Zombie movies I've seen

Stacy takes the position at the head of list of weird films I?ve seen in the last year, and probably takes a position among the top five or ten weird films I?ve ever seen. The film has a three-part plot stemming from the premise: that all young women die of a mysterious disease sometime between the ages of 15 and 17, then reanimate as flesh-eating zombies?called Stacies?who can only be killed by being dismembered into 156 pieces.

1. A scientist and his military bunker full of support staff are researching the Stacy phenomenon and trying to find a cure.
2. A group of three young women are working to earn the 1,000,000 yen needed to hire a celebrity Stacy-killer to ?re-kill? them after they reanimate.
3. A puppeteer meets and befriends a young woman in ?Late Stage Happiness,? a two-week mania that preceeds Stacy-fication. She has asked him to ?re-kill? her.

The film?s plot is trippy enough, with horrifying gore effects involving wiggling bits of bodies and lots of blood everywhere. But on top of that, we have trippy Japanese ads (as in the image above, for home chain saws in the ?Bruce Campbell?s Right Hand? line, we have zombies who give off a blue fairy dust that makes their victims docile, and we have a strange group of zombie-killing soldiers called Romeros.

But then on top of it, there are some secondary ideas about the Stacies being motivated not by hatred or hunger, but by love, and a strange end to the film that suggests a post-war world in which humans and Stacies co-exist and intermarry. That?s right, I said intermarry. I?m not sure what else to say about this film except that it is strange, strange, strange.

Competent, but nothing special.

Graveyard Alive: A Zombie Nurse in Love startled me. I expected it to be one thing, took its early moments to be something else, and came to see it as a third thing by the time I finished.

1. A titillating stupid zombie movie. The netflix description of the movie used the phrase "sex kitten." It's hard to think this film will be anything but juvenile sex jokes. The decolletage and come-hither smile on the poster doesn't undercut that feeling.

2. Early on, the style of the film is pretty disconcerting. Graveyard Alive is shot in black and white and the entire soundtrack is looped, making the early scenes seem particularly amateurish. The early scenes also have a mysterious monster that eludes the camera--another element that makes the film seem a bit off. The acting style plays into this as well (see below).

3. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that the cinematographic style (lingering, odd angles, crisp shadows) and the dreamy quality of the sound (enhanced by the Caligari-like soundtrack and the looped dialog) are being used intentionally. The effect of the film hypnotizes and mesmerizes, much the same way good silent film does. The relatively small amount of dialog in the film amplifies this effect.

A few more thoughts:

* All the actors overplay their emotions in the ways silent film actors used to. This is somewhat amplified by the studio-perfect sound effects that sound dubbed and give the film a disconnected aesthetic.
* The zombies in this film have an interesting quirk -- they only rot if they aren't eating human flesh. They also have an increased libido, which makes them more inclined to spread the zombie-ness.
* One of the characters, Goody Tueschuze, starts out the film as a jerk whom we hate. As the film progresses, we still don't like her, but more and more of the narrative shifts to her perspective. It's a weird phenomenon you don't see much in American movies (but it seems like I've seen it in Japanese movies a lot).
* Facial cream helps hide the unsightly blemishes of zombiehood.
* This film doesn't have a very positive view of men--the guys at the hospital go ga-ga for nurse Patty when she dons black stockings and unbuttons her nursing uniform. At one point, it shows her emerging from a tryst in a closet with a doctor. He seems happily disheveled and unconcerned about the gaping wounds on her cheeks and neck.
* I have no idea why the film has this title. It should just be Zombie Nurse Falls in Love or something.

In the end, I wasn't amazed by the film, but I'd grown to appreciate it for its scope and shape, in much the same way I felt about Call of Cthulu.

It occurs to me that if I spend too much time writing about this short film, I'll spend more time than the movie took to watch. So quickly:

* The premise is promising: two cashier jockeys discover that they have been turned into zombies to work at an all-night bookstore. Like Clerks without the clever dialogue.
* Despite the clearly indie nature of most of the film, the blood and violence effects are excellent.
* The movie has a distinct Tales from the Crypt feel to it -- a short parable in which the evil doer gets undone by their own evilness. Such tales depend on a clever denouement. Alas, no such end arrived here.

Brian Clement?s Exhumed presents three short zombie movies that revolve around a mysterious object (loosely connected to Lovecraftian mythos) that can raise the dead. The three short stories are pretty entertaining and skillfully made, especially given the ultra-low budget background of the film company. Like Call of Cthulu, I appreciate the skill in making movies on low budgets. A few other thoughts:

* ?Shi No Mori? takes place in feudal Japan, following two warriors as they battle zombies in the forest. The film feels very Japanese, with excellent imitation of classic horror style (it felt like one of the segments from Kwaidan). Especially effective were the titles and the choice to use Japanese (rather than English).
* ?Shadow of Tomorrow? brings the film to the 1948s in classic noir style. The lines are delivered at a quick clip, and the mise-en-scene evokes classic B noir.
* ?Last Rumble? takes place in a post-apocalyptic future in which vampires and werewolves battle each other and some sinister human faction bent on maintaining their stranglehold on the world. I think. The style of this last film seemed, at first, to evoke the exploitation action movies of the 70s (like Human Tornado), but as the short progressed lost that flavor.
* All three films mix these styles with the expected low-budget practical special effects. In these, Clement makes good use of quick shots and some striking images?particularly in part 3. One sequence in which a soldier?s face gets ripped off is striking and amusing.

All three shorts are amusing and entertaining, though they work better as objects of art and style than as coherent tales. The complicated story weaving between the segments gets a bit confusing, but not so much that the film is hurt by it. The shorts use atmosphere and clever plotting to work well within the limits of the production. As such, they?re pretty satisfying. Overall, Exhumed is worth watching for fans of indie film and horror, but probably not satisfying for people expecting high-budget production values or vast armies of zombies.

I, Zombie makes an early stab at a theme that would be quite popular in the most recent slate of zombie films. It's most clear descendants are movies like American Zombie, Zombie Honeymoon, and Zombies Anonymous. All three films follow I, Zombie's lead in thinking about what it would be like to be a conscious zombie. In some ways, this film explores that issue more intimately than do the later films.

The film follows Brian, a graduate student who gets bitten by a zombie and finds himself turned into one. He has an uncontrollable hunger for people and is slowly rotting as he hides away from the world. It's a grim tale of desperation and sorrow, with lots of lingering shots focused on Brian's painful life hiding in his flat. A few other thoughts:

* While the film contemplates the question of what it would be like to become a zombie quite well, it veers quite far from the recipe necessary for an enjoyable zombie film. There's not much tension as Brian never seems in any sort of danger. A persistant detective (ala Zombie Honeymoon) would have made the story a bit more exciting.
* The gloomy desperation and haunted narrative reminds me a lot of An American Werewolf in London, which also considers the spiritual tragedy of becoming a monster.
* This movie has one of the more horrifying consequences of rotting I've seen in a zombie film, made much worse by the emotional depth of the scene in which it occurs.
* There's not a whole lot of action or excitement in the film. Instead, its matter-of-fact cinematography and shallow narrative arc short circuit most of the horror-pleasure that one finds in these films. In so doing, I could see it being pretty unsatisfying for people looking for more conventional fare. That said, I think it makes a fine companion to those other films I mentioned above.
* The makeup effects and dream sequences are impressive and solid.

Overall, it's worth seeing, but more recent films do the same work in a more entertaining way.

I?ve seen some bad movies in my day. The Dead Hate the Living. The Human Tornado. Burn, Hollywood, Burn.

Johnny Sunshine: Maximum Violence made the list.

It?s not that the film is amateurish ? and oh boy is it. I can appreciate low budget filmmaking for what it is. But it still needs to do something interesting. And therein lies the problem. Johnny Sunshine has a killer premise. Tell me this doesn?t sound like a great movie:

In a world overrun by zombies, drugs and violence, entertainment is hard to come by. Enter Johnny Sunshine, the beautiful yet cold-blooded assassin whose zombie-killing exploits are the basis for the world?s most popular reality television show. When she discovers that her double-crossing producer has arranged to have her taken out, Johnny decides it?s time to take her world-famous murdering skills behind the scenes.

It does sound awesome. It would be awesome if this were the movie I?d seen. It isn?t.

Instead, the description should read something like this:

In a dull world overrun by zombies, drugs and violence, entertainment is hard to come by. Enter Johnny Sunshine, the sadist whose zombie-killing snuff films are popular.

That whole plot thing described in the first sequence? That takes place in the last third of the movie, but doesn?t really resolve. The end of the movie is when she decides to take her skills ?behind the scenes.? There?s no rampage of revenge.

The main problem is the pacing. Johnny Sunshine snoozes along so slowly that even I, your intrepid viewer of nearly everything, couldn?t take it. I?ll admit that from about the ten minute mark, I watched the film at 2x. Perhaps this muted some of the ambiance, but it was still too slow, IMO.

The focus of the film was actually the torture scenes, in which JS captures a person (not a zombie, as far as I can tell) and tortures them before having sex with and killing them. It was really classy. So classy I closed the curtains lest my neighbors glance in and think, well, that I was watching Johnny Sunshine.

Most disappointing, there aren?t even very many zombies, and the ones in the film are basically worthless. They could have been ?druggies? just as easily.

I usually suggest that most films have something worth watching them for. I can?t make that claim for Johnny Sunshine. I wouldn?t even show this film to my bad movie club.

Meh. You?d think a movie involving space vampires, a naked lady, and zombies (er, space zombies?) would be great. You?d be wrong. This movie isn?t terrible, but there are lots of other movies that do what it does better. Here are some comparisons (I freely admit that comparing a movie to others that came later isn?t really fair, but I don?t care):

* Trope: The astronauts find a creepy spaceship that seems mysteriously organic. Inside are creepy aliens.
They did it better in? Alien. The creepy alien isn?t creepy when it?s a naked lady (see below). Also, it?s lame that this is the same screenwriter as Alien. Dan O?Bannon, what were you thinking?
* Trope: Naked alien lady seduces men and kills them to accomplish her alien deeds.
They did it better in?Species. The mid-nineties sex/splatter fest was clearly inspired by this film. One interpretation of LifeForce is that it plays on the vagina dentata, positing a terrifying sexual figure who devours men. Species took this idea and made it much more interesting.
* Trope: London is destroyed by zombies as people try to figure out how to stop the plague.
They did it better in?Every zombie movie. The problem with the zombies in this film is that they never got enough play to become frightening or even interesting. They were a prop to move the plot forward. I wonder if the zombies were just a bleed-over from Dan O?Bannon?s other 1985 project, Return of the Living Dead.
* Trope: Something strange happens out in space and we shouldn?t have brought it back. (The film begins with a visit to Halley?s comet where they find the mysterious ship.)
They did it better in?Event Horizon, which I actually liked much better than most people did.
* Trope: We find impossibly old aliens and it turns out they may have been here before.
They did it better in?2001: A Space Odyssey. ?Nuff said.

For each notable person involved in the film, there?s something better to watch. Patrick Stewart? X-Men or the first TNG movie. Dan O?Bannon? Return of the Living Dead or Alien. Tobe Hooper directed Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Poltergeist. Cinematographer Alan Hume shot A Fish Called Wanda. Composer Henry Mancini wrote The Pink Panther and Peter Gunn. Editor John Grover cut a couple Bond films and Labyrinth. This seems to be one of those movies with lots of skilled people that just didn?t go anywhere.

I just hope Mathilda May got some extra green for each scene she had to do topless or naked, if for no better reason than as a kickback for keeping the costume budget low.

Review opening 1:
Independent filmmaking in the HD, Uber-FX era parallels programming for the Wii. When Nintendo was working on the Wii, they focused nearly all their development money on implementing its innovative control scheme, eschewing the next round of processor and graphics upgrades that Microsoft and Sony pursued in creating their current-gen consoles. As a result, Nintendo?s current crop of games excel in play control but lag behind on graphics. Thus, game designers are forced to come up with innovative design choices to keep players from getting too caught up on this issue. For example, the designers of Mad World created a cartoony, Frank Miller knockoff world in which everything looks like inked black and white comics, reserving color only for blood. As a result, the style takes care of the need for all the graphics kickassery a modern fighting game usually requires. I Was a Zombie for the FBI pulls the same slight of hand, dodging the need for special effects or complex cinematography by hewing closely to the style of 1950s crime thrillers, which use a more direct, less flashy mise-en-scene.

Review opening 2:
Netflix has a column on the queue page titled ?Expected Availability.? Most of the titles in the queue are labeled ?Now.? For example, of the 480 movies in my queue, seventeen are labeled ?Short Wait? and one is labeled ?Long wait.? Contrary to my instinct, short and long waits are much more common for niche movies than for the big blockbusters. I have never had to wait for a big screen, big money movie. By memory, I?ve only had to wait for two movies: Spaced (disc 1) and I, Zombie. I?ve also occasionally had to wait a bit longer as my movie was sent from some far away shipping center; such was the case with I Was a Zombie for the FBI. In retrospect, the wait has much more to do with the coolness of the title or the rarity of the actual disc than with anything like quality of the film.

Originally made in 1982 and punched up for the DVD with some intertitles and establishing shots, the film works pretty well if you enjoy genre thrillers and SF from the 1950s and 1960s. The dialog is corny without being stupid, and the pacing holds together (though the film got a bit slow for me toward the end). The plot generally focuses on a conspiracy by two mysterious human-looking aliens to turn everyone into mind-controlled zombies through a change in the Uni-Cola ?Healthcola? formula. Embroiled in the story are two criminals, two FBI agents, and one plucky reporter who never actually gets to be plucky. A few more thoughts:

* I thought the film had a strange mix of cinematic touches (it feels like it was shot on film) and modern low-budget effects. I read up on the film and learned about the recent re-edit. I?m glad to hear that the movie was trimmed, as the current version gets a bit long for my taste. I bet the original would try my patience.
* Anyone looking for conventional zombie mayhem will be sorely disappointed. The zombies in this film are much more like the ones from I Walked with a Zombie ? mostly harmless. There?s a monster (the glorious stop-motion ZBeast) and an evil Phantasm ball that shoots swirly lines of zombification rather than sharp spikes, but no cannibalistic ghouls.
* Best dialog exchange, from memory so sorry if it?s not exact:

Doctor: Have you ever heard of Zombies? Webster?s dictionary defines them as people without internal motivation who mindlessly follow commands from their masters.
Agent: And what, this magic ball zaps them and? zombies them?
Doctor: The term is zombifies. Or clinically, we would say they are in a zomboid state.

* I loved the clueless way the agents drove around a whole town full of zombies for most of a day before they figured out something was wrong.
* The criminals are the best part of this movie, gleefully killing and robbing, smirking the whole way.
* My biggest disappointment with the film was the lack of infiltration the title implies. The title, of course, refers to an infamous series of columns and a film from the 1950s in which a fictional narrator tells the story of his time spent with the morally corrupt Communists infiltrating our country. Using the parallel title makes sense within the genre conventions the film relies upon, but it ultimately disappoints as the movie does not actually use the plot point implied in the title.

Overall, it?s a film worth seeing for fans of b-movies from the 1950s, but as a standalone movie, there are far better choices out there.

Imagine that you found the excised bits of an early American Pie script. Then, having recently enjoyed such teen zombedies as Idle Hands or My Boyfriend?s Back, you would make Night of the Living Dorks, or perhaps Boy Eats Girl. As I said, this film reminds me a lot of other teen zombie comedies, particularly in that its ?heroes? find zombie-hood to be a mixed bag, taking moments to enjoy their newfound strength (ala Spider-man in the wrestling ring), but they also find themselves driven to, well, eat people. Some other thoughts:

* If you decide to watch this movie, hold on to at least the 30 minute mark. The beginning is absolutely terrible. I nearly turned it off. The sex jokes are really awful, not only in their stupidity, but in their ham-handedness.
* I like the idea that people react differently to being zombified ? some give in to it more easily than others. The three characters continue their own paths: the uber-nerd who nurses his grudges manages to play out that insecurity, while the normal guy gets to be more normal and the stoner/sex fiend becomes more stonery/sex fiend-y.
* The goths are pretty funny in the movie, especially the part where Phillip chastises them for their crappy skills: they use frozen chicken and one of their mother?s hair for the mystical rites. And they draw a six-point star of David instead of a pentagram on the ground.
* It?s amusing that the bully in the film wears a sweater over his shoulders like Troy from The Goonies.
* The recurring theme of using a staple-gun to reattach body parts that have fallen off is pretty funny.
* I watched this streaming on Netflix, which was okay except that it was dubbed instead of subtitled. The goofy performances in the dubbing were pretty distracting, frankly. I would have preferred subtitles.

Overall, pretty mediocre. Not better or worse than Boy Eats Girl, but definitely not the best zombie comedy out there.