Revenge of the Revenant Review 8: The one with a zombie on a motorcycle

 

 

Title: The Cemetery Man aka Dellamorte Dellamore

What Year?: 1994

Classification: Unnatural Experiment

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

When I reviewed  ChildrenShouldn’t Play With Dead Things ,I mentioned that I first thought of it when I included an “unrated” category for this feature. This time, I’m getting to one of two or so I had in mind all along. On consideration, I felt strongly enough about it that I set aside a movie I actually own to clear a space for it, at least for the moment. I did this because this one is that weird, even by the standards of this feature. I would go so far as to rank it with (dear Logos) Shanks, which I reviewed in the first incarnation of the feature. The strangest part is that it was one of the latest movies to come up, behind only Splinter, and exactly a year after Jurassic Park. The world had moved on, but somebody still wanted to do one more zombie movie. I can offer no better introduction to The Cemetery Man.

Our story begins with a man talking on the phone when there is a banging at the door. He quite nonchalantly draws a gun and shoots the pale figure that bursts in. We learn that our antihero Francesco is the keeper of a cemetery where the dead return to life as cannibalistic undead he refers to as “returners”. With the help of his disadvantaged companion Naghi, he puts down the undead with impressive efficiency. Naturally, he hides these goings-on from authorities, with the semi-explicit rationale that they would close the cemetery and leave him unemployed. Things begin to get out of hand when he takes a fancy to a widow, only to see her killed by her reanimated spouse. He must then deal with the increased volume caused by a bus wreck that claims a cyclist and the mayor’s daughter, followed by the distraction when his beloved seems to reappear in a series of new identities. That’s when the Grim Reaper appears and calls on him to get a head start by killing the living.

The Cemetery Man was possibly the last of a wave of “spaghetti zombie” movies from the Italian film industry (see Zombie and City of the Walking Dead), based on the novel Dellamorte Dellamore by Italian writer and artist Tiziano Sclavi. The film was coproduced with support from Germany and France, with emerging media conglomerate Studio Canal taking a good part of the credit. British actor Rupert Everett was cast in the lead role, with French musician Francois Hadji-Lazaro as Naghi and Finnish model Anna Talchi as his lady love(s). It was released in Italy under the same title as the original novel. It did not reach US release until at late as 1996, when it first appeared under the title Cemetery Man.

I first heard of this movie from The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia. I only watched it a few years back, when I made a foolhardy attempt to watch it on a long ride to work. That made the viewing for this review the first time I watched the movie without interruption. It was yet another movie I went back to without any judgments in advance. It was first and foremost a strange ride, though not in the way that usually stands out to me. No matter how strange the events and imagery, the movie lays them out within a linear narrative according to a reasonably clear internal logic, which is what usually keeps a film on my good side (see Plan9 From Outer Space). This time, though, I find it at least a minor downside, simply because it belies some of the movie’s deeper pretensions. The last third or so in particular comes across like a sane person’s idea of madness; the artists can capture the shape of the thing, but not the thing itself.

Still, the movie certainly delivers plenty of strange and surreal twists on the genre. The makeup and effects for the undead are easily among the best on record. They are grungy, disfigured and utterly malevolent, and the film never lets us see too much of them. Most of the action is clumped in a scene with a group of boy scouts from the bus, who click their jaws reflexively as they creep into the cabin. Things take a further turn for the worse when one of them actually gets hold of Francesco’s gun, while Naghi remains unconcerned until his TV takes a direct hit. My pick for the best single zombie is his lady love on her second return, which leaves him confused and fretful. She looks like a perverse imitation of a fairy queen, with roots and branches either stuck to her or growing straight out of her body. She remains utterly silent as she approaches, throwing him offguard long enough for the inevitable strike.

Even more surreal than the zombies is the movie’s dialogue. In no particular order, there is the mayor’s daughter, who chatters as inanely after death as in life, and her father, who frets about the tragedy “so close to the election”. There is a girl who moons for the cyclist even in mourning, who we will return to momentarily. Then there is a steady stream of one-liners from Francesco, who handles the undead as capably as any number of protagonists in more standard post-apocalyptic fair. When he learns the lady love’s husband is already 2 weeks deceased, he casually says, “Thank goodness.” When the scouts arrive, he remarks that he will need more ammunition, while during their attack, his first response is that they came back “sooner than we thought”. After he has to dispatch the head of the mayor’s daughter, he comments that she was “getting a little off”.

The “one scene” has to be one I practically forgot about, the return of the cyclist. It begins when Francesco interrupts the mourning girl, who literally clings to the tombstone. Suddenly, the earth shakes, and the cyclist bursts from the grave on his motorcycle like a pharaoh buried with his chariot. He is perhaps the most elaborate of the movie’s undead, still wearing a shattered helmet with debris sticking out of various places. At first, he merely rides on, with the girl stumbling after, while Francesco grumbles and swears at the uncharacteristically fast target. After a short distance, the girl gets ahead. She presses her face against the wheel while the rider gazes down inscrutably. He blinks, in itself a horrifying sight I haven’t quite worked out, and helps her aboard. When Francesco catches up, however, it is clear that his drive is no different. Still, the girl actively protests, “He’s only eating me!”, then more forcefully, “I shall be eaten by whomever I please!” He responds only that he is doing his job. Then the returner lunges, and the film’s most fateful twist ensues.

In giving this film an unrated rank, I did about what I expected to, yet still came very close to giving it a much less kind rating. The main things that stopped me were the very high production values and genuinely clever twists on the zombie concept. It is, however, an especially egregious case of the parts being greater than the whole. What is far worse is that it sacrifices its narrative clarity, as well as the relatively redeeming qualities of the main character, for “artistic” twists that make little sense and increasingly just don’t work, up to and including the ending. To me, the strongest indictment is its timing. By comparison, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and even Shanks made “sense” in the 1970s, when everybody was trying to be experimental and weird. By the 1990s, the weird-for-the-sake-of-weird approach had devolved to pseudointellectual posturing. It’s hard to say what could have made zombie movies relevant again in the decade of CGI, but this film only gave us one more very literal dead end.

Movie Mania! Deep Rising soundtrack

 

After creating not one but two movie review features for this blog, what I've found is that there are still movies that don't quite fit. Today's post is for one of those movies, perhaps the ultimate 1990s monster movie and the closest thing to a purpose-built cult movie. I present Deep Rising- the soundtrack.

To briefly cover what I'm sure I'll go into when I get around to a real review, Deep Rising was released in  early1998 by Hollywood Pictures. It was in many ways an "old school" monster/ B movie made on an unprecedented  $45 million budget. The movie was directed by Stephen Sommers with a cast led by Treat Williams and Bond vixen Famke Janssen. It was a critical and commercial failure, grossing $11.4M, while also being savaged by Roger Ebert among others. Needless to say, it's one of my favorite movies of all time, but again we're looking at the music.

On that front, the filmmakers somehow lined up Jerry Goldsmith, responsible for the music for such films as Patton, Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Of these alone, Patton in particular gets my personal picks for the greatest movie theme of all time, and I was practically born a John Williams fan. It would be easy to joke that a truckload of money was involved in lining him up for Deep Rising, but it will be evident to anyone familiar with his work that the composer had a long history of slumming it in sci fi/ horror movies. He scored Logan's Run and The Omen, though those were relatively high-profile and well-funded productions for genre films of the time. He continued working on medium-budget sci-fi films like Gremlins and Innerspace through the '80s and '90s. He also worked on some genuinely obscure genre films, notably Link in 1986 (definitely due for a review). His later work has always felt to me like a revered elder looking for a last blaze of glory, and while Deep Rising was far from his last, it certainly fit the bill.

As for my experiences, the Goldsmith soundtrack is certainly a major reason I like the movie as well as I do. I had tried on and off to find it as a digital album, but only ever came up with a cover from the Cinemagic series, where I had previously turned for the Krull theme. I finally went looking for a CD, and found that it could be had in the $5 to $10 range. When I got it, I took a further interest in the insert art. Here's some more pics.

On listening to the CD, the big letdown was how short it was. All the tracks together are 32 minutes, only about 4 times as long as the cover I had purchased. It still certainly captures the quality of the Goldsmith score, perhaps better than a longer album would have. The main theme has a hint of Caribbean, adding to an atmosphere of piratical adventure. The music that accompanies the monsters' attacks have a deceptively measured, almost mechanical quality. It perfectly conveys the sense not just of mounting dread, but also of a calculating malign intelligence that becomes more apparent as the movie goes on.

What remains just as worthwhile to me is that insert. It's quite clear that those responsible for the CD were genuinely hoping to stir up interest in the movie, which is hilariously futile in hindsight. It's also all too apparent that the studio system had no clue what to do with the movie. To start with, this was a time when the art of the movie poster was dead, buried in a shallow grave and started to smell.  On top of that, the ad men were obviously stymied by how to fit the movie in a genre niche. The slogans suggest a horror movie, while the photos suggest an action movie. In reality, the movie had elements of both, but neither captures the whole, because it was supposed to go above genre boundaries. As with many movies I have covered, it was an approach that might have worked ten years earlier or ten years later. Instead, the movie fell into the studio creativity vacuum of the late 1990s, where it was left in the hands of people with no better idea than to pound a square peg into a round hole and in the process present it in the blandest way possible.

That's all for now, and now I have to wind down. More to come!

Revenge of the Revenant Review 7: The first one with zombies on a train

 

Title: Horror Express aka Panic On The Transiberian

What year?: 1971 (filming)/ 1973 (US release)

Classification: Prototype/ Mashup

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

At this point in the feature, I’ve gotten to the “undecided” column, which has less to do with what I plan to include than with what I want to cover before going back to certain other projects that I have in progress or in mind. For the most part, these are either ones I could cover elsewhere or ones I don’t own myself. Then there was one more I semi-seriously considered setting aside for the moment, for no particular reason apart from the fact that my feelings are decidedly mixed. I finally got to it now because I knew it would still take less time than anything else in the lineup. With that ringing non-endorsement, I present Horror Express, and if you decide to look it up, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Our story begins with a scientific expedition that uncovers what is described as a fossil but is really the frozen remains of an ape-man sort of creature. We learn from its very British discoverer Saxton that it is to be shipped from northern China to Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express, with his colleague Wells and a rogues gallery that includes a countess, a spy and a mad monk aboard. Things go amiss when a thief tries to break into the giant crate holding the specimen, only to collapse bleeding from his eyes when he looks at what is inside. After the train departs, another curiosity seeker tries to get a look at the specimen. Instead, the creature comes to life and escapes, apparently using the memories and knowledge of its victims to pick a lock. After several more bodies pile up, the men of science realize that the prehistoric creature can assimilate the minds of its prey through eye contact with its glowing red gaze. The danger seems to be over after an inspector kills the ape-man, but Saxton suspects that the ancient evil behind it all has merely switched to another body. As the film barrels into its finale, the being reveals one last trick up its sleeve: the ability to reanimate its victims to do its will.

Horror Express was one of an often overlooked number of ‘70s and ‘80s horror films made or coproduced by the Spanish film industry, with other examples being City of the Walking Dead, The Falling, and the long-running Tombs of the Blind Dead franchise. The Anglo-Spanish project was produced by Brit Bernard Gordon and directed by Spaniard Eugenio Martin. Per the lore/ Wikipedia, Martin maintained the film was conceived and planned around train models and sets from his earlier film Pancho Villa. Other accounts indicate it was based in part on “Who Goes There?”, the John W. Campbell novella adapted as The Thing From Another World and later The Thing. In a major publicity coup, Hammer stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were cast as Saxton and Wells, along with Telly Savalas as a Cossack introduced in the final act. The film was rated R by the MPAA citing content including nudity, which does not appear to have survived in readily available versions of the film. The film is considered in the public domain, allowing numerous releases of usually low quality.

The first and foremost thing I can say about my experiences with this film is that I first bought it around 2007, on a DVD release that is (to quote the exotroopers) absolute kaka. I have literally watched silent films in better condition than this one, and anything else out there is likely to be no better. Yet, if you have watched it often enough, the garbage factor starts to seem like an integral part of the experience. It feels like Skynet sent itself back to 1984 on a VHS tape, and this movie is the 30^th generation copy of its consciousness. Or, to use a less mixed metaphor, it’s like looking at the oxidized remnants of a Greek warrior’s arms and armor. You know it was clean and whole and bright once, but somehow, it’s more satisfying to imagine it than see it.

All of these issues are just the cherry on the sundae of the film itself. You would be hard-pressed to find any aspect of the movie that isn’t weird, or awkward, or self-dating, or all of the above. There’s the wildly overcomplicated story, which still never leaves any doubt of the entity’s nature or the identity of its hosts. There’s the gore, which mostly consists of one very unsettling effect done to death. There’s the soundtrack, which feels like the weird uncle of disco. There’s the far too large ensemble cast, most of whom get killed off before they do anything of importance. There’s the extra distraction factor of Savalas, who seems like he got lost on the way back to the set of Kojak. Then there’s the bizarre dialogue, by turns charmingly clunky and mindbogglingly histrionic. On the last item, I can’t avoid mentioning perhaps the best line not only in the movie but the entire zombie genre, delivered perfectly deadpan by Cushing: “Monster? But we’re British!”

What holds the movie together, besides the inevitably good performance of Lee and Cushing, is the totally unique revenant. Pseudoscientific trappings aside, it is less like a zombie and more like a cross between a vampire and a demon, with an inexplicable touch of the Gorgon. The makeup and suit are impressive even on the junk copy, while the performer manages plenty of interesting touches, such as a pause on encountering a sleeping child. By the time the revenant’s mind has reached a human host, there is no further question of its intelligence and cunning. It is around this point that the scientists find a preposterous record of is backstory in its preserved blood, revealing that the being reached the Earth in or before the time of the dinosaurs. The arc culminates when the entity finally speaks for itself, freely describing the services it could do humanity, but only for as long as it takes to revive its servants. The sequence that ensues after that is one of several I have seen to put zombies in a vehicle or other very confining space, and easily in the top two or three most effective. The only thing I can really add is that if it wasn’t in the movie, I might not even count this one in the zombie genre.

For the “one scene”, my pick from an embarrassment of riches is the scene where the ice creature escapes. A porter, encouraged by Dr. Wells, tries to get a look inside. He whistles as he works, either undoing screws or simply drilling into the wood per Wells’ suggestion. (Did I mention my copy is lousy?) His work is interrupted for reasons not entirely clear. While his back is turned, a hand reaches through an opening and gets hold of one of the tools. When the porter returns, he finds the lock already open. He peers inside the crate, to find a glowing read eye staring back. In moments, he collapses, his own eyes turned milky white. Then, as the crate opens, the whistling resumes in the same tune, now evidently coming from the creature.

The only thing that can be said to sum up this movie is that it is all over the place. That presented the makings of a hard choice on the rating. Based on what I remembered about it, I went in ready to give it a 3. Based on what I was reminded of, especially in the early acts, I very seriously considered giving it a 1. After seeing the whole thing, however, the middle of the road was really the only choice. It might not have been great or that good, then or now, but it was competent, and it was unique beyond the wildest acid trip of imaginings. That’s enough for me to go easy, and move on.

Image credit Wrong Side of the Art. 

Crypto Corner: The book no one can read

 This piece begins with my childhood reading, which is probably going to be the same for most people. Back then, I was an especially avid reader of books of actual or posited “mysteries”. Whether it was UFOs, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, poltergeists, Easter Island heads or the Flying Dutchman, I would have run across some book that had retold it breathlessly. It must have been sometime in that vast data dump of legendry and misinformation that I first encountered reports of something a bit different. It was told, and frequently illustrated, that there was an old book written in an unknown language and a form of writing nobody could identify, illustrated with strange pictures that included plants that science only discovered with the exploration of the Americas. Then it was usually said that scholars, linguists and even expert codebreakers had all studied the book, but never succeeded in finding its meaning. That is probably no more or less than most of the western world has heard of the Voynich Manuscript.

That particular bubble took longer than usual to burst. I continued to run across mentions of the matter well into high school and college. I learned that there were any number of distinguished minds who had applied themselves to the problem, typically just long enough to get a few plausible snatches out of a passage of the text. I found out more about the illustrations, which turned out to include some risqué bits that were probably censored from the books I pored over in the school library. I even confirmed there are a few drawings that look at least a little like a sunflower, which was not “discovered” until Columbus returned to the Americas.

Then I returned to the subject a few years back, through a very thorough lay-scholarly book, and found a rather dismaying turn of events. Growing numbers of researchers were arguing that it was a hoax, not in the sense that it was the fabrication of a modern mind (a suspicion largely ruled out when carbon dating was applied), but that its creator, whatever the date and place, had created it simply to fool others with the prefabricated mystery of a pseudomystical, perhaps pseudoscientific tome, with the most likely motive being simple profit. In this light, even the potential objections- above all the elaborateness and sheer length of the manuscript- fall all too well into place. Why not go to the extra effort for the incentive of extra money? Why not fill a book with random or wholly meaningless text and pictures, if it convinced a wealthy patron there must be something to it?

Meanwhile, I was already coming to my own conclusion, so readily I thought of a key example by the time it was mentioned in the book. The closest genuine counterparts to the manuscript were from the realm of what would now be called “contactees”: Self-styled mystics, mediums, channelers and others who claim to be able to speak for gods, angels, ancient ancestors, aliens and other entities. Such characters have a long history of presenting language, writing and whole ecologies for the otherworldly entities. Given this context, the “hoax” hypothesis fails or at least falls behind, but mostly because proponents have somewhat misapplied the term. The kind of characters that crop up are eccentrics, waifs and mental patients rather than polished charlatans, though they are certainly not above willful deception. More importantly, their behavior invariably starts long before the prospect of monetary or  any other gain materializes, if it ever does. Most unsettlingly, many have freely gone to misfortune, imprisonment and even death still churning out reams of nonsense. I find this in particular an all too believable fate for the author of the manuscript.

Of course, these possibilities have not been wholly lost on scholars. Much discussion has already focused on the scenario of a “constructed” language. Interestingly, this has also lent strength to certain suggestions that the manuscript had more than one author, perhaps a group or small community who went along with the venture. However, the main insight to emerge is just how little chance anyone else would have of unravelling the meaning (if any) without the cooperation of the responsible party. In that respect, the problems posed are akin to that of the Japanese who faced the Navaho code talkers. It would be relatively easy to study the characteristics of an unknown or invented language, but this would mainly be a matter of assessing the knowledge and overall sophistication of the creator(s). To really make progress would require a “Rosetta Stone” of known meaning, which in itself implies a level of consideration and good faith that cannot be assumed from the evidence at hand.

An incidental lesson from these cases is that true randomization was beyond the reach of pre-industrial humanity. Charismatics who consciously or unconsciously try to pass off babble as the tongues of angels simply fall into repetition. Those who rig wheels, Ouija boards and the like (which have been discussed in connection with the “hoax” hypothesis) eventually inject their semiconscious minds into the operation. Meanwhile, most of our cast hover at the intersection of semiconscious creativity and deliberate invention, building up the speech of their constructed world from whatever knowledge they have. In practice, even undistinguished individuals (like the well-studied case I had in mind) have impressed the unwary. It is genuinely daunting to consider what might come from an accomplished scholar well-versed in languages. (Tolkien might come close.) This too might account for the manuscript, though I doubt it.

In all the efforts to decipher the manuscript, surprisingly little attention has gone to the simplest question of all: Who wrote the damn thing? Much of the discussion has centered on the early conjecture that it was a work of Roger Bacon, but in hindsight this was a dead end long before modern testing proved the manuscript was written well after his time. As an advocate of free and scientific inquiry, the last thing Bacon would have done was bury his learning in an encoded manuscript. The only part he would have had in such a scheme would have been to mock the obsession of his peers with the occult and “hidden” knowledge, which would make a disconcerting amount of sense if other developments did not preclude it. The other chief suspects are John Dee and Edward Kelley, a pair of mystics who may have possessed the manuscript at one point. However, I judge their role late and tangential. If anything, I would suspect them of inventing the Bacon canard to make the manuscript more marketable, but that would simply reaffirm that the manuscript itself was beyond their power to change or control.

What I have found most interesting is the further information to emerge on the handling of the manuscript. Famously, the pages of the manuscript were numbered by at least one other hand. The numbers show several pages to be missing, and there is ample evidence that the manuscript had been rebound out of its original order and perhaps even partly copied before the numbering occurred. It is also clear that the cover was replaced at least once.  Most intriguingly, several correspondences have been preserved or recovered both with the book and separate from it, including a letter about its contents addressed to Athanasius Kircher, a 17^th-century antiquarian and self-promoter who vainly claimed to have deciphered hieroglyphs. Ironically, these records refer to the manuscript in mystified terms little different than our own, to the point of being flatteringly presented as “sphinxes” to Kircher.

To me, it is these outwardly reassuring developments that are the most unnerving part of the tale. It has reminded me of a science fiction story titled “As Never Was” by the forgotten master P. Schuyler Miller. That story is about a knife brought back from a distant future, made from an untraceable and irreproducible material. Yet it already bears evidence of a long history, complete with a replacement handle that is itself worn with use. Then there is an extra detail that becomes a point in the now fairly predictable plot, still done well enough that I won’t reveal it here. (Thankfully, it is now available in an ebook.) The overarching theme of the story and the reason it is so memorable is the crushing nature of futility, of literally doing what has already been done. That is the feeling I get looking at the history of Voynich scholarship.

One more thing to be overlooked in all this is that it would have been singularly difficult to create something like the Voynich manuscript in secret. To begin with, it was certainly beyond the means of the peasantry or the truly homeless. The world before the printing press was not one where anyone could doodle away at any project they chose. It took skilled labor and leisure time to create a book; just obtaining paper was a nontrivial expense. The further time and labor of producing anything close to the complexity of the Voynich manuscript would easily magnify the expense tenfold. There would have to be notes, tables, rough drafts, and perhaps a theoretical Rosetta Stone that could have explained it all.  It must be further considered that even if the manuscript was originally intended to be intelligible, other parties could have been quite willing to obscure or destroy key records and evidence just to perpetuate a sense of mystery.

This brings us to my most depressing and unavoidable suspicion: No matter when or by whom the manuscript was written, there must have been someone who knew something. This is the foremost reason I reject the “hoax” hypothesis as such. If someone had manufactured the manuscript for mere profit, there would have been someone ready to expose it, if only to humiliate any patron who had already paid for the final product. On the other hand, consider the likely outcome if my line of thinking is correct. Sooner or later, someone could and should have revealed or figured out the true origin of the book, whether it was a crazed nobleman, a mystic with the time and means to write, or a band of monks simply trying to fill their spare time.  After that, all concerned might just as well have set the matter aside in embarrassed silence, yet the manuscript would still remain, ready to attract and deceive another generation. Such is the allure of mystery, even when the mystery is only there because nobody wanted it to be solved.

For links, I highly recommend The Voynich Manuscript by Rob Churchill and Gerry Kennedy. A great deal of good material is also available at Cipher Mysteries.  While I'm at it, here's the link for the P. Schuyler Miller ebook.

Revenge of the Revenant Review 6: The one with zombie kids and a giant poodle

 

Title: The Boneyard

What Year?: 1989 (filming)/ 1991 (release)

Classification: Anachronistic Outlier/ Mashup

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

With this review, I’m finally getting to the first of the movies I had in mind when I thought of this (revived) feature. From here on in, most of the really bad ones are out of the way, and the good ones should be coming closer together. However, this one has presented its own challenges, because it happens to be among my favorites, and I’ve done way too many reviews not to know that reviewing your favorites is as risky as meeting your heroes. With that, I’m diving in to The Boneyard.

Our story begins with two cops going to the house of a reclusive woman. It’s revealed that she is a psychic who has worked with the police and doesn’t want to do it again. The senior detective wants her help with what looks like an open and shut case: An undertaker has been caught with the bodies of three children that were fed with the bodies of the dead before their own demise. But he warns that they are really kyoshi, half-demonic ghouls that feed on the living and the dead. (The term is otherwise used for a form of Japanese poetry.) There are further hijinks when they go to the morgue, including obstruction from the administrator Ms. Poopinplatz (seriously) and the discovery of a would-be suicide who isn’t quite dead. As the psychic unravels the mystery, one of her premonitions comes true as the three undead kids come to life. The psychic, the police, and the civilians are trapped in the morgue with the kyoshi, Poopinplatz and her poodle Floofsums, and only time will tell whose company is worse.

The Boneyard was written and directed by James Cummins, previously known as an effects/ makeup guy for movies like The Thing and Enemy Mine. The cast was led by Deborah Rose as Alley the psychic, Ed Nelson of Peyton Place as the cop, and Phyllis Diller as Poopinplatz. Denise Young was featured as Dana, the civilian of the group, in her only noted screen role. The movie was filmed in 1989 but not released until 1991, reportedly as a “direct to video” release. A number of aspects of the production have become mired in mystery, included its run time, which has been “officially” reported as 1 hour and 38 minutes but is really about 93 minutes in every version to come to my attention. Accounts have popped up in online forums of alternate versions and significant censorship, including a possible shot of the infected Poopinplatz crushing the head of a victim. In 2018, the movie was released on Blu Ray. It differs from a previous DVD release mainly in presenting the movie in a “widescreen” format.

As I have already acknowledged, this is one of my very favorite zombie movies. I first watched it online, probably about 2012, and picked up the DVD in 2015. It feels first and foremost like a movie that “should” have been made at least 5 years earlier than it was. The effects and visual style look very much early ‘80s, a fact which can be put down to the background of the director. The TV/ character actor heavy cast adds to the “old school” feel, along with a strong police procedural influence (also noteworthy in Night of the Creeps). An extra bit of randomness comes from the almost histrionic score, which frequently seems to imitate that of The Thing. At the same time, there are moments that feel prescient. Many scenes feel like echoes of Die Hard, which was in fact released the year this one was made. It’s also notable for some rather candid discussion of suicide, delivered well enough by Young that there’s good reason to wish the actress had had a career beyond this movie.

Most of the further weaknesses of the movie and some of its strengths come out in the first half. The movie up to that point is almost entirely exposition, another move toward “old school” horror. For the most part, the long buildup is sustained by good acting and dialogue, with a little livening up from an unnerving dream sequence. At the same time, there are certainly misfires and random moments, conspicuously a very early jump scare that is too overacted to feel scary or funny. I have suspicions that these issues were at least aggravated by re-editing and censorship, which is further attested by quite audible discontinuities in the audio (including a “jump” in the music during a notorious later scene). A delicious bit of extra grue comes when Alley considers the task of feeding the ghouls from a mortuary. “There would be an endless supply of protein,” she remarks. Then she further muses that bodies meant for viewing would be off limits, “above the waist, anyway”.

Of course, things get in gear once the kyoshi come out. These are easily among the most nimble, ornery and durable undead on record, realized with topnotch effects and makeup. There are only 3 of the diminutive monsters, but they are anything but easy to handle. Only massive damage to the upper body seems to affect them; by comparison, a very clear shot to the head barely slows one of them down. It is eventually revealed that others can be infected through direct ingestion of their visibly gooey flesh and bodily fluids, but this does not come into play until even later. They can still be held off in close combat, if they don’t get in the decisive blow by surprise, allowing Poopinplatz to fight one of them to a draw. Their most distinctive trait is their completely indiscriminate diet, to the point that the living cast seem to receive what breathing space they do while the ghouls forage in the morgue’s cold storage. Their habits lead to a very effective scare when Dana and the younger cop emerge after finally killing one, only to find another already feeding.

What is absolutely and uniquely unnerving are the hints of personality and perverse naivete, especially from a redheaded creature that appears to be female. She/ it is the most aggressive and inquisitive of the trio, though not the last to fall. She persistently carries a doll, leading to another surreal moment when the doll’s head peers around the corner in place of the approaching ghoul. Infected victims are seen to grow to giant size, which is never reconciled with the kyoshi. This leads to the noted scene with the infected Poopinplatz, which I find effective and well-paced. A seemingly unchanged laugh from Poopinplatz adds an unsettling touch, balanced by an upbeat twist as Dana springs into action. Unfortunately, the animatronic rig used is uncharacteristically mechanical in both appearance and motion, with an inexplicable set of oversized eyelashes that could just as well be batting an SOS. This is followed by the appearance of a mutated Floofsums, but the less said about that, the better.

For the “one scene”, however, my pick is an early scene, when we get our only direct view of the undertaker. On a tape played for Alley, we see a close-up view of his face as he answers questions from an off-screen interrogator, by turns shameful, resigned, and seemingly amused. He speaks vaguely of his ancestors’ dealings with unnatural things they “did not understand”. When asked why he feeds the ghouls, or believes he needs to, he replies bluntly, “If they are not fed, they will feed.” Finally, when the questioner remarks that the bodies appear quite dead, he responds, “When they are full, they are very good at playing possum,” adding with what is surely a smile, “very good, indeed.”

In unfortunate hindsight, this movie is most significant as the literal end of an era. It came right at the tail end of the 1980s zombie movie wave, and its troubled and delayed release made it all too clear that the glory days of the genre were coming to an end. Still, there were certainly worse things to mark the end of the era, including some even sketchier 1990s releases I’m probably going to be getting to. It was weird, it was creative, and if it was flawed, it was all the more interesting for it. Let it be a further reminder, there are always better days ahead.

Giant Robot Review: Dollar Store Haul!

 

I was ready to take a break from movie reviews today, and I realized it had been a while since I did a robot feature post (apart from Bigger Than Godzilla). Fortunately, it happens I made a nice little haul earlier this week visiting a dollar store, where I picked up not one but three new bots. Though only one is in the neighborhood of "giant", I decided to cover them together here. For fans of toy packaging, here's the big one on card, and a few more in the wild.

I have to say I love this, though I certainly wasn't saving it for posterity. The only way they could be more direct is to say, "FOR BOYS NOT GIRLS." A bot broken while still in the package is a nice touch. The back of the card shows the name of Greenbrier International, Inc (see below). Judging from the wild disparities in style, they bulk-bought from one or several Chinese factories and put the ROBOT name on anything resembling one.

As for this particular guy, he has the feel of a toy made for toddlers, and as such, he's impressive enough. The plastic is hollow and unmistakably cheap, but just as clearly sturdy. If he got knocked off a shelf, chewed on by a dog (see the Big Red Robotech Guy) or winged by the family car, he'd keep on fighting. Unfortunately, he's not that giant, a little shorter than the Truckstop Queen, though it should be clear by now that that's a high benchmark in itself. He could still have done the job well enough, especially among Star Wars and GI Joe. Here's a few reference shots of the two together.

Okay, it's a tie.

The apparent selling point is that the limbs can be removed and interchanged with other figures. It's an empty promise, as my inspections confirmed that all the figures were entirely the same except for colors. On the other hand, kid me would certainly have loved being able to pull off parts for a demolition-and-dismemberment bot fight, and for once it works quite well. Here's a demonstration pic.

Only a flesh wound...

What was of most interest to me were a couple smaller guys I picked up. These were transformer/ knockoff bots, of a clearly interesting design but less certain quality. Here's pics of them on card.

Of the pair, the tank was unremarkable. I'm satisfied it's modeled on a G1 Transformed I might feature sooner or later. The battleship was much more interesting. There have been some transformers based on watercraft, but the only one I can think of based on a naval gunship is a Gobot from way back when. They are obviously small, though if the ship is assumed to be full-sized, the bot mode would have to be several hundred feet tall. Here's some more pics.

If you're a battleship, I'm Galactus!

Finally, here's a lineup of the bots with Bossk and IG88, the tallest of the Kenner Star Wars figures. Needless to say, the new guy is bigger than the vintage figures. What's noteworthy is that a figure this big can now be had from a dollar store rack. As always, time marches on.

That's all for now, more to come!

Revenge of the Revenant Review 5: The one where the zombies kill the screenwriter

 

Title: Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things

What Year?: 1972

Classification: Prototype/ Unnatural Experiment

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!!

 

In the last installment of this feature, I freely mused on what it would take for a movie to get the lowest rating. This time, I’m back with an answer. I’m also taking the step of introducing a category not originally used for Space 1979. Previously, I have used the designation Irreproducible Oddity for the less classifiable films I have covered. What it has meant to me is that the films in question usually at least fit somewhere within a time and setting. City of the Walking Dead was an Italian zombie movie, Krull was a 1980s fantasy movie, Phase IV was a 1970s ecological parable, etc. An Unnatural Experiment is a movie that goes to another level, whether higher or lower. These are the films nobody else asked for, nobody else was trying to make and nobody else ever tried to replicate. That is as good an introduction as any to Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things.

Our story begins with a disturbance in a cemetery that appears to end with the ambush of the caretaker at the hands of a revenant entity. We then skip to the arrival of a filmmaker named Alan with his cast and crew (though we don’t see any cameras) on an island used as a cemetery. The auteur alternates between bizarre monologues about death, fate and cosmic terror and down-to-Earth berating of his subordinates, who openly insult and mock him in turn. He seems to single out a lady named Anya, who becomes especially vocal. Unknown to the others, a few of his underlings are already on the island play-acting as the undead, who appear to have tied up the caretaker, though there are plenty of other incidents that aren’t so easily accounted for. Alan’s grand finale is to dig up one very real corpse and read a demonic spell from a grimoire advertised to raise the dead, finally driving Anya hysterical. While he and most of the crew retire to the caretaker’s cabin, the spell proves to be very real. The dead begin to rise, quickly taking out the few who have lingered outside and besieging the cabin. After several attempts at escape end disastrously, Alan and Anya face a final onslaught alone, without any doubt as to the outcome. In the final scene, the undead board the crew’s boat and sail for a brightly lit city on the mainland.

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things was directed by Bob Clark, the future director of Porky’s and A Christmas Story. The script was cowritten by Clark and Alan Ormsby, who also starred as Alan. The film was reportedly made for $50,000 dollars with many of their friends and family in the cast, including Ormsby’s (then) spouse Anya Ormsby, also as the character of the same name. Limited information exists about the film’s contemporary distribution, though it is apparent that it reached “cult” status at an early date. Clark and Ormsby collaborated again for the (far superior) zombie-themed 1974 film Dead of Night, which also featured Anya Ormsby.

For my own experiences, I’m sure I first saw this movie sometime before 2010, and may have seen it a few more times before I bought a digital copy a few years back. I actually only thought of it consciously for this feature when I was working out an “unrated” category, at which point this one came almost immediately to mind. I was genuinely prepared to give it that rating, until I gave it another go. With the experience fresh in mind, I can say without hesitation or qualm, this one is just plain bad, in a very extreme and inexplicable way.

If I’m going to get much further talking about this movie, I have to get one more thing out of the way: This is one of those movies that literally feels like being on a bad acid trip, or in my frame of reference being off my meds for about three days. I have commented previously in my Space 1979 reviews (see esp The Day TimeEnded) that not many people really appreciate what this really means. To truly capture being in a hallucinatory/ dissociative state isn’t a matter of psychedelic colors, freaky effects and/ or weird concepts, though any and all of those things can certainly help. What seals the deal is a narrative so disjointed and fragmentary, by accident or design, that it defies the very concept of linear time and causation. The counterintuitive part is that a movie can to all of these things and still be outrageously, incomprehensibly and inexplicably boring. That is what this movie is like.

Of course, we still haven’t really covered the movie’s portrayal of the undead. A major reason is that even that is often inseparable from Alan’s incessant monologues. To be sure, he is comparatively coherent and intermittently amusing when he gets in the presence of the dead, particularly the dug-up corpse he calls “Orville”. However, he gets all the more insufferable, and his more risqué comments get positively cringey. When the dead rise up, there is a strong sense that they have simply been driven to indignation by his antics, a reading reinforced by Anya’s rage. From there, the movie is effective but largely predictable. There are some good atmospheric shots, notably an eerie view of the gathering horde from the upper floor of the cabin, and a few ironic twists, such as the comeuppance of an underlying who tries to take a ring from one of the dead. But the one vivid and innovative moment is the finale, as Alan holds Anya squarely between himself and the undead, who seem perplexed enough to pause before the foregone conclusion unfolds.

For the “one scene”, however, the standout is the reading of the grimoire. As Alan recites the incantation, the camera (which is not at any point tied to the “point of view” of any character) takes in the island’s jungle-like landscape and several of the dead. A genuine sense of Gothic horror builds up, ant for a brief moment, the crew fall silent; Anya in particular stares ahead intently. Then others declare the summoning a failure, and the spell is broken. Then Alan goes off on the most surreal and genuinely entertaining of his monologue, directing his usual insults and abuse against Satan Himself. In a highlight, he protests pointedly, “I paid my money, I expect my merchandise!”

Out of all the films I have chosen or considered for this feature, this is the one I’m getting to early just to have it out of the way. Even with all I have written, I still acknowledge the film as worth watching. I will also freely admit, if you have seen it, there’s a very good chance it will linger in the mind long enough to be tempted to watch it again. It might be worth the trouble, or I wouldn’t be listing it here. Just don’t try too hard to find some deeper message or hidden genius, because it certainly isn’t here.