From Zombos' Closet

Documentary Review: Birth of the Living Dead (2013)

Zombos Says: Very Good

It's something you would be hard pressed to write in fiction: small Pittsburgh-based production company gets bored with making television spots that include Mr. Rogers' Gets a Tonsillectomy, beer commercials, and a Calgon commercial knocking off Fantastic Voyage and decides to produce THE MOVIE that would change the face of horror.

Of course George A. Romero, John Russo, and Russ Streiner never realized the THE MOVIE part at the time; and we can forgive them for first wanting to do Romero's screenplay Whine of the Fawn, a Bergmanesque snoozer. But thank god for us reality reared up and kicked sense into them that a horror movie was an easier sell to their prospective investors. The rest is history. And a rich and inspiring history it is. 

Bob Kuhns captures this inspiring history to a worthwhile degree in his lively documentary Birth of the Living Dead, giving us the skinny on how a small production company moved from small fries ad spots to buying a 35mm camera in hopes of baking a hot potato money-making movie. So what if it didn't make much money for Romero or his investors? It sure as hell made tons of money for everyone else, and the nightmare it started is still going gangbusters across the zombie-stomping globe, from commercials (ironic, right, given Romero's start?), to television series, to an endless stream of mall crawls, village invasions, movies, and merchandising.

That movie, Night of the Living Dead, originally written as a comedy, created the tropes, themes, styles, and scares that are constantly revisisted and expanded on today. But you already know that. Its cheapo black and white starkness, its non-actors who could actually act and ad-lib their lines, and Romero's simple screenplay delivered through sharp editing, still chills us with its flesh-eating zombies (or as Romero originally called them, "Ghouls") and their unending aim to eat anything not moving fast enough away from them. Toss in that eerie, nerve-tingling, music score and the all-hell-breaks-loose-everybody-for-themselves dynamic with its marked deviation from the usual supernatural, psycho, and scientific horrors playing theaters and drive-ins up to 1968, and it's no wonder the wise-ass matinee kids--waiting to goof around and chuck their popcorn at the screen the minute the credits rolled--didn't know what hit them between the eyes. Neither did the critics whose ire was boundless. Romero and company set out to make Night of the Living Dead "as balsy a horror film as we could make." Their gorilla filmmaking did just that.

Night of the Living Dead premiered on October 1, 1968 at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh. Nationally, it was shown as a Saturday afternoon matinée – as was typical for horror films at the time – and attracted an audience consisting of pre-teens and adolescents. The MPAA film rating system was not in place until November 1968, so even young children were not prohibited from purchasing tickets. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times chided theater owners and parents who allowed children access to the film with such potent content for a horror film they were entirely unprepared for. "I don't think the younger kids really knew what hit them," he said. "They were used to going to movies, sure, and they'd seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else." According to Ebert, the film affected the audience immediately. (Wikipedia)

Although Kuhn invokes enough authoritative talking heads to establish this fact (among them are Gale Ann Hurd, Larry Fessenden, Jason Zinoman, Elvis Mitchell, and Chiz Schultz), it's Romero's ingenuous reminiscenses and witty insight we salivate over. The way he explains it, it sounded like the whole undertaking was a lark. A lot of hard, crazy work, but a lark.

Splicing in Vietnam War footage, scene clips, animated segments, 1968 race riots footage, and a side trip as teacher Christopher Cruz shows Night of the Living Dead to his young students in his Literacy Through Film Program class (yes, the times have indeed changed),  we always come back to Romero as he describes the shooting's trials and tribulations at the abandoned farmhouse they rented, and the final nerve-racking search for a distributor. Everyone involved wore muliple hats to pitch in: Bill "Chilly Billy" Cardile joined the cast as a news reporter and gave free publicity for the movie through his Chiller Theatre horror hosted show; aerial shots of zombies stumbling in the fields were provided courtesy of hitching a ride with the local news chopper; local sheriffs with their police dogs joined in the zombie hunting with gusto; Chuck Craig, a real newsroom reporter played a fictional newsroom reporter, writing his own news copy for the movie, making it play uncomfortably too real.

With the movie in the can and ready to sell, distributors presented more challenges because they wanted a happier ending. No way was Night of the Living Dead in any way a movie that could end happily. Walter Reade eventually took the chance, with depressing ending and all gore scenes intact, but screwed up big time when they inadvertantly dropped the copyright notice off the new prints when changing the original title of Night of the Fleash Eaters to Night of the Living Dead.  How many millions of dollars did Romero and his investors never see because of this simple oversight? As Night went public domain,  their profits went out the door. Sure, Romero can laugh it off now, but it must still hurt. A lot.

The usual social and political instigations and social backdrops for how and why Night of the Living Dead eventually hits every nerve just right is touched on but glossed over by Kuhn and never fleshed out. He doesn't plumb those connections, just their intimations. Sure, maybe it was luck and timing; maybe Romero was too lazy to change the role of Ben, written for a white actor but played by a black one instead; or maybe, subconsciously, Romero and company weren't really taking shortcuts but tapping into some Jungian primalcy without realizing it, fueled by their annoyance at how much the 1960s promised to change the world's social order, but failed to. 

So damned if they didn't just go ahead and change the world on their own instead.

SilverHawks Sky-Shadow An Adventure to Color Part 1

I was a big fan of the SilverHawks animated television series when it first aired in 1986. I also had collected all of the toys, but sold them a few years ago. The mix of bionics, bird wings, and metal seemed a little like combining DC's Metal Men with Hawkman and then centering it all in space. I like space adventures. This 1987 Happy House coloring book is pretty cool. I'm fighting the urge to color the pages.

Part 2

Movie Pressbook: In Search of Dracula

Mexican Lobby Card: Santo En Atacan Las Brujas

DVD Review: The Exorcist 40th Anniversary Blu-ray

Zombos Says: Excellent mix of movie versions and features in one set.

Not having watched the extended director's cut or original theatrical version blu-ray editions previously released, this 40th anniversary set from Warners Home Video, adding two new special features on a third disc and a snippet from William Friedkin's book The Friedkin Connection, is a superb way to re-experience the artistry of The Exorcist, one of the top 5 horror movies made.

One of the new additions is Beyond Comprehension: William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. Blatty, former comedy writer (good luck with that career after this movie hit), now famous horror author and screenwriter, takes us on a tour of old haunts. Our first stop is the guest house he eventually settled into, with mass quantities of coffee and cigarettes, to write his novel. He explains the few false starts that led him there; for instance, his first choice of writing milieu was a beachfront abode, but noisy cresting waves were too distracting for him. Throughout, Blatty keeps a  wowser! how lucky was I attitude that pops up a little too often to remain fresh, especially at times when more revealing exposition on the process of how he got that lucky would have been appreciated (and yes, that's the writer side of me pointing fingers here, of course). One startling revelation: he didn't have an outlined plot and worried he would eventually write himself into a corner. I recall Charles Dicken's never outlined his novels, either. (Lucky bastards, the both of them.)

The impetus for the novel and its memorable terrors was a true-life case of exorcism that ocurred in 1949, which both Friedkin (in his in-depth commentary for the movie and his book) and Blatty refer back to, often. The second new addition is a 20 or so minute chat with Father Eugene Gallagher, who talks about Blatty's time at Georgetown University and that 1949 case, and the exorcism rite itself. This is an informal, filmed in black and white, interview conducted at the time the movie was first scaring audiences, so the set up is minimal, the hair of the interviewer long (radio talk show host Mike Siegel), making it more suited to diehard religious or Exorcist fans with less itchy trigger fingers on their remotes.

The effectively teasing snippet from Friedkin's book, where he relates his experiences with the movie and Blatty, is contained in a hard cover booklet that fits neatly into the cardboard slipcase along with the DVD jacket. It's a revealing nugget of information that compelled me to get Friedkin's book. It also makes you wonder where horror's gotten off to, after such a promising decade in which it received stellar attention from topnotch directors and actors and writers. 

Those of you who have watched the previous blu-ray versions will already know how crisp and vibrant the viewing is, and how rewarding Friedkin's scene by scene commentary can be--I didn't realize until he pointed it out how he used the subtlety of having Father Karras rising (ascending) in his scenes--and how much the documentaries Raising Hell: Filming the Exorcist and The Fear of God: The Making of the Exorcist make you appreciate the nuts and bolts that, finally assembled into the movie, deliver a jolt of character-driven dramatic tension and release you don't often see in today's horror movies.

I can't really say which version I prefer, original or extended cut. The original 1973 showing is the one that made The Exorcist a classic. It's also the one I remember getting the willies from, sitting in a theater in with a whole bunch of other people getting the willies, too. On one hand the original is concisely executed, but on the other the additional 12 minutes have their moments. Some of them include the overly done subliminal flashes of the demon's face, but others reinforce the dual horrors of the medical examinations and the demon's possession , like Regan's jarring crab walk down the stairs. Thank god the technology back then wasn't ready for it: had I seen that in 1973 I don't think I'd have slept a wink for weeks afterwards.

Movie Review: Death Tube (2010) You Are What You Watch

Zombos Says: Good (but ponderous)

I’m not sure why I chose Death Tube: Broadcast Murder Show (aka Satsujin Douga Site, 2010) to review for The Moon is a Dead World's 15 for October series ; I must be a masochist. Japanese horror movies can be pretty taxing on your stomach as well as your critical nerve.

Surprisingly, this one wasn’t all that stomach-churning, and the only nerve-racking thing, really, is the close to two hour runtime. Trimming is called for. It took me two tries before I could finish watching it. And I fast-forwarded to sprint toward the end because director Yoshei Fukuda takes his ever-loving time to tell his story. There’s a leisurely television style pacing here, although you wouldn’t get many sponsors wanting to sell their products through this one. Gore’s over the top when it does appear, but otherwise there’s not much gore here. Go watch Tokyo Gore Police if you’re looking for gooey, chewy mincemeat special effects smorgasbord.

That aside, there’s something akin to a bitter aftertaste you come away with after watching 8 people (actually 7, since one gets killed early, to get things off to a fast start) working hard together at staying alive by solving ridiculous puzzles or silly games. You only see people working together in zombie movies (at least early on), Saw movies, and Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (which didn't help much there, either).

Fans know that camaraderie in horror movies is not used as often as it should be in the dramatic scripting department; usually it’s more like everybody for himself, which easily bringsto mind the shooting fish in a barrel metaphor  since that’s what happens; you get to watch each victim killed in unpleasant ways, one by one, more expediently because they don’t stick together.

That’s the modus operandi here, too, although one smart guy implores the group to cooperate so they can ALL stay alive and complete the lethal games by cooperation (hula hoop twirling, Rubik cube-like scrambling, nail driven under fingernail—okay, I admit that one hurt just watching it), but no one listens; or maybe listens with one ear while the other is busy not listening.

It's not clear if cooperation and teamwork will keep anyone alive, however, there’s a banner or two that hints at it—a lesson to be learned, perhaps?—but then the evil mastermind behind this SEO-driven Death Tube website tells them--in a really annoying game show host sort of voice--only one survivor is allowed. But even that’s iffy because if anyone survives, the show would be hard pressed to go on. There are laws against this sort of thing, you know. Sure, they'll allow Miley Cyrus to twerk and jerk a wrecking ball, but damned if they'd cancel the killing on Death Tube because somebody complained it was real. 

Hosting this Wheel of Unfortunate game show is an evil mastermind, some anonymous person dressed in a yellow kawaii bear costume; cute, cuddly, and packing heat. His Papa Bear persona has a Mama Bear to assist and they goof around while others similarly dressed, outside the games, are making sure Death Tube’s ratings aren’t impeded by police seizures or astute viewer discretion.

Pretty soon you will begin to question why no one's going for Papa Bear. It's 7 against his one gun when a few times there's clearly a go-for-it moment; but no one goes for it. You also start to wonder why no one watching this outrageous show on the Internet is Googling this website to find out more about it or protest how vile it is, or sharing YouTube best moments exposing it for what it is. Is DeathTube telling us we're that stupid now because of the incessant crap we've come to love on the Internet?

You may come to realize that either everyone invovled here is either very bad at showing motivations, or very good at playing their roles as absurdist theatrics--and why aren't you seeing that? Or maybe there's some nihilistic or existentialistic  theme being explored by the director ?

I simply couldn't tell. Maybe it's a Japanese thing?

Instead we see the usual disfunctional relationships all around and the typical smart, dumb-ass, and screaming-mimi characters alternating between winning the game and questioning their participation in it, ignoring all common sense or humanity in the process, and back to winning focus on winning the game and screwing everyone else.  Costumed death-pranking is all the rage these days. You've got those animal-headed guys in You're Next and The Strangers,  those creepy masked assailants in The Purge, and no way can you ever forget those horn-masked guys with aprons in Hostel.

Is Death Tube run by a cult like the thuggees in The Stranglers of Bombay? Are avid YouTube or Apple viewers acting like a cult? Is all this online ad hoc choppy video making us loopy and socially outcast while thinking we really belong?

Just what is Fukuda implying here? Or is he implying anything? Maybe the budget's a factor, or his upbringing, or he's just experimenting with the lighting and an uncle had this great warehouse space free for a weekend, so why not shoot a quickie?

Or are the purpetrators of Death Tube a bunch of bored kids out for a thrill like in Them (aka Ils? Or maybe Papa and Mama Bear are teaching their website viewers a punitive lesson no one lives to learn from like the ones taught in X Game and Saw? Or are viewers of this torture-death website being sucked in like those who watched the torture-death website in Feardotcom (2002), perpetuating the madness because they accept it blindly?

One thing is certain: if you dare to watch this movie you may find yourself the next morning in one of those little budget comfort rooms, screaming your brains out for help while thoughtless, cruel, and useless comment threads from viewers to your plight egg you on to death.  There's nothing like having trolls, moles, and dweebs giving you their wisdom, observations, and advice when death is inches or seconds away, right? How many times have you gone to the web to find answers only to discover how profoundly stupid some people really are?

If you read the reviews on this one, it’s mentioned that it's a Saw rip-off with little to show for it. Some reviewers even cite Cube and Hostel to draw parallels to all the torture-porn horror dynamics, but generally poo-poo the storyline without much thought. But there’s more going on here and that's what's engrossing. Like those unfathomable pachinko parlors and the wild, alluring, colors and noises of Akihabara, you get sucked in watching the victims play games while being watched by--us?

When done it doesn't gell to a clear message of intent. The best assessment you’ll find is Isugoi’s review by Miguel Douglas, which questions the balance between the predicament the “players” find themselves in and the implications of cultural commentary for it. When Facebook decided to show people getting beheaded again, for real, what did you feel or think?

Or didn't you feel or think about it at all?

Death Tube is so downbeat you feel you should be more concerned with what's happening and who it's happening to, but the direction is emotionless to a fault, not giving us any clues as to which way to feel or think. Maybe that's the point: that all this voyeuristic absurdity leading to futiliity, seen without humor and emotion, is a warning. That we are what we watch, and what we watch is also watching us. 

Sort of ruins your day, doesn't it?

Double Bill Movie Pressbook: White Huntress & Naked Africa

Santo En Profanadores De Tumbas (1966) Mexican Lobby Card

Mad doctor digs up dead bodies: Santo digs up the dirt, wrestles, reads, and kicks butt. And, of course, there's a hunchback assistant.