The Screengrab : the crazies

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.

In Other Blogs: Where No Blog Has Gone Before

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

At The House Next Door, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard get their Trek on, running down the first six films in the series. “There's something ephemeral about these films, something insubstantial, like they'll all just melt away once I stop thinking about them. Maybe it's because they're so thoroughly rooted in this weird nostalgia for the original series, a nostalgic feeling that I can't say I really share. Each of the films has an extended montage, some of them longer and more insufferable than others, in which the camera caresses the glistening surface of the starship Enterprise with fetishistic glee, like a horny dude ogling a naked centerfold or a mid-life crisis case polishing the chrome on his sports car. In the first film, it feels like it takes 20 minutes for everyone to stop just gawking at the damn ship in disbelief. It's a strange experience to watch these films with all these obvious nostalgic cues—the crew reassembling for each new mission, the familiar faces being highlighted, the bombastic music whenever the ship first appears, the obscure nods to episodes of the TV series—and to realize that I'm not in on the reminiscences of the intended audience.”

Our erstwhile colleague Vern weighs in on twittering at the movies. “I don’t think I’m gonna start catching up with all the 21st century technologies, for example I still don’t have a cellular phone device or those shoes with the wheels in them. But everywhere I go I hear about this “twitter” they got now. Moriarty writes in his column about how Harry Twittered him something or other, Harry writes in his column about what he was Twittering during the movie because it was so scary, Devin Feraci on Chud is mad because some other douchebag used his twittering during Crank 2 and also he had to cancel his tweeter for Even Rachel Wood because he was disappointed in the quality of her twitterings, or whatever.”

Beyond the Multiplex features more Jarmusch chat. “For me, film is very related to music, in that it flows before you in its own time signature. And my own musicality is on the slower side. Maybe it's like the way I talk. Maybe I think slowly. Then there's the aspect that, I don't know why ... I'm attracted to the moments that are somewhat -- maybe completely -- devoid of something dramatic. My films are built around those things. Coffee and Cigarettes is just little moments out of a day that are not considered important. Or I made Night on Earth, in which the whole film is made up of cab rides that, in a dramatic narrative, would be the part you would leave out.”

David Poland of The Hot Blog has an interesting take on that viral version of Wolverine. “Personally, I think Fox should include the now-infamous leaked version in the eventually DVD package for this film. Own the situation. And if you are a film lover, the footage of unfinished effects is kind of interesting when you see the final version. It’s the kind of stuff that studios put in DVD extras in order to illustrate the process of building effects.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Spoutblog offers the very timely How to Survive a Plague - 10 Lessons From the Movies. For instance, Don’t Bomb the Plague. “The original hushed-up outbreak in Outbreak is thought to be eradicated with a bomb, and in The Crazies the military wants to destroy an infected town with nuclear weapons. But as we see in the former, such means aren’t guaranteed to make the plague go away. In The Andromeda Strain, it’s even learned that the threatening bacteria will be strengthened by an atomic bomb, which is unfortunate since the underground facility in which the alien organism is being studied is equipped with a self-destruction mechanism employing such weaponry. Fortunately the lab also has a way to disarm that bomb, but it’s best to just not have such “safety” measures in the first place.”

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!

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!

New Grindhouse Classics: "Mulberry Street"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The holy grail of a certain kind of movie geek is the low-budget genre picture--crime, sci-fi, or maybe, especially, horror--made by no-name filmmakers who, forced to compensate for their lack of resources with whatever they can come up with in terms of ingenuity and febrile, crackpot ideas, achieves what Manny Farber called "termite art," a strange and living vision that charges down alleys that Jerry Bruckheimer wouldn't venture into if there were strippers in there. Mulberry Street, which played theaters for an instant last year tucked in alongside seven other scare pictures as part of the 2007 "After Dark Horrorfest" and which recently came out on DVD, is a rare example of a movie that gets close enough to achieving grail status for viewers to catch scent of the wine. It's an apocalyptic horror movie that suggestively touches on post-9/11 anxieties without resorting to the kind of explicit speechifying that one encounters in the films of such specialists in ambitious schlock as Larry Cohen. It's also a movie that solves the problem of how to capture the edgy, grungy vibe of the classic New York movies from the seventies and make it seem relevant to the city we know today.

Mulberry Street is set among the people who can barely afford a ticket to the theaters in the more photogenic parts of New York now, who are being crowded out of a place that increasingly seems to have no place for anyone who has to keep up on the price of groceries. The main setting is an apartment building whose tenants are on the brink of being evicted by a development company looking to upgrade the area; the company's billboards are plastered with the message, "The neighborhood is changing" and a picture of the Trump-like company head, gazing down over his latest acquisition like a Yuppie Big Brother. The construction process has apparently set off reverberations that are reaching down beneath the subway lines and bringing to the surface an especially nasty breed of rats, who, biting anyone they come across, turn their human victims into rabid, murderous were-rats. Silly as this sounds, in the movie it plays with a metaphoric logic that's hard to shake off. It's as if gentrification has finally driven what's left of the city's natural essence insane and forced it to fight back. Of course, in fighting back, it mainly strikes the people who are already its fellow sufferers--the people who, as in Katrina, can't afford to get out of nature's way. When all hell is broken loose and Manhattan has been quarantined, a TV news announcers informs us that the mayor will soon be making a speech, "from the Bahamas."

Directed by Jim Mickle from a script he co-wrote with Nick Damici, who plays the hero, an ex-boxer named Clutch, it's a monster movie whose fast-cut editing (by the director) and blurry, often weirdly lovely cinematography (by Ryan Samul) are so effective that it's hard to mind much that they probably developed as a way to conceal the limitations of the special effects/make-up budget. The first rat people we see are bum-like creatures with loose, matted hair that strategically conceals their features, though once things are going good, there's a quick glimpse of a bald, pointy-haired sucker who looks rather like the title character of F. W. Muneau's Nosferatu. (The ending, which features guys running around in protective suits, plays as a double homage to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and his lesser-known 1973 film The Crazies.) Most of the characters are hard-scrabble members of the working poor and self-styled tough New Yorkers; when a young family hustles to get the hell out of the building before the plague engulf them, one urban warrior yells after them contemptuously, "Go back to Connecticut!" (There's also a memorable scene of a heavyset bar owner matter-of-factly chasing a monster out of his place by repeatedly whacking it upside the head with a skillet while hollaring, "And stay out!")

The biggest flaw in the movie is that the casualness-in-the-face-of-chaos tone can get underdone. There are a couple of moments where characters seem bizarrely unmoved by the loss of people they had reason to feel close to, and Clutch, who's expecting his grown daughter's return home after a stint in Iraq and a spell in a military hospital, never betrays the concern you might expect a loving father to expect upon his realization that his kid is out there somewhere in a zombie minefield; he never even comments on it. (The daughter is played by Kim Blair, whose beauty is somehow made only more affecting by her character's facial scars. The standout member of the cast is Ron Brice, who plays Clutch's gay roommate; he knows how to communicate fear and confusion while retaining his character's dignity.) But even when it seems to have a couple of circuits misfiring, Mulberry Street has a look and feel that set it apart from the run of blood-squib operas cluttering up the direct-to-video shelves. Hardcore horror geeks and people nostalgic for the old Times Square should give it a look. Some sane people might want to give it a look, too.

Take Five: Romero Alive!

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

George Romero's Diary of the Dead opens this Friday, and it's the fifth in his legendary zombie film series. We thought about dedicating this week's Take Five to an overview of each installment, but not only could we not swing a screening of Diary (dammit!), but we figured, what better time to look at some of Romero's other films? Yes, it's true: the man who invented the modern conception of the zombie, who's responsible for one of the most durable and appealing of the Famous Monsters of Filmland, has actually made a couple of movies that do not feature the living dead! We're the first to admit that we're suckers for the low-budget, foul-mouthed, expatriate Pittsburgher, though, and while he seems to save his best stuff for the zombie pictures, that's not all there is to the man. True, he sticks with bloodshed and horror — we aren't expecting a Shakespeare adaptation or a minor-key family drama from him anytime soon — but at least a few of his non-zombie pictures are worth checking out for various reasons. So if you're in one of the many cities where Diary of the Dead won't open for a while, head to your local grindhouse video emporium or fire up your rent-by-mail queue and have a Romero-fest in which the dead don't walk: they just die.

THE CRAZIES (1973)

Romero's fourth film overall, and his best to immediately follow the original Night of the Living Dead, this is similar to his original zombie masterpiece in many ways: the Pittsburgh-area filming locations, the largely amateur cast and the ultra-low budget, and the dreadful atmosphere of paranoia and nameless fear. It concerns the government's attempt to control a bizarre outbreak of a strange virus that causes instant, violent insanity in all who contract it; but the government, as it often is, isn't telling all that it knows, and the faceless federal agents in stark white biochemical hazard suits quickly become as menacing as the maddened townsfolk. A fascinating, underseen movie that creates a terrific mood of terror and insanity, with some of Romero's pointed social commentary; he's currently working on a big-budget remake.

MARTIN (1977)

Perhaps George Romero's most underrated film is this suspenseful, character-driven horror film made just before the release of Dawn of the Dead (and financed by Romero's direction of a TV movie about O.J. Simpson called Juice on the Loose, which would only take on horrific dimensions much later on). Martin Madahas — played compellingly by the young unknown John Amplas — is a drifter of Eastern European descent who has come to believe that he's a vampire, and for everyone who's determined to talk him out of it before he wields the straight razors that compensate for his lack of fangs, there's someone else who's trying to convince him he's right. The ambiguity over Martin's true nature, and his own feelings towards the urges he can't deny, are what make this such an interesting movie. Definitely worthwhile.

CREEPSHOW (1982)

We've discussed this one before, in our Stephen King Take Five, but it's a longtime favorite of ours and one of the gems of Romero's catalogue — not to mention the only time he really seems to relax and have fun. It's his first truly big-budget picture, and while the effects and film quality are much improved, the most he gets out of the money he's given to play with is populating the cast of this campy good time with tons of appealing character actors, from Fritz Weaver and Ed Harris to Leslie Nielsen and E.G. Marshall to King himself and an uncredited Tom Atkins. This isn't high art by any means, but it perfectly captures the atmosphere of giddy vileness in the old EC Comics it emulates, and it's a highly enjoyable romp if, like King and Romero, you surrender completely to the pulp tone of the thing.

MONKEY SHINES (1988)

Monkeys share one thing in common with zombies: they are awesome. As single-word punchlines, only robots can rival them. But with Monkey Shines, a film about a homicidal helper chimpanzee, Romero manages to prove that monkeys are only as successful as the stars of horror movies if they are a hundred feet tall. Monkey Shines isn't nearly as bad as its reputation or its horrible name (it's hootily subtitled An Experiment in Fear); it has a compelling psychological angle, an interesting undertone of moral ambiguity, and a light touch with the social satire. Then again, it ain't all that good, either, and it's largely sunk by dud after dud in the supporting cast, from charmless Jason Beghe in the lead to completely baffled pros like Stanley Tucci and Janine Turner. Still, it's got a monkey, plus Stephen Root, so you'll laugh at least once.

BRUISER (2000)

We were quite excited when we heard about the impending release of Bruiser back around the turn of the century: not only was Romero back, but he appeared to be directing a movie that was more psychological thriller than gorefest. Unfortunately, despite tight direction and some swell performances (especially by Peter Stormare), the story of a repressed, simpering executive who explodes into rage and revenge gives the game away too soon and drifts aimlessly in its latter half into a fog of serial-killer cliches. This is a movie that could have benefited hugely from dwelling on the psychological state of its lead character and leaving open a degree of ambiguity and uncertainty about his actions, the way Martin did, but instead, it's a statement of the kind of potential Romero always has but doesn't always deliver on.