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).
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.
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“).
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.
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.
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).
Watching this and Body Bags together, an anthology of anthologies, two horror kinda-features from the head and tail end of Tales From The Crypt‘s cable run.
We open with the segment by Romero, not in his prime era. It’s his least scary zombie movie, and this seems like a half-hour script padded out to an hour since the actors say everything at least twice. I get that they’re trying to modernize a Poe story, but without that Corman/Price flair it feels like a TV episode. “Sick stuff always turns out to be rich people.” Adrienne Barbeau (after her John Carpenter heyday) is keeping her rich husband alive long enough to transfer everything into her own name with help from her hypnotist boyfriend. Husband dies too soon, and they consider Weekend-at-Bernies-ing him but settle for tossing him in the basement freezer (my second frozen body of the week after Crimes of the Future). Since he died while hypnotized and is still responding to questions, the doctor has got an open channel to the afterlife, very exciting for him until the scared wife just shoots the zombie husband in the head. Two cops arrive at the rich guy’s house to investigate, then when the spirit of the zombie husband kills the hypnotist in his sleep the same two cops arrive at his hotel – there are only two cops in NYC. At least it’s fun that everyone here except Dr. Boyfriend was in Creepshow.
Dr. Boyfriend and his comatose patient:
Argento’s half opens with police photographer Usher (Harvey Keitel) shooting a woman who died by pendulum, this is more like it. Harvey’s wife brings home a cat, he kills it to photograph its death then when she rightly accuses him he attacks her in a mezcal rage then dreams of being sentenced to the Ga-ga pole treatment at a ren faire. Of course she knows he killed the cat because she finds the photo book he published of its murder, and when she brings home a new cat he kills his wife with a cleaver and bricks her up to rot within the walls. When yet another cat alerts visiting cops to the body Harvey kills them and then, as foretold by prophecy, accidentally hangs himself trying to escape out the window while handcuffed to a dead cop.
The cat’s distinctive mark:
Good cast – the landlords are from Psycho and The Seventh Victim, the wife’s music student from Maximum Overdrive, one cop is McDowell from Coming to America, and the hotgirl he meets at a bar is a Warholian who played “Diane Paine” in a sports slasher. Released the week after the Living Dead remake, with a cameo by Savini as a madman. It still feels like a Crypt episode, but a good one.
Usher’s wife, dream sequence version:
Zombie conspiracy movie with lots of birds and boobs, from the director of O.G. Puppet Master, this videotape was very popular with some teens I could mention who were stuck at their great aunt’s house. The wannabe-Phantasm flying stone hand never looked extremely cool, and holds up even worse in HD, but the birdies have never looked better. The stone hand facehugs a would-be rapist using its barbwire grapples and maybe transforms the guy into a bird, and we’re off.
These red-crested cardinals and a cockatoo get carted into the background of every room/scene:
Verbose young man Corey arrives at his late dad’s estate and meets the staff, including lawyer Robert Burr (a doctor in Return to Salem’s Lot), Anjanette Comer who runs the place (she starred in The Baby with Arletty from Messiah of Evil), and her hot young horsegirl daughter who is constantly hitting on Corey (naming her “Diane Palmer” was probably supposed to spark some connections I didn’t catch at the time). The horsegirl says to stay away from the feather-eared bird people at the brothel next door, but her mom is one of them. Corey got a note from his late dad saying someone named Dolores can help resurrect him, and guess where Dolores hangs out.
The director appears onscreen, at left, as if to say “don’t take any of this too seriously”:
Corey keeps acting confident as he blunders around, way over his head, risking his ass to save the father he never met. He gets it on with his dad’s girlfriend while guest star Edgar Winter blows a sax solo. Anjanette maybe tries to kill him, but gets blinded by Dolores. The alliances are confusing… and the meaning of the stone hand… lotta good birds though. Zombie Dad gets almost-resurrected, intending to inhabit his son’s body, but Corey fights back at the last minute and dad turns into a zombie muppet eclectus.
This is the real stuff, pre-Lynchian eccentricity (even art directed by Jack Fisk) with rich color, good eerie music and some quirky sound editing.
Marianna Hill (Blood Beach, Schizoid) is seeking her missing dad, finds a hotel room throuple (Joy Bang of Night of the Cobra Woman; Anitra Ford of Invasion of the Bee Girls; Tiresome Tom) in the middle of interviewing freaked-out Elisha Cook, who says she’d better kill and burn her dad if she finds him. Anitra ditches the group now that Tom is slobbering over the new girl, she flees a rat-eating albino then comes across a gang of locals eating raw meat at Ralph’s, so they grab and eat her instead.
Marianna finds dad’s house and his diary entries about gradually turning into a zombie. She’s not doing so well herself, vomiting up bugs and lizards. Tom hasn’t adequately explained himself, claims to be just an art dealer, but knows that the bleeding eyes indicate a transformation is starting. Sometimes zombification takes long enough to leave behind an entire diary, sometimes it happens real fast (a cop changes sides mid-shootout). Dad Royal Dano (Gramps in House II, the farmer in Killer Klowns) finally comes home to provide an 1870s backstory flashback about a dark priest hiding in the sea. But it stays compellingly mysterious because none of these things exactly come together – even the DVD commentary guys agree that it’s never clear exactly what’s the deal in this town. The directors getting kicked off the movie before the editing couldn’t have helped.
Royal Le Fou, he blue himself:
All sorts of weirdos show up in this. The first victim is Walter Hill, a rude art gallery guy is Morgan Fisher, a murdered mechanic was the killer Santa from Silent Night Deadly Night. Huyck directed Howard the Duck, which I’m not keen to revisit even though I enjoyed it when I was ten, and with Gloria Katz he wrote Radioland Murders and Temple of Doom. Elisha was prolific – it’s exciting to think I’ve got 100 more Elisha performances to go.
