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Screengrab Review: "Pontypool"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

When thinking of those who, in our lifetimes, have made major contributions to the shape of pop mythology, let no one forget the name of George Romero. When I was a kid, growing up between the time that Romero's first and best movie, Night of the Living Dead, planted the seeds of his achievement, and the release of its sequel, Dawn of the Dead, cemented it, I spent maybe half my young life watching and reading about horror movies. Partly this was research: at the playground, the jury was still out on whether monsters actually existed, and if they did, I wanted to be ready for them when they stormed the house. Mummies didn't occupy my thoughts to any special degree: they were easy to outrun, and besides, so long as you didn't go violating any Egyptian tombs, it was easy to stay on their good side. Vampires and werewolves were a lot worse, but at least there were clear, set-in-stone guidelines for dealing with them: daylight, wooden stakes, silver bullets, full moons, everybody who dipped a toe into the horror genre knew the drill. But zombies? Now there was a disappointing monster. There weren't many zombie movie classics, and those seemed to be vague on the rules regarding zombiedom. Basically, a zombie was a big, reanimated dead guy with bugged-out eyes and no personality who, under the distraction of the voodoo master who had resurrected him, stagger up and throttle you. No zombie ever looked as if he enjoyed his work, and there was no consensus on how to deal with one, or even if it was the zombie you wanted to target or if you should go over his head and take it up with his boss. Vampires, werewolves, and even most mummies were free agents. Zombies were the hired help.

All that changed thanks to Romero. With two movies and some help from a few enthusiastic Italian imitators, Romero completely changed not just the rule book but the contemporary identity and meaning of zombies in horror movie culture. Voodoo? Fuck that noise. The modern zombie may still not be the life of the party, and he tends to travel in packs, but he's out for himself, and there's no mystery about what he wants. The boy is hungry. Zombies lurch around, using their superior numbers to overwhelm their victims, on whom they plan to dine. The solution to the problem is also simple and direct: bring a shotgun and a mop. Think of it: thirty years ago, when Dawn of the Dead was just being released and Night of the Living Dead was an acknowledged midnight classic but not yet seen as the starting point of a whole damn sub-genre, zombies were monster movie runner-ups on the verge of disappearing altogether on account of political correctness. (It's hard to give a dignified representation of a voodoo priestess.)

By now, we're already at a point where the cliches that Romero created are understood to be part of the shared general knowledge of moviegoers, and are drawn upon by filmmakers who like to insist that they're not "really" making a zombie movie. Bruce McDonald's Pontypool (which Scott von Doviak reviewed here when it played at SXSW, and which goes into release today) isn't "really" a zombie movie, in the same way that 28 Days Later, which (like Pontypool) was about virus-maddened mobs, wasn't a zombie movie, just as Guillermo del Toro's Cronos wasn't a vampire movie, and Mike Nichols's Wolf wasn't an update on Lon Chaney, Jr. But both Pontypool and 28 Days Later are zombie movies in the sense that they play by their own version of Romero's rules, and play on the expectations that the audience builds up based on cues the movies send out that we're in Living Dead territory. (In fact, one of the first not-really-zombies zombie movies was Romero's own The Crazies, which came out between the first two installments of his living dead saga and which established some durable new cliches of its own.) Neither Pontypool or 28 Days Later is really imaginable without Romero's movies, and Pontypool in particular depends on the precedent set by Romero's movies to keep the audience with it for the first half hour, when the prolonged wait for something to happen is actually made more tolerable by the fact that we have a pretty good idea of what that something will look like when it does happen.

Pontypool is set almost entirely in a small radio station in the title locale in rural Ontario, and for most of the first half there are only three characters onscreen: the morning DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his beleaguered producer Sydney (Lisa Houle), and the fresh-faced young techie Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) who's just back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. (And when circumstances take one of them out oif the picture, a new character appears out of nowhere to ease the transition.) Grant--described by New York magazine reviewer as "an egghead incarnation of Don Imus" (which I think may be a non-litigious way of saying a version of Don Imus that isn't a smug, lazy scumbag)--is an aging, haggard-looking "fight the power" type who likes to gas on about "developing a relationship" with his listeners by challenging them (i.e., pissing them off) and whose catch phrase is "taking no prisoners!" He has apparently been reduced to manning the mike in this jerkwater burg because of his past indiscretions, and the first half of the movie includes the makings of an entertaining comedy about this self-styled provocateur's attempts to adjust to his new surroundings as Sydney fills him in on the sorrows and family connections of the nobodies he's making fun of on the air and lets him in on the local trade secrets, such as the fact that the "Sunshine Chopper" from which the station's traffic reporter delivers his broadcasts is actually a Dodge Dart parked on a hill.

That all pretty much goes out the window as the suspense plot develops. Snug and isolated in their studio, Grant and company begin to pick up reports--from the traffic reporter, from phone-in callers, from a BBC reporter trying to get his own handle on the story--that a deranged, gibbering mob is tearing around Pontypool, tearing people apsrt with their bare hands. As the descriptions of the carnage going on outside the studio grew more detailed and grisly, evidence mounts that there's a virus at work that spreads through the English language; people who succumb to it are particularly susceptible when uttering terms of endearment, such as "honey" and "sweetheart." Conceptually, Pontypool might be a blood-soaked spin-off of William S. Burrough's zen koan "Language is a virus from outer space" (and also, maybe, one of Alan Moore's old comics stories for 2000 A.D.) The script, by Tony Burgess, is based on his novel Pontypool Changes Everything, but it would be a bang-up radio play. Given the War of the Worlds set-up and the metaphorical use of spoken language--and the use of a breakdown in language as a sign that a character is about to start slavering blood--it's kind of amazing that Burgess didn't shape the material with a radio play in mind. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that radio plays are one of the few forms that now have less cultural cachet than Canadian-based midnight movies.

Bruce McDonald, whose credits include Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, the Ellen Page showcase The Tracey Fragments, and the TV series Twitch City, has always struck me as being sort of like the Canadian Alex Cox. Like Cox, he's a self-styled hipster weirdo who picks his projects to serve his image, but unlike Cox, he's not so infatuated with himself that he makes the mistake of thinking that he's made a wild, provocative movie just by signing his name to it and hanging out on the set while the cameras roll: he does make a little effort to entertain. His greatest success here is with McHattie, who has a great radio voice and who, with his gaunt features and frame and black cowboy hat, is an indelible image of the motor-mouthed hipster malcontent who's just found himself on the wrong side of sixty. The scenes in which McHattie's Grant, on the air and flying by the seat of his pants, valiantly tries to string together the hazy reports coming his way into a coherent picture for his listeners add up to a stirring depiction of professional competence that may be more exciting than the reports themselves.

But the downside of McDonald's relative modesty as a director is that it costs him something in both energy and conviction. And his pursuit of cool at all costs can be self-defeating: a scene in which Sydney undercuts the news of a character's death with a cheap sick joke destroys the emotion that the movie has achieved without replacing it with anything stronger. The last third of Pontypool, which is when it's most like a conventional zombie-attack picture, is the weakest, and it devolves into a real mess. The film will be most satisfying to those who like their horror movies to wear their "conceptual" timber on their sleeve. (When a character says, "Talking is risky, and talk radio is high risk," he might be reading the Director's Statement on camera.) It's "interesting." But it's never scary, and I'm not enough of an avant-guardist to see that as a good thing in what's billed as a horror movie.

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

CLIFFHANGER (1993)

Let’s be clear...Cliffhanger is not a good film. Sylvester Stallone is...well, he’s Sylvester Stallone, and John Lithgow only works as a villain when he’s playing a snotty elitist or Dr. Lizardo and not somebody who’s actually meant to scare me. But the primal suspense of the opening sequence above haunts me far more than any number of scenes from much, much better films. Here’s the set-up: Stallone plays Gabe, some kind of extreme mountain ranger who (along with helicopter ace Janine Turner) attempt what should be the routine rescue of their colleague Hal (Michael Rooker) and his cute-as-a-bug girlfriend, Sarah (Michelle Joyner), who’ve managed to get trapped while hiking in the Rocky Mountains -- but then things go horribly awry, and suddenly Gabe and Sarah are stuck hanging from a thin line between two peaks over a vertigo-inducing abyss...and then the line starts to give way...and then Sarah slips and winds up dangling from Gabe’s meaty fingers...and it’s all very suspenseful and routinely pulse-pounding until -- holy shit! -- sweet, innocent Sarah actually falls to her death, screaming all the way...the kind of unexpected gut-punch one rarely encounters in the typical theme-park safety net of most summer thrill rides. The incident is so demoralizing, in fact, that it hangs like a pall over the characters and audience for the rest of the film's running time, adding untenable weight to a ludicrous Die Hard knock-off that can’t support it -- but director Renny Harlin deserves at least some credit for creating such a terrifying, memorable stand-alone reminder of the visceral power of cinema. (AO)

WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (2000)

It’s fairly common in the films of Bela Tarr to find scenes that take place in barrooms. But there’s no scene in Tarr’s filmography -- or anyone else’s, for that matter -- that’s quite like the opening of his 2000 film Werckmeister Harmonies. At the end of another long night, the barkeep kicks out all of his customers, but not before Valuska (Lars Rudolph) demonstrates to the others the way a solar eclipse works by using three of the drunks to portray the sun, the Earth, and the moon. At first, it’s a hilarious bit of imagery, with the sun waving his arms, the Earth lurching around the sun, and the moon circling the Earth at a dizzying pace. However, before long Valuska has a surprise in store for the others, as he stops the moon between the sun and the Earth and proceeds to describe in haunting language what happens when the sun’s rays have been blocked out -- the strange behavior of the animals, the moment of dread felt by the people who witness it, and so on. Of course, Valuska explains, the moment is over as soon as it began, but it’s this moment, and the thoughts of apocalypse it inspires, that sets the tone for the rest of the film. Soon enough, a real brush with the reckoning arrives in town (in the form of a traveling circus and its mysterious whale), causing all hope to disappear, however briefly, from the townspeople. And so, what begins as a strange and hypnotic opening comes to encapsulate the entire film -- practically the definition of a great and important opening scene. (PC)

DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004)

Zack Snyder’s loose remake of George A. Romero’s 1978 zombie classic gets progressively less interesting as it goes along, though there’s almost no way his film could have maintained the level of blistering, manic terror delivered by its opening sequence. After finishing her shift at the local hospital, Sarah Polley’s nurse returns to her suburban home and loving husband. Their peaceful domesticity is shattered the following morning, however, when the neighbor’s little girl appears at their bedroom door looking decidedly fleet and hungry. A ferocious attack ensues, followed by Polly’s husband transforming into a crazed cannibal, sparking further mayhem that propels her outside and – as a gorgeously wrought panoramic shot reveals – into mass chaos, her street overrun by zombies and their fleeing, panicking would-be victims. Hopping into her car, she zigzags through the madness, Snyder’s camera situated directly behind her car (or attached to its hood) to heighten the crazed immediacy of the action, which culminates in a thudding car crash that proves an ideal segue into Snyder’s Johnny Cash-scored credit sequence and subsequent mall-set zombiepocalypse saga. (NS)

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

It's the nature of the world that everything you think you understand should be challenged. That no matter how long you live and what sort of times you have seen, the world will always seem stranger and more frightening as you age. You expect wisdom with your years, but time tends to make you complacent instead. No Country For Old Men is a little too insubstantial to qualify for Cormac McCarthy's top shelf, but that doesn't mean that it's devoid of his signature insight into darkness and weakness. The movie hews tightly to the book, but movies are more immersive than books, and it's harder to take a step back from a seemingly wise narrator to ask whether one is actually hearing wisdom or whether it is complacency. When Sheriff Ed Tom Bell tells us from the beginning that he can't understand the way that crime has changed, that he can't be a part of the world because it would put his soul at hazard, the sweep of the movie leads some or even most of the audience to believe that they are supposed to agree with him. And given a choice between Sheriff Bell and the amoral killing machine Anton Chigurh, well, Bell would be the safer choice for your sympathy. Bell is wrong, though, which will be brought to his attention late in the movie. But now we're at the beginning, just Sheriff Bell talking about how time has passed him while the camera lingers over those gorgeous shots of West Texas, so serene they look like still images until the wind blows. And then we're in the police station watching a man calmly murder another, leaving scuff marks on the floor as random and beautiful as the desert grass we just saw. And we're reminded that the desert, like the world around it, is always as full of danger as it is of beauty. That's nothing new. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Thursday Poll for November 6, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This year’s Presidential election might have resulted in a decisive win, but not all elections lately have been so clear-cut. Take last week’s poll, in which we polled you folks about your favorite of our top 5 horror movies of all time. With nearly all precincts reporting, it’s a dead heat between the top contenders, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Making this deadlock all the more surprising is the fact that, just a few weeks ago, these first two installments in George A. Romero’s Dead franchise didn’t finish nearly so closely in that particular poll. At any rate, it’s looking like we’re going to have to send this one to the House of Representatives, who ought to be able to settle this thing, although the possibility of a corrupt bargain is a very real one.

This week, we look ahead to the upcoming awards season. If recent history is any indication, most of the Oscar nominees will come from films that have yet to be released in theatres. But odds are that at least the moviegoing public has already seen a few of the nominees who will wake up happy on the morning on January 22, 2009. So who stands the best chance of getting nominated from the first ten months of the year? Setting aside the most obvious choice (the late Heath Ledger, of course), I’ve listed five of the most likely contenders, taken from films that have been widely released or are currently available on DVD. Will it be Anne Hathaway’s revelatory work in Jonathan Demme’s family dramedy? Angelina Jolie in her first collaboration with perennial Oscar favorite Clint Eastwood? The scene-stealing Penelope Cruz in Woody Allen’s latest? The Jenkins, knocking one out of the park in his long-awaited leading man breakthrough? Or will the Academy decide to recognize the controversial, attention-getting comedic work by Robert Downey Jr., the big-star story of the year so far? The choice is yours:

Who's most likely to be Oscar-nominated? | BuzzDash polls

As always, feel free to sound off in the comments section. See you next week!

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

5. DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)

Fuck a Zack Snyder remake – no other zombie movie, not even by George Romero, will ever surpass the original Dawn of the Dead. How do I love this gory, nasty, and surprisingly moving masterpiece of terror? Let me count the ways. First of all, while it can’t surpass the closed-up creepiness of the original Night of the Living Dead, it opens it up to staggering effect and makes it a truly apocalyptic horror film. Second, Night had always been projected as a one-off; it was Dawn that made zombies into one of the famous monsters of filmdom, that transformed Romero’s dead-eyed flesh-eaters into beings with their own mythology and internal logic. By doing so, it didn’t just launch a franchise – it launched an entire universe, a cultural archetype with as much meaning and possibility as vampires, werewolves – or angels. Third, it’s tight as hell, incredibly suspenseful, and remarkably well-acted, with the technical difficulties of filming something so ambitious on a shoestring overcome in surprising and effective ways. Fourth, like all great horror movies, it gives us an essential human drama at its center; we care about the story because we care about Stephen, Peter, Roger and Francine. Fifth, it’s a deeply satirical exercise, the first attempt – and probably the most successful – by Romero to mock us by showing us the way a lot of people probably see us: zombies as cultural/political metaphors. And sixth…well, it’s about a bunch of flesh-eating zombies running amok in a shopping mall. And, to use the highfalutin language of film criticism, that’s awesome.

4. PSYCHO (1960)

One of the running jokes around the opulent Screengrab offices is that no matter what lists we come up with, there’s some way to fit Psycho onto them. I’ve personally written up so many aspects of it, I feel like I should get a screenplay credit. But Psycho is definitely responsible for two major accomplishments – both, to me, indisputable, and both decidedly mixed blessings to cinema – that make it especially suitable for this list. The first is that it effectively killed off noir. The highly stylized crime dramas were already on their way out, but Psycho, by cribbing so many of their visual cues but utterly annihilating (literally, at least in the case of Marion Crane) their doomed criminal anti-heroes and shifting the focus from ordinary criminals to extraordinary psychopaths, Psycho put noir in the ground as a dominant method of storytelling. The second is that it ushered in a new kind of villain: setting the tone for the slasher movies of 20 years later and the torture porn of 40 years later, Psycho replaced the notion of the murderer as a relatable character – a villain, surely, but one driven by rational urges like greed, lust, revenge, or envy – with that of the psychopath. Gone was the moral ambiguity of crime dramas past, and in its place was the appeal of the villain who was totally alien: who was intriguing because we could not recognize ourselves in him, because he did things we literally could not imagine. There’s no denying that these two transformations did more harm than good, and ushered in legions of terrible movies, but they’re also further testimonies to how great, and how transformative, Psycho really was.

3. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

George A. Romero has directed a number of great films, but his legacy will surely be his contributions to the zombie horror subgenre. With five Dead films under his belt and yet another on the way, Romero has defined the modern concept of big-screen zombies. Many consider his masterpiece to be 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, with its scathing critique of our consumerist impulses, but for sheer thrills, nothing can top the original Night of the Living Dead. The plot is simple, almost crude -- a group of strangers barricade themselves in an abandoned home in order to defend themselves against an infestation of zombies roaming the countryside. But working from this rudimentary premise, Romero fashioned a scruffier, scarier counterpart to Hitchcock’s The Birds, another film that mined horror from a sudden, uncanny plague unleashed by nature. In addition, Romero’s hardscrabble shooting style -- his black and white 16mm cinematography was necessitated by the film’s $100,000 budget -- helped to change the way horror movies could be made. With the runaway success of Night, horror began to move away from the elegant, big-budget productions to more quick-and-dirty scares, paving the way for the likes of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, and many others. But none of this would matter if Night wasn’t scary as hell, which it definitely is, in large part because Romero so skillfully orchestrates the breakdown of society that results from the zombie plague. With the line between living and dead so thoroughly obliterated, nothing else can be sacred -- government, law, morality, and perhaps most memorably, the institution of the family. When a couple’s infected daughter suddenly turns on her parents, it’s clear that anything is possible in Romero’s world, which is perhaps the scariest notion of all.

2. FREAKS (1932)

Having launched a legend the year before with the Bela Lugosi talkie of Dracula, old Hollywood hand Tod Browning decided to quit fucking around: this time, he was serious. This time, the horror felt by his audience wasn’t going to be creepy or sensual: it was going to be repulsive and visceral. And he was going to make them pay for it. The essence of some of the greatest horror stories is making the audience question who, exactly, the monsters really are, and, by peopling its cast with authentic touring circus freaks and then making them the victims of the greedy, lying “normals”, Freaks made it crystal clear: they are us. Some have accused the film of exploiting its cast, but that’s a knee-jerk reaction that not only ignores the movie’s moral complexity (and the fact that the wronged freaks exact a chilling, and utterly deserved, vengeance on their tormentors), but also the fact that for many of the performers, it was the biggest paycheck they’d ever have. They were also treated well by Browning and his cast, something that couldn’t be said for the studio (which wouldn’t allow most of them to dine in the cafeteria) or many of its stars (who refused to star alongside “sideshow exhibitions”). The knowledge of how the picture was made only serves to enhance its powerful condemnation of intolerance -- which was even stronger, just as the ending was even bleaker, before the studio forced cuts. Even today, over 75 years later, Freaks remains one of the most disturbing films ever released by a major Hollywood studio – just as Tod Browning had intended.

1. THE SHINING (1980)

One of the big mistakes many horror filmmakers make is to over-explain the mysterious forces at work in their films. Ask anyone who’s watched the misguided “explanation scene” that George Romero belatedly added to some of the DVD releases of Night of the Living Dead -- usually, not knowing exactly why the monsters are attacking is much more effective than knowing. No horror movie has captured this idea better than The Shining. Stanley Kubrick memorably stated of 2001 that he “wanted to ask more questions than we had answers,” and he used the same tactic in bringing Stephen King’s bestseller to the screen. Naturally, this annoyed many viewers, including King himself, who didn’t cotton to the liberties Kubrick took with his work. But no matter -- it’s the film’s ambiguity that makes it so disturbing. Why are there two different Gradys? What’s up with the guy in the animal suit? And what exactly happens to Jack at the end of the movie? Wisely, Kubrick withholds the answers, allowing the disorientation that results from these scenes to go unresolved. In addition, the film also tells a more human-sized horror story, of a family that’s barely holding together even before the ghosts arrive on the scene -- a man whose eerie formality keeps his demons uneasily at bay as long as he stays off the sauce, a boy overwhelmed by his supernatural gift (curse?) and still scarred by an act of drunken violence by his father, and the woman who can’t handle the idea of losing either of them. All the while, Kubrick practically hypnotizes us with his filmmaking brilliance -- those Steadicam shots! -- meaning that even when The Shining becomes difficult to watch, it’s impossible to look away.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six & Seven

Contributors: Jack-o-Leonard Pierce, Mauled Clark

Thursday Morning Poll for October 23, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Reader Steve C. accused me of being a sadist due to last week’s poll, in which I asked readers which of George A. Romero’s Dead movies was their favorite. But (somewhat spurious) charges of sadism notwithstanding, the Romero poll saw perhaps the most decisive win of any Thursday Morning Poll to date. A full two-thirds of Screengrab readers selected 1978’s gorefest/consumerism satire Dawn of the Dead as their favorite of the franchise, followed by Night and Day. The more recent entries in the series, Land and Diary, received no love whatsoever, but while neither of them is up to the high standard set by the original trilogy, I have a soft spot for Land, which almost feels like the best John Carpenter movie that Carpenter never made. If nothing else, it’s the best Carpenter movie in the last two decades (since They Live, of course).

In conjunction with both the upcoming Presidential election and the recent release of Oliver Stone’s W., I thought a Presidential quiz was in order for this week. But while I struggled to come up with a suitable topic, it dawned on me that Josh Brolin wasn’t the first member of his family to portray an actual President. A few years ago Josh’s dear old dad, James “Paging Mr. Herman” Brolin, essayed the role of Ronald Reagan in a much-ballyhooed and controversial miniseries, The Reagans. In light of this realization, I decided this was the only logical question for this week’s quiz. So, I ask you- which Brolin do you think was more Presidential?

Which Brolin was more Presidential? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. So exercise your right to vote, and we’ll see you next week!

DVD Digest for September 30, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a master’s final film shares the shelves with one of the summer’s biggest hits and a number of classic horror films coming out just in time for Halloween.

DVD of the Week: For years, the Criterion Collection has been committed to releasing superior DVD version of the films of the great director Yasujiro Ozu. Now, they’re continuing their commitment with this week’s release of Ozu’s final film, An Autumn Afternoon. In many ways, the film is a color analogue to Ozu’s classic (and my favorite film of his) Late Spring, this time telling the story of an aging man and his reluctant-to-marry daughter from the perspective of the father, played as ever by Ozu stalwart Chishu Ryu. With the switch in perspective away from youth to old age, it’s tempting to read An Autumn Afternoon as a kind of farewell piece by the filmmaker, a kind of passing of the torch to younger filmmakers. Yet it’s clear while watching the film that Ozu was as talented in his final years as he was in the prime of his career, and his seamless shift to color with his final films provide a hint that he might have been able to gracefully change with the times while keeping his one-of-a-kind style.

Other “classics” coming to DVD this week include the 123-minute cut of Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (Ryko) and, uh, the “10th Anniversary Edition” of Can’t Hardly Wait (Sony) for which I know you were all clamoring.

The week’s biggest new release on DVD is Iron Man (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), the first and one of the biggest summer blockbusters, and much-anticipated arrival of Robert Downey Jr. on Hollywood’s A-list. Also of note is the Judd Apatow production Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Universal, also Blu-Ray), which is also included in Universal’s Ultimate Unrated Comedy Collection (also Blu-Ray) alongside fellow Apatow films The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. Other recent releases coming to DVD: Taxi to the Dark Side (Image), CSNY / Déjà vu (Lionsgate), and Jellyfish (Zeitgeist).

This week’s rather sparse TV on DVD selections include: My Name Is Earl Season 3 (Fox) and Numb3rs Season 4 (Paramount).

Finally, in Blu-Ray Only news, this week brings Universal’s “Halloween Starter Pack”, which includes Dawn of the Dead [2004], Land of the Dead, and The Thing, also sold separately, and the director’s cut of Daredevil (Fox).

Reviews By Request: Knightriders (1981, George A. Romero)

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: Beginning this week, I’ve decided to make a change to my normal posting schedule, switching the posting dates of my big features. So from today onward, Reviews by Request and When Good Directors Go Bad will post on alternate Tuesdays, while Yesterday’s Hits will run every Friday.

Thanks to reader Jason Alley for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks), see the bottom of this post.

In the opening scene of George A. Romero’s Knightriders, we see a blackbird flying through a forest at daybreak. The bird awakens a man, sleeping on the forest floor, next to a woman. We next see the man, stripped naked, in the river, flagellating himself with a stick. Then the man and woman don their clothes- the man, a suit of armor; the woman, a cloak and a crown. As they prepare to leave the woods, the camera finally reveals their trusty steed- a shiny new motorcycle, gleaming in the morning sun.

Make no mistake about it- Knightriders is a strange creature, from its premise on down. As the film continues, the man and woman soon join up with their companions, a traveling Renaissance Faire-esque troupe whose specialty is staging medieval tournaments using motorcycles instead of horses. It’s an odd juxtaposition and something of a bizarre spectacle around which to make a movie. But somehow, against all odds, Romero pulls it off.

From the beginning, Romero acknowledges the strangeness of pairing these two extremely dissimilar concepts. For most people, chivalry carries such associations as tradition, discipline, and a code of honor, while motorcyclists have a stigma of being hell-raisers and outlaws. Part of the reason the movie works is because it doesn’t so much try to reconcile the two ideas as let them play off each other.

On one side, there’s Morgan (Tom Savini), a mustached biker who joined the troupe to rider and fight, and started calling himself Morgan Le Fay until he was informed that the character was a woman. Morgan has set his sights on being the troupe’s King, until he gets another offer from a sleazeball agent to start his own show. Not for Morgan is the chivalric code, not when there’s money to be made and women to be bedded.

On the other side is Bill Davis (Ed Harris), the man we met in the forest at the beginning. Bill formed the troupe and became the King, and honestly believes that he’s carrying on the old ways. To him, the bikes are a necessary evil- they’re certainly not horses, but under the circumstances, they’ll do. But he’s not happy about it. When a young fan asks him to autograph a motorcycle magazine with his photograph inside, Bill refuses on principle. He treats the knight’s code of honor with deadly seriousness, and even when his actions seem foolish to others, he’s acting with the honor in mind.

In terms of the material, Knightriders would seem to be an odd choice for Romero, best known as director of horror movies like the Dead franchise, Martin, and The Crazies. But thematically, the films are more similar than they initially seem. Like all of his best-known work, Knightriders deals with the gulf between the lives of an insular, marginalized minority and the outside world.

The Dead films portray this idea at its most basic- a band of survivors barricading itself against outside threats. Here, the outsiders are those who aren’t part of the troupe- the “suckerheaded American driftwood” (Billy’s words) who come to see destruction and mayhem with no care for the meaning of it all. A pivotal tournament scene happens just as the troupe looks like it’s about to disband, but all the spectators care about is the motorcycles and the violence, even complaining when the musical accompaniment gets shut off.

But no less important to the story is the internal conflict of the group, between those who want to pander to the crowds and make big money, and those who want to stay true to the ideals upon which the group was founded. What’s sort of amazing is how successfully Romero integrates it into his story, instead of simply paying it lip service. As a filmmaker, the conflict between commerce and idealism no doubt held a great deal of interest for Romero, who must have had numerous temptations to make “safer” and more respectable films following the success of Dawn of the Dead.

I sometimes wonder if Romero doesn’t get his due as a filmmaker because he usually made movies in “disreputable” genres. Does the fact that action and horror movies are designed to provoke an emotional response first and foremost make the best ones unimaginable as art? Romero’s typically unobtrusive direction of Knightriders ranks among his best, effective in both its larger moments (the tournament scenes) and the smaller ones. One indelible moment in the film, almost incidental to the story, finds a middle-aged woman with a black eye standing alone in her kitchen just after her daughter has left with one of the troupe members. Romero’s camera watches her from a distance through a doorway, as she turns on the faucet just before she starts to cry. It’s a perfect little touch, one that tells us everything we need to know about her, and I’m glad Romero decided to keep it in the film.

Knightriders is divided into three main sections, centered around three tournaments. In the first two tournaments, the troupe is putting on a show for the paying audience, knocking each other off their bikes to get the spectators to whoop and cheer. But for the third, there’s no one watching but the rest of the troupe. The ideological conflict between Bill and Morgan has become real, and the battle could decide the fate of the group. True, no money will be made from this battle, but no matter- the participants finally have something to fight for.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

George Romero Runs the Voodoo Down

Phil Nugent — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:15:00 GMT

Every kid with a taste for horror movies knows that vampires hate garlic, sleep in, and can be dispatched with a wooden stake through the heart. Also that werewolves are allergic to full moons and silver bullets. But these basic ground rules were cobbled together from a mix of fictional sources and ancient folklore, whereas George Romero, starting with Night of the Living Dead and then with its sequel Dawn of the Dead, actually created a new, long-lasting set of basics for a breed of movie monster. There had been zombies in movies before, but they tended to be dullish, pop-eyed stranglers whose strings were being manipulated by the local voodoo master. Now, thanks to Romero, everybody knows that zombies are carniverous and can only be taken out with a brain-pulverizing blow to the head. Now Romero is getting proprietorial about it. In his new Diary of the Dead, a student crew filming a mummy movie argues over whether a mummy could run; the director is clearly on the side of the guy who says that "dead things" can't move fast because "their ankles would snap." Speaking to the BBC as his movie arrives in Britian, Romero acknowledges that there is a trend build to update his concept by flooding theaters with fast zombies, and he ain't having it.

The "fast zombie" prototype can be found in 28 Days Later, even though the frothing speed freaks in that movie are not, strictly speaking, "zombies." They're living people suffering from a kind of hyper-rabies, and in the end of the movie they basically starve to death, but there's enough of a family resemblance to Romero's creatures that it's easy to understand why so many have, adopting a kind of genre shorthand, referred to it as "a zombie movie." What really hurt was when Zach Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead came out and betrayed a clear 28 Days Later influence. Romero, who didn't have a hand in that movie, was horrified to see zombies sprinting around in a movie nominally connected to his own body of work. "Zombies don't run. They can't! Their ankles would snap. What did they do — wake from the dead and immediately join a health club?" Perhaps to avoid asking Romero just how much actual research he had done in this area, the BBC also asked him the seeming prevalence of the "found-footage" gag that his new movie, like Cloverfield and Redacted, is built around. "We thought we were going to be the first ones out there," says Romero. "But now we have to settle for being part of a trend. I guess there must be some sort of a collective subconscious."

Take Five: Take Four

Peter Smith — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

As a professional film critic, it is my most sacred duty to deliver honest, truthful assessments of the films I am assigned to see — and to review them fairly without prejudice or favor. It would be a betrayal of my professional and personal standards to review, positively or negatively, a film without actually seeing it. Having said that, here’s a prediction: Saw IV, which opens today nationwide after having been completed approximately three days ago, is going to suck. Now, I say this without having seen Saw IV; for that matter, I say this without having seen Saw I, Saw II or Saw III. For all I know, they’re cinematic masterworks the likes of which Orson Welles could never dare to dream. But let’s face it: the fourth installment in any series, let alone one as misbegotten as the Saw series, has the deck stacked against it from the jump-off. The number of Part 4s that have been worth watching can be counted on one hand; it just so happens that I have five fingers on my left hand, so here’s five fours that aren’t complete wastes of time.

THUNDERBALL (1965)

Believe it or not, there was a time when there weren’t so many James Bond movies that nobody bothered to count them. Thunderball wasn’t quite as good as Goldfinger and From Russia with Love, the two films that preceded it, but it’s still a Bond flick in the grand tradition, with lots of fun lines, exciting action sequences, and swell spy gear, and it’s one of the last 007 adventures that still feels like something you can enjoy rather than just live through, like most of the long-slog installments of the 1970s. At any rate, Sean Connery seems to be enjoying himself, and who wouldn’t, with Claudine Auger around?

ROCKY IV (1985)

Ha, ha! Just kidding. This isn’t a good Part IV at all. It’s terrible. But taken strictly for laughs, it’s an inadvertent masterpiece, with its overblown jingoism, mindless commie-bashing, and endless hilariously bad dialogue. It also introduced the world, however briefly, to currently unemployable Swedish galoot Dolph Lundgren and Sly Stallone’s gargantuan Danish girlfriend, Brigitte Nielsen. A movie decidedly of its era, it is a fine measure of the tenor of its times, and I had the pleasure of getting thrown out of a theatre during its initial screening for loudly cheering for the Russian fighter to pound the obnoxious Rocky into soup.

BRIDE OF CHUCKY (1998)

The fourth installment of the "Chucky" series of tongue-in-cheek horror movies following the adventures of a homicidal doll, Bride of Chucky benefits enormously from not taking itself at all seriously. Surprisingly well-directed by Hong Kong veteran Ronny Yu, it features a genuinely funny script, some surreal dialogue between the supremely professional Brad Dourif and a game-for-anything Jennifer Tilly, and one of the most ridiculous sex scenes in cinema history. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to win any Oscar nods (by the time you get to Part IV, you’re generally running on fumes even if the original film was decent), but it’s highly enjoyable just the same.

CITIZEN TOXIE: THE TOXIC AVENGER IV (2000)

Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma pictures may not be particularly well-crafted, which is not unexpected given that they are generally made for as much money as Kaufman happens to have in his pocket at the moment. And they aren’t Art with a capital A, dealing as they do with things like surfing Nazis and the question of whether or not they should die. But they’re occasionally hilarious, brilliantly campy, and damn it, they give their fans what they want, which is more than you can say for a lot of studio films. Citizen Toxie’s shotgun approach guarantees at least a couple of solid hits, and it’s chock full of ridiculous celebrity cameos, from Corey Feldman to Ron Jeremy.

LAND OF THE DEAD (2005)

Why is it that horror movies rack up the biggest sequel counts as well as the biggest body counts? If a movie title is followed by a Roman numeral higher than V, it’s a, well, dead certainty that its plot revolves around serial killers, monsters, and/or megadeaths. Anyway, the fourth of George Romero’s zombie series (after Night of the Living, Dawn of and Day of the Dead) is by no means the best; it’s full of plot holes, marred by a ridiculous ending, and generally a tad ridiculous. But it’s also George Romero, and that means it’s chock full of visceral thrills, black comedy, and social commentary — and this time around, we even get a couple of juicy star turns from Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo.

— Leonard Pierce