Zombies

LIFF25!

Last weekend, the 25th annual Leeds International Film Festival launched its programme, ahead of the festival in November. There’s heaps and heaps of exciting things to look forward to in what is, surely, one of the UK’s premiere film festivals, so I thought I’d do a (very) brief preview here.

The Official Selection is the home of the big names, high-art and gruelling drama but really does host all sorts of things. It’s nice to see the festival score the coup of a whole bunch of UK premier showings of European and World cinema as well as a handful of very exciting retrospectives. Psycho on the big screen is surely one not to be missed and, though I’ve seen them before, Waltz With Bashir and Persepolis are both great and worth a cinema trip. For the more hardy, Bela Tarr’s epic Sátántangó - which is seven and a half hours long! - is screening in the Hyde Park Picture House. Thankfully it comes with two interval breaks!

In the gleefully brutal and bloody Fanomenon strand, meanwhile, there are also a few exciting treats to look forward to. Heading up the classic genre film retrospectives are Alien, Aliens and Invasion of the Body Snatchers but even these treats don’t seem so tasty when compared to the bounties on offer in the new films selection. Monster Brawl, which pitches all the horror favourites against each other, looks too-good-to-miss whilst _Exit Humanity’_s American Civil War zombie apocalypse would surely be the most gloriously insane zombie adventure imaginable, were it not for it being partnered up with Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Hell Driver and Cuba’s very first zombie film, Juan of the Dead. Oh my! That’s three slices of very different but very exciting ZOMBIE ACTION! Hurrah!

Thirdly, and no less excitingly, comes the fabulous news that all Cherry Kino film screenings are FREE (!) this year! Cherry Kino is the semi-independent experimental film strand of the festival and hosts screenings and workshops of ‘wondermental’ films all year round. CK has it’s own web presence in a blog (HERE!) and should bring some reliably curious, strangely beautiful experimentation to the screen. And it’s FREEEEEE!

This is, obviously, a brief and over-excited preview. I didn’t even find space to squeeze in a mention of the exquisitely bonkers-looking Japanese sub-section of the Fanomenon strand (hint: it’ll be weird!), the Cinema Versa documentary strand or the short films strand. And the Official Selection definitely demands some more attention too. More to come soon!

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…

Looking Back: 2010 in ZOMBIES

This is the first of my “Looking Back at 2010” posts, in which I plan to have a look at what I watched this year and see what was great (and not so great…). First up: Zombies! This is based on the list of films I watched in 2010, not necessarily those released in 2010.

Last year I sat through a fair number of Zombie films and, much like the genre, I have to say they were a pretty mixed bag. My film list contains 29 that I would describe as either being Zombie films or at least significantly featuring zombies. Of these, there were a handful of true genre classics - several of which I’d seen before - including Umberto Lenzi’s zombies-with-weapons masterpiece Nightmare City (which I reviewed here), Hammer’s brilliant Plague of the Zombies, the creepy Spanish Tombs of the Blind Dead and cult-classic no-budget cheese-fest The Video Dead.

By brokensbone at 2011-01-03

Somewhat less memorably, I also endured Zombie Cop and Zombie Nosh, neither of which I’d recommend even to Zombie film-fans! At this end of the scale The Asylum’s I Am Legend rip-off I Am Omega sneaks in too, falling just about on the right side of watchable, but not by far.

Big name Zombie offerings were perhaps a little thin. Although Zombies are supposedly making a bit of a come back (from the dead, heh) Hollywood and big name studios are yet to put out much of any worth. As much as I love Shaun of the Dead, I’d like a few more not-comedy Zombie films, and Hollywood is not exactly leaping at the idea. George Romero’s newest, Survival of the Dead, went straight to DVD and, though not a bad idea or unwatchable film, it certainly isn’t comparable to his best. Zombieland was pretty disappointing too: although it started out well, it was as if some Hollywood executive had stepped in at around the half-hour mark to tell them what they were doing wrong. What’s starts promisingly turns into a predictable, warm-n-fuzzy feeling inside, relationship drama with predictable characters. You mean the big mean one is actually sensitive? And the nerdy one who looks like Michael Cera will get the girl? Who’d have thought it? Come on Hollywood, get some guts and kill off lots of main characters in a depressing, violent and gory ending. Please?

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Away from the US, this year confirmed to me (as if it needed confirmation) that the Spanish are just damn good at zombies. Mucha Sangre, Kárate a Muerte en Torremolinos and [Rec] were all brilliant fun in their own ways but it was (new to me) Una De Zombies that really astonished me. It’s some months since I watched it and I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but it’s an incredible and clever film that plays with the viewer from start to finish. Highly recommended! It’s also worth mentioning here that, although not a feature film, the Spanish short Zombies and Cigarettes is just about as much fun as you can have in 17 minutes. And it’s free to watch online!

Back in the English language, I saw the compelling but utterly horrible Deadgirl - think carefully about whether you’ll enjoy it before you watch it: I did, many wouldn’t - and the ruthlessly intelligent Pontypool (which I shall be re-watching as soon as possible), both of which I’d recommend. Nazi Zombies made an appearance in both the hit Norweigan Dead Snow and Brit-classic Outpost, whilst I was puzzled and thrilled in equal measures by a handful of mad-as-can-be zombie flicks, including Killer Shrimps, Wild Zero and the brilliantly titles Holy Virgin vs. The Evil Dead. Excellent!

The film that eclipsed all others for this year though was the world’s first zombie film set in West Africa - Burkina Faso if we’re being precise - The Dead. I don’t know quite what made it so much better than any zombie film I’ve seen in recent years. Maybe it was seeing it for free. Maybe it was sipping a pint of ale as I watched it. Or maybe it’s just fantastically good. It was introduced by one of the Ford brothers who directed it (I’m afraid I don’t remember which) as being a Romero inspired Zombie epic and I think they certainly achieved that. The Dead is like Zombie films used to be. It’s sprawling, rural and slow. The Zombies themselves are not especially threatening, but it’s the endless, lonely tension that builds and builds that brings the sense of despair.

I’m certainly no hater of the modern-day speedy zombies (and having watched Nightmare City this year I was reminded they’re not actually that modern a creation at all) but The Dead is a film that throbs with the pessimistic, end-of-the-world threat that characterised early Romero and Fulci films. It’s also great fun. I have no idea if/when a DVD release is scheduled but I’d recommend it to anyone!

Teleportal

From Nuisance Films comes two fabulous minutes of blood-drenched splatter horror. Though the fiom does cram a fair amount into it’s tiny running time, I shan’t say an awful lot here… save to say there are zombies, videogames and heaps of blood.

This was made for an ever-so reasonable £80 by Paul Shrimpton and Alex Chandon. Paul has previously won the Zone Horror ‘Cut!’ short films competition (with the, also excellent, ‘Hung Up’) and this film is definitely a film worth several watches. I just hope he makes something longer soon!

On-set photos (make up fx by Graham Taylor)