SPLINTER (2008)

Low budget filmmaking is tough, especially when it comes to horror. If we're taking on just the low budget medium, a lack of financing can affect the final output. Lesser money can only afford the lesser actors, cinematographers, editors, composers, production designers, etc., and a weakness apart of any of these individuals can severely handicap a project. In the horror genre, you have all of these risky areas, but then in addition, you have the inherent prejudice against the genre for the years and years of cheap imitators, exploitation romps, depictions of "glorified" violence, and on and on. Lord knows I certainly feel this way, and I'm supposed to love this shit. Because they were grandfathered in, it's easy to forget that watermarks in the genre – Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Night of the Living Dead – were made on the amount of money you found beneath your car seat the last time you dropped your iPhone. Even today, Hollywood approaches to the horror genre – unless of course they're greenlighting a dripping CGI mess of an extravaganza – are apt to keep the budget low. In case you haven't noticed, Hollywood's track record in giving us decent quality horror films (the recent Insidious and Sinister don't count, as they were both made independently) are about on par with those low budget filmmakers who are either genuinely trying to make something good or simply trying to create something stupid they know they can sell for the bottom shelf at the video store. (Oh shit, I just totally dated myself.)

Enter Splinter, a little backwoods monster movie that nearly came out of nowhere and personified how so much could be done with so little.

Polly (Jill Wagner) and Seth (Paulo Costanzo, aka the stoner from Road Trip who believed he was destined for great things) are celebrating their anniversary of sorts in a far less glamorous place than Cancun or Aruba. Instead they're jeeping into the heart of the wilderness with nothing but dufflebags of clothes and some camping gear. Her idea more than his, he attempts to play the role of outdoorsman, but it becomes increasingly obvious he's meant for motel beds and flourescent lighting rather than tent assembly and gazing up at the stars.

Meanwhile, a mile down the road and standing outside a broken-down car, Dennis (the immeasurably cool Shea Whigham) and Lacey (Rachel Kerbs) are on a rendezvous of their own – one that has them fleeing from the law. Tensions run high between them, but Dennis has his sights on getting out of dodge, pronto, and Lacey has her sights on something else – anything else, desperately – as long as it comes in pill form.

Eventually, these two couples run afoul of each other, and at gunpoint, Dennis and Lacey force themselves into the car – and lives – of Polly and Seth. With one half of our on-screen couples taken hostage by the other, the new foursome simply drive down the desolate wilderness-surrounded road...until they run over something strange and suffer a flat tire because of it. Seth and Lacey find the thing they ran over...something covered in unnaturally large splinters...something that most assuredly be dead, but attacks them anyway.

The couples speed off in the repaired jeep, unsure of what they had seen, but Seth, who is currently in the process of obtaining his PhD in biology, attempts to make sense of the very dead thing covered in a blanket of splinters, which seemed to multiply across the ruined piece of roadkill, keeping it alive.

A hissing and smoking radiator has them pulling over at a gas station, where they encounter a former splinter creature victim, and one of their numbers becomes infected. Locking themselves into the gas station to hide from the strange things stalking them, they're forced to rely on their wits, a healthy array of convenience store items, and each other, if they want to survive.

And things get awfully bloody.

What we have with Splinter is a loving homage to creature features that came before it, mixed with zombie films that have directly inspired it. Clearly in love with John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing, George Romero's Dead series, and holy crap, even Tremors, Splinter takes the "rules" of the zombie film, marries them to the absurdity of the nature/science run amok sub-genre, and creates a wonderfully clever and at times disturbing resurrection-gone-bad grimy gore fest.

You will find no CGI here; nothing but a collection of unique and imaginative practical effects. A dismembered hand covered in needles crawling across the floor like a spider recalls The Thing (and perhaps Evil Dead II), and the ruined bodies of anyone unfortunate to become infected send-up Peter Jackson's early kiwi splatter romps. Added to this are a collection of camera tricks nearing one hundred years old in their construction and are still just as effective.

The best part of all this? Taking a page out of Night of the Living Dead, there is no explanation – no why – for the events unfolding. A brief, one-second shot of a sign – something about keeping away from an oil company's experimental extraction site – is all we're provided, and we've seen enough of these flicks before to let our imaginations fill in the gaps.

Shea Whigham's presence here is the smartest casting decision. With Denny, Whigham plays a total bastard, but one you know from the start you're going to end up rooting for. Yeah, he's a thief, and he and Lacey are on the run from the law, but his main want for freedom is not to avoid an indeterminate amount of time behind bars, but so he can get his drug-addict girlfriend out of the country and into Mexico, where he'll focus on trying to get her clean. Whigham plays this incredibly well; he is a bastard, but he's also the kind of bastard you'd hope to have around when shit hits the fan. He's got both a cowboy's balls and a thief's unscrupulousness, both of which come in handy as our characters find themselves confined to one place and warding off attacks from the slowly growing numbersof splinter creatures. And wouldn't you know it? Turns out he's a big ol' softy, too, just like the rest of us.

Whigham has done nothing but expand his increasingly impressive career. (Motherfucker's only been in three films nominated for Best Picture over the last two years, as well as appeared in both "Boardwalk Empire" and "True Detective.") Splinter was not one of his first major roles, but rather an interesting stepping stone for him along the way. He was far enough along in his career that he could have easily not taken part, but I'm glad he did, as the film is all the better for it. And despite all the bad-asses he'd already played, and all the bad-asses he'd yet to play, I guarantee he'll never do anything as bad-ass as shooting a shotgun one-handed, since his other arm has long been torn off, tossing it in the air to load another shell, and shooting it again. (Don't get me wrong, Wagner and Costanzo as the kidnapped couple forced to align with a "bad guy" in order to survive do just fine with their roles. But this is Shea Whigham's film.)

Speaking of smart casting, enjoy the appearance of the opening gas station victim, played by Charles Baker. Perhaps you know him by another name: Skinny Pete, from the pop culture phenomenon that is "Breaking Bad."

Toby Wilkins' direction over Splinter is just fantastic. The chaotic camera does a nice job of masking the assuredly cheap and simple creatures while also creating a deep frustration within his audience, because we just want to see this thing – every ugly nook and cranny. And among the many great set-pieces on hand, one in particular – which has one main character, er, let's say impaired, and making his way toward a getaway car – which will literally have you screaming at the screen for him to move his fucking ass. It's a sequence designed explicitly to have you wondering if he'll make it, and it works like gangbusters.

Toby Wilkins, where the fuck did you go? I mean, okay – The Grudge 3 didn't work out, and I don't at all blame you for hopping on board that franchise and working alongside Hollywood heavyweight Sam Raimi, even if the film was always fated to go direct-to-video. And I don't at all fault you for The Grudge 3 turning out kind of...well...shitty. Let's just pretend it didn't even happen. I don't look at such a film and even remotely think "a Toby Wilkins film." At best, I consider it a minor diversion on the road that will eventually lead you back to the world of horror features, where I know you'll once again give us something worth a damn.

KNIGHT OF THE DEAD (2013)

Get it? Like Night of the Living Dead? You know, that $50-budget film from the '60s that filmmakers have been ripping off ever since? I guess it doesn't matter. Gimmicky title or not, any horror fan worth their weight in cinematic excrement knows any movie about the walking dead who infect via bite/scratching and can only go down for good with a shot to the head has been directly inspired by that hemp-smoking Pennsylvania native in the safari vest. 

It is the mid 1300s and the Black Plague is ravaging the land. Nearly 1/3rd of the world's population is in the process of dropping dead (thanks a lot, rats!), but that is not stopping one ragtag group of crusaders from escorting the Holy Grail (?) to a place unknown, but in actuality perhaps to hide it from that blonde Nazi who talks in her sleep from The Last Crusade. Along the way they encounter blood-spattered mindless humanoids who saunter toward them with nothing in their eyes, but their eyes on the men's delicious epidermis. Finding themselves surrounded at every side by a growing army of the zombie persuasion, the knights prepare to battle, and get gooey guts all over pretty much everything.

Perhaps inspired by the popularity of HBO's "Game of Thrones," a show that combines traditional fantasy/King Arthur-esque storytelling with mature themes, icky monsters, and all kinds of violence (though doesn't share nearly its budget of one episode), Knight of the Dead, if nothing else, at least takes itself seriously. Thematically similar to Christopher Smith's The Black Death (starring that headless "Game of Thrones" guy), the tone is bleak, the men seem haunted, the film stock is bleached, and things seem hopeless. (It IS the plague we're talking about here.) That's pretty much where the similarities end, as The Black Death was a great film made by a great filmmaker. While Knight of the Dead isn't terrible, there's nothing about it that injects the viewer with any sense of intrigue.

I have seen a lot of fellow reviewers tear down this film and I guess, while I can see why, I don't feel as obligated to do so myself. In the pantheon of zombie films, it's certainly not at the very bottom, but it is most certainly down there somewhere. I say without hesitation it's superior to the majority of the Resident Evil sequels and any remake of Romero's Night sans the Savini version. (And it's definitely better than the other Black Plague horror travesty Season of the Witch, but that's not really saying all that much, is it?)

Knight of the Dead tries to offer something new – zombies eating dudes during the Dark Ages – but the stark landscapes and the condemnations of witchcraft and the wailing, moaning soundtrack makes this all feel so damn familiar that the fact there are zombies included now doesn't really raise the stakes at all. This new trend of take-new-setting/add-zombies/shake-well sometimes results in some truly great films (see Exit Humanity), but sometimes it results in something like Knight of the Dead. What CGI that's utilized ranges from spotty to "Jesus, that's bad," but in a film where knights do back-flips and it's apparently possible to split zombies perfectly in half from head to hips, it's the most minor of qualms. Though inoffensive, competently assembled, and including zombies being eviscerated by battle axes, there's nothing particularly memorable about it.

Also, despite that cover, there is not ONE scene featuring a knight in a suit of armor battling an army of ghouls. I mean, come on...that scene writes itself.

Come the next day, when you're rinsing out your coffee mug in the break-room sink and someone asks if you saw any good movies recently, not only are you not going to name-drop Knight of the Dead, you're likely to have forgotten you even watched it.

LET’S RAISE SOME HELL: ‘PET SEMATARY TWO’ IS A MASTERPIECE

[Spoilers follow for the entire Pet Sematary series.]

Oh, sequels. On paper, you’re so weird. You’re a continuation that was never meant to be. You’re glorified fan fiction sanctioned into existence by a producer or studio eager to continue a profitable story that was only ever meant to be just that story (unless, of course, your characters wear capes, because then we need thirty-seven of those, I guess). By now, it’s become common knowledge that most sequels are inferior retellings of their originators. Subsequent writers and directors who hop onto an existing franchise try to make their sequel as different as they can, but ultimately, they are still going to exist within the structure that’s already been established. No matter what else the sequel might try, we know that Terminators are going to travel back in time to protect or destroy, Michael Myers is going to kill, and Jigsaw is going to impossibly exist and rattle off dime-store philosophies while ripping money from your pockets and laughing maniacally.

Director Mary Lambert knows this better than anyone. With her 1989 adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, she nailed the holy trifecta of horror filmmaking: scaring the shit out of audiences, striking gold at the box office, and scoring a positive critical notice or two. Even today, it’s still considered newsworthy when a woman is put in charge of a major tentpole release, and though Pet Sematary wasn’t considered tentpole, it was still highly anticipated. It was, after all, the next in a long line of extremely successful King adaptations, this time inspired by what was deemed the scariest book he’d ever written. Could a—gasp—female director make a film every bit as dark, graphic, and taboo as the book written by a lovable man with a few loose screws? That answer was a resounding yes, and no one knew that more than Paramount Pictures, so when it came time for them to greenlight the sequel, they made sure Lambert was along for the ride.

I’ve had a strange relationship with Pet Sematary Two ever since seeing it at a young age. As weird and kid-inappropriate as it may sound, the first Pet Sematary was a childhood institution. USA Network used to run it back to back with another King title, Silver Bullet, and I would watch them every single time they aired. I was unrealistically scared of Pet Sematary, and never more than when Rachel’s bony sister, Zelda, was on screen. I eventually saw Pet Sematary Two a few years after it hit VHS, and even as a child, I could tell it was stupid. Beyond stupid. It had sacrificed anything legitimately creepy about the first film in favor of slasher-flick antics and sensational violence…but I can’t pretend I wasn’t scared of it at times, because I was. 

After recently shrugging my way through the pallid and lifeless Pet Sematary remake, I felt compelled to revisit this 1992 sequel I’d long ago dismissed in hopes of finding some new merit and satisfying the itch that the remake failed to scratch.

I’m so glad I did.

Pet Sematary Two is one of the strangest, darkest, and uncomfortably funniest horror flicks ever produced by a major studio—one directed by a woman, headlined by a 13-year-old kid with more star power than the guy playing his father, and which had absolutely no problem killing multiple children… and mothers… and kittens. (Though I didn’t find any of it remotely scary watching it with adult eyes, the parts that used to frighten me as a child still filled me with slight apprehension.) Originally, Lambert had intended on directly continuing the Creed story with a teenage version of Ellie (played by Blaze Berdahl in the first film), but in a stunning act of boundless misguidance, Paramount was leery about making a teenage girl the lead character in a horror film...even though the studio had just completed a successful eight-film run of the Friday the 13th series, in which the lead in nearly every single entry was…a teenage girl. In response, Lambert and screenwriter Richard Outten (Van Damme’s Lionheart) created an entirely new crop of characters, though obviously the action remained in the town of Ludlow—the site of the pet cemetery and the Micmac burial ground beyond it.

Meet the Matthews family: there’s Chase (Anthony Edwards, Miracle Mile), patriarch and veterinarian; his wife, Renee (Darlanne Fluegel, Once Upon a Time in America, which makes a cameo), actress of cheap looking gothic monster movies; and their son, Jeff (Edward Furlong, Terminator 2: Judgment Day), looking as exhausted and barely into anything as the actor normally is (or isn’t). A freak on-set accident sees Renee being fried to death by some “oops!” electricity, so Chase takes his son back to Ludlow to bury her in their hometown’s cemetery—and to hopefully start anew. It’s there that Chase encounters a cold Gus Gilbert (an all-in Clancy Brown), Ludlow’s sheriff and a former flame of his deceased wife, who's quick to remind the bereaved widower—after her funeral, no less—that he and Renee used to bang something fierce. Despite this, Jeff eventually befriends Gus’s stepson, Drew (Jason McGuire), and after his dog, Zowie, meets the wrong end of Gus’s rifle, the boys bury him in Ludlow’s whispered about burial ground. 

Things…escalate quickly. 

Tobe Hooper struck his own gold with 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so when Cannon Films came knocking at his door to direct the sequel, Hooper agreed, but decided to make as different a film as possible while remaining true to the basic components that the prior film had established. If the first Chain Saw were an exercise in pure terror, the second would be an exercise in black comedy quirkiness featuring ironically used Oingo Boingo and a duel-chainsaw-wielding Dennis Hopper. Lambert seems to have taken the same approach, because while Pet Sematary Two is a direct sequel in terms of concept and character dynamic, it’s not at all a spiritual follow-up with respect to tone, sincerity, or any attempt at mature horror (of which there is zero). Pet Sematary was trying to be a good film, whereas Pet Sematary Two is trying to be a fun film—and boy, it isn’t just fun, it’s fucking looney tunes, a gonzo masterpiece of weird characters, ace gore effects, befuddling dialogue, and with the purest, most palpable sense of, “Can you believe Paramount is giving us money to make this?” 

The screen story never strays too far from established structure, involving a family looking for a fresh start, a person burying a cherished pet in the cursed burial ground, and the ante being upped as dead human beings begin to replace dead animals as burial ground fodder. Pet Sematary Two even maintains the established archetype of the patriarch, but with a slight twist, turning him from a medical doctor to a veterinarian, which maintains the prior’s institutional and sanitized philosophy of death as normal and necessary (read: better) while doing it in a more on-the-nose way. (One of Chase’s first scenes has him gently putting a dog to sleep, telling its crying owners, “It’s better this way.”) (Read: dead.) And speaking of death, Pet Sematary's most defining, catalytic moment comes from the death of Gage Creed, the adorable four-year-old son of Louis and Rachel, which ruins what remains of Louis' sanity and directly effects the tragedy that befalls the Creed family by film end; though the visual presentation of this was considered a major taboo at the time, his demise derived from a total freak Orinco truck accident, a horrible but sadly realistic incident. Meanwhile, Pet Sematary Two straight up murders two children while aging them up a little so the act of doing so feels less soul-crushing and more deranged. Basically, when Gage Creed bites the big one in the first film, Lambert wants her audience emotionally pulverized to more easily buy into father Louis’s descent into madness, but in the sequel, when Drew and the local scarf-wearing bully, Clyde (Big’s Jared Rushton), both meet their untimely ends at the hands of a resurrected Gus, the audience isn’t that upset. Sure, it’s unfortunate to see Drew and his mother (Lisa Waltz, The X-Files) lose their lives, but as sad as that makes us, we’re even more glad about Clyde’s face being chewed off by his rear moped tire because he was such a dick. This, seemingly, is part of Lambert’s design: she wants her audience to embrace the gory death of that 13-year-old bully, and her design is correct, because we do. Clyde sucked! 

Wes Craven once mused about the difference between directors who scare their audiences legitimately, and those who make the audience believe that said director is “dangerous,” and willing to show them anything to elicit that desired scare. How far is this director willing to go? That’s the beauty of Mary Lambert and her approach to Pet Sematary Two: its goal is to break rules and encourage pure insanity; it goes freely with the flow and adopts every halfcocked idea someone on-set could muster. If there were any suggestions proffered during production that Lambert decided would be going too far, dear lord, I would love to hear them, considering the things we did get:

Monster/humanoid wolf-head nightmare sex — check.

Zombie rape — check.

Flesh-melting, pun-hurling, undead mothers — check.

A leading role for Clancy Brown — hard check.

Speaking of, no one has ever had more fun playing a psychotic undead murderer than Clancy Brown. He is Freddy Krueger, swapping out the Christmas sweater for a pair of sheriff beiges, but certainly keeping his knack for dark-humored kill-lines and vile sense of humor. (“Why did you dig up my dead wife?” Chase asks him during their final confrontation, to which Gus responds with a growl, “Because I wanted to fuck'errr.”) Brown seldom gets the chance to enjoy a lead role, so while that could be part of the exuberance behind his performance, it’s really because—as many actors will tell you—it’s so much more fun to play the villain, to be let off the proverbial leash and to go as big as you want. (Brown would go on to star as the villain in another King-inspired project soon after this one—The Shawshank Redemption—and I like to believe  director Frank Darabont saw his nutso performance in Pet Sematary Two and said, “Oh, definitely that guy.”) As the resurrected Gus Gilbert, Brown chews on every piece of scenery not nailed down, and it’s his legitimate testament as an actor that he doesn’t always have to go big to imbue his undead Gus with the strangest of personalities. One of his best scenes is a total skewering of the generic dinner table set piece, during which his undead muscles barely function and he ends up dropping a bowl of veggies on the floor. When his annoyed wife mutters and stoops to clean up his mess (and who, I might add, he’d necro-raped in a previous scene), he very subtly glares at her with narrowed eyes as if wondering what she's so sour about. Still, when Brown goes big, aw hell—what a blast to watch. The Cheshire grin he flashes while chasing down his family to kill them, sliding on his sheriff’s hat before he delivers their deathblow, is the stuff of cinemagic. 

Pet Sematary Two is filled with this kind of craziness—a collection of scenes so inspiring that they force you to stop and reconcile that, yep, you’re really seeing all this in a film made by Hollywood. Take the scene where Chase kills the undead Zowie and then finds Gus inside the modest Gilbert home, asking him, “What are you doing, Gus?” The resurrected sheriff looks down at the shot-dead Zowie, and then says, with detectable wryness, “Well, I was building a doggy door.” Sure, it’s a stupid line, throwaway in nature, but what makes this such a magical moment is that this hulking, demonic, undead corpse actually was building a doggy door for his hulking, demonic, undead dog. Forget all the warm-blooded people that demon Gus definitely wants to kill—that all momentarily stops to build a tiny door for his corpse dog. 

You guys, this is a movie where a young boy is being murderously pursued by his undead stepfather, and with the zombie-maniac hot on his heels, the boy races into his house, shuts and locks the door, and then CALMLY HANGS HIS HOUSE KEYS ON THE KEYHOOK BEFORE LOCATING A GUN TO SHOOT THE GHOUL MAN TRYING TO KILL HIM.

WHO WROTE THIS?

And that ending, holy shit. What morbid mastery. What unabashed fuck-it filmmaking. The fiery finale that concludes in the attic of the Matthews’ house, which features not one but two resurrected bodies trying to kill father and son and turn them into the walking dead, is a carnival sideshow of horror chaos. Undead Bully Clyde doesn’t just show up, but he shows up with a voice five pitches deeper, very little face, and grasping an ax, which he swings with the brute force of an able-bodied stuntman (you know, the one obviously playing him). The real showstopper of this scene, however, is the return of Jeff’s mother, which actually starts on a sad and creepy note: she beckons her son to join her in the afterlife, a moment that threatens to touch hands with honest-to-gosh pathos…but that’s before things descend into utter madness, which happens pretty quickly. The fire spreading around the attic soon begins licking at the ends of her burial dress as all the work her mortician had done begins to melt off her face, and she begins repeatedly screaming “DEAD IS BETTER!” in absolute, chill-inducing, operatic, Argento levels of unhingement until she turns into a fucking STANDING, BURNING, SHRIEKING SKELETON. 

Frankly, it’s the ending we needed and deserved.

No matter how much King’s output has declined in quality over the years, he’s never written anything as farcical as Pet Sematary Two, but that doesn’t mean the sequel doesn’t manage a handful of Kingisms. (King actually requested that Paramount remove his name from any marketing having to do with the sequel, so he was obviously not a fan.) First, there are the two shaky relationships between fathers and sons, which he’s explored in more than one of his novels (The Shining comes to mind), and then there’s the unrealistically evil bully who could give IT’s Henry Bowers a run for his milk money any day of the week. The first film was about a parent losing a child; meanwhile, the sequel is about a child losing a parent and navigating the grieving process, which King later explored in his excellent short story, Riding the Bullet. There’s also a nod to The Shining when Gus busts a hole in Drew’s bedroom door with a hammer, but instead of sticking his face through the hole and bellowing  “Heeere’s Johnny!,” he verbally ponders if Drew understands the Miranda rights he’s been rattling off, or if he’s “too fucking stupid.”

Ever since its release, critics and fans have derided Pet Sematary Two, and it’s a sure-fire inclusion on many “worst sequel” lists. (Amusingly, Variety “praised” the sequel, calling it “about 50% better than its predecessor, which is to say it's not very good at all.") Pet Sematary Two isn’t a patch on the original, and it’s so tonally different that the two don’t appear to be part of the same family beyond their titles, but I’ll be damned if Lambert and co. aren’t going for it, and that’s what makes it so special. Whatever Pet Sematary Two may be, it’s all part of Mary Lambert’s gloriously gonzo plan, and that’s all that matters. One thing is certain: 2019’s useless Pet Sematary redux proved it’s better to be a goofy, red-headed stepchild but still have your own identity than to be completely without one.  

BLOOD IN THE TIME OF INTOLERANCE: THE SAD NEW RELEVANCE OF ‘EXIT HUMANITY’ (2011)

“Courage did not come from the need to survive, or from a brute indifference inherited from someone else, but from a driving need for love which no obstacle in this world or the next world will break.”

— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera 

The phrase “beautiful zombie movie” is probably all kinds of things: an oxymoron, a contradiction, and if you want to get really philosophical, a paradox. But that’s exactly what 2011’s Exit Humanity is. It’s gorgeously written, envisioned, photographed, scored, and realized. It just so happens to feature the undead ripping apart human beings.

Say the word “zombie” over and over and it eventually loses meaning. The oversaturation of zombies in film and television has long been threatening to do the same: showing you the same undead carnage over and over until those rotting, shuffling ghouls lose their power to make your blood run cold. Following the Resident Evil film franchise and the television dramas The Walking Dead, iZombie, Z Nation, and probably more of which I’m not aware, zombie horror has become spread so thin and overdone that a zombie doesn’t mean anything anymore. Twenty years ago, watching a zombie crack open a skull and reach inside for its gooey treat was just for horror fanatics. Now it’s for grandmothers. Even the zombie comedy – always the telltale sign that a previously terrifying concept is on its last leg – has become overdone. Once your horror is Abbott & Costello’ed, that horror is no longer horrific.

Recent mainstream attempts at adding horror elements to a pre-existing institution, whether it be a real human being (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) or a fictitious event (Pride & Prejudice & Zombies) were made by filmmakers with their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks, afraid to take their concepts seriously for fear of being laughed out of theaters. Exit Humanity, about a war-torn America contending with the marauding undead, is another kind of historical mash-up – one that’s not afraid to embrace its concept without hiding behind a curtain of cheekiness. It doesn’t re-imagine any real historical figure as a secret monster killing machine, and its immersion in the past is not done for kitsch value.

George A. Romero’s initial zombie quadrilogy had a bonafide purpose – to ask a pertinent question about the human condition, and society’s ability to steer clear of corruption. Exit Humanity has a question among those lines, but one a bit more specific: what if, during the most tumultuous time in American history, there were a greater danger that wasn’t choosing sides? Didn’t care about your man-made conflict? Was going to destroy and consume you regardless of your uniform’s colors? Would America stop warring with itself? Would it forget this initial conflict that amounted to nothing more than a petty squabble in the face of real and absolute destruction?

The year is 1865. Edward Young is a confederate soldier, caught between the union enemy trying to put him down for God and Country, and a single undead soldier slowly trickling through the trees toward him. We don’t know why the dead walk. At this moment, we’re not given a reason. Instead, we’re immediately thrust into this horror. Edward battles this monster and survives the encounter, but it will prove to be the first of many, and soon it will eclipse this other thing we’ve heard spoken of and seen written down so many times before in our history books that its significance and implications have lost all meaning: we’re in the midst of the American Civil War.

Six years later, it’s 1871. The war is over, the country remains in shambles, and the dead still walk, but those soldiers and civilians who survived the battlefield do their best to live their lives anyway. Edward returns home from hunting to see that his wife has been reborn as one of undead. With no choice, Edward kills her and departs to find his missing son. It’s not much later that he does: young Adam shambles toward him with full-dark eyes and pale, dead skin. For a second time, Edward is left with no choice. He returns home a tortured soul, and the muzzle of his pistol soon hovers beneath his chin. However, he realizes he has unfinished business. He remembers the promise he’d made to Adam – to take him to Ellis Falls, a waterfall miles from their home. Deciding to keep that promise, Edward gathers the boy’s ashes in a small tin, hops on his horse, and sets off on his journey – one he’s not sure he’ll survive. But what a one he’ll have.

Exit Humanity is Day of the Dead with a dash of The Outlaw Josey Wales by way of Terrence Malick – think The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford re-envisioned as a zombie film. Written and directed by indie filmmaker John Geddes (Hellmouth), Exit Humanity is a thoughtful and introspective take on a subgenre that’s been done to death…and it just might be the weightiest addition to the genre since Romero’s foursome. And like Romero’s films, the zombies are always present as a looming threat, though they’re often not in the foreground – or background. The dread and foreboding created by them is what drapes over the running time, but indeed, for a good stretch, there are none to be found. Because, Exit Humanity isn’t a movie about people barricading themselves into a house and fighting off the walking dead, and it’s not about gore effects and carnage. It does, however, very much contain that original Romero sense of purpose: to hold up a mirror to society and ask, point blank, “What’s your fucking problem?”

Exit Humanity is about the human spirit, but also about what humankind are willing to do to each other. It’s about a country split in two because of political ideology, and how it makes enemies out of former friends and neighbors. At this very moment in reality, 150 years after the end of the Civil War, America has been re-divided. Hate is soaring. Trust in media has been called into question. Everything is politicized – right down to the American flag. Look no further than the 2016 election – the most divisive and ugly presidential campaign in this country’s history. Clinton (vs. Sanders) vs. Trump changed relationships, and in more extreme cases, destroyed friendships and marriages; it upended faith in the political process; it took all the progress made over the last decade and dismantled it, slowly, little by little. The very thing we held onto as the backbone of our republic – the democratic process – had been abused and manipulated and bastardized by forces here and abroad. In the wake of the election results, hateful groups with hateful thoughts and messages suddenly felt emboldened. These people were going to take back their country, believing it had gone somewhere dark and sinister, and only they could save it. As a result, well-meaning messages and movements striving toward racial equality were rewritten as anti-patriotism and terroristic to neutralize their power. And hate crimes increased 5%.

When the new normal (this is not normal) is to wake up in the morning and see city squares overtaken by hordes of white supremacists – see them take the life of a peaceful protester – and hear our president call some of them “fine people,” Exit Humanity doesn’t just become depressingly relevant – it becomes a teachable moment.

In our less surreal political past, friends and family at ideological odds could always take comfort in knowing that, even when they disagreed most vehemently, each was doing so because of the profound love they had for their country, and felt whatever stance on whatever position they had taken was because of this love. But now – in a country where the word “science” has become tantamount to witchcraft, where people get their news from Uncle Bob on Facebook, and where it looks more and more likely every day that our president has committed treason to gain his position of power – that reasonable barrier of political disconnect is gone. We’re in a whole new world now, Twilight Zone-ish in its unfamiliarity, but very unfortunately not a place of science fiction. The unyielding trust that a large portion of the United States continues to put into a president who has done absolutely nothing to earn it is surreal, and scary, and extremely sad. Just this week, a Trump voter said this about his loyalty toward the current commander-in-chief: “If Jesus Christ gets down off the cross and told me Trump is with Russia, I would tell him, ‘Hold on a second, I need to check with the president if it’s true.’” (Source: CNN.) (Source: FAKE NEWS.)

This has become the new normal (this is not normal), and it makes absolutely no goddamn sense.

During a time when politicians still had class and honor and a sense of duty, Bobby Kennedy, in the speech “the Mindless Menace of Violence” that he gave following the shooting death of Martin Luther King Jr., once implored us to look at each other not as strangers, but as members of a community with a common goal for good:

When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies – to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear – only a common desire to retreat from each other – only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers.

It’s scary to read those words now and think that’s a place toward which we can never return – that this idea of all Americans co-existing in peace is still obtainable. With each passing day, it starts to feel like a hazy dream, the details of which are wisping away like smoke.

Exit Humanity argues for hanging onto that dream, but it also presents the same conundrum as it examines the continued division among men within the confines of the overall bigger walking horror: “What divides us in such times? What brings us together?”

Interestingly, director Geddes never makes any blanketed denouncements against the confederacy movement. He doesn’t go the redemption route and take a moment to introduce Edward as a brash and hotheaded racist whom incrementally discovers his inner George Bailey. Except for the brief battle scene opening, we never see a single union soldier – no one representing the north in any fashion later appears to challenge Edward’s ideology. There are no conversations about the chasm between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists. The words “slave” or “black” or any period-appropriate derivatives are never uttered. Even though the Civil War was very much about this, Exit Humanity isn’t. Again, it’s thinking bigger picture. So yes, our protagonist is a confederate soldier, whom history has taught us to be the enemy, but on screen, we don’t see someone with enemy qualities. We first see a soldier fighting in a war – with neither judgment nor condonation spared for him – and later, we see a husband and father going through the worst kind of emotional turmoil in the most unforgiving of landscapes. And it won’t be until a later act where he encounters the villainous confederate General Williams. “You used to fight with us?” the general asks him while a gun is pointed at Edward’s face. “Looks like we got a new kind of fight on our hands,” Edward responds. “The war is over…I’d rather live amongst the living dead than with men like you.” It’s clear: whatever loyalties he had to the spirit of the south are gone.

Mark Gibson makes his film debut as Edward Young – frankly, a role that could have only been played by a newcomer. Gibson’s desire to prove himself as an actor results in a performance unafraid to embrace the unusual premise; he bares his soul in what most people would write off as simply a genre film. At times, Exit Humanity threatens to overindulge in schmaltz through his character, some of it having to do with a few too many anguished bellows, but Gibson then reins it back with a focus on Edward’s humanity.

For such a low-key production, the film boasts a cast of well-known genre faces. Dee Wallace and Bill Moseley appear in supporting roles, one representing decency (Eve, the “witch” who was banished to the woods), and the other depravity (General Williams, for whom the war will never end). Stephen McHattie also appears as a conflicted (and consistently drunk) surgeon/scientist named Johnson who is tasked with fulfilling the general’s hopes in finding the cure for “the scourge” – one that requires the purposeful infection of the kidnapped civilians imprisoned in their underground bunker. Finding someone immune means controlling the infection, and that means weaponizing the dead… at which point General Williams can take back the South, “restore order,” and finally win his war.

Connecting everything is the narration by acting legend Brian Cox; it both propels the story and embodies Edward’s inner self – not to mention that Cox’s involvement achieves an air of legitimacy for a film otherwise cast with unfamiliar or genre faces. His off-screen character of Malcolm Young, descendent of Edward, reads entries from the journal that Edward kept during his journey across the zombie-infested lands of former America, some which complement a handful of beautiful animation sequences that bring Edward’s own journal illustrations to life. In a film already taking risks, this is just one more aspect that makes Exit Humanity daring and different.

Perhaps the best aspect to Exit Humanity is the gorgeous musical score by Nate Kreiswirth, Jeff Graville, and Ben Nudds, which can oftentimes sound so soaring and intimate and pregnant with swelling strings that it feels like it doesn’t belong anywhere near a horror film – music that would sound at home in a dramatic sweeping epic about star-crossed lovers or some such mother movie. (One track in particular, called “Edward and Isaac Bond” on the soundtrack [which you can download for free from Bandcamp], is so good that it’s used a second time for the closing credits.)

In a first-act flash back, Edward’s wife asks him what he wants in life. “I just want to be a good man,” he replies. “Good to you…our son. That’s all I want in life.” And throughout Exit Humanity, he confronts his own personal horror – that he didn’t live up to that want. Whether it’s his time spent on the confederate side, or the brutality he’d go on to commit against the living dead, or simply that he continued to live while his family did not, Edward spends much of the film believing himself to be a bad man – unworthy of love or companionship or peace. Because, throughout Exit Humanity, his resolve is tested. Edward Young loses everything. He loses the war. He loses his home. He loses his wife and son. At one point, he even loses the will to keep going. But he doesn’t let it destroy him. It takes time, but he seizes on the thing he believes will resurrect his happiness. He’s existing in a country that no longer resembles itself, and he’s lost his familial bonds, and he’s at odds with the very people with whom he once fought alongside, but he can see through all of that and know what’s really important. 

“It’s never too late to heal the soul,” one friend once told another. 

Exit Humanity is about the hope for humanity. It’s an artful message begging us not to give up – not to ever give up – not in the face of war, or death, or division, or the crumbling of this thing once known as social order. And as suggested during the film, the scourge of the undead seems to plague the worst of mankind throughout history – even as far away and isolated as a slave ship in European waters two hundred years before the war. The living dead aren’t just reapers that have come home to sow; they’re our reckoning. They’re our executioners. They’ve come to restore the natural balance. They’ve come many times before, and if need be, they’ll come again. In the film’s opening moments, Malcolm Young warns us that his ancestor’s journal from which he is about to read should be taken, for every generation, “…as a warning on how we should govern ourselves in such times.”

Exit Humanity is an allegory for the spirit, a warning for the future, and a reminder of what can be lost. It’s a living painting. It’s cinematic poetry.

It’s, dare I say it… important.

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

LAND OF THE DEAD (2005)

The name of George A. Romero will always carry weight with horror fans. That's just the way it is. Colleagues of mine have suggested that he often gets a pass from reviewers who glow about his new films, even if we're talking dreck like Survival of the Dead. The theory is, because he's given the world two bonafide classics with Night of the Living and Dawn of the Dead (and a minor one with Day), his less-than-desireable output will always be celebrated because he's earned it.

I can't really say I agree. While his name will always carry weight, no one gets a pass. We're dealing with the human race, after all - the only species to have both learned and mastered cynicism. 

Perhaps the only other name in the genre with George's amount of clout is John Carpenter, and that man hardly ever gets a pass anymore. His last few efforts (outside of the very good "Masters of Horror" entry Cigarette Burns) have been eviscerated - as far back as 2001 with Ghosts of Mars. People, almost joyfully, lambasted his newest release, The Ward (defended here), as if their harsh criticisms were tantamount to orgasm.

That said (and yes, in a typical IMDB message board disclaimer), I recognize that film is a subjective medium. It's art, after all, and everyone will have their own opinion and approach it in their own way. But I cannot stand idly by and read positive reviews for Diary and Survival of the Dead. Those are not good films, plain and simple. Diary gets by for being at least exciting and never boring, but Survival is so terrible that I'd rather sit through that awful Day of the Dead remake again. 

Positive reviews for Land of the Dead, though? That I can get. What I can't get is the hate. Because it's out there, and who knows why.

Exactly twenty years after 1985's Day of the Dead, Romero's fourth zombie opus stormed its way into theaters in the wake of Resident Evil, Shaun of the Dead, and a remake of Romero's own Day of the Dead, to reclaim its title as King of the Zombies. Romero had done his press, fine-tuned his script for a post-9/11 world, and sucked it up to work with a major studio. He even used Universal's original opening logo as opposed to the current one, in a statement I like to think equated to: "Motherfucker, I've been making this shit since before your father was big." He is the big cheese who created the modern zombie, after all, so I'll allow him the proclamation. 

The excitement in the horror community was palpable. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz's Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright eagerly provided cameos as chained-up zombies. KNB FX worked for a fraction of their usual prices just to be working with Romero again and to help support his project. Someone high-profile, perhaps Eli Roth, equated the new sequel as being a new addition to the Star Wars series for horror fans. And he was right. After twenty years, Romero was doing another zombie film, and this was a big deal.

But the movie was released...and nobody came.

Not realizing horror films don't do big business in the middle of the summer, squished in between all the hundred-million-dollar-budget releases, Universal sadly chose to release Land of the Dead at the end of June, and it simply got lost. (Not by me - I saw it three times.) While I knew Romero had been a revered figure in the horror world, I was shocked to pick up USA Today or the local paper and read positive reviews for this, his newest Dead film. A horror film getting good reviews? About zombies, no less? Isn't that impossible? (Let's not forget one crucial thing: Both Night and Day opened to critical drubbings, and it wouldn't be for years until they were duly appreciated.)

But I had my focus on the wrong place. It wasn't the film critic I had to worry about - it was the film fan. And oftentimes, that's so much worse. So-called fans hated it. "We waited twenty years for this?", etc. It even has the dreaded "WORST MOVIE EVER!" message board post. (Not hyperbole, this chick means it!)

And the fake complaints came rapid-fire, chief among them being "The acting was terrible!" (Sorry, have you not seen Night of the Living Dead?)

Romero's earlier zombie films have always relied on the power of the ensemble (Dawn proved this), and while that's still somewhat applicable to Land, this time the focus really seems to be on Riley Denbo (Simon Baker). Riley is a sort of messenger boy for Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), ruler and ultimate landlord of Fiddler's Green, a posh utopia allegedly free from zombie tyranny, but also divided into social class systems.

Despite Land being part four of an ongoing zombie saga (and though, mercifully, Land would end this particular series), each entry never really carried on anything beyond the zombie problem. No characters returned from one film to another and no events are mentioned - not even in passing. The only thing that was consistent was the worsening of the zombie problem. But in Land, Romero does choose to carry on one particular development established as far back as Dawn: the "walkers" are capable of learning, using tools for simple tasks, and communicating. What was solidified with Bub from Day has been passed onto Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), Romero's requisite strong minority character. (In Night, it was Ben, in Dawn, it was Peter, and in Day, he switched sexes for Sarah.) His trend continues, only now he's not just switching sexes again - he's switching to "the other half." Romero decided it was time to take the idea of this zombie race revolution seriously, and with no better way than his usage of a strong black male lead. 

Romero, working with a big studio again (a rarity), has all sorts of toys to utilize: better actors, better production design, and an abundance of CGI married into KNB's normal wonderment of red stuff. It's not just the producer or the producer's wife talking about cannibalism, but Dennis Hopper, lord of the acid era and all-around cinema legend. Fucking guy who made Easy Rider, people - he's kind of a big deal. Simon Baker as Riley does a fine job keeping a straight face amongst the sea of ghouls surrounding him, but he knows when to have fun, too. For some reason his performance comes off more Sam Spade than John McClane (maybe that's just me), but it works all the same.

By his side is Robert Joy, who also worked with Romero back on his ill-fated adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Half. He's saddled with uncomfortable looking burn make-up, but in turn receives all the best lines. ("I normally don't need that many.") He provides most of the film's much-needed comic relief and seems to have the biggest heart of anyone, but he also bears the brunt of society's cruelest treatment. As far as realism goes, that sounds about right.

John Leguizamo as Cholo (an actor for whom I don't normally care), likewise, cheeses it up all over the map. He knows what kind of film he's in and he enjoys going off the deep end in his normal John Leguizamo way. I'm actually a little surprised at how enthusiastic he was about being involved in such a project; I often wonder how A-list Hollywood regards not just the horror genre, but the fiercely independent side with which I sometimes think only hardcore horror nutballs are familiar. Speaking of horror nutballs, Asia Argento (daughter of the famed director Dario) shares the majority of the screen time with Riley as Slack, a former soldier and now prostitute forced to work the streets for Kaufman. She does pretty okay, as she was never the strongest actor, but she looks more at home than anyone else swinging weapons into zomb faces and delivering some pretty questionable dialogue. Also, her short skirt and body fishnets aren't the worst thing on Planet Earth.

(Lastly, check out the 0:47 minute mark for a cameo by a three-foot high version of Catherine Keener. Wah-wah!)

The political subtext, without which Romero's films would be admittedly less interesting, is ever present; it was pretty relevant in 2005, but has never been more relevant than right now. The super rich live high and mighty and safe in their golden towers, shielded from the outside threat, while the poor live with barbed-wire-thin security from that same threat. Are they safe? Perhaps. But there's not much between them and total bloody chaos. Romero takes it one step further and says when shit really hits the fan, it doesn't matter how many zeroes are in your bank account: your ass gone get et.

Strictly on a technical level, Land looks great. Romero, who has been making zombie films for nearly FIFTY YEARS, lacks nowhere in enthusiasm. "I love these guys!" he once said about his zombies, and it shows. He's definitely not conservative with the gore gags, even within the stifling confines of a major studio's restrictions. The scope of the film can sometimes feel stunted, as we never get a real feel for the scope of Fiddler's Green, but it looks gorgeous - even the night shoots, which are hard to pull off. And the scene where Big Daddy's zombies slowly emerge from the foggy river waters is the stuff of goosebumps.

Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil, whose most recent and amazing score for Cloud Atlas captivated audiences, provide a very percussion-driven anthem for Romero's tapestry of destruction. Gone are the days of Goblin, John Harrison, and library music; Land's music is big and jarring. The stand-out track (called "To Canada" on the official soundtrack release) is so fucking good that it appears three times.

And another thing: Earlier, when I said Romero never carried over older characters from one sequel to another? I lied:

Additionally, Romero's ability for black comedy is ever in place: listen during the zombie invasion for the automated voice of Fiddler's Green reassuring its occupants that Kaufman will always be there for them in times of danger...as he flees with his chauffeur to his car, his bags stuffed to the gills with all the cash he could carry.

In the Romero zombie pantheon, he hit the ground running with Night, peaked with Dawn, continued with the less-impressive-by-comparison Day, and went out somewhat unceremoniously but still nicely with Land. Even among those fans who consider Land to be quite strong, methinks they would still rank it last, and that's okay. Being the last in the race doesn't necessarily mean you suck; it just means you're the least good.

If I were to have an issue with Land of the Dead, it's this: from Night through Day, the zombies were always the main threat, and under it played out the mini and man-made conflicts to make the story socially relevant. But in Land, for the first time, the zombies are the back drop. Don't get me wrong, rotting ghoul faces fill the majority of the frames, and their absence is never more than brief. But Cholo's theft of the Dead Reckoning and Riley's vow to get it back in exchange for a one-way ticket out of the city is the main conflict, relegating the zombies to supporting players - as things to be simply dealt with while the fight over Dead Reckoning continues. Because of this, and for the first time, I sometimes wonder to myself as the closing credits play, "What was the point of this film?" I know, I know: Such a confession kinda makes all of the above and below null and void, right? "Except for the film not having a point, I really liked it!" And that's...kind of a problem. That's the last thing you want your audience to wonder as they file out of the theater.

But then again, Romero wanted to make a point about rich vs. poor, and he certainly did. In the process, people were ripped apart, decapitated, blown to crispy critters - all done with a wink and a smile. In the climax, when the zombs storm the Green and eviscerate the high-falootin rich - people, mind you, to whom we have not been introduced - we enjoy seeing them get ripped apart. And not in the "I'm watching a zombie film!" kind of way, but in the way that secretly satisfies the blood lust in us, and scratches that itch we have in terms of the hate we have for the top "1%". In this country, the rich belong to the most exclusive social club in the world, and, like Cholo, we'll try our whole lives trying to get in, only to be denied. They consume most of the country's wealth, so let Romero's army of the undead consume them in kind.

Romero may not be on top of his game anymore, and if Land were to be his last..at least debated-over film (as to its quality), I say fine with me. Twenty years later, his successful trilogy became a successful quadrilogy, and that's pretty fucking cool.

WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD (2014)

Wyrmwood is exhausting, but not necessarily in a bad way. Though its own marketing is quick to declare it as a combination of Dawn of the Dead and Mad Max, what Wyrmwood seems to owe a lot to, in spite of its vehicular zombie carnage, is From Dusk Till Dawn, a film that was so excited to circumvent expectations that the sheer audacious spectacle of it all pushed its audience to sheer fatigue by the time the Geckos were regretting their pilgrimage to the Titty Twister.

Wyrmwood takes a more restrained approach in scope, as necessitated by its budget, but the frenetic and frantic camera work, the cuts, the quick zooms, the Greengrassness of its execution - it soon becomes an entire carnival of clowns burning with neon-colored fire screaming in your face. What that overextended image means is simply: after a while, you want to scream "enough!"

Thankfully, this in-your-face motif doesn't last through to the end of the first act, but then the film runs into a new problem: going from a hyperkinetic carnage-a-thon to a slower-paced and idiosyncratic walkabout. Jokes happen, sadistic doctors dance to disco - and this in a film where a father is forced to shoot his own daughter in the face with a nail gun. It's unexpected, and the decision to do so feels like trying to appeal to every facet of the zombie-loving audience: those who love goofball humor with their undead, and those who don't.

People like to debate the effectiveness of the zombies from the Romero era versus the post-28 Days Later/MTV generation version, and which of them are superior, and on and on. This debate is generally broken down into the ol' walking versus running ghouls. But what it should be broken down to is the approach to the story - in particular, how the zombies are presented, and what purpose they serve. You'll find that the separation of the old school versus the new school becomes increasingly blurred, and after a while it doesn't matter if the undead are shambling slowly after you or doing an all-out sprint. Soon the only question that will matter is this: are the zombies being used for a purpose, or a plot device? Is there a social message at hand beneath all the face eating, or are zombies in right now so let's open that killer werewolf script you have and do a term-find/replace from one monster to the other?

The biggest hurdle Wyrmwood has to overcome is how completely oversaturated the zombie sub-genre has become. To purposely use a bad pun, the zombie thing has been done to death, and except for the minuscule population who simply can't get enough, everyone else has taken two steps way back from the whole brain-eating affair. Because horror subsists on cyclical genre, the zombie thing is a phase that will soon work itself out and fade back into the ten-dollar budget camp, where filmmakers have no agenda beyond good intentions and a story that hinges on metaphors of cannibalism and consumption rather than because zombies are "in." The slasher craze came and went - twice - as did the "torture porn" phase, which was mercifully short-lived. Zombies, too, will one day fade back away into the dark, unexplored recesses of the genre, and high school teen girls (or their moms) will stuff their Daryl t-shirts into the Goodwill garbage bag and wonder just what it was they were thinking.

Wyrmwood doesn't have a whole heck of a lot to "say," and its tonal shift from dead seriousness to smart-talkin' ironic fun doesn't necessarily come off feeling natural. That, once again, a group of survivors encounter a threat even more dangerous than the growing zombie army - that of the military who have let the power go their heads (which has been done already in 28 Days Later and Day of the Dead before it) - isn't doing the film favors. Its involvement of the Mad Max angle (another Australian production) certainly has a lot of potential to inject new life into the increasingly boring zombie sub-genre, but not nearly enough is done with it to make Wyrmwood stand out from the pack. However, given its easy watchability factor, the solid performances, and admittedly excellent make-up and visual effects, a little bit of brainless entertainment never hurt anyone.

THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

Happy Return of the Living Dead Day!

My love for the horror genre was written in the stars long before I ever fired out of my mother. But certain films along the way cropped up early on during my wee-one years just to make sure I stayed on the right path: Don Coscarelli's Phantasm 2 was there to show me that not every battle between good and evil had a happy ending. Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street proved that no place–not even your bedroom–was safe. And Dan O'Bannon's The Return of the Living Dead proved that "horror" could be hilarious.

Rumors suggest that following the bungled release of 1968's Night of the Living Dead, in which the filmmakers lost copyright to the entire film following a last-minute title change, George A. Romero and his partners John A. Russo and Russell Streiner parted ways, each divvying up this potential new zombie franchise to take in different directions. Romero was awarded the partial phrase "of the Dead" for all future "official" sequels while Russo and Streiner walked away with "of the Living Dead" for less official spinoffs. Now, is this true? As Trump says, all I know is what I read on the internet. But it sounds so silly and spiteful that I wouldn't be surprised if it were. Having said that, Romero obviously went on to create two celebrated sequels, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, along with...some others...while Russo, Streiner, and Night alum Rudy Ricci would wait to seize on their creative cinematic rights until 1985, which saw the release of The Return of the Living Dead.

Despite all the contributors (ultimately the Night veterans had very little influence on the final product), The Return of the Living Dead is fully a Dan O'Bannon film. Twenty years before Shaun of the Dead brought comedic zombies (or zombies at all, really) into the mainstream, O'Bannon rightly realized that rotting, wailing, running zombies chasing down a bunch of angry punk teenagers was actually kind of funny, and he played up the humor to maximum effect. Imbuing his story of the resurrecting dead with a wry sense of humor containing sarcasm, slapstick, and Vaudevillian timing, what O'Bannon does that's even more clever is give the horror aspects of his screenplay real bite (sorry), making scenes of marauding hordes of the dead sprinting–sprinting!–after their victims much more terrifying. Forget "removing the head or destroying the brain"–this time the living dead are wholly unkillable, regardless of what you have in your arsenal. "I hit the fucking brain!" growls Burt (Clu Gulagher, Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge) after putting a pick-axe into a zombie's skull without it doing a thing. By comparison, Romero's slow-moving, easily killable ghouls were barely a threat. O'Bannon ups the terror, but brings the humor with it. (He claims that naming his two leads Burt and Ernie was entirely coincidental, and he was completely unaware of the duo's long-running residence on Sesame Street, but when two of the film's hapless and doomed paramedics eaten by the living dead are also named Tom and Jerry, you really have to wonder.) 

During one scene where they look to Night of the Living Dead to provide answers on how to kill the undead (destroy the brain!), Freddy (Thom Matthews, Friday the 13th: Part VI Jason Lives) asks, "What do doctors use to crack skulls with?" Frank (James Karen, Poltergeist) answers, "Surgical drills!" at the exact moment Burt re-enters the scene holding a pick-axe. Humor like this seems very broad, especially when compared to today's standards in horror films where someone would stop to ironically muse on the meta of the conflict before continuing on, but it's a sadly extinct, wry sense of comedy that, for anyone who has ever seen or read an interview with Dan O'Bannon, senses was a part of his genetic makeup.

O'Bannon, famously, opted to make his take on this somewhat new zombie universe more humorous in an effort to avoid treading directly on territory he felt strongly was owned entirely by Romero. But at the same time, in lieu of this respect, you get the sense that O'Bannon was also having a hell of a time sending up this genre that, maybe, people shouldn't be taking so seriously after all. After all, Romero's zombies were flesh-eaters, taking their sweet time in stripping flesh and entrails from their victims for a warm feast–this is intrinsically frightening. O'Bannon's zombies seem only interested in braaaains, which they shouted repeatedly while chasing down a victim. While the image of them chowing down on brains is still the stuff of nightmares, everything leading up to a kill is kind of a cartoon.

It's during a routine training session at Uneeda Medical Supply where Frank unleashes the zombie-resurrecting 2-4-5 trioxin gas from barrels stenciled with Property of the United States Army, which douches himself and his new hire, Freddy, in the necromancing fog slime. This is part of the overall palpable sense of distrust O'Bannon shows toward the American military throughout, beginning with Frank refuting any inference that the barrels containing infected corpses might leak (even though they do), and ending with the very downbeat and cynical finale which sees the military dealing with their "missing Easter eggs" in the only way they know. And in between, brief scenes with Colonel Glover (Jonathan Terry) present him as a dry, bitter, and disillusioned man who orders nuke strikes like other people order pizza.

But even out of this anger comes further opportunities for humor. When Freddy asks why those tanks of diseased bodies ended up in the basement of a medical supply warehouse, Frank smiles slyly and says, "Typical Army fuck-up," with the word "typical" giving his response its meaning, as if it were part and parcel among the many other Army fuck-ups worth mentioning that deal with the misdistribution of dead bodies. After shit hits the fan and one character logically suggests that they call the number stenciled on the side of the tank, Burt looks besides himself as he demands, "Do you think I want the goddamned Army all over the place?," as that would be worse than the recently resurrected corpse screaming and pounding on the inside of the walk-in freezer.

The Return of the Living Dead's use of somewhat dated and primitive techniques for special effects is the thing, among many things, which make the film so lovable and enduring. Seeing the Tar Man or the female half-a-corpse strapped to the table opening their mouths once, but somehow emitting multiple syllables, of course doesn't look all that convincing. It makes no sense that their very tongueless and lipless mouths can emit 'S' and 'P' sounds. But it somehow goes along with the spirit of the film, which leans heavily on, "Fuck it, let's just have fun."

After all, have you seen the poster?

They're back from the grave and they're ready to party!

Calling The Return of the Living Dead the greatest zombie film of all times feels like an insult to George A. Romero, being that its existence directly stems from his 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, but also because O'Bannon avoided doing a more serious-minded zombie film, as he felt it would tread too closely on Romero's territory. However, where Romero was able to carry respectability through his zombie series up to and including Day of the Dead (which was pulverized at the box office the same year by O'Bannon's film), multiple attempts to sequelize The Return of the Living Dead–either maintaining the humor or not–proved that it wasn't so easy. (This more than includes Return of the Living Dead II, which tried so hard to be its predecessor that it not only brought back James Karen and Thom Matthews to play different characters who "feel like they've been here before," the sequel even ripped off its predecessor's incredible opening music, known as the Trioxin Theme.) Inspired by what came before, The Return of the Living Dead was lightning in a bottle, made from a perfect combination of sensibilities, willing performers, and grisly special effects. Though it may not enjoy the same critical or historical reputation as its mama, Night of the Living Dead, it's easily just as beloved...but only by people with braaaains.

MARK OF THE DEVIL (1970)

It's an undated 18th-century Austria, and two witch-hunters - Lord Cumberland (Henry Lom) and his apprentice, Count Christian von Meruh (Udo Kier), have come to a small village to root out its witchy influence. Already in attendance is Albino (pronounced Al-bee-no, and played by Reggie Nalder), the acting witch-hunter and all-around misogynist, who accuses any woman of witchcraft if she does not submit to his sexual demands. At first, Lord Cumberland seems to be rational, punishing Albino for his behavior and removing him from his service, but Cumberland soon lets the power go to his head and acts on his sexual desires much in the same way. His young apprentice has no choice to rebel, and that may have more than a little to do with the fact that he's begun falling in love with the beautiful and sultry Vanessa Benedikt (Olivera Katarina). Things soon spiral out of control as Lord Cumberland and his peons begin accusing the most random of people as being in league with the devil; the biggest offense, it would seem, is causing impotence in men. 

Talk about a limp reason! (Terrible.)

Goddamn, Udo Kier was handsome in his youth, wasn't he? What a handsome man! Look at those eyes! Why was he never cast as a James Bond villain? He's the perfect amount of handsome and miscellaneous European. They should have cast him in “A Man Too Handsome,” and James Bond would’ve fought how handsome he was. (This would have been one of the Timothy Dalton ones.) Man, I wish he'd come save me from Henry Lom!

Uh oh, I've really gotten off track here. I better get back to the film.

It goes without saying that Mark of the Devil, more than anything, is about men forcing their dominion over women, threatening them with torture and death should they not submit to their sexual whims. The majority of the men in the film are either villainous, or spineless and weak. Count von Meruh is the only decent male and ultimately ends up paying the price for it. Take that, add a few scenes of bodily torment, and what you have is an exploitation film masquerading as European gothic, but despite those specific tropes, Mark of the Devil did well enough financially that a sequel was commissioned, which maintains a religious vibe, retains Reggie Nalder in a different (and again villainous role), and tosses out the rest.

Mark of the Devil was a reactionary film based mostly off the success of 1968's Witchfinder General starring Vincent Price. Though the two films share a similar plot (that of witch-finding/destroying), Mark of the Devil is fine existing in shadow of the former so long as it gets to inflict all kinds of pain against its characters as well as revulsion against its audience.

Upon the film's premiere, sick bags were handed out to theatergoers who were there to see what was being marketed as "positively the most horrifying film ever made," which had been rated "V for violence." What that means in modern speak, by which time films that include a man's penis being bitten off and eaten by piranha have the potential to go theatrical, is that forty years later, it all plays rather tamely. Despite the tongues being ripped out and the bodies being stretched on the rack and the bed of nails poking all the butts, it doesn't quite retain the same amount of shock and horror as it did then. Normally that wouldn't be a big deal, since that's not the reason one should go see a film - regardless of it being horror – but that's really all Mark of the Devil had to which it could lay claim at that time. If we're being fair, it was an unoriginal plot conceived by piggy-backing off another infamous horror film (that underwent its own cuts to avoid getting a "V for violence" rating [just kidding, that doesn't exist]), but after all these years, the shock of the "violence" has worn off. Because of that, there’s not much else to carry the film beyond the array of very interesting and memorable performances (the best probably being the absolutely slimy role of Albino by Reggie Nalder).

Obviously, films have no choice, regardless of when they take place, but to reflect the zeitgeist of the times, and Mark of the Devil is no exception. While it was the brutality that drove audiences to see the film after word-of-mouth had begun spreading, it undoubtedly played much differently back then compared to how it plays today. Thankfully, though time has counteracted the appeal it once had, enough was left in place to justify first-timers to give it a chance. Of all the films made during this era, it's more that Mark of the Devil is one of the more infamous rather than the one of the better made, but that's okay. Sometimes that's reason enough.