The Screengrab : george romero

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.

Unwatchable #42: Zombie Nightmare

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I don't like to feel sorry for myself when I'm writing up these Unwatchable entries. I took this task on voluntarily, and I'm determined to see it through, so there's no point whining about it. I'll just say this: nobody's life should have this many zombie movies in it. OK, maybe George Romero is an exception, but at least he's made a good living at it. Me, I've got at least one SXSW zombie movie on deck later this week, and now this...thing.

I'll give Zombie Nightmare this much: it's an old school, voodoo-based zombie movie, which makes it a change of pace from all the apocalyptic walking dead flicks we've been bombarded with of late. Jon Mikl Thor stars as Tony Washington, a hulking, heavily mulleted young man who favors ripped muscle shirts that flatter his well-oiled physique. If you remember the Barbarian Brothers, well, picture one of them. I'm not sure which.

After busting up a liquor store robbery with a baseball bat, Tony is unceremoniously flattened by a carload of joyriding teens. His grieving mother summons the local voodoo priestess, who reluctantly transforms the late lad into an undead vengeance machine. Zombie Tony makes the rounds, tracking down the unrepentent young people who caused his demise and returning the favor. The local police captain (Adam West) is content to pin the crimes on a scuzzy punk rocker, but the murders continue until the fresh-faced young cop tracks Zombie Tony down at the warehouse where he's cornered his latest victims.

Anyone nostalgic for slow zombies will find what they're looking for here, but sadly, Zombie Tony's sluggish pace has infected the entire movie surrounding him. Adam West fans shouldn't get too excited either, as TV's Batman has limited screen time (although he does eventually get dragged into hell). Those of you who can't get enough of '80s fashions, hairstyles, heavy metal (including incidental music by the star's band Thor as well as powerful synthesizer riffs by "Thorkestra") and Tia Carrere (the actress, not the band) may be able to salvage some entertainment value from Zombie Nightmare, but I wouldn't count on it.

Previously on Unwatchable:
43. American Ninja V
44. Leonard Part 6
45. Another 9 1/2 Weeks
46. 3 Ninjas: High Noon on Mega Mountain
47. Creepshow 3

Unwatchable #47: “Creepshow 3”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I can’t say I didn’t learn anything from Creepshow 3. For instance, I learned that, at some point, there must have been a Creepshow 2. I also learned that, unlike the first two Creepshow movies, the third one is not based on short stories by Stephen King. This is a good thing for him, as it saves him the trouble of having to file a lawsuit to have his name removed from the credits as he did with The Lawnmower Man. It’s not a good thing for us, the viewers, because King is someone who knows how to construct a horror story in the EC Comics mold, and the makers of Creepshow 3 could not construct a successful dump if you gave them three extra assholes.

Pardon my crudity but, after all, I just finished watching Creepshow 3, which is so crude it should be selling for $45 a barrel. Like the previous Creepshows, it’s an anthology film consisting of five loosely connected tales o’ terror. This time it took five different writers to come up with the stories, and if any of them had even a passing familiarity with EC Comics, I’ll eat my complete run of Tales From the Crypt. In fact, I’m not convinced that any of these scribes has ever read anything more challenging than the back of a cereal box. As a group, they don’t seem to understand that a good story is usually not simply a series of random events punctuated by gruesome bursts of gore – that a good story should have some sort of, I dunno, point.

Take the Creepshow 3 opener, “Alice.” The title character is a snotty teen who comes home to find that her father has purchased a new universal remote. Apparently he bought it at the same store Adam Sandler shopped at in Click, because this is a crazy remote that does crazy things! When he hits the “hue” button, Alice’s entire family turns black! When he pressed the button for subtitles, they all start speaking Spanish. And when he tries to get a better signal, Alice sprouts unsightly blotches all over her face and body. I guess this is her comeuppance for being such a brat, but it seems just a little disproportionate and out of left field.

In “The Radio,” a schlubby security guard buys a portable radio from a flea market to listen to the game, but instead all he hears is a female voice bossing him around. The first thing you or I might think to do in this situation is to turn off the radio or throw it out the window, but this guy just keeps following orders until he gets himself killed by the pimp down the hall. It’s just a bit unsatisfying that there’s no sort of logical progression or sense of building tension here – just a dumb guy getting dumber until he’s dead.

One story, “The Professor’s Wife,” at least boasts a promising kernel of an idea: an eccentric professor invites two ex-students to meet his new bride-to-be. The students become convinced that the professor has built himself a robot wife, and when the prof steps out to run an errand, they decide to prove it. Again, in the hands of King and original Creepshow director George Romero, this could be a giddily squirm-inducing premise, but in the sweaty grip of co-directors Ana Clavell and James Glenn Dudelson (Day of the Dead 2: Contagium), it’s just a repulsive mess.

Clavell and Dudelson save the worst for last with “Haunted Dog” – the dog in question being a bad hot dog – in which they inexplicably allow Toad the Wet Sprocket bassist Dean Dinning to run wild with his nonexistent improvisatory skills as an ethically-challenged doctor. Physicians found guilty of malpractice should be forced to watch this on a continuous loop; anyone without access to large quantities of prescription drugs should avoid prolonged exposure to Creepshow 3.

Previously on Unwatchable:
48. Cool as Ice
49. Laserblast
50. Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace
51. Simon Sez
52. In the Mix

Video of the Day: George Romero on “The Incredibly Strange Film Show”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Happy George Romero’s birthday! The maestro of the living dead is 69 years old today, which seems like as good a reason as any to dig this clip out of the YouTube vault. The Incredibly Strange Film Show, hosted by the peculiar Jonathan Ross, was a short-lived British program of the late ‘80s featuring such masters of schlock, underground and drive-in movies as Russ Meyer, Doris Wishman and the late, lamented Ray Dennis Steckler. In this episode, Ross visits Pittsburgh, PA, where he encounters a zombie pitching for the Pirates (they’d take him, believe me), along with Romero and cohort Tom Savini (who was prepping his own regrettable version of Night of the Living Dead at the time).

Hit the jump for the clip.

Screengrab's Top Guilty Pleasures (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

LEONARD PIERCE'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986)

Given its date of release – my senior year of high school – you might think that my unrepentant love of this middling John Carpenter action flick is just geek hangover from my formative years. But really, it’s all down to Buckaroo Banzai. I have a lifelong adoration of pulp fiction, the sort of trashy mass-market literary and cinematic entertainments popular from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, which would occasionally yield surprisingly resonant characters like the Shadow or shockingly talented writers like Raymond Chandler. For the same reason, I’m a fan of modern attempts to conjure that rare era, and one of my all-time favorites is the charming, funny, and utterly inimitable 1982 flick The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. At the very end of the movie, a sequel was promised, but it never materialized; however, its director, W.D. Richter, was hired by John Carpenter to punch up a screenplay called Big Trouble in Little China – a B movie he wanted to turn into an A picture. It wasn’t quite that; in fact, a lot of Big Trouble in Little China can’t even aspire to B quality and settles down somewhere around Z. But it occasionally shows flashes of that demented Buckaroo Banzai genius, and while I normally can’t stand Kurt Russell, his insane John-Wayniac performance as two-fisted trucker Jack Burton (who Russell correctly points out is a hero who never does anything remotely heroic) adds an enjoyably louche element to the whole affair. Big Trouble in Little China is a perfect example of a movie that’s better than it has any right to be.

CREEPSHOW (1982)

As my esteemed colleague Scott Von Doviak can testify, Stephen King is responsible for a lot of movies. And many of them are very, very bad. (He doesn’t even seem to like the ones that are good; this is a man who’s on record as liking Maximum Overdrive more than Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining.) His collaboration with zombie auteur George Romero – and one of the few major adaptations of his work where he actually wrote the screenplay himself – isn’t a very, very bad movie, but it isn’t a very, very good one either. Like the EC horror comics that serve as its inspiration, it’s unapologetic camp, with all that this implies: when it’s good, it’s very good, but when it’s bad, it’s worse. With an extremely iffy cast, no particular structure or emotional stakes, and Romero directing like a man who’s looking to buy a summer home, Creepshow has a lot going against it; add to the mix the fact that it features an infamous segment involving a man whose home is overrun by cockroaches, and you’d think I’d hate it more than I hate traffic jams. But, as it happens, Creepshow is one of my all-time guilty pleasures; I can’t say that it’s a good movie, exactly, but I watch it again and again, with some of its flattest, lamest scenes – including King’s own extraterrestrially over-the-top acting debut – being numbered among my favorites. Plus, it has an unbilled cameo by my all-time favorite That Guy!, B-movie king Tom Atkins! How could I not love it?

NURSE BETTY (2000)

There’s plenty of people who don’t even like the good movies that Neil LaBute makes; his early work, like In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, has plenty of detractors. But while it’s no Wicker Man, his third full-length feature, Nurse Betty, is widely considered a low point in his career. And, to be honest, I can see why. He didn’t write the script (a meandering thing about a small-town nurse who, stricken with a sort of traumatic amnesia, goes to Hollywood to hook up with the soap opera surgeon she has come to believe is real), which is often flat and more than a few times carries suspension of belief beyond the breaking point. The role of a damaged naïf is suitable to Rene Zellweger, but she’s still a bad actress even when she’s in her comfort zone. And Greg Kinnear and Aaron Eckhart, two actors who have never done much for me, continue to not do much for me here. And yet, and yet…I return to the movie a lot more than I ever thought I would on the first viewing. Most of it has to do with the film’s villains: Morgan Freeman, taking a break from his normal Magical Negro gig to play a veteran hit man, is terrific as a consummate professional who can’t see his own fatal weakness, and Chris Rock is downright astonishing as Freeman’s hotheaded protégé – it’s the only thing Rock has ever done that suggests to me that he might have a pretty goddamn great dramatic actor buried in him somewhere. Thematically, the movie promises a lot more than it can deliver, but for some reason Nurse Betty has always been one of those movies where I forgive the wasted potential, because there seems like so much of it to waste.

SPICE WORLD (1997)

Why all the hate for the Spice Girls? They only wanted to zigga zigga, after all. The massive outpouring of hate directed at them smacked of bad faith, and the claim that they represented the death of music clearly came from people who weren’t paying much attention to the rest of the dross on top 40 radio in 1997. And while I’ll be the first to admit that Spice World is no A Hard Day’s Night, it’s not from lack of trying: if the band, the cast, and the crew lacked the genius and charm of the Beatles, they certainly didn’t lack good intentions, and at heart, they were making the exact same kind of movie. The biggest band in the world bond with each other, drop wisecracks, engage in wacky hi-jinks, and avoid their rabid fans while having a good time doing it. If the Spice Girls weren’t a patch on the Fab Four musically, they did have a similar cultural cachet (albeit for only about five seconds), and who can begrudge them trying to have fun with the movie that was inevitably going to get made about them? And if they lacked the pure charisma of the lads from Liverpool, Mel B and Mel C looked better in skimpy outfits than Ringo Starr looked in anything. The girls came up with the idea for the movie themselves, which makes them more praiseworthy or more blameworthy depending on your perspective, and the producers, knowing that they didn’t have a John Lennon or a Paul McCartney on their hands, at least stuffed Spice World with ringers like Mark McKinney, Stephen Fry, Bob Hoskins and Richard E. Grant. Like the band, Spice World is a fun, ultimately irrelevant little pop gumdrop, and there’s nothing wrong with that, damn it.

Click Here For More Guilt From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Vadim Rizov & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

In Other Blogs: Trick or Treat

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Night of the Living Dead made the top five in our list of the 25 Greatest Horror Movies, but our enthusiasm for George Romero’s seminal zombie film pales compared to that of PopMatters, which has put together an exhaustive tribute in honor of Night’s 40th anniversary. “Love it or hate it, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is a recognized cornerstone of American culture and world cinema. After 40 years, Romero’s film remains an influential film that generates a variety of readings and discourses. Furthermore, this horror classic continues to spawn a variety of sequels, remakes, and copycats…Indeed, the magnitude of the cultural significance of Night of the Living Dead is made evident in this massive collection of 30 articles that uniquely analyze, dissect, discuss, and re-appreciate the cultural, political, social, ideological, philosophical, and psychological meanings of this groundbreaking horror film. Here you will find fresh perspectives, appreciations, and theoretical frameworks that bring a new light to the critical examination of Night of the Living Dead.”

Spoutblog checks out the sexiest vampire movie of all time: Daughters of Darkness. “The tone is set right from the start: an appropriately blue-hued sex scene, jump cuts from Valerie’s ecstatically grasping hand back to naked entwined torsos, Stefan virtually devouring his young bride, burrowing his head into the heaving flesh of her chest, going for the jugular without drawing blood. The entire atmosphere of the film is steamy, as visceral as the Florida summer of Body Heat. From the rising and falling suspense string score to the lush, sensuous colors and velvet fabrics of the European resort, as cavernous and creepy as the Overlook Hotel; from the fluid camerawork, the grand high angle and long shots, the noir shadows, the close ups on Seyrig’s flawless face, a playful pixie vixen, nails and lips forever painted blood red.”

Filmcatcher looks at (near) great horror movies you’ve probably never seen, including 1974’s Bad Ronald. “Scott Jacoby, a popular TV actor back in the day, plays weirdo Ronald, a high-schooler who lives with his mother. When Ronald accidentally kills a tormenter schoolmate, his Mom fears the police and hides him away in a secret room in the house. Well, Mom dies and eventually a whole new family moves in; trouble is, Ronald is still trapped in the house. Confined to his hiding place, old Ronny starts to become deranged and invents an alternative reality, a fantasy world called ‘Atrantra,’ drawing and writing about it all over the walls of his room in a scrawled graffiti that is truly freaky. Then Ronald begins to venture out of his improvised prison and things get really nasty…”

The 31 Screams photo-essays at Arbogast on Film continue with Arlene Francis. “Francis spends a lot of time screaming in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932). In fact, it's all she does. Cast in her film debut as a ‘Woman of the Streets,’ she is screaming when we meet her, watching in horror as two men kill one another (presumably for her favor). It's a startlingly savage scene for the time, grainy, shadow-ringed and doom-laden, and when both combatants are finally dead, Bela Lugosi swoops in whisk away this damsel in distress.”

Unfortunately, we end this installment with some real-life horror. Andrew Johnston, longtime contributor to The House Next Door, died on Sunday. House founder Matt Zoller Seitz pays tribute. “So many truths only become clear with hindsight. Here’s one of them: Unbeknownst to nearly everybody, even those closest to him, Andrew Johnston was a superhero. His influence was as profound as it was largely unseen. Like the hero of Miller's Crossing, Tom Regan, Andrew managed to re-order large parts of his universe without anyone being the wiser.”

Honorable Mention: The Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Six)

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

JAWS (1975)

There was some back-and-forth among the writers here at The Screengrab over whether Steven Spielberg’s first blockbuster should be included on a list of classic horror movies. But ultimately, it made the cut because, whether or not it qualifies as a horror movie, the truth is that it’s seriously scary. A far cry from the long-standing King of Hollywood Filmmakers who has become semi-notorious for his inability to satisfactorily end his movies, the Spielberg who made Jaws did so with one thing on his mind -- to scare the ever-loving shit out of the audience. And oh man, did he ever succeed. Much has been made of the technical issues with the animatronic shark “Bruce” forcing Spielberg to find clever ways to make the shark’s presence felt onscreen (who can forget that moment when the dock slowly turns around?). However, the withholding of actual shots of the shark actually makes him more frightening, given all the buildup he’s had up to that point. Along with being Spielberg’s most frightening movie, it’s also his most perfectly structured, divided almost evenly between the attacks on the townspeople and the mission by Brody, Quint, and Hooper to bring down the toothy killer. The first half has plenty of good scares to be sure -- the head popping out of the boat, for one -- but it’s the second hour that makes Jaws a classic. The setup is little more than three men on an old boat, and as the makeshift crew hunts down, then fends off, the shark, Spielberg never once cuts back to the mainland. The claustrophobia that results causes the tension to skyrocket, so that every time the shark returns to take another shot at bringing down the boat, the film becomes ever more nerve-wracking. But for all the brutal attacks we see, nothing in Jaws burrows under your skin quite like Quint’s immortal monologue about his experiences aboard the Indianapolis, in which he shares his first-hand knowledge of just how much damage sharks can do.

BLACK SUNDAY (1960)

The Italian director Mario Bava, whose other credits include the 1971 Bay of Blood (AKA Twitch of the Death Nerve), regarded by some as the first slasher/splatter movie, is that rare horror specialist who has earned a reputation as a major filmmaker on the basis of his stylish and atmospheric approach to such genre eternals as cobweb-strewn dungeons and gore-stained torture instruments. He made his name largely on the basis of this Saturday-matinee classic, in which a beautiful young woman visiting her ancestral home is menaced by her long-dead but now-back ancestor, a Moldavian witch who was burned at the stake in 1630. The English actress Barbara Steele played both parts, popping her eyes ever so slightly to indicate when she was supposed to be the murderous, unearthly one. Neither Steele's youthful amateurishness as an actress nor the fact that, by her own account, she was never too clear on what the funny man with whom she shared no common language and who kept waving and jabbering at her from behind the camera was going on about, were enough to get in the way of the fact that, with her stunning features set off by her long black hair, she was both a striking image of virginal innocence imperiled and rampaging evil at its sexiest; the movie turned her into one of the best-loved scream queens of the '60s and '70s.

BRAIN DAMAGE (1988)

This deeply unwholesome film is perhaps the best work by boundary-pushing splatter director Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case, Frankenhooker), who can be heard on the DVD director commentary reminiscing that he always managed to include one scene in each of his films that he enjoyed the pleasure of staging and shooting by himself, because at that point the crew invariably walked out shaking their heads and muttering, "Oh, you sick bastard..." This one, Henenlotter's version of an anti-drug addiction film, is about a fool (Rick Herbst) who strikes up a partnership with a parasitic creature called Aylmer (pronounced "Elmer") who injects him with an addictive, hallucinogenic substance in exchange for the man's help in keeping the monster well fed on his preferred diet of human brains. Elmer also talks, in a voice provided by John Zacherle, beloved in cult circles as New York's most celebrated TV horror show host.

FIDO (2006)

It's a measure of how influential George Romero's conception of zombiedom has been that people who adopt his ideas of shambling, flesh-eating corpses that can only be finished off with a crushing blow to their brains aren't seen as rip-off artists, but rather as traditionalists working with what, since 1969, have been the established rules. Another measure is the way that Romero's imagery has been spoofed in comedies whose makers are confident that the audience will immediately recognize what it is they're making fun of. The British comedian Simon Pegg and his collaborators had a major success making fun of zombies in Shaun of the Dead, but this Canadian film, directed and co-written by Andrew Currie, honors Romero's attempts to use his undead hordes to satirize American society, only with a steadier and subtler hand than the master has sometimes maintained himself. Set in a Blue Velvet-style suburbia where it'll always be the 1950s, Fido features perhaps the best ever performance by an actor as a zombie by Scottish comic Billy Connolly, in the title role of the hungry but strangely winning pet of little Timmy (K'Sun Ray), who soon realizes that his grunting, growling pal is trying to tell him something.

GINGER SNAPS (2000)

This Canadian film does for werewolves what Carrie and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series did for high school misfits in their respective supernatural target groups. The word "snaps" in the title is a verb: Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and her little sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins) have a close knit "you and me against the world" relationship, which manifests itself in the form of a deep (and, to the minds of their school instructors, inappropriate) fascination with death, but after Ginger experience her first period and begins to have confusing feelings about boys, Brigitte senses the beginning of a wedge coming between them that presages the conflict to come when Ginger is bloodied by a werewolf-like creature and begins to literally transform into a different, and dangerous, species. The movie almost didn't happen because of real life adults' concern about teenagers' "inappropriate" obsessions with death and violence: the project's funding was threatened by adverse publicity after the Columbine high school shooting took place during pre-production.

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

Contributors: Paul Clark of the Living Dead, Phil Nugent Is People!!!!

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

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

This 1985 instant-midnight-movie classic just about killed off the concept of the underground-horror-cult-item by being too perfect; a beautifully executed, straight-faced H.P. Lovecraft update with farce timing and gory slapstick, it hit its marks with such stunning aplomb that it's hard to think of a similar film that wouldn't be embarrassed to be compared to it. That includes pretty much every subsequent attempt by the first time filmmaker Stuart Gordon, previously known as founding director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company, to follow it up, though its star, Jeffrey Combs, has managed to keep the spirit of Herbert West alive through his performances in other movies -- especially Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, where his deranged, ghostbusting FBI agent is a scene-stealing fusion of Dr. West, Fox Mulder, and Hazel Motes.

19. EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1959)

Georges Franju's nightmare classic was first released in the U.S. in 1962 in a re-edited, English-language version called The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. In a time when foreign films really had to fight for American distribution, this was a peculiar kind of triumph that demonstrated that it was possible for certain special films to bridge the audiences that responded to the critical theories of Andre Bazin and those who were more at home with Joe Bob Briggs. The restored version that has since become the standard text even here makes it clearer that the movie (about a mad doctor's attempts to restore the once-beautiful, then damaged and now slate-blank face of his daughter) is an attack on unthinking scientific experimentation that draws on the deliberate tapping-into-the-irrational of the Surrealists and such films as Cocteau's Orpheus -- but it's still a movie about a guy whose hobby is stripping the kissers off kidnapped women until he gets eaten by his own attack dogs.

18. MARTIN (1977)

After many failed attempts to successfully follow up on Night of the Living Dead, and two years before returning to the zombie well with Dawn of the Dead, George Romero made this riff on the vampire genre in his beloved Pittsburgh. The title character, played by twenty-six-year-old John Amplas, is a forlorn, alienated young man who appears to be a serial killer and wishes he were a vampire. In its own odd way, Martin, more than any other film of its time, anticipates the Goth subculture of Anne Rice and the post-punk concept of vampires as creatures of morbid romantic fantasy, though it's an ironic comment on that kind of attraction, not a celebration of it: at key moments, Romero shows us Martin's fantasies of himself as a suave, literal lady killer with seductive powers, before staging his murders as the unpleasant messes they actually are. Romero himself turns up in a cameo as a priest who, sought for guidance by an Old World relative of Martin's, turns out to be less interested in hearing the man out than in raving about The Exorcist.

17. ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968)

If Charles Grodin doesn’t exactly spring to mind when you think of the great stars of horror, then you’ve never seen Rosemary’s Baby. Kicking off the 1970s devil movie craze two years before the start of that morally ambiguous decade (and one year before director Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the minions of real life demon Charles Manson), Mia Farrow dramatized the worst-case-scenario fears of young mothers everywhere as the title character in a defiantly downbeat movie where motherhood is perverted, the fetus is the villain, the bad guys win and we get to see Ruth Gordon naked for the first (but, thanks to Bud Cort and Hal Ashby, certainly not the last) time in her distinguished career.

16. THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)

These days Leatherface is just another lovable lunk in the horror franchise Hall of Fame, right up there with Jason and Freddy Krueger, but despite all the sequels and remakes, the impact of his 1974 debut is undiminished. There's nothing complicated about the plot: five young people traveling across Texas in a van happen upon a seemingly deserted farmhouse where they make the sudden and violent acquaintance of the hulking butcher and cross-dresser Leatherface and the rest of the demented Sawyer clan. Tobe Hooper's film derives much of its power from its grimy, snuff-film authenticity; it looks as though it may have been discovered moldering in the attic of the decaying Sawyer farmhouse. When Leatherface revs his chainsaw while closing in on a victim in the deep, dark woods, you can only think, yep, that would certainly scare the living shit out of me. Leatherface's final dance of death in the early morning rays of the sun is perhaps the seminal image of hillbilly horror. Much has been made of the movie as metaphor for any number of things – Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, the collapse of the counterculture, the dissolution of the nuclear family and possibly the 1973 World Series for all I know – but as flat-out unrelenting exploitation of the modern suburbanite's fear of backwoods people, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has few peers.

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

Contributors: Phil BOOOOO!-gent, Andrew OsBurning-in-Hell, Baron Scott Von Frankendoviak

The Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon (Part Three)

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Introduction

Part One

Part Two

Noon – 2 p.m. THE DARK HALF (1993)

I think we can all agree that writing has been very good to Stephen King, and it certainly seems to be something he enjoys doing for a living, given the fact that he still puts out approximately seventeen books a month. Yet a casual glance at the writer characters in his work reveals a certain, I dunno, ambiguity about the matter. There’s Jack Torrance, the frustrated novelist of The Shining, who tries to bludgeon his family to death. Paul Sheldon of Misery attempts to retire his most famous character and ends up the prisoner of an obsessed fan. And in George Romero’s adaptation of The Dark Half, we have Timothy Hutton as Thad Beaumont, an author of serious but poorly-selling literary fiction who achieves success with dark, violent novels published under the name George Stark. When a blackmailer threatens to out Beaumont to the press, the author takes matters into his own hands, confessing his Stark-ness and staging a mock funeral for his alter ego. The matter seems resolved until George Stark comes to life and goes on a killing spree, for which Beaumont is the prime suspect. Romero’s film is one of the better received King adaptations, and Hutton does a respectable job in the dual role of weenie Thad and badass Stark (even if he can’t pronounce “Bangor” – it’s not “banger,” people!), but a more accurate title would have been Half-Baked. Romero doesn’t bother trying to wring much suspense out of whether Thad is actually doing Stark’s killing himself, and like much of King’s latter-day work, the whole thing degenerates into arbitrary hocus-pocus in lieu of a psychologically satisfying ending.

Odd (but not really that odd) fact: Michael Rooker plays Castle Rock sheriff Alan Pangborn, who is played by Ed Harris in Needful Things. Ed Harris is married to Amy Madigan, who plays Thad Beaumont’s wife Liz in The Dark Half. This must mean SOMETHING.

2 p.m. – 4 p.m. THINNER (1996)

Of course Stephen King had his own George Stark, although as far as we known the pseudonym Richard Bachman never came to life and started murdering people. King published five novels under Bachman’s name before being outed as the real author shortly after the publication of Thinner. In King’s case, however, it’s not like he was doing something completely different as Bachman; Thinner, in particular, is vintage King. It’s also a prime example of a story that works on the page, but not so much on film. Whilst driving and simultaneously receiving a blowjob from his wife, fat mob lawyer Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke) accidentally hits and kills an old gypsy woman. The gypsy’s even more ancient father puts a curse on Billy, who begins to lose weight at a rapid clip. This is great at first, especially since he can eat whatever he wants, but it soon becomes clear that the weight loss won’t end until there’s nothing left of him. With the help of a mobster client (Joe Mantegna), an emaciated Billy tries to get the gypsies to reverse the curse. Unfortunately, the fat suit technology is not sufficiently advanced to be anything other than a distraction; Mike Myers was more convincing as Fat Bastard. The “thinner” prosthetics are even worse, but I suppose it’s too much to ask for Burke to go on Christian Bale’s Machinist diet for a B-movie like this. There’s a nasty little twist ending (hint: it involves pie!), but again, it worked better on the page.

King’s cameo: He’s the pharmacist Mr. Bangor (not banger!)

4 p.m. – 6 p.m. THE NIGHT FLIER (1997)

One of the lesser known – perhaps even the least known – King adaptations, Night Flier is based on a short story from the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection. Miguel Ferrer is his usual acerbic self as sarcastic, ill-tempered tabloid Richard Dees, a reporter for the Weekly World News-esque Inside View. Dees and a rival cub reporter (Julie Entwisle) are investigating a series of murders at small airports. It seems “the Night Flier” swoops in at night in his black Cessna, emerges in a black-and-red Dracula cloak, and eviscerates the unlucky inhabitants. It’s a pretty flimsy premise for a feature-length film, and not much happens until the last fifteen minutes or so, when Dees finally catches up to the Night Flier in an airport full of slaughtered victims. There’s an eerie bathroom moment I’ve never seen before: a stream of blood emerging from an invisible wee-wee and splashing into a urinal. Hey, it creeped me out. As so often happens, however, the ultimate revelation of the baddie is a letdown – just another big critter carved out of latex.

King’s cameo: He doesn’t appear in person, but there’s a clever moment when the camera pans across a wall of framed Inside View covers, each of which takes its headline from a different King story.

The Final Chapter

Morning Deal Report: Jamie Foxx is a Law Abiding Citizen

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Frank Darabont is back and Stephen King is nowhere to be found. Darabont will direct Law Abiding Citizen, set to star Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler. “Written by Kurt Wimmer and Darabont, the script follows a successful assistant D.A. (Butler) who finds himself at the center of a vigilante plot hatched by a traumatized victim of the legal system (Foxx). Foxx's character is devastated to learn that, because of a plea bargain, one of his wife and daughter's murderers will be set free. So he unleashes revenge on the killers and those who made the deal,” says The Hollywood Reporter. Hey guys, Charles Bronson just called. He wants his big-ass gun back.

Julie Taymor is collaborating with her first screenwriter, William Shakespeare, again. The Titus director will bring a gender-bending version of The Tempest to the screen. Helen Mirren will play “Prospera,” and the cast also includes Russell Brand as the jester Trinculo, Djimon Hounsou as deformed slave Caliban, and Alfred Molina as the drunken butler Stephano. I kind of wish I was watching this right now.

It seems like only yesterday I was telling you about George Romero’s plans for a new zombie movie. (Actually it was three days ago, but who’s counting?) Now one of Romero’s lesser known early works is getting the remake treatment. Breck “son of Michael” Eisner will direct The Crazies, which “revolves around people in a small Kansas town who are beset by a virus that causes insanity and death after a mysterious toxin contaminates the local water supply,” per Variety. A quick check of Eisner’s IMDb page reveals he also has reboots of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Flash Gordon in the works. I can’t stop him.

Related:
Raiders of the Leaked Frank Darabont Screenplay
Take Five: Romero Alive!

Morning Deal Report of the Living Dead

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

We take no blame for the fact that Beverly Hills Chihuahua debuted at the top of the U.S. box office with a whopping $29 million weekend take. It’s true that I am the proud owner of a Chihuahua-American, but he wanted nothing to do with what he perceived as a showcase for offensive stereotypes. Eagle Eye was second with $17.7 million, and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist took in a finite $12 million for third place. Blindness didn’t attract many eyes and finished outside the top 10, but both Bill Maher’s Religulous and the conservative coalition’s An American Carol made the lower reaches of the list, with Maher’s documentary boasting the higher per-screen average.

George Romero can’t seem to stop making zombie movies. He’s already shooting an as-yet untitled film – we fearlessly predict the word Dead will be in there somewhere – in Ontario. “Plot involves inhabitants of an isolated island off the North American coast who find their relatives rising from the dead to eat their kin,” Variety reports. “The leaders of the island feud over whether or not to kill their reanimated relatives or preserve them in hopes of finding a cure.” That’s a no-brainer, gang.

Screengrab It Girl Kat Dennings will team up with Woody Harrelson and Sandra Oh for the oddly-spelled Defendor. “Written by Peter Stebbings, who also is making his directorial debut, the film centers on a regular guy (Harrelson) who believes he has a secret superhero identity. Dennings will play a teenager he befriends, while Oh is cast as his psychiatrist,” says The Hollywood Reporter.

Related:
Screengrab Review: "Religulous"
George Romero Runs the Voodoo Down

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."

Sundance Roundup: Day 2

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Robert Redford addressed the troops last night as the Sundance Film Festival kicked into gear. He hailed the filmmakers as “agents of change” and warned those desperately seeking buzz to expect the unexpected, the Salt Lake Tribune reports. He might have a point, as this L.A. Times look at last year’s highly touted Sundance crop portends.

The buzz-seekers went on to ignore Redford’s advice anyway. With the WGA strike dragging on, studios are eager to find readymade product to fill holes in their release schedules. The first big deal has already been made, with HBO snapping up the rights to The Black List: Volume One, a documentary collaboration between photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell. For a handy cheat sheet of the rest of this year’s buzz flicks, head over to Defamer.

If you’re looking for something to see in Park City tonight, the highlight looks to be Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired at the Holiday Village at 6:15 pm. Co-writer/director Marina Zenovich writes about her experiences making the documentary for Filmmaker. If midnight movies are more your speed, George Romero’s Diary of the Dead screens later tonight.

Morning Deal Report: Honest to Blog, Juno Gives Birth to Large Profits

Peter Smith — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:50:00 GMT

Juno continues overwriting its way into America's heart — it made as much as I Am Legend this weekend, weirdly enough. To quote Variety, "I liked the movie, but it seemed to me Juno talked [less like a pregnant teenager, and] more like a 30-year-old ex-stripper trying to make a name for herself as a screenwriter." Hey, that's just how the Facebook generation talks, homeskillet!

Michael Showalter will direct Night of the Living Dorks, a German-horror-comedy remake described as "Revenge of the Nerds meets Shaun of the Dead." Given that Shaun of the Dead was already George Romero meeting John Cusack (or someone). . .

Marlon Wayans is Ripcord in the new G.I. Joe. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is also circling, weirdly enough. Maybe he'll play Serpentor. Where's that Cheat Commandos movie I'm waiting for?

(Belated) Take Five: Stephen King

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

So, have you heard of this Stephen King fellow? Apparently he’s pretty widely read. Hs popularity as a novelist is matched only by his profligacy — he’s written over thirty novels and hundreds of short stories on his way to becoming one of the best-selling authors of all time. This level of popularity is like heroin to Hollywood producers, and adaptations of his books and stories — as well as original screenplays by King himself, an inveterate movie nerd — have led to an astonishing 100+ films and television shows. Like their source material, though, they’re a decidedly mixed bag: for every Shawshank Redemption, there’s a Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return. And just as King enjoys a decidedly muddled critical reception, films made from his works, while occasionally made by talented filmmakers who find in the material the bones of something great, tend towards third-rate exploitation horror. Still, with The Mist having opened last week, it’s good to remember that a number of genuinely worthwhile projects have made the translation from the mind of King to the big screen. Here are five of the best.

CARRIE (1976)

The first hint that Stephen King’s novels might be the stuff of memorable movies came in 1976, when Brian DePalma got hold of his tale of a shy, stunted teenage girl who happened to have vast telekinetic powers. As the rest of this list will make clear, it’s no secret that King’s books tended to make good films only in the hands of a competent director, but DePalma in particular blew the doors off of this one, picking out the meaty insides and discarding the extraneous baggage. Ratcheting up the tension of King’s patented adolescent-angst narrative and turning the end into something beyond gore and well into Grand Guignol territory, DePalma also delivers one of the best jump-out-of-your-seat shocks in horror movie history near the end of Carrie.

SALEM'S LOT (1979)

The story of a small town infested by vampires was one of King’s first big successes as a novelist, and this TV movie adaptation — helmed by horror maven and Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper — does a terrific job conveying its sense of paranoia and night terror without resorting to gore or cheap thrills. Indeed, working within the restrictions of television seemed to suit Hooper and screenwriter Paul Monash, who paced and teased the moments of shock out quite effectively. They’re also aided greatly by a cast crammed full of top-shelf character actors, including Elisha Cook Jr., Fred Willard, James Mason, Ed Flanders and George Dzundza.

THE SHINING (1980)

Not a lot of genuinely great directors have taken on the works of Stephen King, but Stanley Kubrick was unquestionably the greatest. Made only three years after the publication of the novel, The Shining is a work of genuine genius, containing one of Jack Nicholson’s greatest screen performances, some absolutely tremendous camerawork, and a sense of creeping horror that’s absent in many of the plodding, obvious shock films made from King's work. (Amazingly, the best-ever movie adaptation of a Stephen King novel was one of King’s least favorites; he later helped a far-inferior TV movie reworking into existence.)

CREEPSHOW (1982)

In a perfectly wonderful and appropriate twist of fate, one of Stephen King’s best friends is zombie auteur George Romero, and while Creepshow, their only true collaboration (King wrote the screenplay and Romero directed) isn’t the best movie based on the horror writer’s works, it’s easily the most enjoyable. The two sought to recreate the goofy, gory tone of the EC horror comics they had both enjoyed in their youth, and they succeeded to an admirable degree — and if the overall feel of the movie, as well as a hysterically nutty performance by King himself, are any indication, they had a hell of a time doing it.

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)

The story of a man who can see the future, and whether or not he has the chance to alter it, is a pretty whoozy old trope in science fiction, and to be honest, it doesn’t fare all that much better even in the hands of a man who, like Stephen King, can lend a patina of respectability to even the hoariest stock plots. David Cronenberg does what he can with the material he has, but it’s not the script or the direction that makes The Dead Zone worth watching: it’s the lead performances, most especially Christopher Walken (sublimely nutty as usual) in the role of the seer and Martin Sheen (hamming it up like nobody’s business) as a politician he suspects may someday trigger a nuclear war.

— Leonard Pierce

Morning Deal Report: Behind My Camel

Peter Smith — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:00:00 GMT

Spider-Man 4 lumbers gradually into production. Sony says this will include a mere two villains, instead of their originally planned 846. Whatever.

Gerard Butler has fled the Escape From New York remake, just after news that Brett Ratner had split for the outer boroughs himself.

The underused Gillian Anderson will star in The Smell of Apples, a drama set in '70s South Africa. Nice to see her again.

That George Romero just really likes zombies, apparently; Diary of the Dead's not even out yet and he's already planning a sequel.

Speaking as the "Andy Summers" in a Police cover band, I'm delighted to hear that the real Andy Summers' autobiography is becoming a documentary. That it's from the director of Tupac: Resurrection is a little less encouraging, but we'll see.

— Peter Smith

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