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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.