Genre: Horror Comedy, Zombies, Evil Kids Director: Jonathan Milott, Cary Murnion Availability: Amazon Instant Video
I know it makes me a terrible person or something, because kids are precious (and a gift! and the future! and innocent! and pure!) but oh. my. god. children are on my last nerve right now. I work in retail so I lay witness daily to their predictable, repetitive nature of manipulation, greed, destruction, and ability to go batshit crazy on a dime. Also, I'm officially the cranky old lady that lives next door to your idyllic family. All of that youthful playing outside with the laughing and the yelling and the screaming and the chasing and the crying... let's just say I'm missing the gene that finds all of this charming. Much like my feline friends I like things quiet and peaceful. I will most certainly be telling them to GET OFF MY DAMN LAWN in about thirty more years. Or tomorrow. Whichever. This is all to say that wow, was I in the mood for Cooties!
Being an avid reader of the horror magazine Rue Morgue I catch wind of certain movies sometimes years before they finally make it to a wide release. Those damn Canadians and their amazing horror film festivals. So I'd been looking forward to this one for some time. Especially with this awesome movie poster taunting me...
Well, I loved it. It was funny, disgusting, smartly written, and has a great cast. It was more of a comedy than I had anticipated but I'd read an article that said, "the great thing about comedy: it allows you to do so many outrageous things. As long as you can get a laugh, you can get away with them. It raises the bar of censorship." And when you have kids eating teachers and babies and then getting gruesomely killed, I suppose dressing it up in humor helps the medicine go down.
Elijah Wood is once again giving back to the genre that nourished his love of film at a young age - horror. Cooties marks the sixth movie that his film company SpectreVision has produced, and it is the fourth horror movie that he has starred in. Way to go Mr. Frodo!
Circle, circle, dot, dot now you have a cootie shot!
Genre: Zombies, Psychological Director: Ben Wagner Country: USA Availability: Netflix Streaming
If the zombie apocalypse came and you had a safe place to stay, would you ever leave? My reply, given from the comfortable, naive cocoon of normalcy, is fuck yes. In fact, this isn't really a question for me. I can barely stand to be at home with the curtains drawn, let alone be holed up in a cabin and literally not taking a step outside in six months. Zombies be damned, that's no way to live. I'll take my chances with the biters. I'll sleep on the rooftops and bloody my hands with the slaughter, but goddamn don't you cage me.
Dead Within takes place entirely inside a two room cabin with two people. We see their daily routines, how they've held on to the small niceties of life like cleaning the house and getting dressed up for dinner. And we also see how things have changed as they go to bed fully dressed with their shoes on, weapons at their fingertips. Mike leaves Kim during the day to look for supplies. Kim finger paints the walls and talks to a painting of her cat.
There are very few zombies in this zombie movie, mostly because they aren't really the point. The movie is more about isolation and what that can start doing to a person over time. The two actors in Dead Within are terrific. They are believably melancholy, morose, hopeful and hopeless, scared, paranoid, and tender. The score here is also really great. There's this ominous dread that builds with the music but not just during the suspenseful times, it plays over the mundane scenes as well, adding tension to the entire atmosphere that sustains itself throughout every scene. They really did a lot with very little for this movie and it reminded me of a play I saw last year. Proving that talented actors and a good story will make any production a powerful one.
Genre: Creature Feature, Zombie Director: Ti West Country: USA Availability: DVD
The night that I finally decided to watch The Roost I was feeling particularly unenthusiastic about horror movies. I've watched a lot of terrific horror lately - The Theatre Bizarre, The Cabin in the Woods, Chernobyl Diaries, The Divide, The Loved Ones - and the burden that comes with an overabundance of unique and original horror movies is that it heightens your cravings for something great, while at the same time lowering your tolerance for the standard, mediocre drivel.
I'd started my night out on Kill Katie Malone, a thoroughly boring and sophomoric effort in horror making, and was on the hunt for something reinvigorating. I scoured Netflix Streaming and Amazon On Demand and Redbox and remained uninspired. Sometimes the time it takes me to choose a movie is time I could have spent actually watching one. But the pleasure that comes from a quality horror movie night is the very reason that my excitement for this genre exists. And on certain nights, when my mood is finicky and my expectations are high, the process of picking a movie takes time.
So I abandoned my online queues and lists and revisited my personal collection of DVDs. This special mood I was in required that I watch something new but I was out of ideas so I thought my collection might inspire something. That's when I saw, The Roost. I'd purchased The Roost a while ago, spotting it at CD/Game Exchange for only $1.00 and knowing it was Ti West's first film there was no question that it was going home with me. But it's been sitting among my DVDs, unwatched, for nearly a year. When I initially brought the movie home I looked up reviews and watched a trailer. The reviews were poor and the trailer looked kind of... bad. So there it sat.
But when I saw it there, all unwatched and mysterious, there was no hesitation - I put it on.
Right from the beginning I knew I was in for something special. The movie opens in black and white with a slow panning across fake tombstones and cardboard cutout trees, finally setting on a charcoal sketch of a spooky mansion on a hill. It cuts away and we are then introduced to an imposing man dressed in a suit and holding a lantern - The Host of Frightmare Theatre!
When I was a kid I used to stay up late and watch Elvira's Movie Macabre and Joe Bob Briggs's Drive-In Theater. They would introduce b-movies and make commentary on kill scenes or nudity. It was hilarious, it was raunchy, and the movies were always b-movie gems. So when The Roost opened as a macabre TV show that introduces b-movies, I was in love.
The score that runs throughout the whole movie is reminiscent of classic b&w horror with a touch of the '70s and '80s more energetic style. And once we begin watching The Roost you'll notice that the film is grainy, like you're watching an old movie on VHS with occasional tracking blips. This is the third Ti West movie I've seen - the writer/director that gave us House of the Devil and The Innkeepers - and it made me realize that the man has a definite style that has been apparent in all of his movies. For one, he loves a silent slow-moving scene. There are moments of glacial pacing and spatial silences that fill the flashlight illuminated darkness. For two, he loves flashlight illuminated darkness. He also seems to pick very "real" kind of actors. That is to say, no one is too beautiful and they all seem to have a raw, basic quality about them that is instantly relatable. The characters are never your cliche "slutty blonde", "grounded brunette", "asshole jock" which are the standard horror movie fodder. And one of his strongest attributes as a filmmaker is his true understanding of the genre. He not only knows how to build tension and create atmosphere, but he has an eye for framing, in almost, dare I say, a Hitchcockian way.
However, for as creative and original as The Roost may be, it still maintains a b-movie, low budget feel with cheesy looking special effects, mediocre acting and over-the-top moments. Combined with its rather straightforward plot and slow pacing I fear it's not a movie that a broad audience would appreciate, and perhaps instead one that only a true connoisseur of the horror genre will love.
Genre: Zombie Director: Nick Lyon Country: United States Availability: Netflix Watch Instantly
I'm actually quite conflicted on 2012: Zombie Apocalypse. There are so many redeeming elements to this low-budget zombie feature that they almost make up for the really bad elements - which are mainly really shitty zombies and the casting of Taryn Manning, who is fucking horrible.
We'll start with the good so I can sufficiently get your hopes up, and then end with the bad so I can adequately squash any dreams you may have of there finally being another good zombie movie out there, because naturally you dream of such things, as do I.
The movie starts with a thorough playback of the fall of the world due to a virus that turns every living thing into, that's right, (really shitty) zombies. These quick snapshots of a world falling to pieces gives us a solid feeling of desolation and despair. We're then quickly introduced to our main players, first to the three individuals who have spent the last 6 months in hiding and who are ill-equipped to deal with defending themselves against zombies, and then to the four individuals who swoop in and save their dumb asses. The story continues like most zombie apocalypse stories do, the group of survivors band together and travel the dangerous roads on a mission to find that "safe zone" that everyone hears rumors of. They take refuge in various abandoned buildings, some of our players die and we're introduced to new players, and there is always the scene where their beloved friend turns into a zombie and someone has to shoot him in the head, female crying ensues.
The casting of our characters was actually solid picks, these actors work hard to pull their weight in the face of some truly dorky dialog ("There was a zombie, so I killed it.") and of course there's Ving Rhames (wielding a sledge hammer for the whole movie, which he only puts down once in order to wield a fucking CHAINSAW) who should be in every zombie movie ever made. Ever.
The wide shots of the city our characters are travelling through is actually quite effective in helping the perception that the world as we know it is dead and gone. The city that they show is grey and abandoned, smoke hangs in the air everywhere from the fires burning out of control in various neighborhoods. There's no sound, no movement... just a stillness that is only broken with, ZOMBIES!
The script actually introduces us to some fun zombie labels, some of them we were already are privy to thanks to the Dawn of the Dead remake, like "runner" and "twitcher", and others have been used in the likes of The Walking Dead comics, like "packs" and "hordes", but the few I hadn't heard before were "newborns", "rotters" and "burners" (zombies you set on fire that then attack you, so now you're not only still being attacked by a zombie but now it's a zombie on fire).
There were nice homages, a strong black female character wielding a samurai sword (The Walking Dead), a zombie cheerleader still holding onto her pom-pons (Romero's Land of the Dead), a mention of a dead guy named Kirkman (creator of The Walking Dead), the concept that the zombies are learning (Romero).
But have I mentioned the zombies are shitty? They SO are. First off they are completely inconstant with each other in terms of appearance. I'm pretty sure they had an open casting call for zombies and told everyone that they were in charge of their own makeup. Some of them look like their faces are covered in white paint with some blood around the mouth, some of them aren't in any makeup at all and just have blood around the mouth, and some of them are in like, monster movie style "What the hell is that thing supposed to be" kind of makeup. They don't even resemble zombies, they just look like fucked-up creatures who look like they're either burn victims or demons going to a KISS concert. And none of them act like each other. Some of fast runners, but like normal chasing your dog down the street kind of running and not like, I'm going to eat your fucking brains kind of running. And others, I shit you not, act like gorillas. Some are doing that lame limp and drag your leg thing while others are just slowly lumbering with their arms outstretched like they're The Mummy. This movie was in desperate need of a Zombie Coordinator because the zombies, well, they're supposed to be the best part. Their name is in the title. Their name is the name for an entire genre of movies. Without them, it's just people running around an empty city looking for something to be afraid of.
Speaking of being afraid, this movie was not scary at all. The kill scenes looked like they were happening in a video game - completely fake CGI awfulness. The movie takes place mostly during the day and mostly out in the open so you rarely ever have that claustrophobic feeling of being trapped with zombies and no way out. And for a world overrun with zombies there are surprisingly few of them when, for 80% of the movie these people are walking the empty streets of a city and no zombie is in sight. The zombies don't wander off alone so you never have just random zombies filling up the background, instead they're always in hordes and they're always attacking you like some crazed football team, running together full charge ahead. Ooooh, scary.
But! The end is pretty amazing in a so bad it's good kind of way. "Here kitty, kitty."
Despite my better judgement I still liked 2012: Zombie Apocalypse and recommend it to any of you who are hard up for a zombie movie. But it's not a good movie. And it's got really shitty zombies.
Genre: Zombie Director: Howard Ford, Jonathan Ford Country: United Kingdom Availability: Amazon Instant Video
I briefly met George Romero at a NYC comic book convention some years back. He was wearing a t-shirt that read, "fast zombies suck". Someone asked him about it in the Q&A and he said, "Dead things don't move fast." And he's absolutely right (I mean, probably right), but then the question is, how fucking scary are slow moving zombies? In the movies they seem to have that eerie Jason Voorhees ability of always being one step behind you even though you're running your ass off and they're slowly lumbering after you with a broken ankle or a busted knee cap. And then, BAM! when you looked the other way for a moment they're suddenly right beside you sucking your brains out through your ears. But for the most part slow zombies are coming at you for like, ten minutes, and it's totally your own fault if you stand there fiddling with the safety of your gun or trying to tie your shoe lace or something and then Oh Noooos! they're biting your leg in half.
My point is, slow zombies are fucking slow so treating the story like an apocalyptic tale where the greater population is being decimated by them is just a little ridiculous and frustrating. This flaw is The Dead's greatest one. Aside from that The Dead suffers from being an incredibly slow, rather boring story of a two men trying to locate a boy and find an airplane. On the positive side of things, the movie is well done, the performances are solid, the cinematography is at times downright beautiful and there are some nice gore scenes. If I had known I was in for a zombie-drama I may have adjusted my expectations and enjoyed the movie more instead of spending every 15 minutes sighing loudly and looking at my watch.
Genre: Zombie Director: Bob Clark Country: USA Availability: Netflix Watch Instantly
Deathdream (also known as Dead of Night) was an interesting movie, if not a little vague and corny. It's got a great 70's feel, exasperated acting, ominous music, awesome outfits, and ridiculous characters. It's not exactly a zombie movie but it's not not a zombie movie. In fact, what is wrong with the boy goes unexplained and unexplored and instead we just watch him slip slowly into insanity while he craves blood and kills things. The ending is pretty great and is probably what makes the movie not completely disposable.
