day. The tall, not-so-hip Allison tags along as they enter the haunted house where it all started. On a dare, she enters the closet. That infamous closet. Shimizu does a good job of building this claustrophobic scene to it’s expected climax with solid scares. Closets can be very scary, whether you are hiding in them or hoping nothing pops out of them. And the way you can never find things in closets–yes, they’re evil, pure and simple.

But this early scene is the only true scare in the entire film. While there are shock-cuts galore, Shimizu dotes on showing us the deadly duo again and again, as they appear under sheets, in windows, in hallways, on desk tops, and in sweatshirts (you will understand that when you see it). The tableaus are visually clever, but swing more toward the manga-style of visual cleverness making it all humorous; and lose their scariness and suspense by doing so. Instead of sustained tension from the unseen, Shimizu has created Hollywoodized slasher-yūrei monsters that rack up the body count in ever clever but not very scary ways. Instead of tight glimpses of that stark, wide-eyed pasty face of evil–covered by severe split ends of hair–we see lingering shots of it appearing out of photographs and mirrors.

This is not to say Shimizu has done a bad job: he’s just Americanized J-Horror to a stage where The Grudge has become a franchise. What was once iconic J-Horror imagery has now been replaced with your typical American horror movie modus operandi–and would you like fries with that?

A journalist researching the murders since the first occurrence joins Aubrey Davis in searching for answers to the mysterious deaths. Finding a journal written by an eight year old girl in the closet, he brings it to a friend who studies Japanese folklore. The journal explains some things, perhaps including why the original evil or rage came into existence, but before Davis and the journalist can head out to see the person who may be responsible for the evil, the yūrei pay a visit in a well-staged, but to be expected, scene involving photographs, photo developing trays, and really bad over-exposure on a negative.

As Aubrey pursues the answers to this mystery, our three daring school girls are not faring so well. The yūrei are working overtime to make sure no one who visits their humble abode goes without a thank you from hell. And Jake, the young frightened boy in Chicago, is also experiencing new tenant issues–only these tenants don’t walk up the stairs, and they make a hell of a lot of noise, too. The neighbors next door, the Flemings, also have a hooded guest who creeps him out. Strange noises and pounding from their apartment eventually force him to find out who the hooded person is, and why dad is going bonkers.

The score is actually quite good, creating more of an ominous mood than most of the movie. The weird gurgling, clicking sound made by the broken-neck yūrei apparition is also used very well here. It provides more chills than most of the closeups. The acting is topnotch, too. But the continual cutting back and forth between the separate plotlines is confusing, and has a dulling effect on what should be mounting tensions leading to a climax.

And what a disappointing climax. As one character notes, “there can be no end to what has started.” I would modify this to “there can be no end to a cash-cow franchise in Hollywood, so what you see is what you get until The Grudge 3. And don’t expect much there, either if we can strudel* the story along to The Grudge 4.”

*strudel: the fine Hollywood art of stretching a concept for all its worth, using as little ‘filling’ as possible to keep you coming back for more.

The Burrowers (2008)
Not Deep Enough

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The burrowers

Zombos Says: Fair

It came to this; a setting sun lingering at the warm edge of approaching night, watched from three rocking chairs indecisively teetering back and forth on their compass tips, saddled by three bored and restless riders of the stiff-slatted pines.

In between a dot and a dash rode Zombos, Lawn Gisland, and me, to nowhere in particular as we traded silences and hiccups on the terrace. The footfalls of summer could be heard bounding up the steps, bringing with them the sizzle of barbecues, giggly splashes from pools, and the monotonous drone of air conditioners humming through hot, molasses-sticky, nights where forgotten candy bars melted in jean pockets, mosquitoes danced to the crackling of ice cubes in sweaty glasses of
lemonade and iced tea and soda, and texting fingers Keystone Copped their slippery grasp on hot cell phones.

“I am not looking forward to estivating by the seashore or anywhere near a barbecue,” said Zombos, absently swirling the iced tea around in his
glass.

“Mind chewing on that a bit more for me?” asked Lawn Gisland, lazily swatting a fly off the pitiado floral rose on his right boot. He yawned larger than a barn door opens and stretched his long legs out in front of him. Former movie cowboy and now traveling circus rodeo star, he was never one for estivating in all his long ranging years.

“Pass the summer,” explained Zombos. “Estivate means to pass the summer.”

We stared off into the waters of Long Island Sound as it grew dark. Zimba brought us another round of iced tea. Lawn took the half-lemon, cut just for him, and squeezed it between his massive fingers. We often joked that if he wanted so much lemon in his iced tea he should be drinking lemonade.

“Oh, I almost forgot, this came today,” said Zimba. She held up The Burrowers DVD.

I jumped up faster than Zombos. “Last one in is a really bad egg!” I said, snatching the DVD. Zombos and Lawn quickly followed me as we hurried to watch this Western horror tale.

 

Lurking monsters spoil the tranquil Western Plains in J.T. Petty’s The Burrowers; an almost refreshing mix of creature-feature, saddle-sores, and the American Old West. I say almost because, while Petty mines the bitter social climate between Indian and settler after the Trail of Tears and the demise of the bison—a once plentiful food source for the Indians—he doesn’t dig deep enough into his characters or embellish their actions to make this a definitive terror on the range Wild West story.

Homesteaders are massacred during the night. A search party is quickly formed to go after the Indians who everyone assumes butchered the men and kidnapped the womenfolk. While you may be tempted to draw comparisons to John Ford’s The Searchers, that would be a bad trail to follow. Ford composed an emotionally-charged journey that eventually forces one man to confront his prejudicial demons, and shot it against sumptuous vistas of sky and land where the deer and the antelope play. While Petty uses his budget-lens quite well to show the desolation across vast distances and makes his assembled posse just as calloused with similar prejudices, its riders and their intentions pale in comparison. No one worth a tinker’s damn stands out from the tumbling tumbleweed to take the bull by the horns or, in this case, the ugly as a mud fence Burrowers by their withers through his shallow direction.

Clancy Brown’s tall and sure character, John Clay, is not given enough dialog or motivation to sink his spurs into. The brash relationship between the slow moving cavalry, wanting to treat every Indian as hostile and hang them high, the lovelorn Coffey (Karl Geary) wanting to move with more urgency to get his kidnapped fiancé back, and Clay’s impatience with the cavalry’s youthful commander never heats to branding iron hot in this story. And as soon as the riding gets rough, the Indian-hunting cavalry and the more determined group of rescuers, led by Clay, go their separate ways after a brief confrontation, splitting the tension, but not intensifying it. Also left behind is any hope of recalcitrance, growth in characters, or mighty clashes of egos to move this period piece beyond the more contemporary getting picked off, one by one, formula.

Petty makes the horror palpable through brief glimpses of the hungry quadrupeds skulking in the bushes, waiting for the cowpokes to fall asleep. The way in which the Burrowers paralyze their victims, bury them, still conscious, in shallow graves to ‘season the meat’—you will know what I mean when you watch the movie—and then chow down after a few days wait is gruesome. But he never moves beyond the lazy horror movie tempo of stalking and dying. If you have watched a few contemporary horror movies, you know how often it always seems to boil down to one frenetic encounter after another, leading to one victim after another being killed, with emphasis on how creatively or gorily that kill is done. For Clay and his search
party, you can break it all down to when an attack will take place—at night—and who will be next; place your bets on the annoying guy who can’t shoot straight. This approach fills the running time; suspense and chills don’t, even when the rescuers find their bullets aren’t effective in holding the Burrowers at bay.

In-between encounters, the cowboys learn a little more about the Burrowers, who mysteriously show up every twenty years, chow down hardy, and then
disappear until the next time. When Clay and his party hear that another tribe of Indians knows how to fight these mysterious Burrowers, they go looking for members of that tribe to help them. The method that tribe uses, however, is not quite what the rescuers had in mind, which leads to the only nail-biting showdown with the Burrowers. If only the rest of the movie could have shown more of this.

At one point I hoped the cavalry would show up with a Gatling gun; but maybe the budget squelched such ideas.

After the initial attack on the homestead in the opening minutes, the pace becomes leisurely with little verve to distinguish the proceedings from the usual horror movie situation. When a young survivor from another attack is dug up, she’s quickly packed up and sent away with Dobie (Galen Hutchinson), a young man whose mom sent him along with the search party hoping it would make a real man out of him. Not much happens between the paralyzed girl, who can only wiggle her toe against her boot, and Dobie after he is sent back with her, hoping to find a doctor who can help; except for an encounter with the Burrowers that ends on the expected down note.

Eventually you start to wonder how many people are buried in shallow graves lying a few feet away from the riders as they make their way along the trail. At one point, a horse’s hoof breaks through the ground—and something more—but Petty keeps his riders moving unawares. The beautiful views of the Plains take on an ominous tone after this, especially when you realize the Burrowers bury their living victims close to where the attack takes place.

The Burrowers fails to use, play with, or dance around the wealth of tropes, clichés, and thematic conventions most of us are familiar with after watching Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Unforgiven, Dances With Wolves, and many other Western shows and movies.

While not exactly a hanging offense, it would have given the story more true grit.

The Video Dead (1987)
It’s A Crime!

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VideoDead_BoxArt

Zombos Says: Poor, Stupid, Lot's of Fun

"Slow down a minute and let me get this straight," said Detective Web. He paged through his notebook. "You say this Paul Hasselhoff—"

"Paul Hollstenwall," I corrected him.

"You say this Paul Hollstenwall is to blame for Zombos's death?"

"Yes. It's all his fault. He insisted we watch another one of his inane travesties of straight to video horror called The Video Dead. Zombos keeled over dead away toward the end. It was horrible."

I held back the tears. Glenor Glenda, our housekeeper, stood in shock over his body. Thank God Zimba and Zombos Junior were at the theater to see the livelier Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

"I told him, I did," said Glenor, between blowing her nose and dabbing her wet eyes. "I told him to go with his son and get away from all this nasty horror. Oh, how will we explain this to his son? The missus will be so upset!"

"Hey, has this been dusted for prints yet?" asked Detective Web as he reached for The Video Dead VHS tape.

"Yeah, done," said a voice from the other side of the room.

"Haven't seen one of these in a while," he said, picking it up. "So tell me about this movie. I find it hard to believe the guy croaked just from watching it."

"I…I don't know where to begin," I said.

"Start with the facts. Just the facts. That will do fine."

"Let me think. Okay. It's about a TV set that looks like it came from the house in Night of the Living Dead. The TV is delivered, by mistake, to a writer who is promptly killed by the zombies who enter our world through it."

"Flesh-eating zombies?" asked Detective Web.

"Well, not quite. They strangle people, mostly, then toss them into washing machines and start the spin cycle."

"I thought you said this television set came from the house in Night of the Living Dead. Didn't those zombies eat people?"

"Yes. I mean no. I mean I didn't say the set came from the house in Night of the Living Dead, it just looks like it did. Now, one neighbor does get eaten, sure, but that happens later in the movie, and we don't see it happen, just the messy aftermath. The rest of the time the zombies giggle a lot…and want to go dancing, too. And there's this Garbage Man fellow that appears briefly in the TV, but we never find out why, or what he's actually doing in there, or even how he got there in the first place. Then again, I'm not sure how the zombies got into the television set, either."

"So…this is a Japanese horror movie?" asked Detective Web.

"No. Why do you ask?"

"Well, you said they come out of the TV. I remember seeing that ragu movie—"

"Oh, you mean Ringu, or The Ring as the Americanized version is called," I said.

"Yeah, right, that's the movie."

"No, this movie is from 1987. Ringu came later.

I looked up at Detective Web. He scratched behind his ear with the pencil in his hand, closed his notepad, and thought for a moment.

"Maybe we should view the evidence to get a better idea of what this is all about," he suggested.

I reluctantly took the tape from him and put it into our old VHS player. We pulled our chairs close to the screen as The Video Dead started playing; after I fast-forwarded through the trailers and such of course.

It starts off innocently enough. The Hi-Lite delivery service delivers an unmarked crate to an unsuspecting writer. We know he is a writer because he is sleeping the day away, he’s impatient, and he says he does not have time to watch television. He must be a blogger, too.

Over his protests they leave the crate in his living room. He manages to pry the it open, takes out the old, battered, rotary channel dial, black and white television set, and plugs it in. Remember, it is 1987. He checks to see if it works, but only one show comes in clearly no matter which channel he turns to. The show is Zombie Blood Nightmare and not much happens in it except for zombies continuously staggering around in the woods. He turns off the television, but it keeps turning on. He unplugs it and goes back to bed. The set turns on even when unplugged.

Creepy.

In a rare moment of directorial acumen, one rancid zombie notices he's "on" TV and presses up against the inside of the cathode ray tube. In a flash, and lots of smoke, he is poking his head out of the set. Remember, this is 1987.

When the Hi-Lite boys sheepishly return later, realizing they made a mistake—the television was actually supposed to go to an occult institute, sure, why not?—they find one dead writer, conveniently propped up by the front door to save them time going through the house to find his body.

 "Boy, those are lousy zombies. That '80s makeup isn't bad, but they didn't even eat the guy," observed Detective Web.

"The zombie look does manage to capture a bit of the EC Comics style, but it suffers from that '80s rubbery mask technology. Wait, it gets worse," I assured him, "those delivery guys were the best actors in the bunch."

"It's criminal." Detective Web shook his head in disbelief.

 A few months later the house is sold while the zombies are still out and about in the woods nearby waiting for the housewarming party. The new owners are sister and brother, Zoe (Roxanna Augesen) and Jeff (Rocky Duvall), and their parents due to arrive from overseas. April (Victoria Bastel), a neighbor, welcomes Jeff to the neighborhood. Her skunk-chasing poodle, Chocolate, runs off into the woods, encounters a zombie and dies from fright.

"Do the zombies chew anything besides the scenery?" asked Detective Web, growing impatient.

"Eventually. All I'll say is her name sounds "like the smell they put on Kleenex" and she's heading to the pet store in the morning.

That night, Jeff finds the old television set in the attic with a little enticement from Jennifer Miro of the The Nuns band who pops up in his room. Jeff carries the TV back to his room and plugs it in, forgetting the dire warning from the loud Texan (Sam David McClelland), who showed up earlier that day demanding to know where the television set was. The encounter with the overacting Texan, calling the underacting Jeff a "damn fool," was forgettable even for me, so maybe Jeff's memory is not so bad after all.

After taking a few medicinal tokes on his weed, Miro pops up again on a TV channel, then suddenly in his lap. Before he can decide whether it’s the weed or fortune that’s placed a naked woman in his bedroom, she pops back into the TV; just in time to have her throat cut by the Garbageman, who warns Jeff she was a zombie playing with his head.

"Hey, was that meant as a double entendre?" asked Detective Web.

"I doubt it," I said. "Nothing in this script indicates the author is that clever."

This is the first and last time we meet the Garbageman. He scares Jeff into following his directions to put the TV set in the basement and tie a mirror across the screen. But the other zombies are still out and about, and after three solid months of staggering aimlessly in the woods they decide to have some fun with the neighbors.

Entering April's house, one undead couple have a hearty giggle at the buzz from a blender—they must have been dead for a long time—while another zombie strangles April's mom.

And strangles her.

And continues to strangle her for some time.

"This is a first. Usually zombies bite your throat, not strangle it," said Detective Web. "He's also got to be the weakest walking stiff I've ever seen."

Finally, even after April's mom plunges an iron into the zombie's head, he manages to strangle her completely. The iron remains in his head for the rest of the movie. Being dead, it is not much of a bother for him. I'm sure there is a witty remark one can make about a zombie with an iron stuck in his head, but I'll take the high road on this one and stay mum.

 "Wait a minute." Detective Web pulled at his earlobe. "How does the Garbageman manage to kill a zombie by cutting its throat…while an iron plunged deeply into this one's noggin' has no effect at all?

"I'm sorry, but if you are looking for any logic or rational thought here, there isn't any. Just go with it. It's another senseless cinematic crime like so many others."

"And I thought I'd seen it all," he said.

"Mr. Zoc, I've made some lovely tea for you and…?" said Glenor Glenda, putting the tray beside us.

"Jack," answered Detective Web. "That's very gracious of you."

I paused the movie while Glenor served our tea. Ever the flirt, she gave Detective Web extra sugar. He noticed. With our cups of tea in hand, I started the movie again.

After murdering—not eating—April's parents, the zombies go next door. The Bride zombie, another flirt, pops out of a washing machine to kill one surprised housewife by strangling her. The housewife is then loaded head first into the washer and put on a spin and rinse cycle. More giggling ensues.

I kid you not.

The Texan returns to save the day. He tells April, Jeff, and Zoe that the zombies can be killed! All you need to do is shoot them so THEY THINK they're dying, then chop them into pieces.

While they discuss this diversion from standard in zombie lore, April is captured by Jimmy D. (Patrick Treadway) a greaser zombie who likes blonds. Not in a rush to save April, the Texan and Jeff get a good night's sleep before heading into the woods to track down the undead, fun-loving killers. Not being an NRA kind of kid, Jeff heads out with a bow and arrow. The Texan wisely chooses to bring along a big gun and a chainsaw.

In the woods, Jeff shoots a zombie full of arrows, and relishes acting like Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, his favorite movie, as he slices the zombie into pieces. To entice more zombies to come and get it, the Texan hangs Jeff—who apparently hasn't watched many horror movies beyond Texas Chainsaw Massacre—from a tree; high enough so his feet don't touch the ground, but low enough so the zombies can grab at him to build suspense for us.

Or try to.

At this point we also learn that zombies, when approaching, make bells ring. Fans of Hammer’s Captain Kronos will recall how he hunted vampires with bells and croaking frogs. No croaking frogs were used in this movie, however, just bells. One final tidbit of zombie lore, mentioned by the Texan, mentions they also go crazy when locked up and start eating each other. So the plan is to either trap them or chainsaw them into itsy-bitsy pieces. More zombie lore I didn’t know. Did you?

"Finally, we'll get to see them eat something," commented Detective Web, taking a sip from his tea. Glenor handed another pastry to him. "These are wonderful, thank you."

Finding the shack, and a partially eaten April inside, the Texan promptly falls asleep while Jeff is left hanging outside. The bells they had spread around start tinkling. Jeff, getting poked by the long sticks the zombies wield with vigor, yells for help, but the Texan apparently did not sleep enough the night before.

I bet you didn’t know zombies like to use long sticks to poke their potential dinner, right?

Right on cue, Jeff drops the only weapon he has, the chainsaw, and the Bride zombie picks it up. Jeff, now with a more urgent reason to yell louder, finally rouses the Texan, who shoots the zombies "to death." The Bride zombie escapes, but the other zombies are down for the count. He lets Jeff down from the tree and both go after her, who, in one of those ironic twists of fate so prevalent in horror movies, goes after them instead.

Unfortunately for Jeff, the she must have been a fan of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, too, because she throttle’s the chainsaw with relish. Jeff, in true horror victim duplicity, runs directly into it as he swings a machete, lopping off her head. Both Jeff and the Texan wind up deader than the zombies through their ineptitude.

A deep groan followed Jeff's slapstick death.

"Yes, that was a groaner, wasn't it?" We both said at once.

Detective Web looked at me. "I thought you groaned.”

I looked at him. "No, I thought you groaned.”

We looked at Glenor. "It wasn't me."

Another groan sounded from in back of her.

"Will you look at that? Hey Jack, we got a live one," said the forensic photographer.

Zombos stood up, cradling his head in his hands.

"Lord love a duck. That is the last triple hot toddy I have on an empty stomach. Glenor, fetch me a bromo-seltzer please. What is everyone looking at?"

Glenor clapped her hands with delight. "You're alive, you're alive!" She ran to fetch the bromo-seltzer.

"Aw, crap, you mean I had to sit through this movie for nothing?" said Detective Web.

"Well, it's almost over. We might as well finish it," I said. 

"What is all this?" asked Zombos, as he pulled a chair over and sat down. "Where is Paul?"

"Long story," I said to Zombos. "I'll fill you in after we finish watching The Video Dead. Glad you could make it."

The Bride zombie, also cradling her head in her hands, joins up with the other zombies, who realize they were not "killed" after all. They all go after Zoe. Left alone to overact, Zoe melodramatically widens her eyes and cries as the zombies lurch outside, stopped only by the mirrors hanging on the doors. Recalling the Texan mentioned the zombies only kill people who show them fear, she decides to invite them in for dinner.

You read that right: dinner.

The zombies don’t know what to make of Zoe's sudden heart-warming attitude, but they go with it.

With everyone sitting around the kitchen table, she serves dinner. Then it is off to the living room for cordials. Two zombies, paging through a magazine, see a couple dancing. Zoe, ever the good host, directs them to the basement, where she pulls out the phonograph. On the pretense of looking for a suitable record, she runs up the basement steps, falls down long enough to build suspense, then locks them in. They quickly go mad and start eating each other. Unfortunately, as you may recall, the TV set is in the basement, too. No sooner than you can say jumpin' jack flash, the zombies are back on TV in reruns.

Zoe, understandably, winds up in a mental institution. Her parents visit, bringing along the TV set, hoping it will perk up her spirits. Zoe's spirits are indeed perked up as she receives unexpected company looking to finish their dance of death.

I turned off the video tape player. Zombos drank his bromo-seltzer as we sat in silence.

The forensic photographer handed me his business card. "I do weddings, bar-mitzvahs, and socials, too."

“Thank you.” I put the business card in my pocket.

"Well, with you alive, we don't need to bring in Hollstenwall. Russo?" said Detective Web, looking around the room.

"Yo."

"Cancel that APB on Paul Hollstenwall. Put one out on Robert Scott. He's the real criminal."

"For what?"

"Impersonating a director and screenwriter."

Prom Night (2008)

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Zombos Says: Fair

Prom Night‘s life-size theater-promotion cardboard standee of a door, strategically placed to pique interest for this teen thriller, is a good indication of how much effort went into this movie. When I opened the door it only produced a halfhearted, single scream. The teenagers walking by when I did this looked surprised and laughed. Even they were expecting something a bit more slasher-scream-full.

When I watched the movie, I found boredom made my mind wander a bit when Donna (Brittany Snow) and her boyfriend, Bobby (Scott Porter) exchange corsages as Donna’s aunt and uncle look on, beaming with happiness. I imagined a prom night filled with monster corsages devouring boyfriends, Carrie-like J-horror prom nights stalked by ghosts seeking vengeance, or maybe even tuxedoed zombies crashing the prom night party; anything else but this unnecessary reworking of Jamie Lee Curtis’ more violent and relevant 80s slasher. I didn’t attend my senior prom. Perhaps I have unresolved issues with that. Or perhaps this movie has unresolved issues with terror, tension, and thrills. I think that’s more likely.

Director Nelson McCormick has done a large amount of episodic television work so maybe that’s why his movie is paced around imaginary commercial breaks. Each time tension builds he moves away from the action to show people dancing or crowning the prom king and queen. Like an episode of CSI, nothing appears out of control or erupts into hysterical terror. He also seems to have a fetish for closets. I lost count how often someone opened, reached into, looked in, or hid in, a closet. Donna hides under a bed twice, but I didn’t find that as annoying. Not much tension builds from opening closets, I can tell you that. I’d sum up this movie this way: give sinister look, slash a victim, show dancing in slow motion, show someone opening a closet; give sinister look, slash a victim, show more dancing, show someone else opening a closet; slash a victim, stop the dancing long enough to show prom king and queen being crowned, show someone opening a damn closet again, slash another victim; and so on…

Donna is stalked by her college teacher (probably her chemistry teacher; they’re all nutzy from handling toxic substances). It’s not clear why he needs to kill people in order to get close to her, but this is a slasher movie so reasons are not always necessary, only lots of slashing. He’s so good at it he leaves a bloodless trail suitable for this PG-13’er. After her family is massacred, three years pass before Donna’s back to normal enough to attend her senior prom. Not surprisingly, her stalking teacher escapes in time to rent a tux and join the festivities.

The teacher (Johnathon Schaech) gives overly sinister looks and acts like a Charles Manson wannabe. He wears a black golf cap, tweedy sport coat, and needs a shave. He looks intensely at you when spoken to without saying a word. Only in movies do psychos dress and act this way. In real life, the only guys who dress and act this way are directors and bloggers of horror movies. I admit I did wear a black golf cap before seeing this movie. Now I realize it does make you look like an oddball if you’re not golfing, so that’s it for me. I’m happy to say I haven’t worn a tweedy sport coat in years. I do still need to shave.

When Donna realizes she’s being stalked again, the action is chopped, but not in that good, horror-chopped-up sort of way. We keep shifting, never staying long enough in one place to be scared or cause popcorn tipping seat-jump. The opening few minutes promise much but deliver little, and I won’t pin all the blame on the PG-13 rating requirements. All the action is homogenized around those imaginary commercial breaks, and starts and stops with little tension or visceral involvement. It’s all glossy, television-slick—not cable, mind you–with no blemishes to fret over.

The prom is held in a lavish hotel with beautiful young people who don’t worry about recessions or social inequities or our out of control national debt. The police are adequately inept to help increase the body count, but Detective Winn (Idris Elba) goes through the motions anyway, and Elba does a good job in spite of the character he’s written into. When Donna is left almost friendless, I imagined how different this might have been.

What if Polly Pureheart Donna was a black-haired goth with punky attitude? Perky goth Donna flirts with her chem teacher (or maybe lit teacher is better: they like tweedy jackets, too), and going too far, regrets it. He goes nutz when she calls it off and can’t hold a test tube without breaking it just thinking of her. So now there’s her guilt and his feelings of rejection adding to the terror. Guilty terror with feelings of rejection is always great for building tension. To stay alive, she’s forced to make nice with the vixens from hell–the envied, fashion-conscious, hip girls at school who despise her Ubergoth ways. Her Doom Cookie boyfriend finds out all about the side fling and joins the chem teacher and both go after her and her newfound friends. Much collateral damage ensues, add lots of blood. The end is a multi-ambulance tear-jerker.

But, sadly, Donna is not goth, and her friends are the socially coolest in school. Everyone but the stalking psycho is dead set on having fun at the prom. Even the girly rivalry between Donna and Paris Hilton–sorry, my bad–between Donna and the spoiled rich girl who despises her is lukewarm and goes nowhere. Her boyfriend doesn’t even get the chance to protect or save her. What’s a boyfriend good for if he can’t at least do that? When the end comes, it’s exactly like the ending you’d see in a non-continued television episode just before the commercial break.

And roll credits.

Wait! There’s a glimmer of tension when her best friend Lisa (Dana Davis) realizes who the creepy guy in the black golf cap and tweedy jacket reminds her of, but no, that fizzles out without much frazzle. Instead there’s lots of predictable running away from potential help and through translucent plastic curtains hung in dark rooms as Lisa hides from the killer in a deserted part of the hotel under renovation. I was hoping she would stop and improvise a defense from the paint cans and tools lying on the workmen’s tables, but her character wasn’t written to be that clever.

At least she didn’t open another closet.

The Perplexing Case of Shrooms (2006)

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Shrooms 2006 poster showing a skull outline made with mushroomsZombos Says: Fair 

Down a forgotten street somewhere in New York City there stands a used-up, ashlar-surfaced office building waiting to be torn down. Should you enter through its bell archway, walk towards the solitary elevator that’s seldom used, and turn right, you would find yourself in a narrow hallway.

In its heyday, you could find the finest business agencies rubbing elbows, hustling and bustling, here, along with the home away from home, cubbyhole, sanctuary, and hideout for the New York Globe reporters. But that was in its heyday. Now all the hustle and bustle is done digitally, behind flickering screens and piled up cups of coffee. Most of the tenants are now tech-related. How boring.

If you walk past those frosted-glass doors now, with their chipped and peeling lettering looking like the worn names on tombstones, and continue all the way to the end, you would come to a frosted-glass door whose lettering still shines. That’s my office and my home away from home: the New York Globe’s old hangout.

My name is Artemis Greensleeves. Since my regular business has been slow of late, I decided to pick up some extra cash by working for the League of Reluctant Reviewers. I didn’t realize how busy I’d be. I prefer the peace of quiet here, though, so they send me what I need when they need to.

I’m always here until three in the afternoon, waiting, with one eye on the door’s metal mail slot, and the other nestled in a good book. After three I head to my regular job, making sure to stop at Starbuck’s for a dark roast coffee on the way. I like my coffee strong.

It’s always the same. I like that, too. A knock hasn’t sounded on the New York Globe’s door since the war, but the sound of footsteps clicking down the hallway lets me know when another movie is coming my way for review. Quick footsteps. Click, clack, click, and another DVD pops through the mail slot; then click, clack, click echoing back down the hallway and the silence returns.

While I waited for the sound of footsteps today, I stared again at the lithograph hanging above the Globe’s trophy case. They sure did win a lot of writing awards. There’s even a Pulitzer in there, on the second shelf, just behind the large crack in the case’s glass door. I’d love to win a Pulitzer one day. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

The lithograph is called The First Prayer of Congress. Every man in it is either bowing his head and kneeling or looking up towards heaven, very pious-like, as if seeking spiritual guidance—or maybe looking for forgiveness? If you look close enough you can see places
where it’s torn and foxing, and fading. I still like it, though.

When the click clack of footsteps came this time they sounded unusually hurried. Before the DVD slid free of the mail slot and hit the floor they were already retreating, leaving me alone with Shrooms. I read the cover, looking for a clue as to what I could expect. The tagline, “Get Ready to Get Wasted,” didn’t fill me with confidence. The soundbyte “Blair Witch on Acid” from a lucyvine.zoo didn’t do it for me
either.

Who the hell is lucyvine.zoo? I got to work writing my review.

 

Once again a group of American teenagers head abroad to get into mischief, and as usual in these low budget horrors, the actors look a tad older than ‘teensy’ would allow, but I won’t quibble. They do a wonderful job with a listless, by the body count, story for the most part.

Heading over to Ireland they meet up with shroom master Jake, who drives around in a Mystery Machine reject (minus Scooby Doo). I guess being a mushroom expert doesn’t pay all that much these days. Funny, but when I travel, which is seldom, I don’t usually book mushroom tours. I don’t think many people do, either. Only too old-looking college kids in horror movies book tours like that.

Soon they’re off to find magical mushrooms in the forest. Only this forest is populated by two drooling, unwashed, dim-bulb—stop me if you’ve seen this before—axe-carrying ne’er-do-wells who don’t communicate well; which is fine since after seeing them you wouldn’t want to hang around and chat anyway.

Unperturbed, the magical mushroom seekers venture deeper into the woods to steep some toadstool tea. At this point, you realize all of them are expendable because no one is likable and the catholic girls are having non-catholic thoughts while the boys aren’t catholic to begin with.

So you can see what’s brewing goes well beyond a simple cup of mind-bending tea.

Stirring the pot and plot, Jake tells them the creepy tale of the evil black brothers of Glenn Garig, who tortured and murdered their young charges—orphaned boys with no place to run except these woods. After one abused boy sneaks some bad-ass shrooms into the communal soup, seventy-eight kids, assorted brothers—and the janitor, I’d warrant—wind up massacred by one crazed surviving brother carrying
a sharp blade.

And that brother might still be stomping around the woods since no one really knows what happened to him!

At this point, the girls can’t take it anymore and tell Jake to zip it. Lucky for them, Glenn Garig is not close: sure, it’s about a ten minute walk from where they’re camped, but it’s not that close, so they should be able to sleep in their flimsy tents without any trouble whatsoever. Right?

While I waited for the sound of footsteps today, I stared again at the lithograph hanging above the Globe’s trophy case. They sure did win a lot of writing awards. There’s even a Pulitzer in there, on the second shelf, just behind the large crack in the case’s glass door. I’d love to win a Pulitzer one day. Hey…wait a minute…

The plop of the DVD hitting the floor nudged my attention. I picked it up. It was Shrooms. Again.

I was just watching it, wasn’t I?

Maybe I was having visions like Tara (Lindsey Haun), who went off to enjoy nature while Jake was giving his lecture on which mushrooms to stay away from. In a fit of pique, Tara eats the bad-assiest one of the “don’t” group.

After her near death experience, she becomes a regular Esmeralda the Fortuneteller, and has visions of her friends being stalked and butchered, one by one, by a hooded creepazoid with long nails, a sharp blade, and rotted teeth; looking like a cross between your typical J-horror vengeance ghost and a Hills Have Eyes mutant, this black brother is a tree-hugging nightmare.

But is he real, or are they all just tripping from the mushrooms?

Her friends, meanwhile, have made themselves pretty damn easy pickings with their sudden arguing. Just once I’d like to see a horror movie with friends that act like they are friends and not acquaintances. Of course  the group splits up to make the slaughter, and the writer’s job depicting same, easier. While a group of people screaming at each other is somewhat easy to victimize, it’s just easier to victimize screaming singles instead.

“Don’t forget to tell them about me,” said the cow.

“Sure, I won’t—.” I blinked.

For a minute there I could have sworn a cow slid through my mail slot, blew up to full size, and talked to me, like in the movie. I mean, there’s no mail slot in the movie, just a cow that talks to Bluto (Robert Hoffman), who goes running off —that would be Bluto who ran off, not the cow—after drinking the entire pot of mind-tripping tea. Of course—sorry, but “of course” is a natural with most horror movies these days—that action makes him the first idiot to get
whacked.

On a personal note, I really have to stop drinking those venti-sized coffees from Starbucks. I pulled myself together. This review was starting to get to me.

Hack and slash, and run run run…to Glen Garig.

The one place in the forest they really shouldn’t be going is where they wind up. Before that, everyone is screaming at the top of his or her lungs for everyone else.

So my question is this: when being stalked in the forest, can anyone hear you scream? Based on this movie, the answer is NO.

As panic sets in, Tara manages to do a Looney Tunes bonk! into a tree, face first. While I think Elmer Fudd had better timing, she’s not bad at it.

Holly, meanwhile, runs to the scary-looking dilapidated shack nestling ominously in the woods. Now who, pray tell, would be living here? You guessed it: the Jonas Brothers!

No wait, it’s not them.

It’s Ernie and Bernie, the two drooling, dim-bulb conservationists seen earlier in the movie. She—sorry, but I can’t avoid it this time—of course walks right into the shack as Burt and Ernie—I mean Ernie and Bernie—look on and drool a lot. Maybe because there are no carcasses or raw meat hanging around she doesn’t realize you don’t enter decrepit shacks in the woods looking for a phone while two
unwashed guys talk a lot about goats with fondness in their voices.

And you wonder why the academy awards doesn’t take horror movies seriously anymore?

While there’s a bit of oh-my-god-how-stupid-can-she-be? in watching Holly walk into that shack, the tension doesn’t quite build enough to raise the scare factor beyond tepid. Director Paddy Breathnach also lingers on peering-through-holes-too-closely moments, but builds little suspense. His direction is by the numbers with little V8 creative juicing to liven up the one down, two down, three down slasher momentum. There is one bright moment regarding how the black brother, real or not, can sneak up on you unawares, but that’s the brightest it gets.

Well, it’s almost three in the afternoon. One more thing before I go. You will find out at the end whether the black brother is real or not, if that’s any consolation. Shrooms is not all that terrible. It’s just not the acid trip it could have been. None of the creative people involved in this movie apparently ingested any shrooms during its production, making it one big, unmagical, mystery tour.

The mystery is how it ever got green-lighted in the first place.

The Sick House (2008)

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Zombos Says: Fair

“I don’t have time for this,” said Anna (Gina Philips), the comely archeology student in The Sick House.

Zombos and I looked at each other. We agreed with her. Once again Paul Hollstenwall, the scion of inconsequential cinema, had underwhelmed us with another exercise in pointless moviemaking.

Anna has just discovered the four punk metal wannabes who are freaking out because one of them appears to have the plague. For shame: that will teach them not to go kicking about in stolen cars for joy rides and breaking into bio-hazard excavation sites previously used as plague hospitals. And shame on Anna, too. Here she is yelling at them for breaking and entering when she did it first, releasing a centuries old evil—and former member of that notorious 1665 London touring group known as the Black Priests—in the process.

The five of them, the usual mix of underachieving and overachieving victims you’ll find slamming into each other in slasher movies, are in for a rough night of it. So is everyone else watching this whoozy, blurry, head-spinning shock-cut apparition, and zoicks! musical extravaganza. Whatever originality and novelty to be found in the story is undercooked by director Curtis Radclyffe’s palsied camera and over-reliance on J-horror hackneyism.

“Why can he not keep the bloody camera still!” cried Zombos.

“He’s sustaining the tension by forcing your disorientation with his constantly moving frame,” explained Paul.

“Tension? My neck is tense from all the quick-cut splicing and visual chittering,” Zombos retorted. “And those flickering fluorescent light fixtures must go. Could they not afford better lighting? I cannot see what is going on.”

Plague doctors? London’s Black Death of 1665?

A capital idea for gut-wrenching suspense and terror is reduced to a half farthing’s worth of overdone digital and cutting room trickery, making sense
the first victim in this suspense-less nonsense. My mind drifted among the possibilities if less confusing herky-jerky motion and more stillness
were the norm, to let the actors convey the terror overwhelming them.

Gina Philips gives a fair performance, though she seems too calm, too emotionless at times when you’d expect some “oh, sh*t, it’s the plague, we’re so f**ked!” or “blimey, what the hell is that thing what wants to eat our souls and kill us!”

Instead, she’s so proper, so academic. At least the others provide some frenzied bickering and craziness, and run like the dickens through the halls of the orphanage away from the not so good reawakened evil doctor making his terminal rounds. Lots of aimless running is part and parcel to horror movies, but here it’s more aimless and unintentionally confusing.

“Help me out here,” pleaded Zombos. “Are you pondering what I am pondering?”

“Not if it involves cocoa butter and bananas,” I said.

Zombos and Paul stopped arguing and looked at me. I quickly pulled my thoughts back to landfall.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“What do you think? asked Zombos. “Paul thinks this bloody movie is a punky masterpiece of new horror style and I am too old to appreciate it. Talk some sense into him will you.”

I took a deep sip from my hot mocha latte, embellished with Chef Machiavelli’s secret mix of herbs and spices he calls the Bombay tincture. I looked at Zombos, then at Paul. They waited expectantly with folded arms. I took another long sip and pondered. Was it simply bad direction or bad directorial choices? Was the acting mediocre or just hacked to pieces by all the scene juggling? Was the story poorly written or intentionally ground into a confusing mash? The Bombay tincture fortified my thoughts enough to proceed.

“It’s obvious the choices made here point to commercially shaping the movie for a younger audience, especially with the odd addition of that acid-drenched-metal song screeching over the opening credits. Today’s kids’ snippet-drenched YouTube attention spans are primed for choppy narrative, so they probably wouldn’t notice the yawning chasms of missing structural coherence in the visual narrative of this movie.”

There. I said it.

Zombos and Paul continued to look at me. Each slowly unfolded his arms. They ignored what I said and started arguing again. Good. At least now they would leave me alone to enjoy my mocha latte in peace.

But what ails The Sick House?

Although it contains cliché after cliché repeated in numbing succession, the acting is strong, the historical context very intriguing, and the atmosphere almost menacing, in spite of the overused Saw–styled tinting in the saturated lighting.

Ludgate Orphanage, aside from its spookhouse-flickering fluorescents, is dark—often too dark to make out what is happening—and filled with brooding rooms and hallways. Then there’s the tall, unstoppable, plague doctor dressed in his bizarre clothing and bird-like mask, stalking around with a bevy of grotesque children, murdered by him back in the 1600s. There is also a kicker ending that twists the story back on itself; but it will leave you just as confused as before.

The archeological dig that Anna’s been working on in the basement of the orphanage leads to another chamber further down. Before she can dig deeper, the authorities find evidence of lingering plague. Being an A student, Anna ignores the grave danger to herself, and the public at large, and breaks into the condemned orphanage after hours, to continue her work.

While she’s digging around in the basement, the four miscreant fun-loving  hoody-punksters crash their stolen auto near the orphanage. Finding the door open—thanks to Anna—they hustle inside to avoid the English Bobbies and all those nasty lectures on grand theft auto and public menace behaviors they’ve obviously heard before.

It all goes down at midnight.

Time becomes frozen for everyone in the building as the plague doctor (John Lebar), brought back from the netherworld by Anna’s academic zeal, makes his killer appearance. There seems to be satanic purpose to his malevolence, but in J-horror fashion, the story doesn’t give you much to go on and the director is so hellbent on gimmicking the action it becomes impossible to follow at times, actually, most of the time, to the point of annoyance.

One clue: it all revolves around a baby to be born, but that is all you get.

Although there is not much gore, you do have people yelling at each other a lot and frantically running to or away from danger, people becoming possessed and frantically chasing other people, and people slippin’ ‘n slidin’ in something white, gelatinous, and filled with pukey-looking nastiness.

Leading up to an illogical but plot-convenient bathing scene—this is the creepy, insane killer infested orphanage remember—in thousands of blood sucking leeches (used to treat the plague back then: go figure).

The ending neatly leads into a sequelization antic for another set of plague doctor’s rounds ad nauseam in a round of franchise sequels, but I don’t think this doctor got to make another house call on DVD yet.

Maybe Paul is right. Maybe Zombos and I are too old to appreciate the style of The Sick House. Or maybe a script doctor and a steadier hand at the camera would have made this a more memorable, even classic, frightfest instead of another victims-offed in factory assembled horror movie storyline,
with added visual confusion to make it appear youthfully fresh.

Spookies (1987)
The Other Plan 9

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Spookies
Zombos Says: Poor (but fun to raz on)

Listen to the Movie Review

"Come again?" I asked.

"Cinderella. He wants to dress up as Cinderella for Halloween," said Zombos, glummer than usual.

"Okay. Why not?"

"What do you mean why not? No son of mine is going to—"

"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "Look, I'm on the phone here. I still can't find someone to come with me to see Saw IV. I'm sorry you've got issues with Zombos Junior dressing up as a princess for Halloween, but I need—Hello? I’m trying to reach an Elvis Mitchell. What? Retired? What the hell? Is Peter Travers there, then?”

Zombos moaned. "Oh, lord, dressing up as a girl! At least if he would be Prince Charming, I could accept that. I should have realized something was amiss when he preferred watching America's Next Top Model instead of the Goosebumps marathon. I blame Zimba for this."

"Maybe you can get him to dress up as Maleficent instead? Damn it all, he hung up. Who else can I call," I said to myself. I was desperate. I should review the bloody movie, but I can't take all that sadistic, gory torture stuff that keeps the Saw franchise alive. I needed moral support. And someone to tell me what happens when I close my eyes.

"Why do you need someone to hold your hand just to see a stupid horror movie. You should be ashamed of yourself."

"You're just mad Zombos Junior prefers Cinderella to that Jack Sparrow pirate costume you bought him. Look, so what if he's transgender? He's still your son, right? Maybe he's got an Ed Wood thing going. That would be super, wouldn’t it?”

In the hallway, Zimba and Junior went running by. She yelled at him to give her high-heels back and to stay out of her makeup case. Zombos moaned even louder.

"Oh, bugger. At this rate, Saw IV will be on DVD before I get a chance to see it. Maybe I'll review that cinematic train wreck, Spookies, instead."

"I thought it was only available through Amazon UK?" said Zombos.

"That's right. But I just got my region-free DVD player, so now I can play all those nifty UK horror movies I've been dying to see."

"Count me in," said Zombos, looking for any diversion to take his mind off of Junior.

We headed to the cinematorium to watch Spookies.

 

If you’re looking for the perfect second-half of a double-bill Halloween show with Plan 9 From Outer Space, look no further. Spookies is a movie to be savored for its underdone acting, overbearing dialog, and sheer incoherence. Rarely do horror movies reach this pinnacle of hilarious ineptitude.

Originally started as Twisted Souls, that unfinished movie gave birth to a spook show hodgepodge of 1980s makeup and monster effects colliding head on with badly edited additional footage from yet another unfinished movie, resulting in a two-headed storyline that never meets eye to eye (or should I say eyes to eyes?).

Billy (Alec Nemsir), possibly the dumbest thirteen year-old ever appearing on screen, runs away from home because his parents forgot his birthday. What that has to do with the two cars, filled with bickering couples from Brooklyn—judging by their accents—beats me, but they're in this movie, too.

The kid and bickering couples wind up at a decrepit sorcerer's ominously dark and creepy home: it's ominous because it has an old graveyard surrounding it. Billy is the first to enter the empty house. In the dining room he finds presents and birthday decorations, and quickly concludes his parents are throwing a surprise party for him; in a stranger’s house. Billy doesn’t notice the ominous cemetery or the creepiness. He admires the presents and opens the biggest box, asking out loud if it's a bowling ball. That’s right, a bowling ball. High on every kid’s birthday list, I’m sure. Instead, the sorcerer's smiling head is in the box. Billy screams and runs out of the house, straight into a freshly dug grave. One down, now it’s time for the bickering couples to play their roles as proper horror movie victims, which involves acting dumb and dumber when it can cause the most bodily damage.

Now back to the two cars filled with the bickering couples. Oh, and there's one solo guy: he's the one with the sock puppet sitting alone in the back seat. And not a very good sock puppet. They wind up at the ominously creepy and dark mansion just when young Billy is coughing up dirt as a purple-faced werewolf buries him alive.

Yes, that's right, a purple-faced werewolf. Just go with it. Nothing in this movie makes sense so get used to it now.

The werewolf not only enjoys burying little boys alive, he gets a kick out of holding doors shut on people, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Couples and sock puppet guy enter the mansion to party hardy, and you know what happens to party people in horror movies, don't you? They die hardy.

The Sal Mineo look-alike insists on breaking into a padlocked closet and finds a corpse clutching a Ouija board. Ignoring the significance of a corpse CLUTCHING A QUIJA BOARD, Carly (Lisa Friede), the quiet, Ouija-savvy girl of the group, knows what to do with the planchette. They continue their bickering over what questions to ask like "will we get out alive," while we cut to the sorcerer (Felix Ward) playing a game of chess, although he never moves any of the pieces. He needs souls to revive his wife, who poisoned herself to get away from him. Finally, a little peek at the plot! Enjoy it while it lasts because a peek is all you get.

Carly becomes possessed by the sorcerer and goes after the others. As they run out the front door, zombies pop up out of the graveyard to stop them. They run back into the house screaming hysterically. You will be screaming with laughter at this point. The bickering continues forcing them to split up. That’s another cardinal rule for victims in horror movies: split up to die more easily. Every lazy horror movie scriptwriter knows that one.

Let me recap this for you: with zombies outside, a demon-possessed Carly on the inside, a purple-faced werewolf holding doors shut on them, and a gloating sorcerer playing chess without moving the pieces, THEY SPLIT UP. At least they spend a few minutes bickering over the pros and cons of SPLITTING UP.

Here's where you notice the acting in no way attempts to accommodate the adrenalin-rush terror befalling them. The three directors–yes, I said three–must have been on a coffee break during these crucial scenes. With directors missing in action, the makeup and special effects crew indulge their fancies. The 1980s is THE decade for puffy, rubbery monster suits, herky-jerky animatronics, skittery stop-motion, and glistening, greenish-purplish makeup. You see all of it in this movie with varying degrees of success.

One by one, the blundering, bickering over-aged teens get taken out by one monstrosity after another. Interspersed between each tableau of gory doom, the sorcerer gloats in a bad, Lugosi-styled accent and summons more creatures of the night through Carly. And each time someone scrambles to get out of a room there’s the purple werewolf outside, holding the door closed on one side while they pull hard to open it on the other.

The creatures encountered are like those you'd find on a Skywald horror magazine cover: there are the sod-men in the cellar, farting with each step they take  (I can now unequivocally say farting ruins suspenseful terror); there's the spider-woman (Soo Paek) that sucks the juices out of the annoying sock-puppet guy, actually deflating him as she slurps him up; there’s the grim reaper statue coming to life with blazing red eyes and wielding a mean scythe; and there’s a tentacled, sucker-fish-looking creature that shoots electric bolts. Go figure. The creations are fun to watch in action and help you ignore the messed up storyline.

While everyone is getting killed a la carte, the sorcerer's bride awakens and runs away. A witch-thingie stops her and forces her to run to the graveyard, where more zombies pop up and grab her in an overdrawn groping romp that needed splicing badly. She manages to break free long enough to run into the purple werewolf. There’s no door between them, though. The end makes no sense whatsoever: it's done for visual flair only. Indeed, the entire movie is a series of visual setups, strung between the incongruous sorcerer gloating, party people screaming and dying, the purple werewolf holding doors closed with glee, and a bride loathing her predicament.

If ever there was a reason to throw popcorn at a movie screen, this is it.

This movie is so goofy nonsensical you'll love watching it while deriding the hell out of it. I’m surprised no one’s made this a stage play yet. I’d love to see Spookies, the musical.