SUMMER OF BLOOD: 21st CENTURY HORROR - THE DAMMED

If I were to tell you that a movie called Zombeavers is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable experiences I've had with a 2015 movie (it's been kicking around since the first half of 2014, but its commercial release was slow in coming), and you were to call me a piece of shit, no good fucking liar, could I be offended? Of course not. What sort of outright psychopath would expect a movie called Zombeavers - and for exactly the reason you suppose it is called Zombeavers, which is that it has beaver zombies in it - to be even slightly close to tolerable? Let alone the funniest horror-comedy since at the very least The Cabin in the Woods, and I'd be privately inclined to set the line farther back than that.

The friend with whom I first saw it - both of us falling head-over-heels in love after expecting not a damn thing from it* - came up with a perfectly pithy one-sentence review, and there's nothing he can do to keep my from stealing it: it's the version of ThanksKilling that's terrific instead of bone-scrapingly awful. It's mostly the same ingredients: uniformly reprehensible characters who speak entirely in filthy jokes that are forcefully dirty more than clever in any meaningful way, deaths presented in a fully comic register, and killer animals that do not pretend for even one instant to be anything but hand-crafted puppets. It simply works better this time, possibly because this film is ultimately sweeter-natured; it's more upbeat, the insults more bubbly and less caustic. And it's considerably less vile in its attitude towards women, who are still objectified to a fair degree (there's an entire scene whose narrative is "girl takes off her bikini top and makes other girls feel awkward by parading about showily"), but who are presented as the authors of their own sexuality beyond what cheap-as-hell horror movies typically traffic in.

Mostly, I am tempted to say, it has better puppets: I badly want the filmmakers to authorise the production of zombeaver plushies, because I would buy one right now. They are the cutest little ugly fuckers. But in fairness, I was already on the film's side before we saw them for the first time, at the 27 minute mark of a relentlessly paced 77-minute feature.

The film's set-up could not be more generic: three college students are driving to a cabin in the woods. These are sorority sisters Jenn (Lexi Atkins), who has just been cheated on; Mary (Rachel Melvin), who has decided that this means it's time for some supportive girl time; and Zoe (Cortney Palm), who isn't trying to contain her irritation that Mary has issued a blanket "no boys and no phones" rule for the weekend. They banter in a raucous, scatological way, etching out a strong, clear-cut dynamic, even if it's also frankly a little bit like what three male screenwriters - Al Kaplan, Jon Kaplan, and Jordan Rubin, the last of whom is also the film's director - would come up with if they knew that they wanted to subvert stereotypes but also had never been around women talking. Still, it takes only a few minutes to get a crisp, strong understanding of each of these characters, and respond to them as individual personalities, which is not at all something you just get every time a genre movie crosses your path. And while their line are crude, there's some actual humor to them as well, particularly because they're tied to character: Zoe makes jokes that Mary would not, and within five minutes of meeting the trio, we understand why that is.

And the other part of the set-up is, if anything, even more generic: a pair of truck drivers hit a deer, and in the process manage to lose a barrel of toxic sludge that ends up getting in the water supply. Cue the zombies. The twist being that the truckers (played by comedian Bill Burr and snoozy rocker John Mayer) are having a filthy conversation of their own, but one that occurs in a zen-like state of stoner's consideration, profoundly anti-funny in its abiding fascination with homoeroticism and the way that both men deliver every line to sound like a non-sequitur, even when it actually follows. And then they plow into a deer, killing it in an inordinately violent way. It's a bold first scene, at any rate, so deep into irony that one can see nothing else. I love it a little bit; it's aggressively absurdist and pointedly alien.

The film, obviously, concerns of holding the zombeavers back just long enough to shake the bottle with the young women in it until it gets good and fizzy - this includes Zoe sneakily arranging for her boyfriend, Buck (Peter Gilroy) to show up, along with Mary's boyfriend Tommy (Jake Weary), and Jenn's notorious ex, Sam (Hutch Dano), and our learning what everybody but Jenn already knew, which is that seemingly kind and pure Mary was the faceless brunette seen making out with Sam in the photo that broke Jenn's heart. And then it goes straight to the usual Night of the Living Dead territory: everybody reacts to the first zombeaver in ways that would be sensible if only they weren't in a horror movie, and then tries too late to secure the cabin their in, by which point it all comes down to waiting to see what errors they'll make to let the monsters get them. Along the way, the leering, puritanical local hunter Smyth (Rex Linn) arrives to provide some false hope, as do the nice old neighbors down the way, with some pretty crude mouths of their own, the Gregorsons (Phyllis Katz and Brent Briscoe).

We're miles away from a movie that's going to work based on the density of its plot, but then you knew that the moment I said Zombeavers. The movie goes all-in on one thing and one thing only, which is a vigorously warped sense of humor. A very precise kind of humor, too: it's not exactly a Sharknado-style exercise in "can you guys believe how willfully bad and stupid and silly this is? Isn't it fun?", a mode that I find enormously enervating. But I'd be hard-pressed to explain exactly what thing Zombeavers does that keeps it out of those particular weeds. Certainly, it is stupid; certainly, it is inordinately proud of the fact that it does all of the reprehensible and trite and illogical things that make lousy monster movies lousy. It just... feels different. The difference between a movie that is funny (or supposedly funny) because it is bad at being horror, and a movie that is funny because it's good at being comedy. It never winks at us, or tries to get away with doing stupid shit by saying "look at the stupid shit!", but treats the zombeavers, within the world of the film, with perfect gravity, even as outside of the world of the film they're pure farce. Comedy is best when the characters don't realise they're in a comedy, after all.

It's a one-note comedy, fair; maybe two, with note one being "zombeavers are too ridiculous to take seriously" and note two being "these characters are deeply committed to being profoundly awful and whipping up some zesty dialogue to prove it". 77 minutes is already a generous running time for something with so few tonal registers - smutty dialogue, manic running about and yelling in a way that Rubin doesn't even slightly care about making scary, random absurdity - and at an absolute minimum, the film could do without the outtakes that are not part of the ending credits. Those are instead set to a jazzy Sinatra-style number recapping the plot of the film we just saw, which is infinitely more fun in comparison. And better still is the post-credits stinger that's a terrible visual pun of the first order, and thus a work of art that needs to be appreciated by every person with a heart.

The repetitive nature of the humor is probably the single thing that most keeps Zombeavers from realising its full potential as a bawdy comedy masquerading as a repulsively gory horror film. Not that everybody would be in the market for the absolute best possible version of that movie, though I know that I am not alone in finding even the imperfect Zombeavers to be exactly the right thing for a specific kind of moment. It's a movie that holds nothing back and pushes itself with such energy that even someone as resistant to this brand of crude comedy as myself can't help but roll over for it.

Body Count: 9, plus a very messy deer, one dog (seen), one dog (implied), and one bear.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR GETS MEAN - THEY'RE DEAD, THEY'RE ALL MESSED UP

As an inveterate lover of making grand historical movements out of molehills, it pleases me to know end that it's possible to pinpoint the exact year that American genre films switched from the classical to the modern age: 1968. In that year, both science fiction and horror made an immense, revolutionary leap forward, with a pair each of movies that made it simply impossible to take seriously the genre as it had developed to that point. Science fiction witnessed the radical visual effects and thematic density of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as the philosophically serious treatment of seemingly frivolous subject matter in Planet of the Apes (which for good measure also boasts one of cinema's all-time most audacious original musical scores). Horror, which we're here to discuss now, had the very grown up, emotionally and psychologically grounded urban realism of Rosemary's Baby, which we'll be looking at elsewhere. Right now, we're just here to talk about neophyte director George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, co-written with John A. Russo, the movie that pioneered the most stomach-churning decency-violating taboo-busting violence that English-speaking filmgoers had ever seen. And if there exists, prior to 1968, any film in all the world with anything like the pure visceral grotesqueness of NotLD, I have absolutely not seen nor heard of it.

The film did not, to be clear, invent the notion of harder-than-usual violence as a selling point. As long as Britain's Hammer Film had been in existence, one of its biggest calling cards was a level of gruesome content beyond anything the quivering Yanks were likely to produce, and five years before Romero and company hit the scene, Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast was sold on the promise of literally nothing but the bloodiness of its death scenes, and is usually cited as the first movie to so centrally fixate on depicting gore. But Night of the Living Dead is in a different league from those: indeed, the new wave of violent horror that it kicked off served in no small part to kill of Hammer, which went from looking like the nastiest, savviest stuff you could ever scrounge up to being utterly square and safe almost in the blink of an eye. NotLD had the good fortune to come out in the exact year that the old Production Code was scrapped in favor of the vastly more permissive MPAA ratings system, which explains most of it, honestly. Some film was going to fill this spot in the movie ecosystem.

But NotLD isn't just "some" film. Romero didn't merely use his new freedom to shock with unimagined levels of blood and call that a good day's work, as Lewis undoubtedly would have in the same position. As would quickly become his wont, the director was hellbent on using his movie to carve open the guts of American culture, using violence and even the horror genre itself as a tool rather than an end. That's by far the most upsetting, vicious element of the film, even if its initial reception was hung up (fairly) on its explicitness. Decades later, the most violent moment in the whole movie, an orgy of cannibalism in which the innards of two victims burning to death in a truck are paraded around by a small army of zombies, looks modest and quaint, the kind of thing that would pass uncut on a basic cable network. It might actually be the least effective part of the movie to modern eyes, for while we've lapped the effects work several times over, virtually everything else about it remains not just fresh and mostly untouched by copycats, but in some ways acutely dangerous. This is a movie that knows what the rules are, and it breaks every one it can; it has an astonishing capacity, otherwise unknown to me in horror of this age, to seriously fuck with your head.

Should it be the case that you do not know the plot of this most iconic and necessary of horror milestones, let me give you the rundown: siblings Barbra (Judith O'Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) have driven hours into the Pennsylvania countryside to leave a cross of flowers on their father's grave at their bedridden mother's request. Enjoying the chance to taunt his easily-spooked sister, Johnny points to an oddly shuffling man (Bill Hinzmen) and jokingly suggests that he's coming to kill them. The joke's on Johnny: that's exactly what the man is up to, and Johnny ends up with a broken neck while Barbra flees to a farmhouse some ways distant. Her explorations lead her to a gruesomely stripped corpse, and she effectively blacks out from that point forward, but the movie is taken over by several other survivors. First comes Ben (Duane Jones), hoping to find gasoline for his truck, who secures the building from the suddenly numerous armies of unspeaking violent humans; and then it turns out that five others have already taken refuge in the cellar: young couple Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judity Ridley), and the Cooper family, blowhard Harry (Karl Hardman), his plainly resentful wife Helen (Marilyn Eastman), and their badly sick daughter Karen (Kyra Schon). The seven prepare to dig in and try to survive the night, but a power struggle almost immediately begins between Ben, who wants to stay upstairs and defend the home, and Harry, who wants to bar everyone in the cellar and hope that the authorities come along soon. Of course, the authorities are a bit busy right now: as the characters learn when they turn on the TV and radio, the eastern third of the United States has been overrun by a plague of recently-deceased bodies reviving as man-eating ghouls, and other than some vague notion about space radiation, nobody has a clue why.

The key element of Romero's ...of the Dead films (there have been six) is already fully-formed in this first outing: when presented with a stressful and deadly situation that can be fairly easily survived through clear thinking and cooperation, human beings will much prefer to fall into in-fighting and mutual distrust, and thereby fall prey to an enemy that, rationally, doesn't have much going for it. The reanimated corpses are slow, clumsy, and despite some rudimentary ability to use tools and solve basic problems, not apparently very bright. The reason for the deaths that occur in that farmhouse are, each and every one, because Ben and Harry can't compromise.

As is the most spectacularly unoriginal observation I could possibly make, Night of the Living Dead serves as a parable of 1960s America, on at least two fronts. The one that smacks you alongside the head and then asks why your face has a handprint on it is the perilous state of race relations in the winding down days of the civil rights movement: Duane Jones was the first African-American protagonist of a horror movie in the States. Romero has consistently, to my knowledge, denied that he did this on purpose, and he only cast Jones because he was the best actor to audition for the part. Which is plausible on the grounds that Jones is far and away the best actor in the completed movie. But it is beyond plausibility that a filmmaker casting a role in 1967 in the United States would put an African-American actor in a leading role - especially this leading role - and have not a single thought cross his mind that there might potentially be some kind of socio-political reading applied to it. The film never blinks on it, mind you: while the driving force of the whole deal is the increasingly enraged hatred Harry feels towards Ben, there's not one line of dialogue nor even the slightest gesture in Hardman's performance that suggests racism is behind any of it. Still, symbolism will elbow its way in no matter what, and the sight of a schlubby, slumped-over, sweaty white guy spitting invective and bristling as a black guy tells him what to do absolutely suggests certain things in a 1968 context (and, I am very sorry to say, in a 2015 context) that are impossible to overlook. Much as the film's punishingly bleak final moments don't inherently rely on race for the narrative to make perfect sense, but SPOILERS IF YOU ACTUALLY DON'T KNOW HOW THIS ENDS roving gangs of white cops shooting at barely-seen minorities without stopping to wonder if they deserve to be murdered or not can't avoid connoting things that are angry and ugly about the way society works (and, I am outrageously sorry to say, possibly more so in 2015 than in 1968).

But the bigger thing that's going on, undoubtedly, is that this story about people ending up in an unsolvable situation and dying for no good reason, but doing an awesome job of blaming each other for their predicament is a curdled, cynical parable for the Vietnam era. As a billion people have already pointed out before me, NotLD paints a profoundly hopeless picture of smart people getting out of quagmires for one particular reason, and it not only gives the film more thematic heft, it works tremendously well to its benefit as a horror movie. Simply put, everything we know about storytelling, and everything we know about unpacking visuals in narrative cinema, tells us that Ben is the hero and he knows what to do, and Harry is a selfish, cowardly asshole whose bullying attitude puts him securely in the wrong. Jones's performance is steady and full of varied, vibrant emotions (the determined way he recites his backstory is beautiful, making it clear that he's trying to put an upbeat vibe into the room or at least distract himself), while Hardman spouts lines in a petulant whine; Hardman is lit and framed to look like a bipedal tower of flop sweat. And yet Ben's plan kills everybody. Follow the rules, be sensible, and use calm logic, the film indicates, and you're just going to make everything worse. As a viewer watching a genre film, that callous violation of the basic contract we make with every movie is acutely upsetting, a daring perversity that almost a half century later has only rarely been matched; as a commentary on the nature of humanity, it is pessimistic unto nihilism, but don't look to me for the argument that it doesn't fit the facts of the world of '67 and'68 pretty neatly.

Strictly as a movie, and not as a cutting political statement, NotLD makes quite a nasty habit of breaking trust with our expectations, and if that leads to some moments which are hard to take here in the 2010s, I can't even guess what it must have been like to experience them in '68. The film lets us know right away that it plans to insult conventional decency: the very first thing we encounter is Johnny bitching about having to decorate a grave, a pointless act of empty symbolism. It's a moment that echoes on the far side of a film with a TV talking head mercilessly declaring that the time for romanticising death is over: if a loved one dies, you had damned well better desecrate their corpse on the spot and make absolutely certain they don't come back to eat you, and bullshit funerary customs are now an unavailable luxury. And there's the other echo, in a moment that has lost not an ounce of its power to devastate, when the most essential family tie of mother and child is corrupted and perverted in a scene that should be ridiculously over-emphasised, with sound editing that goes so far overboard in exaggerating the horror of the moment that it's dissociative with anything happening onscreen. And yet no matter what mood I'm in or how many times I see the movie, that's the scene where it feels like Romero and Russo are playing with actual fire, and I'm seeing something so cruelly transgressive that it flattens me every single time.

Even in its more conventional aspects - and there are not many of those - the film is a superlative piece of construction. The hook is simplicity itself: pare away the new conception of the mindless undead as a biological plague (a notion Romero confesses to having lifted intact from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend) and cannibal holocaust, and this is a straightforward "stressed out cast trapped in small location tries to survive through the night" chamber piece. Though fairness requires me to admit that it's a story model that didn't really exist before this, not in such a purified state. But withing that limited framework, Romero and crew do a fantastic job of manipulating tension in the simplest ways. The more that we're meant to be frazzled and unnerved, the more acute the angle of the camera, either on its side or tilting up and down; and while this is going on, the compositions become tighter and more cluttered. It's inelegant, but it's not really trying to be anything else. And while the use of stock music is to be bemoaned as the necessary evil of a bargain-basement production (the only sign of it, in fact; this is a master class in making a hell of a lot from good implication, repressive camera angles, and a whole lot of game extras working for a couple of nights), the use of music, if not always the specific notes melodies at every moment, is nicely timed to throw us back and forth like a rag doll.

The film is a superlative machine for making you feel ragged, terrified, and bewildered by the essential hopelessness of the universe, but it does ultimately have a distinct mechanical feel in a lot of ways, I admit this. A huge reason for this is that out of seven characters, only Ben and Harry are in any way interesting (Romero's screenplay for the 1990 remake attempted to make Barbra a stronger character than the shell-shocked babbler she is here, which is at least one thing to appreciate about that film), and Jones gives the only performance of any real meat - which isn't a flaw necessarily, Hardman being one-night and inorganic contributes to our inability to connect with Harry and the film gets a lot of mileage from that. Still, an engaging story of humans it ain't, even though it's quite the fable of humankind.

There are also inevitable shortcomings that come with the minute scale of the shoot: small but distinct continuity errors (the newscast, for example, shows an interview in broad daylight that, by the film's internal continuity, had to have taken place after dark), takes that feel like the actor lost focus for a second and found it again, some obvious Foley work. But whatever Night of the Living Dead gets somewhat wrong is negligible in the face of how much it gets right: inventing a new kind of horror movie and a new kind of monster - though Romero never uses the word "zombie" and probably wasn't even in those terms, the film's success buried the old White Zombie-style zombie picture beyond recovery, and even a transitional effort like the 1966 Hammer production The Plague of the Zombies looks woefully old-fashioned in comparison. It is a bleak movie to usher in a bleak decade, cinema's all-time most embittered period in horror and mainstream cinema alike; it is one of the handful of truly transformational individual films in the medium's history, and a gripping, intense viewing experience on top of it. This is as vital of a viewing experience as horror offers.

Body Count: 8, defined solely as those characters that we see alive in the traditional sense who are later killed and/or turned.

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GANGSTERS VS. ZOMBIES

A review requested by Eric "Sssonic" Mason, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

There is a certain kind of film that has existed ever since the first generation of film school students began to direct features, and which came to its fullest prominence beginning in the 1990s, in which a fanboy gets to put all the other movies into his movie. They can be amazingly good, and they can be amazingly terrible, or anything in between, and in the form of Versus, I believe I have been shown the purest version of the genre that I have ever seen. The 2000 film is the third project completed by director Kitamura Ryuhei, following a pair of featurelets clocking in under an hour apiece, and the 30-year-old has claimed that he feared, at the time, that he wouldn't have a chance to ever make another, so he wanted to make sure that every fucking idea he could come up with made it into the final movie (his fears were unfounded: in part because of this very film's admiring cult, he'd get a crack at directing no less a holy grail than Godzilla: Final Wars, the designated Last Godzilla Picture for a good long while. In my opinion, he made a bit of a hash of it, but that's neither here nor there). Which is why in Versus, we have history's first and probably last horror-comedy that sets a lone samurai and, a millennium later, a squad of Yakuza hitmen fighting zombies in a haunted forest, in action setpieces that owe various debts to '70s Hong Kong kung fu movies, '90s American neo-gangster pictures and Peter Jackson-style gross-out action for grossness's sake. And then it ends with a sci-fi interlude, because why not.

There are an infinite number of ways to make this all not work, but only two I can think of to make it actually work. One is to be a genius of mixing comedy, thrills, gore, and action with the fluidity and clarity of purpose of a Sam Raimi, or a... anyway, Sam Raimi could have done it. The other is to be a full-on magpie darting at shiny things without hesitation, so deeply investing into every individual scene and every individual shot, believing in it so absolutely, that every moment of the film lands successfully enough that the audience will be swept up with the filmmaker's own enthusiasm, and not pay so much attention to whether the film steps along a nice A->B->C pattern, or if it's just a string of exclamation points. Kitamura, sad to say, is not Sam Raimi. But he's a hell of a good magpie.

A plot synopsis is almost beyond reason - "Yakuzas, haunted woods, zombies, zombie Yakuzas" is really all you need to know - but in the 444th of 666 portals to Hell, the Forest of Resurrection, a pair of prisoners have escaped: one is known only by his ID number, KSC2-303 (Sakaguchi Tak), the other not even treated with that level of intimacy (he's played by Komiya Motonari). He doesn't matter much at all; KSC2-303 does, though, since he's in a position to spot a girl (Misaka Chieko) who has been kidnapped by the Yakuza and rescue her. At which point the exact plot starts to get a little confusing for me to parse, but a high-level Yakuza (Sakaki Hideo) comes along to crack some skulls, simultaneously with the multitudes of dead bodies hidden in the woods rising up to give the rest of the gangsters hell. He has darker secrets than could ever be guessed, and they connect him to KSC2-303 and the girl, and those samurai a thousand years ago, and potent demonic force of the whole forest. And it takes an enormous amount of bloody fighting to stop him from tapping into the power of Hell itself.

I didn't realise until writing all that out what it is, exactly, that appealed to me about Versus despite its wanton embrace of action that piles up on top of itself to the point of absolute incoherence: it's a Japanese version of one of Lucio Fulci's "gate to Hell" movies. The armies of zombies, the mythology that erupts into the film at at totally arbitrary point in the plot, the way that scenes are far more interested in how to make a visceral impact in and of themselves rather than how they add to the overall development of the plot; that's all pure Italian genre goodness. The particularly Japanese twist comes in the way that it's all treated with joyous goofiness: even when it's not actually stopping to make jokes (something that doesn't happen all that frequently), Versus is absolutely wacky, so overblown in its plotting and excited to show off those gore effects that it can afford - this movie adores that old "blast a hole through a zombie, then point the camera back at the shooter through the dripping wet hole" gag - that there's never much of a risk of taking it too seriously. Certainly not as horror, though it has a few good shocking moments, and the Forest of Resurrection (a well-chosen spot that offers maximum atmosphere for minimal production design and budget) can be satisfyingly creepy in the way of all sufficiently dense forests.

It is, pretty transparently, an excuse to show off, and what he lacks in finesse, Kitamura makes up for in pure showmanship. He's aided considerably by editor Kakesu Shuichi, who keeps the images flowing quickly, and composer Morino Nobuhiko, who whips the tone around from adventure to action to thriller to pensive character piece, even. Among other talented indie sorts, all diving into the visibly low-key production with the best kind of "hey! let's make a MOVIE!" gusto.

What it amounts to is a film that shows its seams rather openly, but expresses such glee in how creatively it assembles all of its ingredients into a series of demented fights that it tends to make us co-conspirators rather than an audience to be persuaded of the film's authenticity. The film is a live-action cartoon, motivated by whatever Kitamura thinks is extremely cool at a given moment, and directed with such fearless commitment to that ideal of cool that it ends up sweeping us along with it, even when our idea of cool doesn't align with the filmmakers. It's not remotely flawless, even discounting its admittedly amateurish production value. It's absolutely too long - and the uncut version of the original I watched isn't even the longest extant cut (in 2004, Kitamura revisted the film to add CGI and re-work the color timing, but that seemed like an inappropriate way to see it for the first time, to my way of thnking) - and there are places where the momentum and mania simply get tiring. And, I mean, it's pretty hard not to disagree with the more serious kind of person who would simply write all of this off as totally stupid. It is stupid. But it doesn't care not to be, and it's energetic enough to be a real gas even so.

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: GO GOA GONE (KRISHNA D.K. & RAJ NIDIMORU, INDIA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/16 & 10/18
World premiere: 10 May, 2013, India

You tell me if this sounds appealing or hopelessly stupid: modern stoner comedy classic Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle meets infamously terrible video game adaptation House of the Dead. I can't actually say what it sounds like to me at this point, but having seen Go Goa Gone, I can tell you that it is fucking wonderful, the best zombie comedy since Shaun of the Dead, in which a pair of excellent well-drawn stoner roommates go to a rave on a remote island where everybody who takes a designer drug turns into a raging cannibalistic corpse, blocking the way back to the only boat anywhere near the island.

In fact, I might go so far as to say that Go Goa Gone is the movie that "fixes" House of the Dead, as their plots are similar in so many ways, and I think there's even a lesson to be learned here: it is possible to take zombie films too seriously. Hopefully this doesn't strike anyone as a life-changing insight, but it's actually quite striking how much more tolerable and downright playful some of the stupidest developments a story can be forced through can be when they're being treated with an insouciant touch by the filmmakers, and foisted upon character far too deliberately comic to permit and kind of serious story to be told about them. It's not that our druggie friends Hardik (Kunal Khemu) and Luv (Vir Das) don't take the thought of being devoured by zombies seriously, because they plainly do. But we do not take them seriously, and so it's easier to laugh at their plight, and find the whole thing a giddy blast of shallow fun. Do this by accident and through incompetence, and you are Uwe Boll. Do this on purpose, because you are ultimately only making a hang-out movie, and you are Krishna D.K. and Raj Nidimoru (credited as DK & Raj), and your movie is one of the best midnight films in search of an appreciative cult audience that I have seen in many a day.

It's painfully simple: Hardik and Luv are looking to goof off (Hardik got fired for having sex at work, Luv just got dumped in an especially humiliating way), and get wind of the rave in the state of Goa on the western coast of India. Finding out that their all-business roommate Bunny (Anand Tiwari) has business in Goa, they convince him to let them ride along, and in hardly any time all of them are at the party, having nothing resembling enough money to try the new, brightly colored, and glowing party drug that the rave is meant to promote. The next day, zombies everywhere: while trying to escape, the three stumble across Luna (Puja Gupta), a girl who survived the horror of the night before only because Luv was annoying her and she ducked out, and Boris (Saif Ali Khan), a Delhi native who joined the Russian mafia and now fancies himself Russian, who was associated with the group that produced the fatal drug. He and his silent full-blooded Russian friend are also the only people left alive on the island who can operate a gun at all, and thus become the most welcome members of the band of ragged survivors, even if Boris is also, in his very consciously bad-ass behavior and his gloriously old-school Cold War villain accent, the damn silliest character in the movie by a mile.

The film is pretty idiotic in every way, but it's saved - made goddamn straight-up brilliant, I dare say - by the completely effortless chemistry between Khemu and Das, who evoke in every beat that they share the complimentary rhythms of two completely shallow and disreputable straight male friends who are the dearest soulmates that either will ever know. Much of what goes on in the movie is of the lowest-brow sort; the characters keep it feeling sweet and joyfully humane and worth watching, because even if there's not a single moment when we don't feel distinctly better than the two of them, there's never any mockery or superiority present in the film, which contentedly presents them as a pair of guys who have a lot to learn and will learn it eventually. Some of it even on this trip, though the sermonising is kept to a bare-bones minimum.

The other thing that keeps the movie buzzing along is DK & Raj's comic-book directing style, involving wacky onscreen graphics (three of which separate the film into chapters based on each word of its title - rather cleverly, I might add) and lots of bright colors - screamingly azure swimming pools, cherry-red blood, and so on. It's glitzy pop-art with zombies and potheads, shallow fun but extravagantly exhilarating fun, and that's surely the part that matters more: as horror comedies go, there's barely enough horror to fill a thimble, but when the comedy manages to be this good-natured and this ditsily funny, that's worth sacrificing a bit of menace from your zombies.

Bonus! Owing to an ad campaign that ran afoul of India's smoking laws, the film (at least its CIFF print) has a delightfully weird anti-smoking PSA glued to the front of it, and onscreen captions reminding the viewer not to smoke any time that tobacco, marijuana, or any other substance that can be burned and inhaled is enjoyed onscreen. So on top of everything else, the film has the bizarre gloss of being the strangest anti-drug message movie I've ever seen.

8/10

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YOU'VE GOT RED ON YOU

If only by a small margin, Hot Fuzz probably has the stronger reputation; The World's End is more sophisticated in all sorts of storytelling and filmmaking ways. But from where I stand, the very first feature made by director Edgar Wright, with stars Simon Pegg (who co-wrote with Wright) and Nick Frost, after the three of them moved on from their brilliant sitcom Spaced, is absolutely the best. Shaun of the Dead isn't merely the pinnacle of Wright and Pegg's series of homages to and parodies of somewhat idiotic fanboy genres, it is quite possibly the funniest and most creative comedies of the 2000s, with enough of a pointed study of character that it's more than just a collection of some of the best and most ridiculous jokes in a generation. Though, it that was all, I suspect I'd still have very nearly the same opinion. Funny trumps a hell of a lot, after all, and Shaun of the Dead doesn't ease up on the funny for even a minute.

The film sold itself as "A romantic comedy. With zombies", which is just about right, and puts them in the correct order. For this is not primarily the story of an everyman squaring off against the cannibalistic hordes of the undead, it's about an everyman trying to grow up fast enough to win back his girlfriend, and the cannibalistic hordes &c are the means by which he is able to do so (much in the same way that the nine-years later World's End isn't about an alien invasion, but about how that invasion is a catalyst for adult men to revisit who they were as teenagers; though The World's End is a great deal more forward about it). The protagonist, Shaun (Pegg), is a twentysomething Londoner who could be described, neither maliciously nor inaccurately, as a fuckup: he's got a dead-end job selling electronics, his best friend is a self-absorbed part-time drug-dealer and manchild named Ed (Frost), and in the film's opening moments, he's dumped by his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) after forgetting their anniversary, in what is presented very clearly as less an impulse of "I'm so pissed at you that I'm going to leave you out of the clear blue sky" than "I have given you every conceivably opportunity to right yourself, and I'm tired of waiting".

The very next day, a zombie outbreak occurs, and Shaun immediately starts to not notice a damn thing. In fact, it's not until after he and Ed end up fighting back a pair of monsters in their backyard that he figures out what's going on, and the two men make immediate plans to go save Shaun's mum Barbara (Penelope Wilton) from her soon-to-zombified husband Philip (Bill Nighy), rescue Liz, and hole up in their favorite pub, the Winchester. From here on out, events proceed as they do in pretty much every zombie movie since George A. Romero invented the modern iteration of the subgenre with Night of the Living Dead in 1968: running back and forth madly, living people dying because they make stupid, easily-avoidable mistakes, balletic fight scenes set to Queen songs.

On the surface, the easy thing to admire about Shaun of the Dead is how well the filmmakers know their audience; the only thing that Wright has made with a clearer program of fan-serving injokes is the "Don't" trailer from Grindhouse. The major difference between that and Shaun (or even between Shaun and Wright's sole Pegg-free project, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) is that Shaun isn't just throwing out bones to fans (though there are plenty - "We're coming to get you, Barbara!" is the most overt shout-out, but there are a seemingly unlimited number of references to classic zombie films). It manages something so tricky that I can't swear to have ever seen it outside of this movie: writing jlines that are inside-baseball references, but also jokes in their own right, and additionally sincere character moments.. When, for example, a flustered Shaun yells "Dont' say the zed-word!", it's a great moment that helps develop who Shaun is (someone who tries, and is frequently successful, to ignore what's right in front of him), while working as a funny counterpoint to the moment in which it occurs (terminology is his concern right now?), and finally, it winks at the zombie fandom who know that the word "zombie" is almost never spoken in Romero's filmography, and that two years prior to Shaun, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later was released on the wings of the director insisting that we should not deign to refer to it as a "zombie film", thank you so much. Incidentally, though I think it would be incorrect to suggest that Pegg and Wright dislike 28 Days Later, they sure do love poking fun it, both in their script and in the iconography their film nabs from it.

The thing is, it would still be a great film and greater comedy totally divorced from its value as a parody, or as a sincere zombie film (and the great thing is that, like Hot Fuzz, it is both a terrific parody and a terrific example of what it's parodying at one and the same moment). Wright is a fantastic director of comedy, is the thing, and Chris Dickens, even more importantly is a great editor of comedy, and Shaun of the Dead is one of the best examples in modern cinema of how judicious cutting can extract every last bit of humor from a moment: I am especially thinking of a sequence where Shaun and Ed try to come up with a plan to save everybody and find someplace save to hole up, where the increasingly fast editing is the joke, after a fashion (it also happens to be my single favorite scene in Wright's entire career, for what it's worth). The "humor through rhythmic edits" thing is perhaps the defining element of Wright's later films (of which only Hot Fuzz was also edited by Dickens, and it's not coincidentally the director's funniest movie), and it came into being pretty fully formed right here.

What pushes Shaun of the Dead over the edge, though, is not its cleverness, nor its technical mastery of humor, but that it marries these things to genuinely likable, interesting characters - not so complex as the population of The World's End, but frankly more fun to spend time with, and that's what makes the movie special: it is a sweet hyper-violent comedy about zombies. Shaun is a tit, but he's our tit, and watching him figure out what his priorities are and should be makes the film an emotionally rewarding experience unlike literally any other zombie film I can name. And the fact that the film's overriding message is that sometimes, we actually do need to become better people to make relationships work, instead of just expecting our charming personality to make people love us, put this miles and miles ahead of almost any other romcom of the 21st Century for sheer pragmatic honesty. It's a great movie, and if it has a speckling of flaws (I think that it exhausts itself and stops, rather than "ends"; and the initial conceit that modern urban life makes all of us act so much like zombies that it's hard to tell the difference is frustratingly undeveloped), so do most things. But great comedies, great horror genre stories, and great coming-of-age tales are three of the rarest things in contemporary cinema, and that Shaun of the Dead is all three at once makes it among the most valuable British films in modern memory.

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ZOMBIES OF THE WORLD UNITE

The first thing to admit is that World War Z is better than I assumed it would have any reason to be, if only because the very phrase "PG-13 zombie movie" is enough to make any True Genre Fan start dry-heaving. On the other hand, World War Z also fails to be as good as it easily could have been, given that it's basically a hybrid of 28 Days Later and Contagion, and all it should have taken was to slavishly replicate the things that those movies did well. Instead, WWZ goes about, contentedly making its own mistakes and failing to learn from its most immediately obvious forebears.

With that lineage, it should be immediately obvious what kind of movie we're looking at: a plague thriller in which the plague makes zombies. The rage virus kind of zombies that a purist might reasonably grouse are no kind of zombies at all - in WWZ, they're not even cannibals, but are wholly content to call it a day once their poison bites have passed on the disorder - though since much is made of the fact that the victims are in fact reanimated dead bodies, and the very word "zombie" even shows up, dodging the somewhat tedious recent tendency to do all sorts of coy dances around naming names (sometimes a flesh-eating revenant is just a flesh-eating revenant), I think it's fair to wave the film right on through.

I have not read Max Brooks's source novel, but I am given to understand that it's a collage of after-the-fact eyewitness accounts of What Happened During the Zombie Apocalypse. That's something that could work as a movie - it is, in fact, not unlike the structure of Contagion itself - but unfathomably expensive summer tentpole movies need a bit more of a sure thing, and that's how a rotating all-star cast of writers perhaps better noted for their marquee value than their consistent quality - J. Michael Straczynski, Damon Lindelof, and Drew Goddard are among those credited - ended up shaping the material into a globe-trotting adventure centered around Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt, who doubles as producer), a former United Nations employee called back into action. What, exactly, Gerry did that so impressed UN Deputy Secretary-General Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokoena) is left a bit muddy; the best I can come up with is that he's a professional survivalist. And in that capacity, he's assigned to be the guide in a field of hostile human monsters for Dr. Andrew Fassbach (Elyes Gabel), a virologist hoping to track the spread of the zombie disease in the hopes of stamping it out while there's still a humanity left to save.

But that doesn't happen right away. First, Gerry and his wife Karin (Mireille Enos), and their daughters (Sterling Jerins and Abigail Hargrove) find themselves stuck in an unusually appalling bout of Philly traffic on their way to the airport, and this turns out to be caused by a sudden explosion in homicidal biting, as urban centers across the industrial West start toppling all in the span of a single terrible day (and if you imagine that the film prods at the Post 9/11 NYC wound with a stick, you have imagined correctly). The Lanes are able to escape to Newark, NJ, devastated by rioting, looting, and a general sense of broken-down terror (there's no indication why New Jersey hasn't been affected by the zombie outbreak), and here they acquire a terrified Latino boy, Tomas (Fabrizio Zacharee Guido), whose parents, for unknowable reasons, would rather send him off with the kindly gringos than go themselves. Anyway, at this point, Gerry's UN contacts are able to send a helicopter to pick him and his family up in the barest nick of time, and it's only after he has them safely aboard a remote aircraft carrier that he learns the cost: nobody gets to take up space on that ship unless they're being useful. Nobody, nor their families. So how would you like to plunge back into the well of a global war against toxic corpses?

That takes us a good quarter-way through the movie (WWZ is a blissful 116 minutes, an elegant throwback to the day when tentpole movie had to earn it if they wanted to break the two-hour mark), and it already showcases what might be the biggest problem out of many small ones: WWZ never does solve that problem of crafting a single unified narrative out of the bits and pieces of Brooks's novel, but ends up like a series of mini-movies, all of them starring Pitt's Gerry Lane. There's the Philadelphia Escape, there's the Incident in South Korea, there's the Siege of Jerusalem, where Gerry picks up an Israeli soldier, Segen (Daniella Kertez) to be his kick-ass, one-handed Gal Friday for the remainder of the picture, and there's the Haunted House Thriller, in which Gerry, thinking he might just about have cracked this whole disease, but has to sneak through the zombie-wracked halls of a World Health Organization facility in Cardiff, Wales in order to find a vial of bacteria. This last sequence of the movie, incidentally, is by far the best part, and it may or may not be the result of massive production traumas that led to a very costly Russian finale to be scrapped and replaced by a new ending; my interests in the case haven't led me to do too much research into exactly what got added at what point. There are those who have observed that the end is sudden, and largely unresolved, which is sort of true; but it mostly tells me that not enough critics have the proper appreciation of Italian zombie films. That's where you get properly abrupt endings.

The point being: it's beyond episodic, and it is best when it's the most scaled-back; though I have to credit director Marc Forster with having evolved so tremendously well in his ability to handle big action sequences from the eye-melting awfulness of Quantum of Solace, that out of respect, I shan't even link his name to the Dramatic Chipmunk, as is my custom. In fact, the action in WWZ is pretty solid, all things considered: the Philadelphia material far more so than the Jerusalem scenes, largely because it has a much higher sense of confusion and chaos.

The unresolved issue, though, is that however successful it is as an action thriller, WWZ is a damnably unsteady story with totally uninteresting characters and too many narrative leaps of faith. It's probably just because Contagion exists, and is awesome, that I think this, but it almost certainly would have worked better if Gerry were at least three different characters, and his story broken up rather than told in neat little discrete geographic chunks, like an Indiana Jones zombie-fighting movie (which I know, sounds awesome - but that's not at all what WWZ is, just how it's structured).

Technically, the film is solid if not quite exceptional: Ben Seresin's cinematography probably didn't need to be quite as flat and bleached of color, and Roger Barton & Matt Chesse's editing surely could have slowed down quite a bit in the faster parts of action scenes, and Marco Beltrami's score could have had a bit more personality to go along with his excellent opening credits theme. But it gets the job done, all of it, assuming "the job" was to keep us reliably perked up by the scenes of mass devastation, and creeped out a little bit at the slow-burn tension of the final sequence.

It is not a good zombie film. It's barely a zombie film at all, in fact: more of a bio-thriller in which zombies are symptomatic of a killer disease. And I'm certainly not going to pretend that I wasn't totally disappointed by that development. But in a summer where the splashy action films have been weaker-kneed than I'd prefer, it's entirely satisfying at the level of popcorn spectacle, and it's fully aware that the best thing is to never be boring, and let issues like story and character hold off for some more serious and probing tale of the undead taking over the world. Aye, there could be a much better version of this scenario; but there just as easily could be, and have been, versions that are incomparably worse.

7/10
6/10?
That Man of Steel 6/10 is really clipping my wings here.
Let's go with a rare decimal point:

6.5/10

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