ParaNorman (2012)

August 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

ParaNorman (2012) movie poster

directors Sam Fell, Chris Butler
viewed: 08/18/2012 at AMC Metreon 16, SF, CA

From the Portland, OR-based stop-motion animation studio Laika (the team behind the fantastic Coraline (2009), emerges the studio’s second film, ParaNorman, a children’s movie about a boy who “sees dead people”.  For a kid who gets along with ghosts better than the living, Norman has a real penchant for zombie films.  His whole room is covered with posters and toys of the living dead.  He’s an outsider in town, even a “freak” in his own home.  So it’s a little odd that when the zombies really do come to life, he’s frightened by them.

The animation is lush and the design is gorgeously detailed.  Every character, from speaking part to walk-on, is lovingly designed, with unique qualities and inherent oddities all of their own.  The entire world of ParaNorman is overtly wonky, and while the story is set, I assume, somewhere in New England, the town looks an awful lot like Portland.

It’s a town like Salem, MA, whose history and commercial tourist appeal is tied to its dubiousness in persecuting “witches” to death some 300 years prior.  When the witch’s curse is not stifled, the dead bodies of those who had killed her are brought back to life to wreak revenge on themselves and everybody else and only Norman’s ability to communicate (and relate) gives the town any hope.

As beautiful as the animation is, the story and execution are far more traditional and straight-forward than the magical levels achieved in Henry Selick’s Coraline.  It’s hard not to compare the two films, coming from the same studio as they do.  ParaNorman also cultivates a somewhat “goth”-ic appeal, perhaps to a more extreme degree.   But it’s always a strike against a film when it comes to the moralizing, especially when the moral is spelled out in specific, somewhat pedantic language.

Clara was super-keen on this film.  She loved Coraline.  Both she and Felix enjoyed the film quite a bit.  I would say though that the film is pretty scary compared to a lot of “kiddie” fare.  Clara told me she was scared at least once during the film, though nonplussed afterward.

I wasn’t overly surprised by the film.  I loved the look of it from the trailers, but the whole thing had an obviousness about it that suggested that it wouldn’t elevate to the sublime charms of Coraline (admittedly one of my favorite films).  I had read somewhere that supposedly Selick was going back to work with Laika on another Neil Gaiman book, The Graveyard Book, and I’ve had real hopes for that.  Laika is also supposed to have optioned the Portland-based children’s book, Wildwood, which I haven’t read but have heard good things about.

The kids liked the film even more from having seen some of the models from the film at San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum a few weeks ago.  I know they would love to see more about how the film was made.  I do enjoy the fact that they like stop-motion animation so much, and I do very much enjoy watching the films with them.

Filed under Animation, Theatrical, With the kids, Zombies

Dead & Buried

November 4, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Dead & Buried (1981) movie poster

(1981) director Gary Sherman
viewed: 10/29/2011

Somewhere in my brain, the image of the movie poster for Dead & Buried was buried but alive.  It may have been those many trips to the video stores in the 1980′s.  It’s a fairly striking image, standing out from its competitors for one’s more ghoulish attention simply in its eerie aesthetic, which doesn’t actually tell you much about this film.

As it touts, “the creators of Alien“, the writers of that film, worked on this screenplay.  As little as the movie poster indicates the narrative, any connection with Alien is perhaps even further afield.

When I started watching the movie no bells rang in my head that I’d seen it before.  The film opens with a photographer on the beach, snapping artistic pics.  He’s approached by a nice, attractive young lady, who is interested in his camera.  But rather than a seduction, we have an attack by a number of small towners on the unwary photographer.  What gives?

Actually for quite a while, the film emanates a weird The Wicker Man (1973)-like image of a small, insular community that harbors some dark secret that most everybody is in on.  And to an extent that parallel is true, but the twist is an altogether different one, well worth its own sort of Twilight Zone-ish irony.  And strangely, it wasn’t until the very end, this final twist, that the film started feeling more familiar.  In the end, I guess I must have seen it at sometime in my youth.

I have to go into the spoilers here so stop reading if you’re interested in the film.  The twists are worth finding on your own.

But for those of you who don’t mind getting it all spelled out for you, it turns out that the town mortician has perfected his science to the point that he can preserve people perfectly, better than perfect, and his methodologies also evoke voodooism, bringing the dead back to life, a bit like robots more than zombies but definitely as dead bodies.  The real kicker of the twist is that the small town sheriff who has been trying to get to the bottom of this, his wife is one of the dead.  Actually, the whole town is dead.  The mortician just kept needing to work so he’s killed everyone, and pretty gruesomely as well (so that he would have some challenges in his work), and of course, our sheriff himself finds out that he, too, is dead.  But not buried.

Definitely more eerie and ironic than purely frightening.  It does indeed evoke The Wicker Man; it might make a good double feature with that film.  But it’s well worth seeing on its own.

Filed under DVD, Zombies

Survival of the Dead

December 3, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Survival of the Dead (2009) movie poster

(2009) director George A. Romero
viewed: 12/02/10

With Survival of the Dead, writer/director George A. Romero now has completed his second trilogy of zombie movies.  His original trilogy, Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985) are the core structure of his status as a major American film-maker.  The later trilogy, Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and now Survival of the Dead won’t do anything to cement that earlier reputation, but also won’t entirely erode it either.  This latter series of films, in fact, have gone from mediocre to pretty bad, and at this point seem to have lost the plot to an extent.

Survival of the Dead is a real mish-mash of a movie.  Part comedy, part Western, part zombie movie, it’s not committed whole-heartedly to any one direction.  While it sort of follows the time frame of the prior two newer zombie films, even picking up a character that appeared in those films to follow in this one, it’s also a free-standing story of its own.  On an small island off the coast of Delaware, a long-standing family feud between two Irish-American clans plays out in the post-Apocalyptic universe in regards to what to do with the zombies.

Kenneth Welsh plays Patrick O’Flynn, who thinks that the zombies should be most mercifully re-killed and buried, while his nemesis, Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick), thinks that the zombies should be cultivated, trained to eat things other than humans, and potentially rehabilitated.  That and they just plain hate each other.  Enter a small roving National Guard militia, headed by Alan van Sprang, who are drawn to the island, and dragged into this Hatfield and McCoy-like feud, alongside the non-partisan zombies, and we’ve got the bulk of the story.  Even with that rather convoluted center, there is a lot more: a teenage hipster, O’Flynn’s alienated daughter who is tired of the feud, her horse-riding zombie twin, and the ranch hand who loves her.

The film employs a number of creative ways to dispose of zombies, from flare guns to fire extinguishers.  And the film also takes many opportunities for humorous zombie moments, where either the creatures are dumbly trying to maintain their functions as living beings (mailmen try to deliver the mail, farmers chop the wood, drivers drive their cars) or their lumbering attacks on the living.

But the film is just plain all over the place.  The most effort, though probably still well below a majority percentage, is focused on the O’Flynn-Muldoon feud that leads up to a good old fashioned Western-style shootout, perhaps inspired by the 1958 film The Big Country.  But it’s sloppy, unfocused, and generally just a hodgepodge of ideas.  And while not lacking in entertaining moments, it’s hard to figure out if there is any real point to all this stuff.

Interestingly, the latter trilogy of zombie films saw Romero showing greater sympathy for the zombies.  While Land of the Dead showed the continued callowness of humanity against the potential humanity of the zombies, Survival of the Dead, perhaps even in its title, plays out the question of an evolution of the living impaired.  While they can’t necessarily “evolve” since they aren’t procreating, they can develop, be cultivated.  But like so much of this film, the ideas are muddled beneath layers and layers of other stuff, never really developed themselves, and ultimately just left to hang there, much like a chained-up zombie with nothing to really do.

Will Romero make another zombie film?  Who knows.  Maybe he already is.  One would hope that whatever he does, that he perhaps puts a little more thought into it next time.  Nothing can take away from his original trilogy, but these later films continue to muddy the waters and tire out the concepts.

Filed under DVD, George A. Romero, Zombies

Zombie

November 3, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Zombie (1979) movie poster

(1979) director Lucio Fulci
viewed: 10/30/10

You want a zombie movie that you can really sink your teeth into?  Zombie (a.k.a. Zombi 2) is your film.

I’d seen this movie on video shelves over the years and have had it in my queue for ages and ages, knowing that it’s one of the pinnacles of the genre of a sort, especially for a zombie film not made by George A. Romero.

What’s kind of nice about it is that it mixes a bit of the more classical zombie themes (Carribean setting, a ghost ship, voodoo) with the more modern zombie tropes, stumbling, gruesome dead who just want to gorily eat the living.  And on top of that, it’s got a zombie wrestling a live tiger shark!   Talk about having your cake and eating it too!!

The film opens with a ghost ship sailing into New York.  Apparently abandoned, the Coast Guard boards it to find…a giant rotting zombie!  The daughter of the ship’s owner, who is sequestered on a Carribean island under a mysterious quarantine of sorts, and a reporter she meets on board the ship decide to hunt down her father and find out just what gives.  What gives is a zombie plague, for which he is trying to find a cure, shooting the living dead in the head and burying them when it fails.

The film’s gore is very effective.  There are numerous notable shots of eye gouges, flesh-ripping, and oozing worms, plenty for any horror fan with that particular prediliction.  It’s a classic for a reason.  It’s good, gooey, gory stuff and what else can you ask for from a zombie movie?  A breath of fresh (or musty, decaying) air in comparison with any current trends in the genre.

Filed under DVD, Italy, Zombies

Dead Alive

June 3, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Dead Alive (1992) movie poster

(1992) dir. Peter Jackson
viewed: 06/02/10

From New Zealand, with blood.  And gore.  By the truckfull.

I recall when Dead Alive hit San Francisco in the early 1990′s.   It was a popular cult gore-fest comedy, cut as I felt at the time from the cloth of Evil Dead II (1987), Sam Raimi’s comic horror masterpiece.  And though writer/director Peter Jackson already had a couple of other comic horror films to his name, Bad Taste (1987) and Meet the Feebles (1989), it was pretty much his breakout success.  Still, it was several steps away from his eventual Lord of the Rings film series that capped with his winning an Academy Award for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) and snagging a surprise best picture.

I’d been long thinking of revisiting Dead Alive, having it in my Netflix queue for some years now.  I remembered liking it, though not thinking it up to Raimi’s measure, and also remembering all the quirky New Zealandness about it.  But it’s been this recent venture into digital cable and the On Demand model of movie watching that has given room for me to open a new window in the possibilities of catching films on television.  In this case, the film was presented by the site/channel Fear.net, so it was “free” and featured only one advertisement and an annoying “watermark” logo of the brand in the lower right-hand corner.  These things might not turn off  your average viewer, but I like to watch films as unencumbered as possible.

Actually, I found the Wellington, New Zealand setting quite interesting this time around and found myself wondering specifically why the film was set not in the film’s contemporary setting of the early 1990′s but rather in the late 1950′s.  And I’m still a little unsure what the reasoning was, but no matter.

The film is full of broad comedy, filled with many looming goofy close-up shots that resemble fisheye lens views, but really reek a bit more of 1980′s music video style.   And the comedy aspect, at least in the film’s first part before it becomes the gore-fest extroirdinaire, is cute and clumsy and not always so well executed.  It’s a low budget affair, of course, with likeable actors if not utterly comically deft ones.  And the broadness of the comedy is high slapstick, which clunks along quite as often as it succeeds.

Where the film hits its stride is in its over-the-top of over-the-topness in the gore factor toward the end.  The moments of gruesome gross-out effects and gags leap far beyond itself or almost anything else I can think of, and the last 1/2 hour or so is just non-stop inventive geysers of blood and ooze, decapitations, disembowelments, shreddings and pureeing of zombies.  It makes its mark.

The story is that a “rat monkey” captured from a Sumatran island is brought to the Wellington Zoo where it bites a lady and infects her with a zombie disease, which starts with gruesome putrefecation and comic grotesqueries ad nauseum as she goes on to infect more and more people.  The woman’s doting son tries to keep a lid on all this, sedating his gruesome zombie mother with a huge syringe to her nostrils, as well as her other infectees, keeping, or trying to keep a naturalized familial setting with the rotting, pustule exploding, much-degraded creatures.

He has a Spanish girlfriend, who has become attracted to him through a Tarot reading.  Her Spanish background is another oddity of the story’s setting in time and place and specificity.  And he’s got an uncle who is not unlike a kiwi John Goodman, who gets a lot of comic action and gore thrown his way as well.

Dead Alive is a showcase of hilarious and imaginitive analog effects, with dumpsters-full of blood and gore, and comedy that gets funnier the more over-the-top and incessant that it becomes as the film works its way toward its climax.  While it lacks the pure genius of Evil Dead II, it earns its place among the cult films of its era and its ilk.

Filed under New Zealand, TV, Zombies

Dead Snow

February 27, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Dead Snow (2009) movie poster

(2009) dir. Tommy Wirkola
viewed: 02/26/10

When you’ve seen one Norwegian Nazi zombie movie, you’ve seen ‘em all.

That said, it’s not all that often these come along.

Dead Snow, I think I just summarized it reasonably well for you, is your typical horror genre film, a bunch of young people in an isolated cabin (in this case in the Norwegian mountains, which are quite beautiful), and the stirring of stolen Nazi gold, hidden away for decades, brings to life an army of zombie German soldiers leftover from WWII.  You know how that can happen.

The film is a pretty by-the-book affair despite the premise, but with a lot of fairly gory blood-letting and a few gruesome surprises.  Director Tommy Wirkola seems to have a particular penchant for intestines.  In fact, the film’s most novel point has one of the vacationing medical students hanging by some stretched-out intestine of a defeated Nazi zombie, dangling over a cliff while he battles another of the creatures.

Beyond that, there is something aesthetic about the Nazi zombies in their military regalia, stark against the snow.  Maybe aesthetic in some video game sort of way, something gruesome and absurd, yet titilating.

While there is obviously some subtext here, these hidden, lost Nazis, both historical and literal among the outlying reaches of clean and modern Scandanavia could carry some weight.  But in the end, that’s about all the subtext there is.  Only one of the campers has a 1/4 of Jewish blood somewhere and the film isn’t too bothered with Nazi evils other than greed pretty much.  Certainly, there’s that.  But in the end, they’re just nattily-clad zombies, who work together as a military group might, with the aim of dismembering the young and old alike.  Like I said, you know how that can happen.

Filed under DVD, Norway, Zombies

Zombieland

October 11, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Zombieland (2009) movie poster

(2009) dir. Ruben Fleischer
viewed: 10/09/09 at AMC Loews Metreon 16, SF, CA

I was up for a double feature of horror films, if not a triple feature (turned out “if not”), so after watching Paranormal Activity (2007), I turned into the next theater to watch Zombieland.  The funny thing about Zombieland (and there are a few funny things about it) is that it’s a total pastiche, a collision of genres, the latest post-modern mash-up of characteristics whose highest moments come even with a dearth of originality.

It’s a horror film (without the scares).  It’s a comedy (spoof? or just comedy).  It’s a teen romance.  It’s a road film.  It even features Bill Murray playing himself in a post-zombie world.

Actually, Bill Murray is the best part of the movie, as probably isn’t so surprising.  But Woody Harrelson is also quite good as the redneck zombie-killer extroirdinaire.  It also features Jesse Eisenberg, who I’d last seen in another film set in an amusement park, Adventureland (2009).  Zombieland / Adventureland, he’s pretty much the same hoodie-wearing, sweet-natured virgin, who doesn’t know his way around a girl.  Just here, he’s also got zombies to worry about.  A little tired of him already.

The style of the film features lots of “words on screen”, 3-dimensional encapsulations of Eisenberg’s character’s rules to live by, which also get whacked and dented as if they were part of the scenery.  It’s something not unlike a truck commercial or a Visa commercial in some ways.  And where the film has moments of style, perhaps best played out in the opening credits, featuring slow-slow-motion 3-dimensional feeling snippets of people running from zombies, it’s also quite banal most of the time.

As much as I wasn’t overly impressed with the film, I would be loathe to say that I didn’t enjoy it at all.  It’s relative fun.  And maybe hedging one’s bets on genre allows room to fiddle with stuff without overly committing to a set of genre requirements.

And what is kinda sad, the disease that triggers the zombification of the world is said to be some variation on mad cow disease.  It’s a very limp premise.  With all the things that could lead to the destruction of humanity, and all the ones that have been used as premises for zombie movies over time, this was is given seriously short shrift.  I guess they just needed to leave the room for all the fucking product placement: Mountain Dew Red, Twinkies, FedEx (demoed multiple times), and probably others that I was trying to blot out of my mind.

Product placement gives you a strike in my book.  Sorry.  It’s a further note of soullessness in corporate-produced “entertainment”.  We’re not the zombies.  Are we?

Filed under Theatrical, Zombies

[Rec]

August 5, 2009 by Leave a Comment

[Rec] (2007) movie poster

(2007) dir. Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza
viewed: 08/03/09

[Rec] is a Spanish horror film that was re-made into Quarantine (2008) almost verbatim.  Frankly, it’s pretty effective and direct, using a hand-held camera perspective for the entirety of the film, assuming a “caught on tape” effect, rather than an omniscient outside camera typical of cinema.  I’ve noted my mixed-to-negative feelings about this technique.  Like the re-make, which I saw earlier this year, [Rec] is actually a pretty effective implementation of it.

A camera crew following a team of firefighters for a light-weight news report on “life of firefighters” follows them on a call to an apartment building seeking to help a screaming, crazed old lady.  But the old lady is really infected with some super-rabies or something, and attacks and kills and infects everyone in the building.  And everyone in the building is “quarantined”, not allowed out, trapped with the increasingly murderous creatures without really knowing what is happening or why.

One of the things that I liked about Quarantine was that there was a limit of explanation, merely suggestions of what the cause is, at the very end, as the lights go out and the vision is limited to that wierd “night vision” lighting where everyone is murky, glowing green, and their eyes are lit like tiny bulbs.  In this case, there is a mixture of possession as well as infectuous disease, but ends with the key visual of the lead reporter, the primary protagonist (in this case the gorgeous Manuela Velasco who is kind of a blonder Marisa Tomei), as she is dragged suddenly away from the camera into the darkness.

The film uses the camera’s perspective well in many ways, managing to capture key images, the first vision of the bloodied, zombie old lady framed in the hall light, the plummeting of a body from the top of the stairs, and as noted, the final powerful visual (ironically utilized in the American re-make’s promotional material, trailers, and even movie poster — it’s the last image of the movie!  You’ve given it away!)  Directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza make the most of their story, their constraints, and ideas, though it is still limited in its scope and power.  It’s also a little hard to say because the re-make was so true to the original that the surprises and images were all familiar this time around.

I do think it’s interesting that the Spanish original’s title “[Rec]” focuses on the “record” image or button on the videocamera, whereas the American re-make focused on the “Quarantine” aspect of the story.  I am sure that it was a more marketable and comprehensible choice, but it does draw focus to a different aspect of the story.

I see that their success has beget a sequel this year.  Gotta wonder about that.  Not usually the best idea, but a sign of the success of the original.  I guess that we shall see.  And by “we”, I mean “me”.

Filed under DVD, faux found footage, Spain, Zombies

Quarantine

March 13, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Quarantine (2008) movie poster

(2008) dir. John Erick Dowdle
viewed: 03/13/09

An unfortunate member of the hand-held camera perspective in which the camera is held by a character in the film (thus the entire film is assumed to have been shot on a camera “at the scene” rather than some omnisicent “regular” camera view), Quarantine is a re-make of a Spanish film [REC] (2007), a film that hasn’t yet been made available in the States on DVD.  That rather convoluted intro is to say that this film uses a trop of camera-work that was tired from its earliest usages and not something that has actually seen itself get furthered in value from its overusage.

Take a look (or don’t) at Diary of the Dead (2007), Cloverfield (2007), The Blair Witch Project (1999) and even Cannibal Holocaust (1980), just to say that the camera in the hands of the crew subgenre of “style” has been around.  And with the YouTube world, the cameraphone world, that this is probably going to continue to be a fairly pervasive methodology of shooting horror films.

Conceptually, it’s okay.  It’s supposed to put you in the moment, the place.  The limitation of perspective doesn’t allow one to know more than any one other character knows about what is happening.  When used well, it can be successful, immediate.  But it’s also a little too easy, suggesting self-referential motifs, but also not building genunine drama or intensity.  Forcing the story through an existing lens is also limiting: how often does a camera in one’s hands hold still long enough for the unfolding of dramatic sequence?

Oddly enough, Quarantine seems to manage to rise above this, to rise above its other simple genre tropes than a lot of other films do.  It’s an uber-rabies, zombie infection film, another subgenre of horror that has been growing of late.  Though it’s existed since the 1970′s (maybe earlier), since the 28 Days Later… (2002) film, has become the new level of horror film with zombies.  It’s a mixture of zombies, madness, viciousness.  While at first it was somewhat shocking, it’s also become its own cheap trope.

Anyways, Quarantine is neither the best nor worst of these films.  Does it make it worth seeing?  Probably I would rack that up to your own predilictions.  For me, I’m willing to sit through a few of these films, for some, it might be pure thrills and scares, and others, the last way they would want to spend 90 minutes.

Filed under DVD, faux found footage, Zombies

Hell’s Ground

November 23, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Hell's Ground (2007) movie poster

(2007) dir. Omar Khan
viewed: 11/21/08

When I read the phrase “Pakistani zombie movie” in a local paper, I was intrigued, excited.  I guess that tells you something about me.  There is World Cinema and then there is world cinema.  And I like them both.  And most everything in between.

Hell’s Ground is an anomoly.  Considered to be Pakistan’s “first gore film”, it is a low budget affair, shot with local folks, but very much in the vein of American or Western gore and horror films, very much with them in mind, a truly unique thing in Pakistani culture.  The film was produced and directed by Omar Khan, who had bankrolled the affair via a chain of Pakistani ice cream stores, or so it is said.

To be true, it’s not a total zombie movie.  There are zombies, even midget zombies, but the major plot point centers around a truly Pakistani version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), perhaps the “Pakistani Mace Massacre”?  As the major masked villain wears a woman’s burka and swings a medieval mace around as his weapon of choice.

The film is low budget, as I said, derivative for sure, but true to its homage, it offers up blood and gore with the standard approach of young good-looking people in a place they shouldn’t have ventured into.  And there is even the “virginal” heroine (though there is a pronounced lack of sex anyways) and the stereotypes that represent contemporary Pakistani culture.  It truly is an artifact of its origin, and it’s merits are steeped deeply in its localization.

The cast is not bad, certainly attractive and mostly engaging.  The homage work gets a tad heavy-handed, but is notable for a nod to a Pakistani Dracula film from the early 1960′s, which is apparently also highly anomolous.  If the film was made in bumfuck USA, it would likely be a lot less interesting.  The fisheye lens, the low budget mist, the obviousness of a lot of it are certainly tired.  But for what it is, it is kind of interesting.

I would be interested to know what a regular young person in Pakistan thought of the film, or even thought of the existence of the film.  It was allowed past censors who have stimied much of what might have been “indie” cinema anywhere else.  And where Khan adheres to the religious mores in a sense, of the culture, the perspective is Islamic, though certainly on the more “modern” side…it works.  Because the religious undertones of the American splatter films are steeped in our own cultural critiques of sexuality and violence, which are not much different.

There is some ecological critique, which lends itself to the zombie manifestation, perhaps the most political angle the film takes, though that is not very acute.

Still, the film is something unusual.  Something different.  Perhaps only by degrees, but by enough of degrees to give it character and an honesty of its vision.  It’s the stuff of blood-and-guts, the “video nasties”, but it’s nice to see it deeply embedded in a world a significant distance from our own.

Filed under DVD, Pakistan, Zombies

← Older posts