The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

Even after a second viewing, I just don’t like Fido as much as almost everyone else seems to. I don’t dislike it. It’s certainly a well put together film. It looks good, the story is decent, the acting is all good or better … yet somehow, my reaction to it continues to be “meh.”

It seems a little shallow and a little scattershot — like, is it a black comedy, a boy-and-his-dog movie with zombies, a commentary on Cold War paranoia? It could be any or all of those, but it seems like it throws little bits of each of those and several other ideas/themes out, but never bothers to tie any of them together or resolve anything.

Paradoxically, if it were a little more shoddy, I might like it better, but as polished as it is, I just expected more from it. It felt a little like cotton candy — tasty while you’re eating it, but it leaves you feeling kind of hollow and empty afterward. Someone tell me, what am I not getting about this film? I will say it’s easy enough to watch that I would consider a third go-round if someone wants to explain what I am missing here…

I can’t say I hated The Dead Pit. I definitely didn’t love it. Really, it was just a kind of goofy, forgettable, late-’80s throwaway that probably got played ad infinitum on Cinemax around 1991, thanks to some gratuitous nudity and a lot of the lead actress (that’s her on the right) running around in her underwear.

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I have to say, The Child is a strange movie. It’s also a hackish, clumsy mess of a movie! But it is kind of a fun hackish, clumsy mess of a movie!

It’s a “bad seed” story about an evil little girl who can reanimate the dead, among other things (like pop the top of a milk bottle with her mind bullets!). She hates everyone and blames them for the death of her mother, so she uses her reanimated zombie friends to kill them. The offenders include her really weird father (who might actually be responsible for the mother’s death), the old lady down the street, her brother, her nanny, the gardener… man, who didn’t get in on this killing action? Anyway, that’s really about it. There’s no explanation for anything, just a lot of killing. And some weird, weird dialog that goes nowhere. But mostly killing.

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So, after two logistical delays, I finally get to watch Invisible Invaders! And it was so, so not worth the wait.

This came out at basically the same time as Plan 9 from Outer Space (review here) and it’s more or less the same movie. Aliens come to Earth and reanimate dead people in a plot to conquer the planet. Here, four people hole up in a bunker to do some science and fix those aliens, but good! And after some not-very-exciting adventures, they do! With sonic rays, which necessitates a big, kludgy sonic ray gun that looks like it was built by a team of six-year-olds. In between, we get lots and lots of stock footage, lots and lots of narration (at least two-thirds of the story is told in voiceover narration) and a really dumb romantic subplot. There are also some zombies, but they are almost incidental. They are supposedly unstoppable, but they are never shown doing anything but lumbering around with their arms held out. I almost fell asleep.

Of course, that was partly because I was exhausted. Kids, never take on four special projects in the weeks before your wedding, okay? Just don’t do it. That also meant I had to skip the short again. Sorry. Shorts will return, but it might be another day or two.

Against all odds and in defiance of all common sense, I absolutely loved Pet Sematary 2. As you might recall, I covered the original last year as part of my Zombie Movie Marathon and found it pretty bad (read it here). Well, Pet Sematary II isn’t pretty bad. It’s absolute garbage, but so completely ridiculous and over-the-top that it circles right back around to awesome. To borrow a term from the immortal sage Mr. T, it’s absoludicrous!

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Wow, I enjoyed The Children far more than its quality merits. It’s a bad, bad movie. Bad acting, bad writing, technically deficient (especially the lighting — half the movie is almost impossible to make out) and nonsensical, it’s a poster child for how to not make a movie. Yet it is awesome.

Why? Well, how about the fact that is about nuclear zombie children that kill with burning, radioactive hugs? Or the fact that these nuke-zombie children look normal, except for black fingernails (OMGoth!)? Or that they can only be killed by cutting off their hands? Or that nothing in this movie really makes sense and nothing is ever explained? These are all contributors to its greatness.

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When zombie movies go mainstream, sometimes they get really weird. Case in point: My Boyfriend’s Back, a screwball zombie comedy from the early ’90s. This is one odd film.

In it, a teenager named Johnny dies trying to impress the girl he’s crushed on since the first grade. His unrequited love and her promise to go to prom with him, made as he is taking his last breath, brings him back as a zombie. He heads home and picks up his life as if he never died. The weird bit is that while everyone is quite surprised to see him, no one really thinks much of it or really reacts to it. They treat him like a pariah, especially once he eats a classmate, but they are remarkably chill about it. That may be because it’s happened at least once before in that town, some fifteen years prior, but still … you’d think it would cause a bit more uproar.

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The more Lucio Fulci films I see, the more I appreciate his work. The latest, and last of the Fulci zombie flicks, is The House By the Cemetery. It’s your basic haunted-house tale, only the house is haunted by a zombie. Crazy!

The zombie lives in the basement and emerges to murder and eat people to stay alive. A family moves into the house so the dad can do some research and pretty soon weirdness is erupting all over the place… The family has a weird-looking little kid and there’s a little dead girl that only the kid can see, and some weird crying coming from the basement. And a tombstone thing in the main hallway and of course the cemetery right outside.

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I really would have liked to like Dead & Buried more than I did, but it made it really, really hard. It’s not a terrible movie by any means, but it’s not anything special either. Let’s just say it’s no surprise it’s been all but forgotten.

The movie is about a small town whose residents have a taste for ritual group murder. They show up en masse, kill someone (and film/photograph it for posterity) and then a few days later that person appears as a new resident of the town. Well, it’s one growth strategy… Not everyone in town is in on the murdering, though. The sheriff seems mighty perplexed by all the dead people and does his best (which isn’t all that great, honestly) to figure out WTF is going on. So it’s a kind of a Twilight Zone-esque murder-mystery with zombies, basically.

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Well, these Resident Evil movies just keep getting more and more ridiculous. I can’t decide if that means each one gets better or worse. In any case, Resident Evil: Extinction is utterly ludicrous. And still kind of fun.

What it isn’t is original. At all. In any way. It’s barely more than a pastiche of scenes and ideas from other, better movies. Start with a base of Day of the Dead — same underground base, same mad scientist doctor, parallel scenes and more — then mix in, well, everything. A little Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome fashion sense, a Texas Chainsaw Massacre/Devil’s Rejects style crazy family, the Rancor-pit scene from Return of the Jedi, shots straight out of Lawrence of Arabia, bird attack from The Birds, ideas from Scanners and/or the X-Men … How you feel about this sort of “borrowing” and your ability to shut your brain off for ninety minutes will largely determine how you feel about this film.

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