Zombie
[REC]3 Génesis
I arrived at this film with high hopes. The first [REC] is a film I absolutely love. Studying Spanish and being mad-keen on zombie films, it seemed almost too good to be true that one of the twenty-first century’s best zombie films was filmed by two Spanish directors in an appartment block in Barcelona. It’s a powerful, scary zombie film (that staircase death!) that managed to breath new life into both the zombie and the found-footage genres. Impressive stuff.
The second in the series was by no means as good but it was still streets ahead of most of the competition. Balaguero and Plaza played around with the restrictions of the found-footage film, spiced up the zombies with a bit more religion (not to everyone’s taste) and spent their obviously increased budget on quantities of guns and gore. More impressive stuff.
Coming to the third instalment, then, my hopes were high. Almost worryingly high. I’m pretty sure that at some point Balaguero and Plaza had said they intended to stop after the second but, given its commercial success, rights-holders Filmmax said they’d continue with other directors in that case (I might have imagined this. But I think it happened). Whatever the details of the scenario, B+P did sign up to do more [REC] films but planned two more, of which they would direct one each, rather than co-directing as before. [REC]3 is Plaza’s segment. It takes place, as far as I can tell, at roughly the same time as the first film. What seemed like an isolated outbreak clearly wasn’t…
It opens in the now-familiar shaky-camera style. We’re at the wedding of Koldo and Clara. As the family and friends move on to the reception, however, it emerges that the Uncle’s dog-bite may be infected. Badly. Coughing blood and staggering, there are no prizes for guessing what happens next. It is, essentially, all fairly predictable. We’re ushered into a secure location (country house), introduced to the characters/victims (wedding guests) and then a zombie is thrown into the mix and all hell breaks loose.
That said, [REC]3 handles it all pretty well. The country house makes a refreshing change from the apartment block of before, the characters are (mostly) intelligent and likeable and, most crucially of all, the gore is good. Some cruel, splattery deaths are dealt to zombies and humans alike, characters are killed off, heads and limbs are hacked at. It’s gleeful, bloody stuff (which is exactly what we want, right?)
It’s certainly not as innovative or as well-crafted as the first film, I’ll accept that, but I’d say that it gave [REC]2 a pretty close run. [REC]3 is a well-made, straight-faced, zombie-movie. And I enjoyed it a lot.
Juan of the Dead
A few months ago, towards the end of last year, the Leeds International Film Festival announced a rather exciting looking UK premiere in the shape of the world’s first Cuban zombie film Juan of the Dead. Sadly, given that I was volunteering at the time (and watching as many films as I could cope with…) I missed it. Given that foreign cult films are sometimes ridiculously slow to appear on DVD here in the UK, I thought I’d missed it altogether. So it was a pretty nice surprise to see the fabulous Bradford Film Festival schedule it as part of their After Dark strand of horror films this year.
As a lover of many things Spanish/LatinAmerican and all things Zombie, perhaps I was somewhat determined to enjoy this. Even so, sometimes that hyped excitement is the surest way to guarantee disappointment. After all, when you’re looking forward to a film that much it’s going to be hard for it to meet expectations (this is also a worry of mine about Iron Sky, the much-hyped Nazis-on-the-moon adventure…). Thankfully, JotD offered no such disappointment. It was great fun from start to finish.
Juan is a tongue-in-cheek zombie killing rampage with plenty of laughs, some fun gore and not a lot in the way of horror. It’s decidedly more in the Dead Snow and Shaun of the Dead lines than Dawn of the Dead or other more (ahem) ‘serious’ zombie films - this was probably a sensible choice: straight-faced zombie horror can be pretty hard to pull off, especially with a comparatively inexperienced cast (French suburban zombie masterpiece La Horde shows how well it can be done though!). Anyway, Juan sensibly balances laughs and splatter, with the obligatory bit of soul-searching and character improvement.
The basic premise is left beautifully stark. Havana is overrun with zombies. Juan and friends are trying to survive. That’s about all there is to it. Like many of the classics they don’t waste much time on life-before-zombies and they certainly don’t bother explaining where the zombies come from - although the TV reporter blames American imperialists, a neat joke on both Cuban news/propaganda and the (modern) zombie’s links to American consumerism. For the most part it just throws us into the middle of the fray as the Juan, his estranged daughter, his best friend and a couple of others start bashing, slashing, smashing and splattering zombies.
It’s not perfect. But who really expects perfection from a zombie flick? The plot is essentially pretty episodic: Juan and friends go to one place, kill zombies. Another place, kill zombies. Go home. Go out. Kill Zombies. Etc. etc. Luckily it’s all carried out with such obvious enthusiasm that it never really gets boring. It’s slightly spoiled by some astonishingly crappy CGI though. Before computer graphics, designers had to find a convincing way to show something or just not show it. If only this were still true. Shots like a helicopter smashing into Cuban government buildings were obviously prohibitively expensive to shoot properly so would have been better left out entirely. Instead the computer generated helicopter just looks cheap.
The gore’s good though! Some nice splatters, severed limbs and oozing wounds show just what fun you can have with real physical special effects. And, even if it is episodic, some of the episodes are so damn good that you can forgive them entirely: one scene sees the heroes naked, unarmed and handcuffed to a zombie in the back of a van… There are lots of wry jokes at the Cuban regime and it’s claims - the zombies are referred to as dissidents throughout - and one of the characters carries both a Cuban and a US flag to wave depending on who wins. It’s also suitably cavalier with its characters: several central characters meet gruesome ends and, at the beginning at least, the gang seem to accidentally kill as many humans as they do zombies (accidentally shooting an old lady with a harpoon…).
Overall, it’s the enthusiasm that holds this film together. It’s made by people clearly enjoying the chance to make the first Cuban zombie film and their enthusiasm is infectious. Juan is somewhat uneven but so are most zombie films. It’s generally a lot of fun.
(The Bradford Film Festival is screening it again on Sunday 22nd and the film will get a DVD release on 4th June. Hurrah!)
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…
The Nights of Terror (Le Notti del Terrore)
Another day, another Spaghetti Zombie flick. Fresh from the prime years of Italia’s Zombie cycle comes Andrea Bianchi’s Nights of Terror.
This film has been called a lot of things. Good isn’t usually one of them. IMDb reviews run from a verdict of “unintentionally hilarious” to “unbearably awful” and, whilst there’s definitely elements of the latter, I must side with the former.
Like so many of the others (and indeed, most of the films I cover here…) it gets off to a bad start on paper.
- Andrea Bianchi cut his teeth very much on the porn side of exploitation films: his previous titles to this included Confessions of a Frustrated Housewife, Strip Nude for Your Killer and The Erotic Dreams of a Lady.
- The film has almost no plot
- The scenes are pretty much split equally between the central characters fumbling with each other and the central characters being hunted by zombies.
Of course, you could very well argue that some of those may be positives….
^^ There is literally nothing that gives away that this film was made in 1980.^^
The ‘plot’ can be pretty easily dismissed as: luxury-loving loved-up couples spend some time at a castle/mansion house. Zombies rise from their graves. Zombies kill central characters. The end.
The characters are similarly bland; in the film’s defence, things to move at a good enough pace that we are hardly given time to consider how little depth Bianchi gives his protagonists but…. on the flipside: whenever any one of them dies, there’s a fairly large temptation to shrug your shoulders and mutter, “oh well”. It’s not as if we really ever care about any of them. The women especially (as might be expected from a 1980 Italian exploitation horror) are completely characterless. Of the prominent women, one is zombified fairly early, the other encounters her slaughtered son and hardly utters another word whilst the third…. She is so enormously irritating in the typical ‘all-a-woman-can-do-when-confronted-by-something-scary-is-scream’ manner that, when she stumbles into a (rather oddly placed) bear-trap, I was vaguely pleased. Sadly, all it means is that she screamed and squawked for the rest of the film, albeit now with added limping.
Frustratingly boring characters aside, the zombification is quite fun. The make-up is somewhat heavier than normal (in the vein of the Spanish conquistadores of Fulci’s Zombi 2) but they are pleasingly grotty with maggots and all. The gore is a little thin on the ground perhaps, but the bits we do get are fairly satisfying. And THAT breast-feeding moment needs no more elaboration…
Perhaps I’m being too harsh. After all, for all the lack of plot, the flat characters, the atrocious dubbing, the obviously budget-limited set, this film moves along at a keen pace and is a lot of fun. Maybe not one to treasure, watch again, or even remember but… if you’re after a fun film to watch, in which stupid people get killed by the undead, this might just fit your requirements.
Nightmare City (Incubo sulla città contaminata)
Ok. First off we’ll do a quick Zombie-Survival, multiple-choice quiz question:
You are on the run from vicious, fast, flesh-eating, blood-drinking ghouls. And your escape-vehicle is running out of petrol. When you stumble upon a deserted looking petrol station, do you…
a)Fill your van at the pump, taking advantage of how there appears to be no-one around, and continue fleeing, or…
b)Pop in, have a rummage through the (presumably deceased) owner’s clothes and make yourself a cup of coffee, whilst dicussing how man’s greed has triggered this crisis. Upon discovering one of the zombies in the back garden, rather than running away, you attack it, alerting others to your presence, allowing them to find your car which you then firebomb, before escaping on foot with only a flask of brandy.
If you anwered a) you might stand a chance of survival. If you anwered b) you’ll die like the suckers in this film.
Oh look, there’s some glamourous dancers. What’ll happen to them, I wonder….?
Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City is both wonderful and awful, serious and silly. The characters are numerous and killed off so fast that we can’t really care very much about them; when the military lieutenant is forced to shoot his zombified wife through the head, we’re vaguely aware that this seems a shame, but it’s hardly a tragedy as none of the characters have enough time to create any depth or link with the watcher.
You can’t fault it on body count though. The monsters of the film might not be strictly zombies - they are victims of radiation who haven’t died and move incredibly fast (think 28days…) and wield weapons - but they certainly cause havoc, feed on blood and pass on their contamination to those that they injure. And the injure an awful lot of people!
The planned air-strike is somewhat derailed by the discovery of an entire airbase of dead pilots and the notquitezombies munch away at doctors, nurses, patients, soldiers, dancers and relatives with ample enthusiasm.
Plot-wise, this is little more than a vehicle for graphic violence and, although this sounds like a criticism, at least it’s fairly open in its lowly ambitions. Refreshingly unpretentious! So if we can’t rate a film on its plot, what can we use to evaluate it?
Why, the nature of the killings of course! Zombie movies are generally an excuse to be inventive and/or outrageous in terms of death scenes and this is fairly competent in this regard. Highlights include beating a vicar’s brains out on the altar, a harpoon through the chest and a scene with a rollercoaster that I won’t spoil…
Whch leads us to Zombie-Survival, multiple-choice quiz question number 2:
If, when fleeing a zombie-outbreak, you encounter an abandoned fairground do you…
a)wander in, or..
b)stay the hell away.
I’ll let you figure the answer to that one yourself…
