The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

Thirty days, thirty movies: done. It all ended last night with Cemetery Man. If you aren’t familiar with the movie, the quickest summary I can give is its Italian title Dellamorte Dellamore, which translates to Death Love. It is a movie about death and love, with lots of zombies. It’s also beautiful (visually and otherwise), funny and damn strange.

I really want to do an in-depth review/critique/analysis of this film in the near future, so I will keep my remarks here brief. First off, if you haven’t seen this movie, put it at the top of your must-see list. Even if you don’t love it (and I think most of you will) it is an important film, both within the zombiesphere and within the larger context of “important” films. Hell, even if you think it is dumb as fuck (and it’s possible, though wrong, to interpret it that way) there is a whole lot of the gorgeous Anna Falchi nude in it (I’ll put a non-revealing nude picture of her below, for those who are curious), and arguably it’s not even gratuitous nudity since it ties closely into the plot.

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There are pleasant surprises and unpleasant surprises and Dead of Night 9also known as Deathdream, among other names) was one of the pleasant ones. I have to admit, when I saw it was created by the team of writer Alan Ormsby and director Bob Clark, who also wrote/directed the execrable Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, my heart sank. All the more pleasant then when this turned out to be such a good film!

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Folks, this movie is the stuff that Cinemax was made for. The Vineyard is cheap, tawdry and dumb, barely more than an excuse for lots of gratuitous nudity and sleaze and a little bit of gore (a very little bit, unfortunately).

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Here we have another zombie cop movie. But this zombie cop is also a Maniac Cop! And by maniac cop, I mean a cop that kills people randomly, for no good reason. Well, he has a good reason to kill a few of them. The rest, not so much. See, maniac!

This movie is chock full of genre vets. Bruce Cambell, Tom Atkins, Richard Roundtree top the list, but there are others you can pick out if you have a sharp eye and a good memory for character actors. It’s directed by William Lustig, who also directed Uncle Sam (review here). Both that movie and this one are basically slasher movies with a zombie as the slasher. This one also mixes in some standard cop movie tropes as well.

It’s kind of hard to tell if the maniac cop is a zombie or not. They never use the word, but he can take multiple bullets without flinching, is cold, doesn’t have a heart beat and survives a serious impalement pretty easily. Sounds like a zombie to me.

I didn’t think much of this, but I definitely enjoyed it more than Uncle Sam. It wasn’t great, but it certainly wasn’t bad. And hell, it’s worth watching for the cast alone!

The world needed a buddy-cop zombie movie and it got Dead Heat. Now it thinks maybe it would like its money back, because Dead Heat is kind of a stinker.

It amazes me that movies like this get made. Someone read this script and said, “Yeah, that’ll do.” Someone auditioned Joe Piscopo and Treat Williams for the leads and went, “Yeah these are our guys! What amazing non-chemistry they have!” (Okay, they probably didn’t think that last part.) How does this happen?

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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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