French
La Horde
Zombies were what got me into b-movies, monster flicks and horror in general. Though I was never the bravest of film-goers back when I was young, from the moment I watched Night of the Living Dead and then Dawn of the Dead, I was smitten. (But not bitten!). So I went out and hunted other zombie films, read books about zombie films (Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead is fantastic) and generally immersed myself in the world of the zombie.
Over the next few years, I watched some gems, some forgettable films and some utter atrocities (Lake of the Zombies, I’m looking at you!). Sadly, however, it doesn’t take very long until you find yourself pretty saturated with zombie films. The downside of a reliably consistent mythology such as zombies is that they very quickly all become the same. Even the Great Debate of zombie cinema is only concerned with the speed they move… Plots, films, set-pieces and characters all very quickly blur into one, leaving only a few stand-out films or scenes that hang around in your memory (like Zombi 2’s underwater zombie fight!)
It’s certainly well-documented that zombies have, over the last few years, been very much back in fashion, but this doesn’t necessarily bode well for decent movies. Whilst the Resident Evil games are fun, the film cross-over (at least, the first one) was pretty dire and Zombieland was a sentimental, overhyped, deeply-flawed trampling of the zombie legacy. There’ve been some decent funny approaches to the zombie - Shaun of the Dead and Dead Snow both show much love for the genre they parody but, whilst parody is fun at times, there has been little meat for the lover of zombie cinema to get their teeth into. The first half of 28 Days Later is probably the height of 21st century zombie cinema, if we’re honest. All of which should go someway to explaining quite how refreshing it was to watch La Horde, France’s contribution to 21st Century Zombie Cinema!
La Horde has had some pretty mixed reviews across the internet, but I must say that I thought it was great, a fabulously fun ride from start to finish that reminded me how long it was since I’d seen a zombie movie even half as good. I would quite confidently suggest that a large number of those who’ve been negative about this film didn’t like zombie cinema in the first place. And this is important. Whilst La Horde is great fun, it’s certainly no crossover hit in the sense of 28 Days. This is a film made for zombie lovers by zombie lovers.
What we get here is a film that’s fast, funny, fresh and gory enough to maintain interest yet that treads very carefully within the boundaries of the zombie mythology that we know and love. The set-up is essentially a familiar one, a group of people who do not get along at all are tasked with relying upon each other to survive a relentless mass of the living dead. This has been the broad set-up for many a zombie film and, provided the interaction between the characters is fresh and interesting, it’s a set-up that still has much to give. The choice to align a criminal gang and a police force in La Horde is an inspired one, and one that becomes still more inspired as it the film slowly messes with our opinions on exactly who the ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ are within the group. Refreshingly, the woman of the group is utterly bad-ass too. Women in zombie films have so often had to accept the role of screaming idiot, so Claude Perron’s snarling, zombie-smashing character is decidedly welcome.
The Zombies, as so often in a decent zombie film, do not steal the limelight at all (there are thankfully no humorous or particularly distinctive examples) and exist to snarl, snap and splatter, bashing endlessly against locked doors and hunting down the living. They’re fast - but that’s fine - and they’re dead. The reason for their zombification is never really explained and hardly even alluded to (cue much disgruntled muttering on the IMDB messageboards) but this is simply not a problem: anyone who thinks a zombie film is about an explanation for what might provoke a zombie attack is misunderstanding the genre. Zombies are the eternal ‘other’. They embody threat, fear, isolation and death, they are nightmares; finding plausible reasons for their existence is somewhat besides the point.
Mostly, what appeals about La Horde is that it is a great fun film. A frantic dash through walking corpses full of suspense and… some good splatter.
And splatter is what a decent zombie film is all about…
They Came Back (Les Revenants)
Yes, this is technically a zombie movie. Yes, this involves the recently deceased emerging from their graves and returning to life. Yes, it is French.
Here, though, the comparisons to Jean Rollin’s godawful Zombie Lake end. Because Les Revenants isn’t your standard zombie movie, it isn’t really a horror film at all. It is however, very, very French.
In much the same way that the recent (and wonderful) Let The Right One In manages to be a vampire film without really being about the routine vampire-mythology horror clichés, Les Revenants takes a very different approach to the zombie film.
We’ll start with the zombies themselves: what most films seem to overlook when bringing the recently deceased back to life is that, by and large, the recently deceased are likely to be, well, a bit old. So here, instead of having legions of youths dragging themselves out of their graves, we have a horde of the grey undead, 65% of whom are over 60…
Secondly, the fairly major distinction between this and pretty much all other zombie films is that the freshly reanimated have no lust for blood or brains whatsoever. They simply want to return to their lives. This has some pretty awkward results; most of their families have mourned them as dead and are at a bit of a loss as to how to suddenly factor all these people back into their lives. How do you interact with your (until recently) dead wife? They also pose a bit of a problem for the whole town, with 13,000 returning, the massive increase in numbers throwing the balance of the population. They’re housed in community centres, helped as if they were refugees arriving from war torn lands.
The film then, is about the relationships that are re-awakened by the return of the dead; we focus mainly on two husband-wife relationaships and a child returning to his bereaved parents. That’s not to say the film isn’t creepy. There may be no gore, no moments of shock and horror, but there are several distinctly unsettling moments of suspense. The child in particular is creepy as anything…
As well as this focus on how we deal with loss and personal tragedy, the film asks about what it is to be alive; we are told that those who return have incomplete personalities, that everything they say and do is just a re-hashed version of what they remember doing, that they are incapable of original thought. So are they alive? All they can do is follow a set of responses that are borne out of their memories but… isn’t that what we all are?
So farm so good. Now we move to it’s French-ness. The film is beautiful. The film is thought provoking. The film is full of suspense. The film is SLOW. So very little actually happens that it really does drag a bit.
The film is novel, unsettling and beautiful but ultimately flawed. Not creepy enough to scare you and not quite intense enough to justify one and three quarter hours of undivided attention. It’s definitely worth a watch and it will make you think, but I doubt it’ll change your world.
(Haven’t been able to find a trailer…)