SUGAR HILL (1974)

If Sugar Hill proves anything at all, it's that the blaxsploitation movement of the 1970s focused much of its attention on angry and sobering concepts, but didn't nearly enough embrace the full-on absurdity that the general exploitation movement had already been doing. When people hear the word "blaxspoitation," certain names immediately come to mind: Shaft, Foxy Brown, and perhaps Gravedigger Jones. Apply that to the horror genre and that's where it starts getting interesting: here comes Blacula, Blackenstein, and the lazily named Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde. Good job on your noticing that they're all "updated" versions of classic myths and literature, but beyond their gimmicky names, none of them felt too comfortable shedding their horrific surroundings and just trying to have a bit of silly fun. (Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde might be the worst offender in this camp, taking a ripe concept for race-relations exploration in which a black scientist inadvertently turns himself into a vampire during a freak experiment - a vampire that just happens to be white - and creating a film that's an utter chore to sit through.) It's easy to laugh at titles like Blacula and Blackenstein, as one might assume that they're hoots and a half, but each film presented a surprising amount of seriousness that one wouldn't expect from their respective posters alone. Despite their not-so-subtle titles, they just weren't stupid enough.

That's where Sugar Hill comes in. 

This 1974 oddball blaxsploitation offering starring the gorgeous Marki Bey as the eponymous heroine just wants to have tons of silly fun, utilizing the "evil white man" component for much more entertaining aspects. The social commentary involved is still just as important, but the film is also totally fine with resurrecting a bunch of cobweb-ridden corpses for the purposes of revenge. (It should be noted that the zombies presented in Sugar Hill adhere more closely to the "myth" of the zombies of New Guinea, in which living people were drugged and brainwashed into following their master; here, the zombies remain resurrected corpses, but are still very much following the orders of their master, not eating a bunch of people indiscriminately, as George Romero's Night of the Living Dead introduced in 1968.)

What may sound like idle praise for Sugar Hill is actually a fair point of commendation, which is the film's refreshing inclusion of something indicative of genuine black culture - more specifically, the inclusion of a New Orleans-esque flavor and the use of spirituality in the form of voodoo as a plot device. Though there are many titles in blaxsploitation canon that are more well-known, and some might argue still heavily referenced in even today's modern pop culture, not many of them relied on a very real and established facet of black culture, relegating many of the more recognizable characters to walk around, listen to funk, and look cool. And that's all well and good as far as entertainment goes, but blaxsploitation was birthed out of the desire to tell stories about strong and suave and sexy black characters, and to have seen such a lack of emphasis on a significant part of black culture is disappointing.

Sugar Hill maintains a fair balance of horror and thrilling action, but if it all comes across sillier than had been intended by American International Pictures (who also released Blacula and its sequel Scream, Blacula, Scream), we'll likely never know. Its own director, Paul Maslansky, would agree that it's not a perfect film, and his commentary track contains a handful of very willing self-critiques, including the nugget, "Look how poorly I framed that shot. He's barely in it. This was a terrible set-up." That right there, kids, is a lesson in humility.

Sugar Hill ain't exactly a film dedicated to charting the black struggle, but it's also clearly not trying to be. What it wants to do is shed minor light on the state of race relations during 1974, though it's wrapped within the very silly undead hands of zombie slaves. It does, depending on your outlook, either fall victim to or maintain certain expectations: the white people are evil, they use the n-word way too liberally, and they pay - oh lord, do they pay - for their transgressions. Everything aside, Sugar Hill is bananas-crazy, and entertaining in the most ridiculous of ways. So long as it gets that right, that's good enough to start with.

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's 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’ 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.  

PATH OF DESTRUCTION

Buy one.

MAGGIE (2016)

Maggie is a remarkable film in many respects, the most remarkable being that it was, for a long time, the little movie that could, and not one that many people took seriously. With several new Arnold films not doing all that well with audiences (in terms of box office), the announcement of him signing on to a zombie film alongside Abigail Breslin, who had already done a zombie film (and a comedy at that), didn't bode well, as right off the bat, it wasn't a project anyone was taking seriously. Talkback sections on the film's announcement were littered with the typical disdain for the actor's legacy and age; quotes from his previous films were appropriated and zombified. "Put the zombie down!" etc. The internet did not miss the chance to be the total cliche that it is.

And then Maggie began making film festival rounds to mostly positive reviews, and even those reviewers who panned the film at least had the decency to rightly herald Arnold's performance. For a long time, Arnold has been less of an actor and more of a superstar celebrity. And that's okay. He's only contributed some of the most entertaining action films on Planet Earth, so in that regard, not everyone need be Daniel Day Lewis. His mysterious "Austrian" accent and subsequent inability to fully articulate through it has relegated him to taking on roles where his subdued and slightly unusual way of speaking didn't inhibit the type of role he was playing, like, say, cyborg, or barbarian, or kindergarten teacher.

It's entirely possible that Maggie director Henry Hobson cast Arnold for somewhat the same reason - choosing someone who once represented the immortal screen superstar to this time play it small, sad, and even helpless. Without being able to rely on muscles or guns or groan-inducing puns, Arnold, this time, has only his performance to contribute. Finally, after all these years, the Austrian Oak has proven that he does have the chops to commit to such a role, relying only his talent without any of his familiar crutches in sight.

Maggie doesn't fully work and its ending may leave the viewer a little unsatisfied, but for the majority of the running time, what does work fully overcomes its weaknesses. Much like George Romero has been doing for fifty years, Maggie uses its zombies as a metaphor, but this time confines it to the family unit - more specifically, to the pain of losing a child to terminal illness. It's about witnessing the slow transformation from living to dying, and feeling completely helpless to stop it. To call the film powerful might be overstepping a bit, but at times it can be deeply affecting, with a roundhouse of excellent performances (including the film's best, which belongs to Bryce Romero [no relation!] as the doomed semi-love interest, Trent) and strengthened by restrained storytelling, Maggie offers the most unique film of Arnold's career as well as one of the most rewarding and unassuming gems of the year.

Hobson designed Maggie's visual presentation with muted and pale colors, as if every piece of surrounding is void of life. Details are finely captured, including Arnold's weathered and craggy face. Background textures of the family's depressed and depressing farmhouse, which contribute to much of the established mood, are also ably captured - they don't so much "pop" as they just exist, in keeping with Maggie's restrained style. From the squeaking and rattling of Wade's truck to the ambiance of burning fields to David Wingo's melancholy score, Maggie's audioscape remains as intimate but present as the film itself. Dialogue is clean and well-presented. Environmental ambiance has been perfectly subdued, wiping away the sounds of birds and other native wildlife, adding to the overall feeling of death that drapes across the entire world. Only the desolate sounds of cicadas remain. 

Strip away all your preconceived notions of just what kind of film Maggie is based solely on the fact that Arnold's face appears on the cover. Not only is Maggie purposely pensive (fans of the quicker-paced The Walking Dead should keep walking), it also plays things 100% serious, perhaps at times to its detriment, but it's still one of the best and underseen films of which Arnold has been a part for a long time. One hopes that Maggie's excellent video release introduce the film to a whole new audience that may have missed it the first time, leading them to embrace the new approach by one of cinema's favorite leading men, perhaps that will result in Arnold taking on more serious films and avoiding studio nonsense like Terminator: Genisys - and that's a possibility we should all take very seriously.

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.]

BURYING THE EX (2014)

Max (Anton Yelchin) has a problem. His girlfriend of many years, Evelyn (Ashley Greene), is driving him crazy, and for the longest time he has stalled in breaking things off because he didn't have the guts to do it. One day a bus changes all that - by knocking Evelyn out of her shoes and the life out of her body, allowing Max time to sigh in relief and grow close and cozy with Olivia (Alexandra Daddario), the punky and quirky malt shop owner/operator. Things seem to be going pretty well...until Evelyn inexplicably rises from the grave and returns home, hornier and gooier than ever, leaving Max in an even worse conflict: not only is she back to make his life hell, she's now a member of the living dead. He once promised her they would be together forever, and she was going to hold him to it.

As you can imagine, brains jokes.

Burying the Ex was the third comedy of 2014 to mix teen love and zombies, following on the heels of the superior but uneven Life After Beth and the well-meaning but dull Warm Bodies. Why this is so disappointing is because Burying the Ex is the latest feature effort from beloved genre filmmaker Joe Dante, he of the cult classics Gremlins and The Howling, whose involvement should have resulted in a slam dunk. Though an overused concept, if anyone was going to waltz in and do something unique with it, surely it would have been him, as his sensibilities as a storyteller and talent as a filmmaker have set him off from his colleagues during his entire career. But it's the broadness of the film's comedy and the unoriginality of the conflict that stunts his ability to infuse it with his identity, thus robbing us of a new Joe Dante film and leaving us with yet another forgettable title in the "uh oh! zombies!" sub-genre.

After 2003's Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Joe Dante took a long break from feature film-making, only returning in 2012 for the solid genre effort, The Hole. However, that didn’t mean he was taking all that time off from directing, as he also contributed the episodes “Homecoming” and “The Screwfly Solution” for the short-lived Masters of Horror, as well as a segment in the horror anthology Trapped Ashes. Generally, when a director is missing from the feature-film game for that long, the eventual next output isn’t normally great. (See John Carpenter's The Ward.) The Hole, which played film festivals for a long time, struggled to find national distribution, and that didn’t bode well, either. But The Hole would go on to prove that not only was the film worth the wait, but that Dante was able to buck that trend and prove one thing: time away didn't necessarily mean he was off his game.

Much as it pains me to say, perhaps Mr. Dante should have stayed away just a bit longer this time around.

Burying the Ex just might be Dante's broadest comedy yet (this being a director who's made a Looney Tunes movie), and it's almost entirely the fault of the screenplay, which relies on obnoxious humor, cliched situations, and tired dialogue. When you can sense what line any particular character is going to utter, or guess the punchline to the groan-inducing joke soon to come, you'll know you're in the presence of a story that's not trying to break new ground, nor trying to find new ways to entertain. 

This is probably the most disappointing aspect, as the film's concept alone is well within Dante's wheelhouse, it being a marriage of horror and comedy, and not afraid to get a little bloody. What it is afraid to do is go for earned laughs. Instead, we see the same recycled gags set to a musical score by Joseph LoDuca (the Evil Dead trilogy) that telegraphs ahead of time what you should find funny or pensive, dramatic or horrifying - and it all sounds cheap.

The cast manages to turn in varying work. Yelchin as Max comes off as likable, as he usually does, but there's something about his performance which suggests he doesn't quite understand the kind of film he's making, or the sensibilities of his director. A subdued performance in the midst of this madness causes the audience to constantly reel back, unsure of how they're supposed to be feeling and what exactly they're experiencing. Greene, on the other hand, embraces her role to maximum effect. Even before she's laid to rest, her Evelyn is overly peppy with quixotic expectations - the cause of her and Max's relationship issues in the first place. She's a green-going liberal to the analth degree, quipping about fluorescent light-bulbs and food additives and vegan tofu. It's mildly amusing until you realize the film is cheating by manipulating its audience into disliking her, transforming the conflict from torn young love - a conflict of substance worth exploring - into something akin to "Run, my zombie ex-girlfriend will bite you!" Daddario, perhaps most recognizable from her role as your heart attack in HBO's stellar first season of True Detective, plays the horror-comedy version of Garden State's Natalie Portman, in that she's bubbly and strange and adorable - an outwardly positive and enthusiastic person, and the kind of character with whom you can't help but fall in love, until you realize that a girl that beautiful who shares all your same interests and still has her baby teeth and somehow owns her own malt shop only exists in the movies. Max and Olivia's ensuing romance is the only aspect that drives the story forward and makes it interesting - and this in a film about a zombie ex-girlfriend at home falling apart in the bathtub.

As a director, Joe Dante has always been successful at “the Joe Dante aesthetic,” and it’s something he’s been rightfully exploiting ever since his first major blockbuster, 1984’s Gremlins. He has the ability to create something that, on the surface, seems to appeal to the younger demographic, but offers a bit more bite than that audience might be anticipating. His films exist somewhere in a chasm between children's fare and adult entertainment. In the Gremlins films, you have the adorable Gizmo as that conduit to perceived accessibility, though little mutants are soon shoved down garbage disposals while elderly women are heaved out windows. In The Hole, early-teen characters are facing their fears head-on, some childlike in their appearance, and some based on some very real-world dangers. But Dante isn’t satisfied with just creating something and presenting it to his younger audiences on a platter; instead, he wants to take his concepts and up them, just a little, beyond his audience's normal comfort level. He wants to challenge them, just a little bit, more than his creative colleagues. He wants “his” children to face facts and understand that this world contains real dangers, and though he may rely on typical horror tropes to establish this, that doesn’t make them any less relevant or emotionally affecting - or any less funny, which, as they say, tragedy often is. Burying the Ex is unique in that it's Dante's first R-rated film since 1981's The Howling, which is surprising considering his Masters of Horror efforts are quite brutal...and yet, meanwhile, Burying the Ex is not. In fact, beyond one scene of violence, the rating is befuddling, as the film comes off as rather tame and closer to his line-straddling aesthetic, only this time, instead of a boundary-pushing coming-of-age, it's a somewhat lame and toothless film geared toward, well, no one specifically.

Burying the Ex feels like one big missed opportunity. It's one thing for a film to be disappointing, but that disappointment is worsened when it comes from a filmmaker so highly revered in the horror community and who has consistently proven to be capable of so much better. A new film from the likes of Joe Dante will always bring with it a certain amount of expectation, which has been fully earned, but as Burying the Ex has proven, sometimes an intelligent director can make something without any braaaaaaaains.