Here Alone (2016)

JUNE 21, 2017

GENRE: ZOMBIE
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

Since I'm a lazy asshole, over the years I've seen a number of films that were more or less exactly like ideas I had and never got around to fleshing out. But I'm never too annoyed by their existence; good for them for being more productive than I am! Especially when they turn out good, as is the case with Here Alone, which is about 75% similar to an idea I had for a zombie movie that focused more on the survival elements than zombie action. Whenever we see a survivor type in a zombie world, he/she has already gotten their shelter secured, their routine down to a science, etc - I'm more interested in how they established those things, i.e. the part that usually gets skipped over.

(It's similar to how annoyed I was with Cast Away skipping four years - I want to see the whole process of him learning how to chuck a spear and kill a fish!)

Needless to say, Here Alone focuses on some of that, depicting a lone survivor (Ann, played by Lucy Walters) who lost her family somewhere along the way and is now scavenging for food, trying to stay out of danger, etc. It's a slow-paced movie that keeps zombie stuff to a minimum, but that's fine - I was legit more entertained by scenes like the one where she inspects some berries and ruffles through a little survival guide trying to figure out if they were safe to eat than I was with any of the rather generic undead action. Eventually she meets a pair of fellow survivors, a man named Chris and his stepdaughter Olivia, and things take on a more traditional "band of survivors argue about what to do next" zombie movie motif, but the focus is still on the humans and the empty world, instead of run n' gun zombie stuff that we can see anywhere.

Comparisons to the likes of The Road and Stake Land are fair; it's a bummer movie with lots of outdoor scenery accompanied by pretty music (I watched with captions and "somber orchestral music" appeared every 2-3 minutes), but if anything there's even less action than in those (well, Stake Land for sure had more - not sure about The Road, as I barely remember it and don't ever want to revisit). We got pretty burned out on the more Romero-y wannabe stuff in the past decade, so I'm fine with these more moody takes on the zombie apocalypse, but I do wish someone could find a way to do one in a suburban area, as I'm tired of looking at endless miles of trees in these things. I get that it's easier to secure a patch of woods on a low budget than it is, so I don't begrudge the indie filmmakers for going that route (this film was at least partially crowd-funded, in fact); it's more of a wish that the studios would try something in this vein. One of my favorite non-horror movies in recent memory was All Is Lost, which was nothing more than Robert Redford on a sinking boat - the zombie movie equivalent with a marquee draw like Kurt Russell or someone who isn't adverse to taking on unusual projects would be fascinating, I think.

Keeping things a little more compelling is the film's flashback heavy structure, cutting between Ann and her new friends in the present day and older scenes with her family, when the outbreak was just starting. Her husband (Shane West) teaches her a few survival skills and how to shoot, but really the main thrust of this stuff is "How did the baby die?", which is naturally kept secret until the film has almost concluded. I'm thankfully not as easily shaken by this stuff as I was in the first year or two of being a father, so this stuff, while sad, didn't leave me curled up in fetal position like it would have back then - my main personal sadness came from the little baby's cute pajamas, the kind my kid is now too big for. I miss those things! So snuggly. Anyway, nothing about this stuff will surprise you, but it makes sense why they try to sync it up with the present day events, offering something that feels like a particularly grim episode of Lost.

As for the zombie action, like I said it's nothing special, though I liked that the characters were far more concerned with simply staying out of their way than with killing them all. Ann locks herself in an ice chest at one point just to avoid ONE, even though she was in a kitchen that presumably had some knives or a rolling pin or something to ward it off. And they're often covering themselves with mud (or poop? The IMDb said poop) to hide their scent so they can get around without triggering any nearby walkers - it's an impressively inexpensive way to bypass the pricier action, and it actually makes things more suspenseful, as watching them mow down dozens of anonymous zombies would get tiresome, especially with such a limited cast. It's one thing for The Walking Dead to offer that sort of thing since people get killed off all the time, but with only three people there's only so much they could get away with before it became ridiculous that no one had been hurt/killed.

So if you like these slower kind of zombie films, it's worth seeing for sure; nothing about it is particularly unique, but it tells its simple story well, and I always, ALWAYS champion a zombie film that doesn't shoehorn in a bunch of evil humans in the third act (there is a minor human conflict, but it's far more interesting than the umpteenth "We can take the world for ourselves" kind of asshole). The score is good and Walters handles the two sides of her character (scared mom and weary loner) well, allowing the film to hold my attention where so many others have failed. I should note I had to watch it for work, and it's the first one in a while that I felt like writing about after (I see at least 2-3 every week for this job), as so many of them just leave no impression. Good to know there are these minor gems still coming my way; if I was still doing the site daily I'm sure I would have seen it, but with such a massive drop in my "intake" I always wonder how many films like this will forever pass me by. Being paid to discover one is such a win-win!

What say you?

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For A Few Zombies More (2015)

MAY 12, 2017

GENRE: ZOMBIE
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Considering how much I dislike watching sequels when I haven't seen the originals, AND how I try to balance out my sub-genres, I find it amusing that this and the previous HMAD review are for sequels to zombie movies I never saw. But unlike Dead Rising, I didn't even realize For A Few Zombies More was a sequel until a character had a rather blase reaction to the appearance of aliens, and got suspicious that I had missed something, i.e. an entire movie. That film, 2004's Hide and Creep, is one of the ones I had on my DVD queue back in the "every day" days of the site, but never got around to seeing it - now I pay the price! Oddly enough, the Blu-ray case doesn't even mention the first film, so perhaps they're purposely trying to play down the connection anyway.

Luckily, besides that quick bit, I never felt at a loss here, and a quick read of the first film's wiki page shows that apart from a few characters there wasn't much of a tie between the two films, as most of this focuses on a character that doesn't seem to have been in that one. Her name is Natalie, and she's on a rescue mission that ropes in the returning characters (including Chuck, played by co-director/co-writer Chuck Hartsell), but if I'm understanding correctly that film had an anthology type structure (like Pulp Fiction or Trick r Treat) as opposed to this one's straightforward narrative. Long story short, if you too haven't seen the first film and have an opportunity to watch this one, don't let your "ignorance" sway you - I'm super picky about these things and I barely even noticed, let alone let it bother me.

Besides I was too impressed with how many zombies they had and the amount of shootout action the film offered. The budget for the first one was only 20k, and while this one was not reported on its IMDb I doubt it was much higher since funding for these sorts of movies has gotten harder, not easier, in the past 10-12 years. So while that means some of the locations ring a little fake and not every actor will be going on to bigger and better things, you get a lot more of what you came for than you're usually liable to find in such things. There's a bit around the halfway point or so where zombies swarm a car, and I was legitimately impressed with how many they had - a wide shot shows several dozen coming from both directions as they close in on the car, keeping it from driving off to safety. Not every scene is that populated, of course, but even Dead Rising I don't think ever offered 50ish of the damn things onscreen at once.

As for the shootouts, they get a bit repetitive (there's even a joke about their frequency that made me chuckle), but since the zombie action was probably harder to pull off and more expensive, I found it to be a pretty nice consolation prize. So even though there's not a lot of undead action, there's still plenty of GENERAL action, as opposed to people just talking or driving around backroads hoping that other cars don't pass them by in this supposed post-apocalyptic wasteland (or dystopia, if you will). Imagine if Day of the Dead had the same amount of zombie action, but instead of Joe Pilato yelling at everyone the characters all just kept shooting at each other - that's kind of what the pacing is like here. That said, I would have been thrilled if maybe ONE shootout had been chucked in favor of another zombie scene, even a simple one like one or two zombies trying to get into a room where our heroes were trapped with no other exit or something - it felt like there were long stretches without any real zombie appearances at all, which minimizes their threat.

Then again, more zombie action would mean less dialogue, and that's there the film shines. Again, not all of the acting is great, but a number of the characters are dryly sarcastic and kind of world-weary about their predicament, which I found amusing - even when they took a shot at Armageddon out of nowhere (*shakes fist*). Hero Chuck is a film buff, and he apparently just wanted to sit around and watch movies until the whole thing blew over, which is pretty much what I'd want to do if the real world got overrun by the undead. But thankfully he doesn't drop too many obvious references, and a number of them are even inspired - mentioning Starship Troopers at one point turns out to be a setup for a later punchline about that film's Dina Meyer (whom young BC was quite smitten with back in the day). And I like that Dawn of the Dead is a movie that exists in this world, without it becoming a big thing - the character has more to say about Star Wars (it's in the same pile) as he's currently faced with a "look out for yourself, or help your friends" decision as Han Solo was in the first film. Plus, when they're talking we're less likely to be pummeled by the faux Carpenter score - we really need to give this brand of homage a rest for a while I think. Same goes for the signature Carpenter font, though here they actually go with the Halloween credit font specifically, instead of the Albertus "Carpenter" one, so I have to give them a pass on that out of loyalty to my favorite movie.

I also really loved a rather inessential bit where our heroine stumbles across a band who is recording a double album. She's incredulous that they're bothering considering the zombie issue, but the band explains that when all the zombies are gone and normal civilization occurs, folks will want new music and there won't be any - just the old stuff they had before everything went to hell. I always wondered, particularly in the Romero films, when exactly these kind of things stopped happening - like in Night of the Living Dead, it's just started and kind of a localized problem, so I'm sure people in Hollywood kept on making movies for a while. But when did they finally decide enough was enough? Ditto for pretty much everything - were the folks who make microwaves still going to work, or did they figure it was pointless and stay home? I would love to see a zombie movie where everything had a specific frame of reference for when the world "stopped" in a general sense; it fascinates me for some reason. Indeed, a lot of the references here were from 1997-1998 (there's even one about The Postman!), so I wonder if that was intentional or just coincidence. Probably have my answer if I saw the first film.

The Blu-ray I was sent came with a novelization, which made me very happy and I instantly put it with all my others, which I really need to organize someday. It's a fitting "gimmick" for the film's 90s worship (the hero is an ex-video clerk, in fact), as it seems every movie that came out in that decade had a novelization (if you want proof I'll let you borrow my copy of Stepmom). I'd like to read it, but I feel I should put more energy into finally watching the first film, because these are the kinds of indie horror films I want to see more often. I may not love them, but I can see that they actually care about what they're doing and have a "let's put on a show" attitude that I am unable to detect in the average found footage flick (hell, they even hand-painted the poster instead of doing some shitty Photoshop thing - see below!). As I find less and less time to watch and review something just for the sake of doing so, I don't want to waste more of my life on cynical "Let's join the party" junk. I want to feel like the people behind it were less concerned with finding distribution in the current market than they were with simply making something they could be proud of down the road.

What say you?

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Dead Rising: Endgame (2016)

APRIL 30, 2017

GENRE: VIDEO GAME, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

Not counting things like Final Fantasy, I can't skip entries in video game series any easier than I can skip movie sequels. I remember when Halo 3 came out and my friend wanted to play the campaign with me, but I refused because I hadn't finished Halo 2 yet and didn't want to spoil anything for myself (the irony being that I couldn't tell you a damn thing about any of the Halo games' narratives beyond "kill those things"), and when I got an Xbox One it came with two Assassin's Creed games that I still haven't played because I haven't finished all of the Xbox 360 era entries. So it's kind of funny that I watched Dead Rising: Endgame without seeing the first film (Watchtower), which not only had reveals that meant nothing to me since I hadn't watched the first film, but also included game characters I haven't met yet as I've only played the first game.

(If you're wondering why I broke my "rule" - I had to watch the movie for work and didn't feel like tracking down the original as it wouldn't have any bearing on what I needed to do as I watched the sequel.)

Long story short, I am probably in the minority of people watching Endgame who were neither fans of the original film or die hard fans of the game series. Don't get me wrong, I loved the first Dead Rising (it was the first game I got for the 360, in fact) and played the "Case Zero" mini prequel to the 2nd game, but just never got around to playing the others. I am cursed in that the kinds of games I love are very long, and I'm also a sucker for side missions and collectibles, but I also have about three hours a week max to play games more often than not. So I only get through maybe four or five games a year, and for every ten games that come out I want to play, I maybe get through one of them. Long story short, the DR sequels are (as of now) part of that unfortunate group that just falls by the wayside. It bums me out, and I'm constantly having "Maybe if I beat traffic I can play..." kind of daydreams that never come to fruition; I just have to make sure my systems all still work in 2045 when I can retire and spend the rest of my days in blissful game-land.

That said, I enjoyed the movie more than I expected to. The "movie based on a video game" sub-genre is a fairly sorry lot, as you all know, and the film's low budget roots seemed ill-fitted to the game series (more on that soon). But despite the fact that it swiped a good chunk of its narrative from another game movie sequel (Resident Evil: Apocalypse), I found it rather engaging in a timekiller way, never boring me or making me angry or anything like that - my main gripe was that I was reminded that there are now four games in the series I haven't played (if you count the remake of Dead Rising 2 that told the story from Frank West's point of view). Jesse Metcalfe made for a decent everyman hero and proved to be capable of handling the action stuff, and he was backed by a good supporting cast including two Bates Motel vets: Keegan Connor Tracy (the hot teacher Norman offed in season 1) and Ian Tracey, who was Dylan's gunrunner boss. Oddly enough, his character, who hadn't been seen for a while, reappeared on the show's finale, reminding me of where I knew him from and saving me a trip to the IMDb while I was watching this. P.S. - Bates got real good during its last two seasons, so it's worth catching up on Netflix or whatever if you dropped it during its wheel-spinning third season.

Like I said Endgame borrows more than a bit from Apocalypse, as it focuses on a motley group of heroes making their way across the zombified city as a doomsday device counts down toward their certain doom. Hell they're even being aided by someone from the evil company who is exchanging his assistance in order to save his daughter (with Tracey in the Jared Harris role), which I found kind of amusing. See, the two game series are both from Capcom, but they're not much alike beyond "zombies", so it's strange that instead of following suit the movie would crib so heavily from the other series' sequel (especially one that tends to be the least liked among its fans, though I kind of enjoy Apocalypse for the most part). Luckily it's not just a standard "They're going to blow the city up!" countdown - it's something a bit more interesting, as the corporate assholes plan to activate an overload of the chip that people have implanted to keep them from turning into zombies.

This would be Zombrex, a "cure" from the games that the player must take after being bitten, used here sparingly outside of the chip subplot (the chip administers a small timed dose on the regular - an overload will have the opposite effect, I guess?). Since its existence would kill most of the film's suspense, the idea here is that the evil company has come up with a new strain of zombies that are faster and harder to kill, and standard Zombrex won't work (because they're also developing a cure for this new strain and will make billions selling it). It's one of the few things from the game that's used really; Fortune City is mentioned and one of the series' heroes shows up near the end (I'm not sure if he was in the first movie), but it also shows a character playing Dead Rising 3, so I'm not sure what plane of reality we're dealing with here. As with the RE series, it seems they didn't think copying the story from the game would be a wise option, but knew they needed these little shoutouts to make the hardcore fans happy.

But it's still an odd use of the license, in my opinion. For starters, the zombie numbers are very low, and I don't think you ever see more than ten or twelve on-screen at any given time. One of the game's big draws is how many hundreds of zombies it was able to render on-screen at once for your player to kill, and there's never any real break from them (at least, in the two I played, beyond a small safe zone where you save and such) as they swarm everywhere at all times. There are no human psychos to deal with either, just a few obligatory looter types, and the evil corporate guy played by Dennis Haysbert (who never interacts with the core cast), and it's also largely devoid of humor which is another thing that helped the game stick out from Resident Evil and the like. Apart from the Zombrex and a quick appearance from the hero of the second game, the only thing time it really feels like its namesake is when they find themselves without guns and have to fashion weapons out of the stuff they find laying around the room. For whatever faults most game movies have, they at least feel "at home" with the visual aesthetic and tone of their source material (save for a few Boll flicks and the abysmal Super Mario Bros), but here it's like they shoehorned in a few things at the last minute to justify a license they didn't initially have. I'm curious if the original film had the same problem?

Luckily, the zombie action is decent when it occurs. There's a lot of digital, but for some reason it didn't really bother me (maybe because it was offering a bit of the cartoonish feel a Dead Rising movie should offer in droves?), and Metcalfe gets to enjoy a pair of fun sequences. In one he's tumbling up and down an escalator as the zombies come at him from both floors, and then later we get a John Wick inspired "long shot" (it's got some obvious cuts "hidden" by Metcalfe backing right up on the lens) where he takes down a swarm of walkers in an operating room. He uses the medical equipment to fight them off as they keep coming, scrambling around like Jackie Chan or someone as he tries to stay alive but also find a way to get the hell out of there - it's not what I would have expected to see given what we saw in the first hour or so, and it put a big smile on my face. Again, there aren't a lot of zombies in the movie, no "hordes" or anything like that, so I'm glad that they balanced it out by making the action scenes stick out instead of offering generic run n' gun kinda stuff that would get real old by the end of the flick. There's one evil human too many in the film's climax, but otherwise the characters are largely likable and even fairly well developed for this kind of thing.

Apparently the last game didn't sell so well, so I don't know if that means the film series will come to an end as people are apparently moving on from the franchise. Someday I'll give the first film a look, and the cast/crew should be commended for taking what could have been sub-Syfy movie crap and turning it into something fairly enjoyable. I wish it felt more like the game, true, but if it was a direct adaptation of one of them (or indulged in some of the games' wonkier elements, like the cult in the first one) it'd make the changes even harder to ignore. No, ultimately they had the right idea to more or less tell an "original" story and let us get immersed in something new, and if they do get a third film (this one lays the groundwork for one) I hope they continue that path. It worked OK for Resident Evil (and, to a lesser extent, Assassin's Creed, which bombed but was at least its own thing set in that world, rather than a boring retelling of one of the games), and should be the approach for pretty much all game films. Any game with a story worth telling on the big screen will likely be too long for one, after all - trying to cram it into 90 or even 120 minutes would just piss off the gamers while leaving the non-players bewildered at a "Cliff's Notes" version of a narrative. Then no one wins.

What say you?

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The Girl With All The Gifts (2016)

FEBRUARY 25, 2017

GENRE: POST-APOCALYPTIC, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

With Walking Dead scoring massive ratings and World War Z more than doubling the gross of the previous highest grossing zombie film, I don't understand why we never got glutted with zombie flicks at the multiplex as we were with found footage movies in the earlier part of this decade or torture-y/hardcore horror in the '00s. And in turn I REALLY don't understand why The Girl With All The Gifts, based on a popular novel and led by three known actors (the horror genre doesn't need stars to be a hit, don't forget), got this nothing release - even here in LA it only played on one (not large) screen, with no marketing even for its accompanying VOD release. In a few years this is going to be one of those titles that gets cited as a winner the way we do for the likes of The Babadook or Hush, while folks have to be convinced the likes of Bye Bye Man actually got wide theatrical releases. It's a broken system, and has been for years, and I don't see it ever improving again; I'm happy I got to see it theatrically, but it's a shame I had to double check someone's geographical location before suggesting they do the same.

Because unlike many of the horror films you have no choice but to see on VOD, there's actually a scope to this film that would be served well on a big screen. It's not the kind of zombie movie where everyone holes up in a "safe zone" that gets overrun - it's about that safe zone being overrun and forcing our group of heroes (five of them) to make their way on foot through their eerily quiet, crumbling city to another safe area some miles away. The zombies are formed by a kind of fungal virus in this particular story, and it affects the world as well as its inhabitants, spawning these giant vines and pods throughout the city. So it's overgrown like many a post-apocalyptic film, but it's not just a cool-looking bit of production design - it's actually a source of the danger, as the pods threaten to burst and send the virus airborne. The zombies themselves are incapacitated by these vine structures, so our heroes stumble across a few that look like that they are victims of Eldon Stammets from Hannibal (and some are in groups, so it's like a cross between his victims and Lawrence Wells' totem), which is both the creepiest thing I've seen in a zombie movie in a while, and also one of the most unique.

So it's kind of funny that this is not a traditional zombie movie. It has a number of the beats of such films, but the zombies kind of stand in spot, swaying back and forth (like grass, keeping with the plant theme), unless they smell a human target. Humans are issued a scent blocker spray that they apply to themselves like bugspray, and that keeps them safe unless they make eye contact - allowing for a nailbiter scene where they make their way past dozens of zombies who are standing in place like mannequins. Sure, it's not much different than Shaun of the Dead's "let's pretend to be zombies and walk right past" bit (other than the lack of humor, obviously), but the zombies just standing there adds a level of uneasiness that sets it apart. Also, even when one zombie is alerted, it's usually isolated, so when one of our heroes accidentally spooks one, it's not like they're done for - they have to silently (and quickly) dispatch the activated one before any others catch on (kind of like in a Metal Gear game when you trigger an alarm but if you kill the closest guard things are fine). It's genius; it allows the sequence to break tension and then get it right back, which, if I've ever seen that before in a zombie movie, I can't recall it at this time.

Speaking of Shaun, it's kind of funny that one of the aforementioned recognizable faces is Paddy Considine, who appears in the other two installments of the so-called Cornetto Trilogy but gets a rare lead role here as one of the three adults who are in charge of the titular "Girl", whose name is Melanie and may be the key to saving the human race. She is one of several children who were infected in the womb but did not become full fledged zombies like the others, but live as a kind of hybrid. Like the regular infected, they have a thirst for flesh and blood (animal will suffice, though human is preferred) and get a bit worked up at the scent of one, but unlike the others they are capable of speech, free thinking, etc. Considine's character is kind of a Capt. Rhodes type who just wants to kill her, but he works with (for? I missed some of the specifics) Caldwell (Glenn Close), who wants to dissect Melanie and the other children in order to find a cure, believing their hybrid state is the key to a vaccine. And then there's Ms. Justineau (Gemma Arterton), who is the childrens' teacher and has taken a particular liking to Melanie. Naturally, she wants to protect her, so you have this odd dynamic where Melanie is being kept alive by the three adults but for different reasons. And naturally, the thing about her that makes them afraid of her eventually proves to be essential to their survival, as she can make her way quickly through the zombies to find supplies or a scout the best route, or sniff her way to find a missing member of their group.

And the cool thing is, I agree with all of them. Considine's character is introduced as an antagonist, but he comes around and bonds with her in his own way, and never really enters full "evil human" mode. Close's character actually inches, er, closer to that territory, as she will seemingly stop at nothing to achieve the "greater good", but since we never see any of the people she's allegedly trying to save (there are only like ten named people in the entire movie; we never see any traditional civilization, even in a flashback), her goal, while noble, is hard to really consider when it means the possible death of the little girl who we've spent the past 90 minutes with - a flesh and blood reality vs. a vague notion. Naturally, not everyone survives this journey, but the script by Mike Carey (adapting his novel) smartly balances out the primary characters so that one is never more or less likely to survive than the others, and gives them enough time for us to really care if and when they are dispatched. Not since Dawn of the Dead have I seen a zombie movie (or show) where I literally did not want ANYONE to die, a relieving feeling that I probably won't experience again for a while.

My only real nag about the entire movie was the ending, which generally works fine but I have a major question about how one character is still alive (to be as vague as possible - the final scene is obviously some time later, so what is ______ drinking/eating?), and Melanie's final action against the zombie fungus seemed a bit abrupt. I later learned that the book had a scene that set up her decision (I can't recall if they said it was filmed and then cut from the film, or just excised to begin with), so I get it now and it smooths over some of that concern, but neither I or they can/should expect everyone to follow up with the novel (or movie news sites) to get that context. Not that the ending was confusing or anything, but it seemed like they rushed through the final moments after pacing the previous 100 so perfectly, so it was a bit of a bummer that they couldn't retain that near-perfect quality. Perhaps book readers can mentally fill in those blanks and not even notice (with Carey writing both, I doubt there are any major changes - just things that the movie didn't have time for), but that's the double edged sword of seeing a movie based on a book - you're always going to partially dampen the surprise of one by experiencing the other first. I tend to watch the movie first before diving into the book, because the book will be fleshed out (it's like a director's cut!), whereas watching the movie after reading will almost always feel like you're getting cliff's notes, but rarely do I feel I SHOULD have read the book first so I'd have a little more understanding of the final moments of the story.

But a few quibbles about the ending is nowhere near enough to take away the fact that this is a great addition to the zombie sub-genre, and is very much undeserving of its unheralded release into the world after some well received festival appearances - including Fantastic Fest, and I'm almost afraid to look up what I saw at the same time I could have been seeing this, as I wasn't exactly in love with many of the movies I saw there this year (update: turns out it was Call of Heroes and The Void; I liked this more than either of them, but I doubt I'd have the chance to see them theatrically, so I guess it evens out). Then again, this way I got to buy a ticket at a regular screening, and do my part to try to convince the money men that movies like this should be championed and given a chance to thrive on the big screen.

What say you?

P.S. I didn't even realize it at the time, but the director was Colm McCarthy, who directed Outcast - a HMAD book selection! Definitely a name to watch and one I won't forget next time.

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Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2017)

JANUARY 27, 2017

GENRE: MAD SCIENTIST, MONSTER, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

In case it never dawned on you, projected film is nothing more than a series of still images played in succession, fast enough to create the illusion of movement that you'd witness in real life, with your brain kind of filling in the missing chunks in between those frames. That same kind of idea applies to how I saw the action sequences in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter - I (usually) could tell you what happened from point A to B, but only because my brain was sorting it out through context clues. Milla Jovovich and some monster rush toward each other, and then ????? (STUFF!), and then the monster is dead, so I can safely assume Milla killed it. However, I couldn't usually tell you HOW, because Paul WS Anderson and his editor (named Doobie, and - trigger warning - a frequent collaborator of Neveldine/Taylor) often cut five or six times per second during the action scenes, and often in closeups, so my brain couldn't quite process who was hitting who and where - I just had to wait until the encounter had concluded and then use context clues to determine what happened.

It's a shame, because on a script level this is one of the better entries in the series. The story isn't too complicated, the villains are fun (Iain Glen, you have been missed, sir), and there's a pretty great final showdown between the major players that not only pays off the things set up in this movie, but the series as a whole. The action scenes, poorly edited as they may be, are varied and frequent, and the movie series has finally embraced the giant monster element from the games, pitting Alice against a giant bat for the first big sequence and some Cerebrus (basically GIANT dogs) later. It even brings back the horror element that's been largely scaled down in favor of action; there are at least three legit scare moments in the movie, plus a lot of creeping around and "I think something's watching us" kind of moments. The budget was scaled down from previous entries (with inflation factored in, it's actually the cheapest, by my math), so Anderson and crew were forced to rely on such things and save the big-scale action for highlight sections instead of throughout the movie. In a general sense, it pays off.

Plus, the aforementioned Iain Glen is a total hoot, and the best reason to see the movie. Even if you're not a fan of the series, it might be worth a look just to enjoy the sight of a gifted, theater-trained (and award-winning) actor making his way through a B-movie like this. As with the Underworld films, these UK theatre guys not only lend the proceedings a touch of class, but make the gibberish plot believable by committing 100% instead of smirking their way through it like American actors in his peer group might. He's clearly enjoying himself, and he even gets to play two roles - or, two variations of the same role. By now you should be used to the use of clones in this series, so it's not really a spoiler to say he plays both the original Isaacs and a clone who is unaware of his clone status. One is in charge of Umbrella and spends his time in a nice suit and delivering exposition, the other is out in the wild and seemingly on his way to becoming a Mad Max villain of sorts. It's the best of both worlds, and both of them get to fight Alice and spout a few applause-worthy lines (one, involving the word "trinity", is so glorious it might be the main reason I watch the movie again if I ever have the option).

But the editing! Along with that reduced budget came the fact that they shot with traditional cameras and converted it to 3D later, and apparently Anderson didn't seem to care much about people seeing it in that format (I saw it in 2D, thankfully). Whereas on the previous two films he knew to keep the action fluid and with long edits (in fact, perhaps TOO long in Afterlife's case - he nailed it with Retribution), here he dishes out the most over-edited and choppy action scenes this side of Olivier Megaton. There is a scene about halfway or so through the movie where the heroes are making their way through a giant turbine fan that's been turned off, and naturally the thing turns on before everyone is safe. But it's "warming up", making the blades turn slow enough that people can still get their way through (like they would in *a* video game, though this kind of platforming thing has never been present in a Resident Evil as far as I can recall). All well and good, but I swear to Christ, I had no idea what was happening as the sequence neared its conclusion. I couldn't even tell which character got stuck, let alone how they were eventually freed, and this wasn't the only example of such editing atrocities in the film. I mean, it's one thing to pull the "hero moves so fast the villains never know what hit them so lets disorient the audience in turn" stuff every now and then, I don't even mind that - it's another to keep us in the dark of who we're even looking at and what needs to be done for them to be safe (I THINK the girl got her bag of gear stuck on a blade, but I honestly don't know). I've seen trailers with smoother, more complete action beats.

And while I'm used to it by now, the series' penchant for abandoning its characters really hurts this time around, in that it kind of leaves the movie feeling like we missed a giant sequence. When the last one ended, Wesker and Alice stood side by side along with the latter's friends, ready to save humanity together using their combined resources. When this one starts, Alice is just under a pile of rubble, and she immediately goes off on her own looking for supplies/shelter/etc. Much later, we learn that Wesker betrayed them (again) and only brought her there to kill her, a scene that we probably should have seen, not just heard about (by the time we've probably forgotten the gap anyway). As for Jill, Ada, etc. - we just have to assume they're dead, as they're completely omitted from the film beyond the obligatory opening recap footage - no in-film mention whatsoever. Later, Alice finds (spoiler for those who didn't see the trailer) Claire, who got the same treatment along with Chris in between Afterlife and Retribution, and she gives a half-assed explanation for her survival, but doesn't mention Chris nor does Alice inquire about him. Then there's the minor issue of her surrogate daughter from the previous film, who is also never mentioned even when Alice's past and current humanity comes into question. For a series of films that are all written by the same man, it's remarkable how little he ever seems to care about the characters he created (and yes, he created them, as they rarely have anything to do with their game counterparts beyond their name). Granted, cast availability might throw a wrench into the plans, but would recasting really be an issue? Especially for this film, when it's so dark and over-edited that I couldn't tell you who I was looking at half the time anyway?

That all said, I really did enjoy it overall, at least as much as I can for these things. As I rewatched them all this past week (save for the original, which I got through a couple weeks ago - it took me this long to get to 2-5, sigh), I realized that I couldn't even rank them in any definitive way - they're all just varying shades of "OK". I know people really hate Apocalypse, but I can't see why it gets singled out - there's no discernible difference in the CGI (it's not great), the cast (Milla and... some others!), the way it translates stuff from the game (loosely!), etc. It's got some truly awful slo-mo stuff, but I can't imagine that'd be enough to sink it below the others, especially when compared to this (slo-mo > incoherent-mo). They're never great, but never terrible either - they're just kind of enjoyable in their own low-key way. I own all the Blu-rays but can't imagine a scenario I'd ever sit down and listen to the commentaries (at this juncture, I mean - back in 2005 when I had little else to do I recall going through the features on Apocalypse DVD), because I just don't get INTO them like I do for things like Halloween and Friday the 13th, where I'll devour the bonus features for even the entries I hate. It's a decent series that got a decent send-off, far as I'm concerned; if you hated the others this won't change your mind, and if you loved them... well I'm not sure what you love about them, so I couldn't tell you how you'd feel about this one.

I do know this though (minor spoiler ahead): for all the talk about this being the "Final Chapter", they don't exactly close the book on the series in any meaningful way. The last shot is literally of a monster chasing one of the heroes, so if this makes a zillion dollars you can expect Resident Evil: A New Beginning in ten months, if history repeats itself. The one bonus to Anderson introducing cloning and also leaving so many characters' fates ambiguous is that the series can conceivably run forever if they continue to be profitable, simply by rotating out the players - a concept that would be more believable if he ever gave anyone even half as much weight as Milla/Alice. It baffles me that in this MCU/Fast & Furious-heavy world that Anderson wouldn't use "The Final Chapter" to bring back as many characters as possible instead of paring it down (Alice, Claire, Isaacs, and Wesker are the only returning characters - there are no surprise appearances) and give them legitimate closure, because even if they're not exactly iconic it'd mean more when say, Leon died instead of one of the random people we just met. And maybe that's part of why I can't really get into these as much as say, the Saw series - there's an air of indifference to them. There's been a decent attempt at continuity at least in broad strokes (though they've completely abandoned Extinction's idea of the entire world being a wasteland), but no one to really get attached to besides Alice - who is a blank slate. Had this one been better directed/edited, it might have managed to be my favorite just for the sheer variety of action scenes and legitimately great final reel (well, great for this series), but thanks to Anderson's hyper-active nonsense it ends up being just another entry in this entertaining but forgettable series.

What say you?

P.S. I know I said I'd review Apocalypse and maybe do a real one for Retribution, but I'm so behind on work I can't really justify it. Long story short, Apocalypse is the least boring entry and seems to have the games at heart more than any other film in the series, but the slo-mo stuff is terrible and Mike Epps' character is annoying as all hell. As for Retribution, I kind of regret making my review a gimmick, because it's actually pretty good and a big step up from the previous one. But I still can't forgive it for finally introducing Barry and giving him so little to do (great death scene though). P.S.S. I really want to play Resident Evil 7 on PS VR but I swore not to buy any more games until I got through a good chunk of my backlog. So someone buy it FOR me. Thanks in advance!

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The Rezort (2015)

DECEMBER 30, 2016

GENRE: ZOMBIE
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

There's a long-standing theory that if Halloween III was just titled Season of the Witch, it would have been a bigger hit*, and we'll never know if it's true or not. But I DO know that if The Rezort didn't have such a stupid title, I might not have had such low expectations for it going in, so there's definitely something to be said about how important a title is and how it affects one's perception of what they're about to see. With the dumb misspelling (which I mocked repeatedly on Twitter), I figured this was some Asylum level zombie schlock in the vein of House of the Dead or something, but as it turns out, the errant Z is the only goofy thing about the film - it's actually a fairly serious, largely enjoyable zombie flick, the kind that I thought would be playing multiplexes in the wake of World War Z, but always seem to be DTV efforts.

I also would have had higher expectations if I knew beforehand that the film was directed by Steve Barker, who previously impressed with the first two Outpost films (he did not make the 3rd one, and it was not very good). Like Outpost, the movie takes a B-movie kind of plot and carries it out with an A-level amount of effort, elevating it above its brethren in ways the average watcher (who doesn't overdose on this junk like seasoned viewers might) might not notice. Sure, it's not a great movie, but it's worth seeing, which is more than I can say for the likes of Zombie Massacre 2 and Army of Frankensteins (or even Cell, which had a bigger budget than those two and this combined), and if you're looking for more traditional zombie action than Walking Dead provides (i.e. without all the tired monologues and "humans are worse" stuff), it should satisfy and then some.

Oddly enough the last zombie movie I remember liking more than I imagined I would was Zoombies, which was heavily inspired by the Jurassic Park films, and this actually goes a step further by pretty much directly copying JP's concept, albeit with zombies you can hunt instead of dinosaurs you can look at (if they show up). The titular "rezort" is a pricey vacation spot on a private island for folks to come and take down masses of captured zombies, both in the wild (roaming around in fenced in areas where the shooters are safely on hills nearby) and in shooting gallery type scenarios where they're secured to targets that pop out as you make your way through corridors and alleyways. And like in JP, too much of the security relies on malfunctioning computers and electric fences, and when Nedry- er, a blond woman messes with the system, the zombies get free and our protagonists need to make their way back to safety without any protection in place or vehicle to use.

And that's pretty much it, and I say that as a compliment - it's refreshingly straightforward and fast-paced enough to be exciting but without making us numb or leaving character development by the wayside in their attempts to keep "stuff happening" at all times. Our heroes are a pretty decent and varied lot, from a typically brooding mystery man (Dougray Scott) to a jilted would-be bride who got the trip as a wedding gift and decided to go solo, to a pair of 16 year olds (no age limit, I guess) who won the trip on a contest sponsored by the Call of Duty-esque online shooter that they play. These two provide the movie with one of its few jokey moments, as they are apparently amazing at their video game but (no surprise) can't aim worth a damn in the real world, blasting away at the dirt and the zombie's feet when going for headshots. They're probably the closest the movie gets to annoying characters, and they're not even that bad (and they're SUPPOSED to be obnoxious, anyway), which was also a relief - I actually liked pretty much everyone and wasn't happy to see anyone die when they did. Hell, even the obligatory asshole who leaves his friends behind to save his own ass wasn't really that much of a prick.

I also like that we get just enough of a glimpse of how the park actually operates on a normal day, something I wish Jurassic World had offered more of (I really wish the Operation Genesis game was revived for new consoles, post-World - I'd play the hell out of that) even though I understand that "things going wrong" is what we're here to see. There's a great bit where one of the guides mutters his "great job, you're doing awesome" to what is probably his 1000th group of middle-aged businessmen living out their Rambo fantasies as they shoot down (secured, distant) zombies, and they also make them gun train and such before heading out. Also, unlike Jurassic, they actually have a goddamn plan for when things go to shit, though it's hardly enticing: they basically just blow the island to smithereens via jets dropping explosives on it (like at the end of The Rock, sans Nic Cage and his green flares), so our heroes have two threats - staying away from the zombies, and getting off the island before it's blown up. Not the most original scenario on the planet, but it works as well as it needs to, with some added personality and a few clever touches here and there for flavor.

It's also not as overly digital-ed as I've come to wearily "accept", for lack of a better word. Bullet hits tend to be digital (foregone conclusion nowadays - I think they lost the recipe for squibs), but when things get up close and personal they favor practical work. There isn't much gore, I should note, but there's enough to satisfy, and the "less is more" approach extends to the zombie numbers - Barker understands that seeing 1,000 digital zombies isn't nearly as interesting as seeing a few dozen real ones for "shit hits the fan" moments, so everything's on the up and up there, too. Really, the only thing working against it (besides the phony looking news footage at the top and bottom of the film - why can't digital artists ever make these graphics look legit? They're using the same programs the stations have!) is that you and I have both seen plenty of "We have to escape the zombies and get to safety" movies before, and it operates more or less exactly like them; the setup is new enough but once everything goes to hell it doesn't much matter (they wipe out the anonymous park goers and staff members pretty quickly). There is a pretty interesting concept regarding where the zombies come from, but it's underplayed (saved for a sequel? The movie ends almost exactly like Outpost 2 did, now that I think about it), and we never learn much about Scott's character - these things probably could have given it a little more of its own identity if embellished.

But as it is, like I said, it's not an essential viewing, but it's much better than I had any reason to believe it would be given the current state of indie/low-budget zombie fare and movies that misspell words for their title. I've ranted before about how people seem to forget that there's a middle ground, and not everything is "amazing" or "shitty". Sometimes (in fact, a lot of times) it's fine to watch a movie that's just enjoyable for what it is, and nothing more. Rogue One is currently on the verge of breaking $500m in the US alone, which will put it in the top 10 of all time, and that too is a movie that's just perfectly OK (but it has Darth Vader and some familiar music, so people see it over and over). It's a shame that these two movies, that I'd give the exact same grade to if I was a grading type, will be judged in entirely different ways by the masses (and by history; I doubt anyone will remember The Rezort in ten years) just because one has the right title to connect, and the marketing to get it out there (indeed, this has actually been playing fests for over a year but I never even heard of it until I was assigned to watch it for my job). Hopefully a couple of you will check it out and feel the same way. And yay, I get to end 2016's batch of reviews on a high note! Happy New Year!

What say you?

*Halloween III actually sold more tickets than Halloween 4, the series' "comeback". I always found that funny.

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Resident Evil (2002)

DECEMBER 28, 2016

GENRE: MUTANT, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Even though I saw it when it came out, it's still hard to remember that when the first Resident Evil movie came out in 2002, it was the first zombie movie in multiplexes in nearly a decade (the last one was My Boyfriend's Back, which shouldn't even count since it was a Disney comedy). There were a few indie/foreign ones, of course, but the sub-genre - which had never really been a major box office success in the US - was deader than slashers are now. However, video game movies were chugging along at a fairly steady rate, with the previous year yielding Tomb Raider, which is and remains the biggest game-to-movie hit of all time. While nowadays the zombie aspect would be what got it in theaters, back then it was almost a red flag - it's kind of crazy how much things have changed in the past 15 years. Imagine a world with so few zombie movies that we would flock to this one out of sheer desperation!

Given how no other game to live-action movie series has lasted past a 2nd entry, it's also crazy that the series is still going, with the sixth and so-called Final Chapter* hitting theaters next month after a lengthy gap between it and the previous installment, 2012's Retribution. These things came out like clockwork every 2-3 years, but with Retribution's muted reception Stateside (it cleaned up overseas) and Milla Jovovich's pregnancy, we had to wait over four years, which might as well be an eternity for my increasingly forgetful mind. So I figured I'd revisit the series to refresh my memory (I'm gonna try to do the same for Underworld, a series of films I couldn't follow in the first place), and review this and Apocalypse since those came before HMAD (I might also give Retribution a proper review if I have the time, since the joke doesn't work as well now, as people probably forget it came out on the same day as The Master). I honestly don't know if I ever watched this one again since it first came to DVD, so my memory is dim enough to qualify it as a proper HMAD review (instead of a "non canon" one), so it was kind of fun to go back and watch it with fresh-ish eyes.

One thing I never really appreciated before is how the movie really does function as a prequel to the game series, as I forgot that it didn't have a single actual character (well, human character anyway) from the game(s). I recall being mildly annoyed with it at the time, but looking back, it makes sense. While the game series eventually did do their own prequel (later that year, if memory serves), at that point we never really got the whole story of how the outbreak occurred, where the hunters came from, etc. Not that the movie is canon with the game series in any way (it's probably contradictory, if anything), but it's a fine way to go about working within the parameters of that world without boring players with an exact retelling or pissing them off with changes. They throw in references to the hallmarks - the T-virus, Umbrella, Raccoon City, etc. - without screwing up the characters we may love. Indeed, one thing that always bugs me in the movie series as it's gone on is how certain characters are treated, i.e. Barry in the last one. As the franchise has gone on, Alice (Milla's character, an original) rarely meets other original characters, but finds herself allied by game heroes more and more often. It puts those films at a disadvantage that this first one didn't really have to deal with - it kind of has a blank slate here.

That's not to say it's particularly great or even better than the others (I have trouble ranking them since none are great and they kind of blur together, though I know Extinction is my LEAST favorite, at least in my memory - I'll do a ranking when I finish this refresh!), but it's nice to watch without rolling my eyes that a game character was awkwardly shoehorned in (like Claire in Extinction, an obvious replacement for Jill), or being confused at the narrative. They never really adapted any particular game, but they certainly retained the games' insistence on being convoluted. No one stays dead, people just disappear in between entries, clones are thrown into the mix... all I want is to see Milla Jovovich kicking monsters and zombies, why can't they just be satisfied with that? Why all of the gobbledygook? But this one's pretty straightforward - Alice wakes up with amnesia and within a few minutes a bunch of commando badasses take her under their protection (along with another guy played by Eric Mabius) and explain the situation to her as they work to contain the outbreak and make their way back out. I forgot that Wesker and his ilk aren't even in the movie - there's no real human villain until one guy turns on them late in the film. It's just the zombies, monsters, and lasers.

It's also got a lot of door opening, a fun little nod to the older games that used such actions as loading screens. Paul WS Anderson defends it on one of the bonus features, saying that you never knew if a door would lead to an empty hallway or a pack of monsters, and so he tried to incorporate that here - it's actually kind of successful in a "what will be next?" way, though it rarely offers that sort of creeping dread that the game did. One key difference is that the game had you alone and often severely underpowered, making even a single zombie a bit of a challenge in some instances - but these are hardasses with machine guns and three or four other people watching their back. So the film is never scary in the traditional sense, opting for a more action driven style that isn't necessarily a bad thing in theory, but makes Anderson's attempts to live up to the game in that sense very underwhelming. Silent Hill did a fine job of retaining the game's sense of atmosphere and terror, I think - if Anderson was even trying to scare the audience here, he kinda botched it.

But he keeps it moving, and unlike the game he doesn't backtrack - our characters are always moving from A to B to C, not going in circles like the game often had you doing back then (they've since moved past that, and, perhaps partly because of the films' success, also moved more toward action than horror). He's got a big hard-on for Aliens, and so he follows Cameron's lead by offing the badass types at an even clip while letting the "civilians" take charge as it goes, with Alice in the Ripley role. Most of the action revolves around turning this thing on or opening that door, with the backstory about the virus delivered mostly via flashback or expository dialogue from Mabius' character. He also keeps the enemies fresh - they first fight a bunch of zombies, then the dogs, then different zombies, then a hunter, in addition to the ticking clock scenario adding to the excitement. The CGI is a mixed bag, of course, and the film isn't as bloody as it could have been with an R rating (the film's most famous kill, of the laser grid slicing a guy up into little chunks, is almost entirely off-screen, though we get to see that cool oozing eye at least), but the sheer variety makes up for it, and it's of course fun to see two females as the leads in this kind of thing. The games always had a female and male combo, but since the two male characters of note don't do that much (one of them turns villain) and they're the ones on the poster, it does the games one better - you get Jill AND Claire, essentially, instead of one or the other. Even better, no one makes a big deal out of it - one guy questions Michelle Rodriguez's ability to open a heavy door early on, but otherwise it's not any battle of the sexes statement or anything - they're just competent fighters and the guys respect that, end of story. When filmmakers go overboard making their female heroines superior to the males and constantly showing off said superiority, you end up with angry trolls perceiving it as a threat or an insult on men, and all the fun gets taken out of it. Just let them simply BE and only the worst of the worst will be whining into their little void, while the rest of us can simply enjoy or dislike the movie on its own merits without it becoming a target for some ongoing political/social commentary.

Now, you can't bring up this movie without someone whining about how they fired George Romero and hired a guy whose name elicits the same sort of derision usually reserved for Michael Bay and Uwe Boll. Alas, as someone who was also sure that a serious crime had been committed, I read Romero's script back in the day, and it kind of sucked. It was more or less a retelling of the first game, albeit with some odd changes (Chris and Jill were lovers, blah), but it was just dull as dirt. Granted, I played the game so I knew the beats, and presumably a good chunk of the audience would not be as familiar, but I've also read books that got turned into movies and found them engaging, so there's more to it than that. And with that one change he'd already be annoying a good chunk of the gamers, so even though I don't think Anderson made a particularly great film, I DO think his is better than what Romero's would have been like (if that script was used) and that he made the right call to go into prequel/blank slate mode so people could judge it on its own accord. Granted, it'd be a better example if the movie was really good instead of OK, but we gotta take what we can get here.

What say you?

P.S. Since someone might be wondering - as far as the games go, I played 1-3 on the PS1, Code Veronica and 4 on PS2, and 5-6 on Xbox 360 (and RE1/Code Veronica were the primary draws when I bought my PS1/2, respectively). I never finished 2, 4, or 6, however; I got stuck on 2, had too much trouble with the controls on 4 (I've since bought the Xbox version but haven't played yet), and just plain didn't like 6 enough to finish it. I own Zero and the Revelations games but haven't played them yet. I also did the RE-themed "escape room" recently and we were told that we were the 2nd fastest group yet. Boom!

*No horror film with that (or similarly "final") subtitle has ever proven to be the last one.

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Zombie Massacre 2: Reich Of The Dead (2015)

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

GENRE: MAD SCIENTIST, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

I didn't review the first Zombie Massacre when I saw it back in 2013, so my memory of it is non-existent. I did tweet that it "wasn't very good", noting Uwe Boll's cameo as the US President to be the highlight (back in 2013, jokes about random maniacs being the President were still funny), but I had to look up someone else's review to double check that the film did not take place during World War II like its sequel, Zombie Massacre 2: Reich of the Dead. It didn't, but it DID involve soldiers, so as unrelated sequels go it's at least got that much going on - I mean I guess there could be some tangential connection, like someone in this movie was the grandfather of a character in the first one, but if you think I'm gonna try to cross-check for the sake of this goddamn movie you clearly don't know me very well.

(Which would make sense, because 99% of you are strangers and probably should NOT know me very well. If you do, we need to set some boundaries.)

The same filmmaking team is behind this movie, but they've changed their MO considerably - the first had the Boll cameo, a lot of action, etc. It was, for lack of a more honest term, fun, whereas this is somber and slow-paced to a fault, like they were trying to mix elements from Black Hawk Down (wounded, trapped soldiers) and Jacob's Ladder (more on that soon) within the context of a zombie flick. On paper, that's a great idea, but almost nothing about the execution seen here could be considered successful. The languish pace is the biggest problem; it's not that it's slow in the "slow burn" kind of way, but more like they only had a 30 page script and opted to just stretch it to feature length. Not since Meet Joe Black have I seen a film allow so many dead pauses in between lines, where even a simple "I'm going over there." "OK, be careful!" kind of conversation can take up a full 30-40 seconds of screentime. And, not for nothing, but Meet Joe Black is a movie about trying to savor every moment, so that approach makes sense - not so much when you're in the middle of a devastating war and also adding zombies to the mix.

It doesn't help that you can actually count the number of zombies in the movie (I didn't actually do that, but it's under 30, I can almost guarantee), with the first one not even showing up until over a half hour into the film - weird for ANY zombie movie, let alone a sequel. Even the ones where the zombies are created in the film and thus need to be set up don't make us wait until the 2nd act to see one, and the war-driven action that we watch until that point is hardly exciting or original. There are only four soldiers, and (not counting some anonymous Nazi soldiers and the zombies) they make up a full half of the cast, which would be fine if they were well-rounded and compelling people, but they're all just generic soldier types you've seen in a dozen or more war films. You know that scene in Saving Private Ryan where Giovanni Ribisi tells that heartbreaking story about pretending to sleep so he wouldn't have to talk to his mom? They go for something like that, but it's like the Asylum mockbuster version of such scenes, and the not-particularly-good actors' delivery doesn't help much. And that's one of the movie's better scenes!

Luckily, the FX are improved over the original. They still use CGI blood spray for bullet hits, but there's some practical red stuff to enjoy, and since there's barely any action our eyes aren't being assaulted by laughable CGI explosions and and the like. In fact, across the board the movie is technically fine - it's well shot and I never doubted I was in 1940's Germany (low budget period pieces are rare for a reason), and it's even got a stylish opening credit sequence (one that was probably only commissioned to help get the runtime over 80 minutes, but still). Alas, there's only so much they can do when their script is so minimalist; it's the kind of movie where I felt like I just missed something because 40-45 minutes had gone by and so little had happened. There's an evil Nazi mad scientist guy who pops up in the 3rd act, giving the movie a bit of spark (the actor playing him is also the best of the bunch, which helps) but it's too little too late, and it also lacks a big action climax that would at least send us home with a bit of an adrenaline surge.

Instead, the movie ends on a confusing and bizarrely unexciting note, to the extent that I wondered if there was a glitch in my screener or if this was actually the first half of a movie that they decided to split in half, Harry Potter 7 style. Neither is the case, so your guess is as good as mine why it ends like this, which seems to suggest a vague kind of Jacob's Ladder twist? I mean, that was my interpretation anyway; a quick check of the IMDb message board confirmed others had very little clue what had just happened, with "It was all a dream?" type questions popping up but very few answers. I'm sure the filmmakers have an answer, but damned if the movie was interesting enough to track it down - I was just happy it was finally over and I could do something else with my time (I ended up watching the Stranger Things pilot again since it had been three months since I first gave it a try - still not drawn in, guys). Still, if you were inexplicably a fan of the first film and were excited about a sequel, I almost feel bad for you - it's different tonally, completely unrelated, and ends on a giant question mark, which would seemingly only promise another entry like this one instead of a true sequel to the original.

Incidentally, that's how I felt about the 3rd Outpost movie, a series that also involved zombies and World War II. The 2nd film ended on a cliffhanger, but then the third one was inexplicably a prequel - and it presumably killed the series for good, as that was a few years ago and there's still no word on a proper 4th film. It's an unfortunate occurrence in franchises; the producers know that the title alone will get the fans of that series to pick it up and thus don't really care, but it still baffles me when filmmakers (like this, the 3rd Outpost movie was with the same people) go in a different route, presumably bumming out the people that supported the previous film enough to keep them employed for another. And then it just sours the brand name, so what's the upside? Beyond making the first movie look like a classic in comparison, I mean. Well, whatever. Donald goddamn Trump is our President now, so the days of a bad horror movie being of any concern at all are behind us.

What say you?

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Army of Frankensteins (2013)

NOVEMBER 11, 2016

GENRE: MAD SCIENTIST, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

On any other week, Army of Frankensteins would have been the worst part of it, hands down. But... well, you know. However, it's actually somewhat MORE damning of the film that I wasn't able to find much to enjoy about it, since it involved time travel, a device a lot of us wish we could have right now. If the movie was competent on any level that mattered, it might have worked as a bit of a pick-me-up or something, but the unconvincing effects, worse actors, incoherent plot, and (most insulting) punishing length just added to the misery more than anything else. Yes, I do wish I had a time machine myself, but whether I'd use it to stop Hitler 2.0 or merely convince these folks not to make such an ambitious film when they only had 12 cents to make it, I'm not sure. Could I do both?

Indeed, the budgetary restraints were probably their biggest downfall. The narrative is appropriately "stitched together" from a variety of films, primarily Army of Darkness (grocery store clerk goes back in time and gets involved in a major battle, using some of his futuristic technology to help the good guys), Back to the Future (the same guy accidentally causes strife between his will-be great-great-grandparents and has to reunite them to ensure his existence), Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (revisionist horror gibberish playing a part in Lincoln's death) and, well, Time Chasers, the movie that was so savagely lampooned on MST3k that its filmmakers actually felt depressed about it. Like that movie, our time traveling hero gets involved in a Civil War, with soldiers and equipment belonging to a reenactment troop that probably could have used a bigger budget themselves. Honestly, I'm sure these filmmakers weren't intending to homage that piece of junk, but I was certainly thinking about that one more than any of those other, superior movies. Then they throw in zombies and a pointless subplot about the hero and his girlfriend BOTH being sexually harassed in the present day bookends (he by his landlord, her by her boss). It's like they had four scripts and opted to shoot scenes from them all until the money ran out. Then shot for another few days anyway.

The other big problem is that the movie is tone deaf - I never could quite decide if it was supposed to be funny or not. I certainly didn't laugh much (John Wilkes Booth inexplicably slapping Mary Todd on the butt as she headed out of their balcony to rush to Lincoln's aid made me chuckle for the irony, given that the Presidency itself was just killed by a man who proudly admits to such behavior), and the 110 minute length and plot revolving around Lincoln and the Civil War (so, in turn, a bit of slavery) doesn't exactly scream high comedy. If they were going for laughs and it simply didn't amuse ME PERSONALLY, that'd be one thing, but the majority of the actors weren't really mugging or playing up their bad dialogue, so I have to assume it was, at best, meant to be FUN, not funny. However, that approach only works if we're still supposed to be taking the story and its stakes seriously (think Amblin movies), which is impossible here since it revolves around a time travel concept that comes out of nowhere.

It also involves the title characters, and believe me - the use of "Frankensteins" when it's an army of the Monsters is the least of the movie's problems. The makeup is actually pretty good, but the rest of the execution for the big lug is a crippling flaw. For starters, he grunts exactly like Phil Hartman playing the Monster on SNL (where are Tarzan and Tonto?), effectively killing any chance of him being scary in the slightest (if anything it's the movie's best clue that it's supposed to be a comedy). Worse, it may be an "Army" but it's only one guy playing him, and these folks don't have access to those great Matrix computers that allowed Keanu to fight a hundred Hugo Weavings at once. So you see a row of digital clones of the guy, and most of the time they don't even bother to have the actor do six or ten or twelve takes of his actions, so they all act more or less in unison as well (they at least stagger the start time of their canned "animation" a bit so they're not 100% in sync, but it's not enough of a difference to avoid giving away that they're copy/pasting clones of one clip around the screen). They TRY to explain this away by working in a device where there's only one real Frankenstein and the others are copies (and will all die if the main one dies, or feel the same injury, or whatever), so it would make sense that they all act/move exactly the same, but all it does is call attention to a shitty effect.

Curiously, bad green-screen work rears its ugly head even in shots without Frankensteins. The last 15 minutes take place in Washington DC (as opposed to on the battlefield in Virginia) as the heroes try to stop Lincoln's assassination, and the non-Monster actors look like they've been virtually placed over plain stone walls and the like, for whatever reason. I know they shot the movie in Oklahoma and not Virginia/DC, but I can't imagine there isn't a single building in these Oklahoman cities that would have worked for these brief shots. After all, the backgrounds are too dark and/or close up to contain any period detail of note, and even if they weren't I assume by this point no one would care if they could see Priuses driving around behind the actors, as long as the movie just got itself over with, so the fact that they didn't just have the actors stand in front of whatever exterior wall was closest at the time is beyond me. Maybe they were going for a Sky Captain/Sin City kind of deal, but for that to work they have to commit to it for the whole movie, not just random scenes. As for the digital blood - well, like the "Frankensteins" thing, I wish that was something that was actually an issue (though they could at least work on the CGI actions - when Frankenstein pulls a guy's head off it looks like it couldn't have been attached in the first place).

There is also a scene in a hot air balloon, so if you're a student of Ebert's list of movie rules, you already got everything you need to know about this thing.

Ultimately, I admire the ambition, but when you're asking for nearly two hours of my time (instead of 80), constantly reminding me of better movies, and doing almost nothing effectively, I can't get excited about it any more than I can my toddler drawing a fairly decent circle, albeit on the wall with a Sharpie. One of the best things a filmmaker do is play within his/her limitations (both budgetary and creative, though the latter obviously takes a little soul-searching to find), because it allows the audience to quickly settle into the world you're presenting. Biting off more than you can chew (and then some - there is really no need for any of the Lincoln stuff at all. Even Time Chasers knew that much) is, 99 times out of 100, a surefire way of letting the audience down, and hard. The team is already in post on a 2nd feature, a giant monster movie called Gremlin (Amblin again!), so hopefully they got enough constructive criticism on their first film to improve on this one. It's never fun to pick on an indie (especially one that doesn't settle for doing the same shit as everyone else), but like I've said a million times - at the end of the day the consumer has to pay the same price for these movies as they do the big budget ones, and thus it's the filmmaker's job to make sure we're getting our money's worth regardless of how much they spent to earn it. The $7,000 Primer is just as valid a time travel movie as the $30m Twelve Monkeys - by the same rule, Army of Frankensteins should engage and entertain just as well as the movies it's cribbing from.

What say you?

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Train To Busan (2016)

JULY 28, 2016

GENRE: ASIAN, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I'm sure there ARE some, but as far as HMAD (and thus, my memory) is concerned, I've never seen a traditional, non-comedic zombie film out of Asia until now. Train To Busan takes the usual "band of strangers" zombie movie concept and applies it to a fast-moving train, and takes the concept quite seriously - there are a few character-based lines that are funny, but otherwise it's more dramatic than "fun". It didn't even really dawn on me until the zombies really started appearing en masse that I had never seen a Korean (or Chinese, or Japanese, etc) film like it before, when I tried thinking of how others had depicted their own undead and then realized that I had nothing to really compare it to. Again, I'm sure there are some others I just missed, but overall the film I kept recalling was World War Z.

And that turned out to be apt, because I also realized (a bit later) that the film was clearly PG-13, or at least the South Korean equivalent of it (turns out it was K-15, which would be like the PG-15 rating we've often pushed for but will seemingly never get). There's a lot of action in the film, and our cast is reduced to a very small number by the end, but it's mostly splatter-free (95% of the film's blood is either smeared on a wall or on a surface wound) and the deaths are usually played in the "they are swarmed and pulled down out of frame" way, if not off-screen entirely. As for the zombies, none of them get those sort of classic deaths you cheer for - no one has any really destructive weapons (why would they? Most of them were just on their way to work or whatever) so a few baseball bats courtesy of a traveling high school team are all they really have at their disposal - Dead Rising it is not. Even the film's biggest asshole character, when zombified, gets a pretty mild death as opposed to the crowd-pleasing (read: gory and violent) version you would expect from a big zombie film.

But that's (mostly) fine, it's not a knock on it really. It's not like we're starved for that sort of thing - it's more just a heads up for those who might think they're in for a bloodbath. Instead it's more of a survival adventure in a way - our hero Sok-woo is a generic absentee dad (he missed a recital AND got her a dud gift for her birthday - way to double down on the cliches, movie) who is taking his young daughter to see his ex-wife in Busan. Naturally, the film will show him learn to be a real dad, care about what really matters, and all that stuff. It's not exactly the most original character, but it works well enough when placed in context with another passenger, a man whose wife is pregnant and is trying to be the best dad ever already. They meet when Sok-woo is scrambling through train cars with his daughter and shuts the door behind him, momentarily trapping the couple with zombies in the other car. After some hesitation he lets them in, but the damage is done - the other guy is pissed at him and proceeds to call him "Asshole" or "Douche" throughout the rest of the film.

However, the tone of how he says these things changes - he never calls him by his real name I think, but the insult almost becomes a term of endearment as the film proceeds, as the two save each other more than once and fight alongside each other until the end (the end of one of their lives, I mean - not the end of the movie. More on that soon.), giving the film much of its overall appeal. The other guy (named Sang Hwa) is also the film's resident badass, fighting off most of the zombies himself and getting the best action moment when he swiftly grabs a riot shield while running for the train and uses it to bash some ghouls aside. It's possibly the one real drawback of the limited rating - you know he woulda torn one apart with his bare hands if the censors would allow it. Sok-woo is our main character, but Sang Hwa is the guy you'd want the action figure of, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one hoping for his survival more than they were for Sok-Woo's. The actor was in Nameless Gangster, which I saw at the same cinema (the CGV in LA, which plays Korean films as well as some American ones with Korean subs), and I hope I see him in future ventures - he's got great presence.

As for the other characters, it's a pretty stock set - the young lovers, an elderly pair (sisters, in this case), and, of course, a gigantic asshole in a suit who causes several deaths while selfishly protecting himself. Luckily, we don't spend too much time getting to know these people before the outbreak - they each get a quick beat to distinguish them from the extras, but they're all on even ground when the zombies start attacking, making it hard to tell who will die first/become a second main character/etc. The character development comes mostly out of how they act accordingly once their lives are on the line, and the situation is too frantic for them to stop and chat all that often. However, I wish the screenplay had taken the time they spend on Sok-woo's job problems and either cut it out entirely or given it to some of the others, because this stuff is very unnecessary. I don't know if it's a bad translation issue or if these scenes were left over from an earlier draft (or even longer cut of the film), but Sok-woo repeatedly calls into work and gets updates about what cities are safe or quarantined, and also their company's possible connection to what is going on. He's an investment banker, so unless they bought stock in Zombie-Co or something, I can't quite piece together how he is in any way responsible for it. And even if he was, it doesn't really matter to the narrative - there's no attempt at a "cure" or even a bit where people wonder where they came from (they DO refer to them as zombies, however), so it's just needless, go-nowhere exposition that the 118 minute film didn't need.

And that's the other thing - the movie's a bit too long. I was sure that they would eventually stop and get off the train for a bit, because nearly all of these vehicular movies do that (Con Air, Under Siege 2... hell even Speed keeps cutting back to Jeff Daniels at the police station), and also they had the zombie problem contained into a few cars so obviously something had to happen for them to bust out again. But there are actually THREE scenes of the train stopping and our characters getting off slowly, looking around to check for imminent danger and seeking a new shelter (or train, in one case). The appeal is being trapped on a moving vehicle, so stopping three times to get off (one's at the end, to be fair, but it's a lengthy sequence until credits roll) weakens the high-octane feel they're going for. Plus, the first time they get off is the best - they're told to stop where the military will be waiting to bring them to safety (actually quarantine), and make their way from the track through the station down to the place where the military is waiting, only to discover they've all been infected - resulting in a mad rush back to the train. Here's where we get chaos, hero moments, even a few scares - leaving very little for the 2nd stop to introduce beyond a bit of destruction. Reworking this stuff and giving the film one big detour in the middle before getting back on the train and staying there until it was time for the film to wrap up would have improved it overall, I think. It even robs the film of a chunk of its emotional impact, because a major character dies in a sacrificial moment, something that should be paving the way for the big finale, but it's like, barely over halfway through the movie as it turns out, and later someone else dies in almost the exact same way/context, so we should be sad but I'm sitting there thinking "I've already seen this." The very end had me getting choked up because of my now-standard dad traumas (it also swiped a beat from Armageddon for good measure), but had it come closer to the film's other big moving moment, the movie would be a knockout instead of merely "solid".

They got the zombies dead right though. I mentioned World War Z earlier, and they're used in similar ways during the more hectic action scenes - during one of the rushes back to the train two swarms of them collide like waves, causing a pileup with some at the top just kind of tumbling their way back on their feet to pursue their food. There's a terrific bit late in the film where they form almost a sort of net for the others to clamber across - it's such a cool visual, and justifies the stops (for a movie about zombies on a train, its three best zombie moments occur outside), at least in the moment. I also liked how the zombies 'work' here - they're blind, and almost shut down when its dark (train tunnels providing such moments), plus they move in a very spastic manner that gives them a creepier vibe than the average rotting corpse. None of them stand out (except the humans we got to know before they turned zombie, obviously), which is the right way to go about it - they don't distract away from the heroes. If this movie had a line of toys, it'd be of the human, not "Punk Zombie" or "Nurse Zombie" or whatever the hell.

The film is doing quite well in its US run (it's the first of the CGV movies I've noticed on the box office chart), already nearing the top of Well Go USA's all-time chart for domestic releases, and apparently broke some record or other in Korea, so clearly its finding its audience all over, which is great. I've mentioned before that I'm baffled about how few major zombie movies there are in this day and age - and what few there are tend to be comedic (like last fall's underrated Scouts Guide) or gimmicky (PPZ, though to be fair it wasn't as goofy as I expected). R rating or no, this was a legit zombie horror film with an emphasis on characters and even a sense of adventure - even if it didn't hit every mark well, I'd love to see more like that.

What say you?

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