More SURVIVAL footage, reviews OF THE DEAD

Here's some more SURVIVAL footage. And here. I'm not sure if these are merely promo pieces or actual clips from the film (maybe the opening, pre-credits?), but I dig them. They're vintage Romero in many ways. I love the cutaways to the puddle of blood.

The first reviews of the film have gone live. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter have lots to say about Romero's latest-- the former is pretty scathing, the latter quite positive. Neither are very insightful nor are they of much use to me either way, as my ass is already in the seat.

Zombie Girl

In the vein of An American Movie, but hopefully less depressing (and necessarily less entertaining), Zombie Girl is a 90-minute documentary following twelve-year-old aspiring filmmaker Emily as she sets out to make a zombie film.

The full documentary streams at snagfilms.com. Check it out if you like. You can watch it until August 20th.

I was actually bored after the first few minutes and had to stop--my time is a little too precious these days and I've already spent hundreds of hours behind the scenes of various low-budget endeavors, and that's boring enough first-person when you have an actual stake in it--but I thought some of you out there might be interested. Do let me know if you think it's worth your time. Personally, I'm more apt to give an hour and a half to the actual feature. (Something I can't say for Coven.)

District 9

I won't be the first one to tell you to go see District 9. I also won't be the first one to tell you that it's not all it's hyped to be. As with Cloverfield, the promotion and critical ovations foment expectations that are nearly impossible to meet. District 9 is not a Messianic work.

It is, however, a really nifty genre-straddling piece of action-adventure. By stripping some of the best gears and cogs from horror, disaster films, alien SF, and even contemporary sociopolitical features like The Constant Gardener, all mashed together and presented roughly documentary-style, District 9 strikes a very fresh balance and manages to surprise at nearly every turn. The first act, strictly journalistic in tone, is intense and constantly delights. Context for the story--twenty years of allegorical history--is provided in natural, low key shorthand. The second act drops the handheld camera shtick, and it's a bit jarring to shift to what is in essence an utterly conventional 80s Unlikely Buddies action flick. This proves a bit of a disappointment; I'd have preferred the distanced, cinéma vérité model to have carried throughout the film, and for the plot to have continued building on challenging social observations and human drama rather than falling back on more shopworn narrative tropes, but I understand that this is a little more trying than most mainstream viewers want their blockbusters to be. Still, the ending is admirably inconclusive, and I'm curious whether the intent is to spur a sequel.

The most remarkable thing is the effects work. The scores of physically complex insectile humanoids are magnificent and certainly adequately repulsive, and interact with their environments almost flawlessly. The animators imbued the lead Prawn, Christopher, with gestures and tics that are remarkably expressive and humanlike considering that he has a freaking exoskeleton.

As a friend of mine pointed out, digital film is the great leveller. I'll add that $30 million is the new low budget blockbuster. Indie and semi-indie studios, particularly thanks to patronship by a fellow like producer Peter Jackson, are built on economy, inventiveness, dedication, and vision. The Day The Earth Stood Still must have blown through its preposterous $80 million on, I don't know, throngs of highly trained and well-armed security forces to keep long-loving geeks from throwing themselves on Jennifer Connelly. It certainly wasn't spent on special effects, since those amounted to Occasional Big Smooth Metal Man and A Couple Minutes of Hungry Clouds. There's no excuse for a budget that bloated to create a movie that unimpressive, and District 9 demonstrates that principle commendably.

While imperfect, District 9 is a great flick and well worth seeing for the visual effects accomplishments alone, though there's much more to love than that. (Go Weta!) It's a marvelous sign that movies like this are being thought up, and that there are studios uninterested in intellectually neutering them and gussying them up throughout production with tits and 'splosions to better appeal to the mouthbreathing masses. (Hell, that's what Michael Bay is here to do.)

Review: Pontypool (2009)

The setting is Pontypool, a Canadian podunk mired in snowiest winter. The hour is ungodly-early, and disgraced talk radio host Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) is still getting his bearings at the new small-beans gig. The morning begins typically enough, but soon unbelievable reports of mob violence begin coming in. Shut up in their studio, Mazzy and his crew try to make sense of the situation as it worsens--and even as merely speaking about it becomes dangerous.

Pontypool, directed by Bruce McDonald and based on the novel Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess, does what so many zombie-type films fail to: while playing with the familiar undead themes of senseless mob rule and inverted (or erased) humanity, it climbs out of the Romero sandbox and presents a wholly different type of baddie. The "conversationalists", as they are referred to in interviews with the director but not in the film itself, are mere living humans infected with empty linguistic mimesis, the frustration of which drives them to violence.

Viewers looking for a coherent pseudoscientific justification will be diappointed. This is more like Les Revenants (2004), an eerie French film about the return of the dead that saw no reason to inject half-assed explanations or even logical chains of consequences. The event simply occurs, and the results simply are. Pontypool, likewise, includes no talk of radiation or viral mutation. The phenomenon seems to be a massive metaphor, perhaps for the idiosyncratic nature of human existence and the increasing impossibility of genuine communication (or even interest in it) as we move forward into times that are more and more Me-centered. My husband suggests that it might symbolize the poisonous nature of some Western ideologies (only the English language is affected by the disorder--I argue that this plot point is a contrivance rather than part of a political statement).


The subtext might be hazy, but McHattie's dialogue makes a general point quite clearly: words only have the meaning that we give to them, and we can rip that meaning away or swap it out for another as we please. This is a flimsy theme, so either the creators intended for the film to provoke speculation about deeper themes, and certainly succeeded in our case, or they're satisfied with this stoner-musing level of cut-rate open-ended "like, what if my blue was your orange, man" philosophizing. Ain't a thing wrong with that.

For my money, though, Les Revenants does a better job of letting its characters simply deal with the repercussions through an organic dramatic playout rather than spend all their time talking. And talking. And talking about how to defeat something that's never fully explained in the first place, trying to come up with logical solutions to illogical problems, as McHattie's character is forced to do by virtue of being an on-air personality attempting to inform his listenership and by virtue of the vehicle of terror being the spoken word itself. There's no avoiding it, and I consider that a pitfall.

However, the acting is solid, the aesthetic is evocatively dreary, and the violence is hard (if not abundant). It's not a loud movie. The first half hour is remarkably well-executed and chilling. If you like your zombie horror straight-up and untainted by artsy half-baked injections of meaning, it might not be for you. If you're interested in experimentation with what "zombies" can be, you won't find your ninety-five minutes wasted.

Review: [REC] and DEAD SNOW

I've reviewed recent(ish) foreign horror films DEAD SNOW (Norway) and [REC] (Spain) and examined them specifically as the inverse of the normal trend we have coming out of Hollywood: they are influenced by American cinema to the point of feeling like the same retreads we seem to tire of over here imbued with varying degrees of their own cleverness, but the international flair they're necessarily lent makes them feel downright refreshing.

[REC] is presented as the recovered footage captured by a TV crew during a zombie outbreak late one night in Barcelona. DEAD SNOW is a zombie comedy pastiche set in the gorgeous Norwegian Alps. They're both fine viewing, though DEAD SNOW, I think, earns the rank of classic.

Check out the review at FearZone.com.