by ·Comments Off on Dead Heat (1988, Mark Goldblatt)

After Hiruko and White of the Eye, I’m accidentally on a late ’80s kick… help.

Straightman Treat Williams and his wacky partner Joe Piscopo (Wise Guys, SNL) are in trouble with their cop boss Robert “The Cowboy” Picardo for being reckless out of control loose cannons who do not follow the rules. At a sketchy science lab investigating some major crimes committed by zombies armed with machine guns, PR Hotgirl Lindsay “Sister of Mark” Frost fails to distract them and Joe easily finds the zombie reanimation chamber – and just in time, since Treat gets himself killed in another room.

Lot of fishtank drama in this movie:

“Rich dead people, what does it mean?” Funny, I’m reading Don DeLillo’s Zero K, which asks the same question. But here the screenplay is just something you’ve gotta get through, an obstacle to the heart of the movie, which yearns to show us more reanimated corpses with machine guns (and admittedly good makeup), now including Treat. The PR woman joins them, saying she didn’t mean to be evil. When she belatedly admits that she’s also dead, the company keeping her alive as long as she’s useful, she corpse-rots immediately. Now they need a new hotgirl on the team, and fortunately we’ve got Treat’s ex, morgue attendant Becky.

Treat, Gremlins Salesman, and the zombie army:

More stuff: the zombie chemicals run through Chinatown, where the Gremlins salesman makes a getaway by turning on a lightning machine which reanimates all the chickens and ducks and pigs in his butcher shop. The zombie company is run by Dr. McNab (Kolchak: The Night Stalker) and PR woman’s father, VHS Vincent Price. You expect the happy ending is gonna be finding a way to keep Treat unalive so he doesn’t rot like the PR woman, but no, everyone ends up dead, and when a cornered Kolchak shoots himself, they reanimate him just so they can kill him again. Good commitment to the bit, though overall the movie doesn’t move swiftly or smartly. Director Goldblatt was better known as editor of James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven and Joe Dante movies (the evil company here is called Dante).

The split-second before John Le Carre’s “Smiley’s People” took a bullet intended for Joe Piscopo:

Treat’s final form:

by ·Comments Off on 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026, Nia DaCosta)

This one is set 28 days later than 28 Years Later. Our kid Spike has been kidnapped by the Jimmy Gang run by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, spends most of the movie semi-panicking since his new friends have a kill-or-die policy and they like to torture local homeowners to death for no apparent reason. They plan to grow in numbers and take over the land, but their plan seems mathematically challenging, since you have to kill a Jimmy in combat to become one. Spike Jimmy does make friends with Girl Jimmy (Erin Kellyman, a ghost in The Green Knight), who finds out about Ralph Fiennes and thinks he might be Crystal’s dad Satan.

Fiennes, meanwhile, spends his days hanging out with anesthetized alpha-zombie Samson, and spends his nights dancing to Duran Duran in his bunker. He makes a deal with Crystal to put on a show and impress the others. But things start to turn sour in Jimmyland, with loyalties in doubt, then Jimmy kills the Jimmy who was gonna kill our Jimmy.

Dr. Ralph and the Jimmys destroy each other, leaving zen zombie Samson partially dezombified, and Jimmy Spike running off with Jimmy Kelly. Being an immediate sequel with no new characters, DaCosta (Candyman 3) goes through the motions of setting up part three part three, which is apparently gonna star the ur-Jimmy Cillian Murphy.

by ·Comments Off on Ick (2024, Joseph Kahn)

This has got one of those modern sound mixes where the dialogue is buried, too bad, but the one-star reviews were wrong, Kahn is back baby! [an hour later] Okay, they buried the dialogue because it’s bad, lot of embarrassing culture war stuff, but most of the visuals are still good, Kahn is kinda back baby! This week I watched two Superman-adjacent movies about townspeople zombied by gooey creatures, and this one doesn’t come off great when closely compared to Slither.

The ick has been around for decades, suddenly becomes hostile and starts zombifying people, leading washed-up science teacher Brandon Routh to summon his old hometown-hero energy and fight back with student Grace (who played Young Supergirl, appropriately) plus fellow losers The Goth One and The Arty One. Big year for guys going on adventures with high schoolers who they believe to be their illegitimate daughters. At least we all learned about some key figures in existentialism.

by ·Comments Off on The Day The Earth Blew Up (2024, Peter Browngardt)

Palate cleanser after all this week’s zombie movies (28 Years Later, The Sadness, Weapons) and antisocial behavior (Golem, The Beast To Die). I mean sure, this is also a zombie movie (the population gets possessed by alien chewing gum) full of antisocial behavior (Daffy), but with a different tone, and animated. Zippy and funny, the 74 credited writers should be proud (their other works include Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Samurai Jack, SpongeBob, Camp Lazlo, She-Ra, and Brigsby Bear).

by ·Comments Off on 28 Years Later (2025, Danny Boyle)

Dad and son leave their tidal island home for a coming-of-age venture into zomb territory, and when their short trip gets derailed and extended they end up meeting skull collector Ralph Fiennes, a doomed Swede, and evil acrobat messiah Jack O’Connell. Second-most interesting part of this movie is learning that the rest of the world is normal modern, with internet and uber eats, and only England is zombie-quarantined – the most interesting is that Boyle is image-making here, not just telling a family/zomb story, and this has got more trick shots/edits in the first four minutes than the entirety of last week’s zombie junk The Sadness. Ends weirdly because they’re setting up a sub-trilogy, so the kid and his dad (Aaron T-J of one of the bad Godzilla movies) and other weirdos will return, but the kid’s mom (Bikeriders wife Jodie Comer), an elite zombie defender with terminal brain cancer, will not.

by ·Comments Off on The Sadness (2021, Rob Jabbaz)

Starts as a mild relationship drama (she has a job, he is useless), then he goes outside and witnesses an extremely sudden citywide outbreak of The Crazies. The infected get red around their big black eyes, sport a big grin, and torture normals for fun, retaining their person skills (can talk and use weapons). After no living humans are in sight, the crazies have violent blood orgies. So our guy runs back home to come up with a plan, after the gardener neighbor cuts off a couple of his fingers, meanwhile the girl has taken the midnight meat train to work, uh oh. Rest of the movie is them trying to find each other, meeting up at a hospital, each trailing their own zombie archnemesis. I feel like it’s trying to be somewhat comical in an over-the-top gory kind of way, like Terrifier, but mostly ends up depressing (“charmless, sadistic“).

by ·Comments Off on Vulcanizadora (2024, Joel Potrykus)

Back to basics, just Joel and Joshua Burge alternately amusing themselves with fire or glowsticks and driving each other nuts in the woods. As their growing tension and weird vibes and the movie’s awesome poster indicate, the end goal is a double suicide, but squirrely Joel can’t follow through, so his head is exploded by a supercharged firecracker while Josh gets a half-hour coda of legal issues and regret. Really messed-up movie, a perfect addition to the Joel/Josh canon.

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Ludovico Testament (1999)

Best-case scenario of early homemade short films. This is exactly the sort of lifesize stop-motion that I would’ve made in my VHS-cam days if I’d seen The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb the year it came out instead of eight years later.

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Gordon (2007)

Gordon takes his kid to the playground and dies unexpectedly, then comes back a few months later as a zombie, his face deteriorated but his suit still in nice shape. Family has moved away, and nobody can stand to look at him, so he bums around town to Beck’s “He’s a Mighty Good Leader,” his teeth and fingernails falling out, then returns to his grave.

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Joel Calls Indie Film Type Dudes (2020)

Conceptual comedy, Joel calls all the industry people in his phone to ask how the quarantine is going for them, then doesn’t listen to their responses and hangs up in a hurry. The joke is on Alex Ross Perry, who gets called four times, each time listing him as the director of a different film.

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Unemployees (2023)

Dani and Kandy are slacker idiots with an ill-thought-out plan to get jobs and be fired then collect unemployment. After stints in an office, a factory, and a cafeteria (all filmed at Grand Valley U in Allendale MI) they take a field labor gig and discover that money does grow on trees – but trees that cause horrible skin infections.

by ·Comments Off on 28 Days Later (2002, Danny Boyle)

I was gonna say “the movie looks artfully shot, too bad my copy is smeary low-res for some reason” – but no, it turns out they shot it on mini-DV. I don’t need to rewatch part two before the third movie, but don’t remember this one at all. Coma victim Cillian awakens into the post-apocalypse, after the extremely infectious rage virus is released from a lab by idiot activists and England is destroyed by Crazies®. He’s rescued by Naomie Harris, and they find a girl whose dad is Brendan Gleeson, and they go on adventures together, getting a flat tire in a rat tunnel, having a Grandaddy-soundtracked grocery shopping spree. Fun’s over after Gleeson gets infected by a crow and the others find a mad group of rapist soldiers. Cillian (a bike messenger who just woke from a coma) turns elite commando and wipes out the squad to save the women. Nayman and Lewis.

by ·Comments Off on Flesh for Frankenstein (1973, Paul Morrissey)

Paul Morrissey died at the tail end of SHOCKtober so I immediately put on his masterpiece. Mad Scientist Udo Kier is building a race of zombie superpersons with his equally mad assistant Otto, while the doctor’s wife is having a barely-secret affair with houseboy Joe Dallesandro, who is disturbed to see his late buddy’s head atop Udo’s monster.

Beautiful movie, full of Cronenbergian wound-fetishes and guts comin’ at ya (it’d be so sweet to see the 3D version). I can’t remember the Frank family’s two children having any lines but they’re lurking behind walls and windows in every scene. All the people and monsters tear each other apart through malice and/or incompetence, and after Udo’s incredible disembowelment, Joe is still alive but a captive of the psychotic tots (she’s the girl we saw die in Who Saw Her Die, soon to star in Demons).