Daydream Nation is an odd beast. Despite its major flaws, it is often beautifully photographed, and there are a few nice surreal touches at the periphery of the film’s action. Still, in trying to make every character likeable (or at least sympathetic), Goldbach has strangely removed them from the point at which the audience can identify with them. Even the unmasked serial killer is presented at such a distance from their actions that it is difficult to connect the person to the bodies they left behind, and Josh Lucas’s teacher is handily redeemed despite spending much of the film engaged in reprehensible behavior. Perhaps that is the ultimate example of the problem with Daydream Nation: by the end, you may feel sorry for the serial killer, but you don’t feel bad for the high-school teacher who’s sleeping with his student. And as for the student herself, recklessly trashing the lives of those around her for no clear purpose, well… maybe it would have been better if that serial killer thing had played out differently.
The Dead (2010)
Originally published on Film Monthly 13 February 2012
After seeing so many low-budget stabs at zombie movies, it’s easy for horror fans to get weary of the formula. Cheap makeup, cheap blood or– infinitely worse– CGI blood, bad actors holed up in a room. Probably a lot of running and some weak humor. The independent horror landscape is littered with this sort of thing, and it’s all too easy to get tricked into watching yet another cheapo zombie movie. So it is with no little sense of relief that the horror fan finds a film like The Ford Brothers’ The Dead, that takes itself seriously and treats the audience and its subject with respect, recalling the great zombie films of the past while offering something decidedly new.
Lt. Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman) is in the last evacuation plane out of West Africa when it goes down just off the coast. He makes it back to land, the sole survivor of the crash. Murphy is forced to find his way on foot to safety in the midst of a zombie epidemic ravaging the continent. He meets up with Sgt. Daniel Dembele (Prince David Oseia), an AWOL African soldier searching for his son. The men form an uneasy alliance and work their way north, where there is supposedly a safe zone set up by the American military where Dembele’s son has been taken.
From this point, The Dead has a very episodic feel. The two men make their way between villages and abandoned outposts, finding people dealing with the situation different manners. The opening slaughter of Dembele’s village is harrowing, the film’s super sharp digital video nicely highlighting the queasily effective practical effects. The African landscape offers some stunning views and some serious tension. In one particularly effective sequence, high grasses grow near a truck that Murphy attempts to start. Zombies could be lurking anywhere– this is a film where the sunlight gives no respite. In fact, when characters kick open the door of a seemingly empty shack, the pitch-black shadows are just as threatening as they would be in the middle of the night.
The zombies in The Dead are reminiscent of Romero’s model: Mostly slow, “all messed up,” and hungry for flesh. Again, the film’s practical effects and makeup are spectacular, and the images of the zombies staggering through the desert terrain are often chilling. The Ford Brothers have created a convincing zombie apocalypse on a budget, and dropped the audience right in the middle of it with the film’s two lead characters. Despite the widescreen vistas, The Dead often has a claustrophobic feeling, mostly due to keeping the human interaction and dialogue between its two lead characters.
As technically excellent as The Dead is, there is one misstep that detracts somewhat from its effectiveness. The viewer’s emotional investment in the film is entirely dependent on the leads, and while Prince David Oseia gives a great performance as Dembele, the character of Murphy is less convincing. Rob Freeman is left to carry virtually the entire film, but Murphy is unfortunately just not a very interesting character. Dembele’s search for his son is a much more compelling story, and though attempts are made to show how Murphy changes from looking out for himself to taking chances to help others, there is still not much for the audience to sympathize with in Murphy’s arc.
Despite this issue, there is much to recommend The Dead to the serious horror fan. Gorgeous cinematography, amazing locations, great practical effects, and plenty of daylight scares and tension all combine to make The Dead stand out in the independent horror crowd. It’s films like this that make slogging through the wasteland of direct-to-disc horrors worthwhile. The Dead is a great take on well-worn material, and certainly worth seeking out.
Dead Hooker in a Trunk (2009)
Originally published on Film Monthly 30 January 2012
After gaining a lot of attention at various film festivals over the last couple of years, Jen and Sylvia Soska’s Dead Hooker in a Trunk is finally getting a U.S. DVD release. It’s no surprise that the film has been talked about extensively in genre circles: it’s a ridiculously gory cartoon, a (nearly) all-girl show packed with enough blood splatter and pitch-black humor to more than deliver what its title promises, and the fact that the film was written and directed by twin sisters gives it a great backstory.
At a horrible concert in a dive bar, Junkie (Rikki Gagne) gets into a fight with the band’s “vocalist” and storms off the stage. Badass (Sylvia Soska) lines up an entire bottle’s worth of shots for them to drink in response. The next morning, Junkie and Badass don’t really remember anything from the night before, and are severely hung over. Geek (Jen Soska) gets a text from her friend Goody Two Shoes (C.J. Wallis) asking her to pick him up from his church youth group. Junkie wants to score now that she’s awake, so Badass agrees to pick up Goody Two Shoes as long as they can stop by Junkie’s dealer on the way back.
After picking up Goody Two Shoes at church where Badass has a flirtatious run-in with the attractive Pastor (Loyd Bateman), Badass pops the trunk and the group discovers the titular Hooker (Tasha Moth). Neither Junkie nor Badass can remember anything about the night before, so they have no idea how she got there, and rather than risk going to the cops they decide to finish up their errands for the day and then figure out what to do with her. Geek and Goody Two Shoes don’t approve, but also don’t have much choice, and now the standard stress-free day of picking up drugs is complicated by cops, rival gangs, and at least two vicious killers whose motives aren’t clear, but who are obviously not interested in friendly conversation.
Dead Hooker in a Trunk moves at a brisk pace, constantly dropping its nicknamed protagonists into one awful situation after another. There are a lot of solid practical effects throughout the film, and the Soska sisters famously did all their own stunt work in addition to writing, directing, producing and starring in the film. The film looks great, too– it was clearly shot on digital video, but this look actually helps cement the film’s neo-grindhouse tone. From a technical standpoint, Dead Hooker in a Trunk is a great example of what filmmakers can do with a very small budget.
However, the actual content of the film is only intermittently engaging. The Rodriguez/Tarantino influence is strongly felt, but most of the characters are as one-dimensional as the Hooker, defined primarily by how much swearing they do. Everyone in the cast is good, but only C.J. Wallis as Goody Two Shoes is really required to do much other than look badass and swear profusely– mostly he’s a churchy nerd, but occasionally he is allowed to swear. Although clearly not short on ideas, the film spends a little too much time with the characters instead of moving the cartoonish action forward. The centerpiece scene where Badass storms into Junkie’s dealer’s apartment is the one point of the film where it felt like everything came together exactly the way it was meant to. If all of Dead Hooker in a Trunk had been pitched at that level of absurdity, it would have been an instant classic. As it is, it’s still a hell of a ride, and it sets high expectations for the next film by the Soska Sisters.
The Dead Next Door (1989)
Originally published on Film Monthly 26 September 2017
For anyone not familiar with the history of J.R. Bookwalter’s insanely ambitious 8mm zombie film The D
ead Next Door, it may seem odd that the film is getting a Criterion-level Blu-ray/DVD release the better part of 30 years after it first hit video store shelves. But there are a number of reasons this little film has had numerous home video releases over the years, beyond the fact that two of the principal collaborators on the original Evil Dead films were involved in its production. Most movies shot on 8mm film tend to be fairly narrow in scope due to budgetary and/or technical limitations, but The Dead Next Door is positively epic–it looks like half the population of the state of Ohio worked as extras in this movie. And despite some obvious unavoidable pitfalls, Bookwalter actually pulls it all off impressively.
The zombie apocalypse breaks out, and the action of the film opens in Ohio as the zombie virus is unleashed and the undead begin their bloody, inevitable shamble to the top of the food chain. It doesn’t take long before there is a fragile order among the remaining humans with a makeshift government agency dispatching “Zombie Squads” across the country. In Washington D.C. research scientist Dr. Moulsson (Bogdan Pecic) is experimenting on zombies in hopes of finding a cure or vaccine that will stop the plague. He travels with a squad to Ohio to find the home laboratory of Dr. Bow (Lester Clark), the man whose work inadvertently doomed humanity. Moulsson’s hope is that Dr. Bow’s work will help him and his team find the cure before the balance between zombies and humans reaches an irrecoverable tipping point.
This mission initially seems like a cake walk when agents Raimi (Pete Ferry), Kuller (Jolie Jackunas), Mercer (Michael Grossi) and the scientists in their care arrive at Dr. Bow’s house. But soon they stumble upon a young man lurking near the house who seems to have ties to the movement that constantly pickets Washington campaigning for “zombie rights.” The truth is much darker: Reverend Jones (Robert Kokai) leads a cult based out of a church he and his followers have turned into a fortress complete with armed guards and cages full of ravenous zombies. Jones and his people believe the zombies are the harbingers of the end of the world, and they want to help the Lord’s work along as much as possible. Moulsson is hard at work on a cure, but the squad is hugely outnumbered and outgunned. Suddenly, getting the cure back to Washington is the least of their problems.
The Dead Next Door is quite an achievement for debut writer/director Bookwalter, who was barely out of high school when he started shooting the film. His concept of a world in which humans campaign for “zombie rights” was almost unbelievably ahead of its time; most indie horror filmmakers cranking out zombie movies in the 80s were content to make shoddy knock-offs of Romero’s films. Bookwalter took both the gore and the social commentary from the master’s work and extrapolated a fascinating world from the same basic starting point as Night of the Living Dead. However, since this is an independent film from the 80s it has shortcomings in common with many of its contemporaries. The acting is often amateurish (although the dub with capital-A Actors is an improvement) and the dialogue can be clunky and inadvertently humorous. The makeup and effects are fun, and while many of them get by more on homemade charm than anything there are some that are genuinely impressive. Bookwalter keeps the film moving at a brisk pace, and manages to accomplish quite a bit in under 80 minutes. This is a phenomenal horror debut and a certified classic of the genre, and this new Blu-ray/DVD release is the best way to introduce yourself to it–if you don’t already own VHS and/or DVD copies of it, of course.
Dead Season (2012)
Originally published on Film Monthly 31 July 2012
The seemingly endless torrent of direct-to-disc zombie films continues unabated, and Dead Season is one of the latest horrors to make its way to the DVD players of horror fans looking for diamonds in the rough. On the one hand, Dead Season doesn’t really offer anything that die-hard genre fans haven’t seen before. On the other hand, it’s got some pretty solid practical effects, which are refreshing given that CGI blood is increasingly the norm.
As Dead Season opens, former paramedic Elvis (Scott Peat) and Tweeter (Marissa Merrill) are communicating via radio and explaining how they came to be where they currently are one year after the onset of the zombie apocalypse. Tweeter makes her way to Elvis’s home, and they form a tentative alliance. Elvis has plans to head to Florida where a former boss is surviving by setting up boats for people to take off the mainland, and with little other choice, Tweeter joins him. Once they reach an island, they discover that it is just as overrun with “walkers” as anywhere else.
In addition to the living dead, the island is occupied by a small group of humans who are holed up in a compound and who scout out the island’s beaches for supplies to scavenge. These survivors are led by Kurt Conrad (James C. Burns), who appears to be former military and who keeps his 17-year-old daughter Rachel (Corsica Wilson) locked up in her room all the time. Elvis proves useful to the community for his medical experience and Tweeter turns out to be an effective zombie killer, but when Elvis learns an unsettling truth about the small colony’s survival, Tweeter urges him to help her rescue Rachel and flee the island.
Technically, Dead Season is much better than many independent zombie films that have been released over the last few years. The practical effects are gruesome and mostly effective, and the filmmakers are to be applauded for going the practical route over cheap CGI even if most of the zombie makeup isn’t quite on par with the rest of the effects. Unfortunately, those effects are really the only thing that stands out about Dead Season. Its characters are barely defined, which is especially a problem with Elvis and Tweeter. They should be the emotional core of the film, but the audience isn’t given much time with them to make a connection, and their relationship doesn’t make much sense. The island survivors are so samey that at least one of their names is not revealed until after he’s dead, and some of the zombies are so lightly made up that it’s often difficult to tell who’s dead and who isn’t in some of the action scenes. Without any characters to care about, there are no emotional stakes, which makes Dead Season feel almost more like an effects reel than a fully realized feature.
Deadgirl (2008)
Originally published on Film Monthly 9 October 2009
In case anyone hasn’t noticed yet, the zombie is no longer the exclusive property of the horror genre. Co-opted by popular culture over the years (with special nod to Shaun of the Dead for advancing the cause), the Zombie is officially in the ranks of Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy. The proof is everywhere: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was a best-seller, Popcap Games made the family-friendly game Plants Vs. Zombies (wherein you use adorable plant weapons to fight off hordes of the undead) and Columbia Pictures recently scored a major box office hit with Zombieland. The Zombie has become a permanent fixture in our cultural landscape, for better or for worse.
So now that the Zombie is culturally acceptable, how do filmmakers keep the zombie film interesting? Well, as with those other monsters, film versions of the Zombie must now do something truly different. Something memorable, perhaps something shocking. If George Romero has proven anything with his “Dead” films, it’s that the Zombie’s flexibility as metaphor is nearly limitless. Anyone can make a “Zombies take over the world” movie, and they will. But as this apocalyptic depiction becomes more popular and clichéd, filmmakers who want to do new things with the monster will be forced to get more creative, take bigger chances. To truly get weird.
And that’s where Deadgirl comes in. In a landscape where kids are playing Zombie-related games and no one bats an eye, this film twists the genre into something completely different. Deadgirl is not a film for the faint of heart or soft of stomach– it’s a bleak, brutal story that will inspire awe and disgusted anger in almost equal measure. Simply put, it’s one of the most original and daring horror films in recent memory.
Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and J.T. (Noah Segan) are two high-school losers. One day they decide to ditch and hang out at an abandoned mental hospital and drink beer. While poking around the bowels of the hospital, the two are chased by a wild d
og into the deepest recesses of the hospital, where J.T. discovers a door rusted shut and hidden behind piles of discarded hospital equipment. In the room they find a young woman covered in plastic and chained to a gurney. Rickie’s first impulse is to call the police, but when J.T. realizes the girl is alive he decides that it may be in their best interest to “keep her.” Rickie, disgusted, leaves but promises not to tell anyone. Later, J.T. takes Rickie back to show off his gruesome discovery: the “Deadgirl” can’t be killed. What follows is a power struggle between the increasingly distant friends, with J.T. determined to keep the Deadgirl and spending more and more time with her and Rickie trying to free her. Unfortunately, J.T. can’t keep his discovery to himself and soon drags more people into his obsessive game, which quickly spirals out of his control and threatens to destroy more than just his friendship with Rickie.
Deadgirl is not an easy film to watch. Its graphic scenes of violence and sex are going to put off most audiences well before the credits roll. However, despite its graphic and disturbing content, Deadgirl also gives the audience a lot to think about well after the film is over. It’s the kind of horror movie people might write a thesis about; not to get all “grad school,” but the layers of subtext in Deadgirl only really become apparent once you can get past the confrontational subject matter. In short, it’s one of those rare films I had to watch twice before I could even form a coherent opinion regarding how I felt about it.
The Unrepentant Cinephile Page 18
