We Are Going to Tweet You

It's official: George Romero tweets.

Below is a really cool featurette on Romero's latest, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, a movie I'd very much like to see next month in Austin.


BTS George Romero Sneak Peek

Darabont + Walking Dead + AMC

Linky link: Frank Darabont to Direct The Walking Dead for cable?

So what do y'all think: is this a better move than the silver screen? I think it could be delish.

MORE zombified nazis

...in something called Worst Case Scenario. Seems like the sort of thing that only exists as trailers but might lift off the ground if the trailers get enough attention. I don't know. I don't feel like looking it up, but if you're interested enough, I'm sure you can dig up something. I'm just here to link you to YouTube.

Worst Case Scenario trailer 1: in your face

Worst Case Scenario trailer 2: atmospheric

Buon appetito.

I Love Sarah Jane

Check out I Love Sarah Jane, a short Australian coming-of-age zombie film. Very much worth fourteen minutes' viewing.

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.

Interview with a Zombie

Well, this is just plum adorable, but for maximum fun you have to pretend it's Christian Bale deep into undead method-acting. (Trust me, it's not much of a stretch.)