The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

I didn’t expect a whole lot from Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane, but maybe that’s why it was such a surprisingly enjoyable movie. I think its biggest strength was it knew exactly what it was: a well-funded b-movie without pretension. Plotwise, it was a pastiche of cliches from the zombie and plane movie genres, but it got a lot of mileage from its competent (albeit unremarkable) cast of vaguely recognizable character actors and generally high production values. The director kept things from getting too hammy and kept the pacing moving along nicely — why can’t more horror and b-movie directors do these two, simple things? These zombies were the fast type, which I generally disapprove of but am becoming more accustomed to, and the make-up and gore were nicely done. I especially liked the yellow eyes of the zombies, which are illogical but pretty cool looking.

The story is exactly what you’d expect: mad scientist dude illegally transports zombie on commercial flight, zombie busts lose on the plane and things get seriously negative for the crew and passengers from there. Everyone reacts pretty realistically, which is to say mortal terror, panic and selfish if ultimately stupid actions by most of the soon-to-be zombie chow.  The ending was awesome, too. I liked this one so much I bought it.

The entirely CGI-animated Resident Evil: Degeneration was, for my tastes, far better than the live-action Resident Evil. Admittedly, I have only seen the first RE movie – I was so disappointed I didn’t bother with the others, though I will eventually. In Resident Evil: Degeneration you have a typically (for the franchise) convoluted plot that centers around the efforts of another company to pick up the pieces of the Umbrella Corporation’s research and profit from it, even if that means their market is terrorists. The main event is a release of the zombie-making T-virus in an airport and pure zombie mayhem is the result. Franchise heavyweights Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield are the main characters and they lead a rescue mission from inside the airport, before tangling with a corrupt corporate executive (is there any other kind?) who’s concocted an elaborate plot to test the G-virus, which creates a weird reptile/insectoid hybrid demonic-looking mutant that is all but unkillable. There’s also a romance sub-plot between Kennedy and a new character, and the new character’s brother is involved in the release of the G-Virus, as revenge. Oh, and he is being manipulated by the corporate executive who’s linked to the senator trapped in the airport and, uh, … did I mention it gets a little convoluted?

The movie looks great at times and horrible at others, depending on what the scene portrays.  The zombies themsleves and the action scenes typically look great, and the fires looked nothing short of amazing (the film makers knew this, and used the effect as much as possible). Unfortunately, any kind of  emotional scene or anything that required a facial close-up was way too much “Welcome to Uncanny Valley!” to be anything but off putting. The pacing is generally tight but it does drag at moments and the story is convoluted enough to be difficult to follow at times. Those two things conspired to make my attention wander at several points. Luckily the dialog is nowhere near as bad as the games’ famously bad writing — at its worse, it’s just kind of stiff and unrealistic, but no worse than many a live-action zombie epic I’ve sat through.

For fans of the RE games, this is definitely a worthy exercise, if only for the additional insight into the characters and back story of the games.  For fans of the RE live action movies it’s probably little more than a curiosity at best and utterly confusing at worst (“Uh, how does this relate to Alice now?”). For general zombiephiles, it’s an interesting, if flawed, work that’s worth a look (especially if you enjoy anime, which it strongly resembles in many ways: pacing, story and dialog in particular).

When zombies make zombie movies, bad things happen. The sole claim to fame offered by FleshEater is that it is the pet project of Bill Hinzman, who was the graveyard ghoul in the original Night of the Living Dead. He wrote, directed and starred in this turkey, which mashes up NotLD with any generic Friday the 13th inspired slasher film and ends up as a mess. A dumbass farmer unearths a zombie, who breeds more zombies in the usual, bitey way. This troupe of flesh-loving undead systematically kill a bunch of completely unappealing teens during a camp out. In a departure from completely generic zombiedom (but well in line with generic slasherdom), the zombies all use weapons — pitchforks, a hatchet, etc. — which gives a little bit of variety to the killings. Things are set to get all apocalyptic up in this bitch when the local townsfolk pull out the guns and wipe them all out — or do they? Then the end rips off NotLD‘s ending — what a surprise. Apart from being slow, dull and dumb, it wasn’t bad. Just kidding, it was bad.

As an aside, I am pretty certain this was filmed in rural Pennsylvania. Something about the scenery, the mullets and the ready availability of firearms and Iron City beer just reminds me of my time there.

Mario Acevedo’s Jailbait Zombie is based on the can’t-miss premise of vampires versus zombies. You have Felix Gomez, a lecherous, snarky soldier turned vampire enforcer, facing off against an army of rotting, walking dead. Along the way, the plot is thickened by the addition of a precocious, troubled teenage girl with immense psychic powers and a burning need to become a vampire. She latches on to Gomez, occasionally aiding his search for the zombies’ creator but mostly just getting in the way. Her family are bush-league Mafioso, which adds another complication, as does the need to keep the existence of the supernatural — including vampires, zombies and psychic teenage girls — a secret from the mortal world.

The books starts strong with a fight between Gomez and a zombie and proceeds to go on a twisty, page-turning journey that reads like a contemporary detective yarn heavily laced with supernatural elements. In interviews, Acevedo has called his genre urban fantasy, and that works as well as any descriptor for the mix of familiar fictional tropes from horror, hard-boiled detective stories and the new wave of supernatural fiction. Acevedo does a good job of mixing things up with some original ideas about his creatures of the night while sticking closely enough to the classics to not upset anyone’s apple cart. His vampires suck blood, get burned by sunlight, can control the minds of mortals, are immortal themselves, etc. At the same time, they can operate in daylight with the aid of sunblock and makeup, eat food as well as blood and even have a sense of morality. Of course, given the nature of this blog, it’s the zombies we’re more interested in here. These are the work of a reanimator who comes off a bit like Herbert West of Re-Animator mixed with Dr. Frankenstein. They’re rotting, shambling messes but the “best made” can manage some pretty advanced tasks, like driving. They’re pretty much impossible to kill and share some kind of group consciousness. Oh, and they love brains.

It’s not great literature, but no one picks up a book called Jailbait Zombie looking for deep insight into the human condition, now, do they? The book delivers what it promises: an action-packed tale of the supernatural, laced with humor and gore. There’s never a dull moment and Acevedo knows how to pace a story. Characters such as Gomez and his teenaged stalker are well-developed and satisfying, but in a few cases, especially the Red Bull-swilling mad scientist reanimator, I felt like there was a good bit of potential left on the table and I wish he’d done more with them.  I also can’t help but wish there were more zombies in the book; the climactic battle between Gomez and the zombies was great but left me wanting more scenes like it. The bottom line is you pretty much get what’s advertised with Jailbait Zombie; if the concept of a vampire enforcer squaring off against an army of zombies sounds good to you, you’re not going to be disappointed.

For more info, visit MarioAcevedo.com

What do you get from Severed: Forest of the Dead? Apart from starring the guy who plays President Roslin’s assistant on the new Battlestar Galactica, a fairly novel setting for a zombie movie (the forest!) and a new origin idea, not a whole lot. And even the novelties come with pretty severe caveats. The zombies here are created when genetically modified tree sap comes into contact with an open wound. It’s a fairly original but wholly retarded plot device. Explanations are overrated anyway. The lumberjack setting allows for a couple of creative, albeit barely shown, death scenes and it ends up feeling like a tease.  Once you get past the novel premise and setting and the familiar face what you’ll find is an uninspired, pedestrian zombie movie. The acting, direction and script are all mediocre, and the ending is pretty lame. It does manage to be moderately entertaining for its run time but it feels a lot like treading water. I mean, I don’t expect every zombie movie I see to blow me away, but it’s nice if they throw me a little bone here and there. This one simply didn’t and I was really disappointed they didn’t take better advantage of all those axes, chainsaws and wood chippers that were just begging to be used. Overall, not terrible, but not special.

In Night of the Comet a mysterious comet reduces nearly all of the planet’s population to a fine, red dust. Many of the survivors are turned into crazed zombies who chase and try to eat the unchanged. And there’s some mad scientists who want to use the unaffected to create a cure and save themselves. Facing off against these evil scientists are two sisters (one a cheerleader, of course) and a truck driver who will look familiar to fans of Star Trek: Voyager. It’s fairly lightweight and pretty dumb, but it’s also a lot of fun. The zombie makeup was excellent, but there are not nearly enough zombies in the film.

I have to admit to a fair bit of nostalgia for this movie. I must have watched it a dozen times as a kid, thanks to the miracle of cable TV. It’s clearly influenced by Romero, but it isn’t really a zombie movie — more like an apocalyptic sci-fi movie with a few zombies thrown in. Still, some of my adult fascination with zombies has to stem from the deep imprint this movie left on me as an adolescent.  And hey, zombies + apocalypse + ’80s = a good time in my book! If I didn’t have the nostalgia, this would probably warrant a lukewarm positive response. But I do, so I really enjoyed it.

The legendary Joe Dante takes on zombies in Homecoming, his entry in the Masters of Horror anthology. Overall he acquits himself well. It looks nice, the acting is solid and everything moves along at a nice clip. The story covers a group of zombie soldiers that return from the grave to express their opinion on the unpopular war that killed them (hint: they aren’t too fond of it). As well execuuted as this was overall, I really felt that it got bogged down by its politics. It’s so heavy handed in its approach to its message that it distracts from the experience of watching it, even if you more or less agree with its position (although some parts of it work precisely because they are so blatantly taking aim at some political hack, such as the scene where the Ann Coulter-esque character takes a bullet to the head — that worked great for me). I watched it for the first time recently and I wonder if I would have liked it more if I’d seen it right after it came out in 2005. I’ll watch it again in five years and see if I feel the same way – this one may actually be easier to swallow when what it is commenting on isn’t in that weird, not-so-fresh gray area between current events and history. After all, the idea of soldiers returning from the grave to express displeasure with the way they were used is an essentially timeless idea.

The gutless Wicked Little Things is representative of a disturbing trend in horror over the past six to eight years, toward generic, slick and soulless genre exercises. It features mediocre, if generally competent, acting, combined with stiff, pedantic direction, a questionable script and just enough gore to slip under the censor bar while throwing a bone to gore-hound fans. The plot of this stinker seems to have been generated by writing various horror movie tropes on cards, shuffling the deck, then dealing out half a dozen cards and calling it a story. This one got flesh-eating zombies, scary-ass dead kids, single mom moves to small town with a secret, possibly imaginary friend, revenge haunting and running in the woods. It does remarkably little with that haphazard collection of ideas. It is probably a tad better than Mortuary, another film that is representative of the same trend. Still, a tad better than utterly atrocious is still fucking miserable.

It’s hard to believe Tobe Hooper directed Mortuary, a steaming pile of crap about a mortuary built over the lair of a Lovecraftian beasty that can reanimate the dead. Note to developers: storing dead people over a creature capable of reanimating them is a bad idea. Note to filmmakers (the ones who made this, and any others out there): cramming in half a dozen subplots doesn’t keep me interested, it just makes them all underdeveloped and leads to gaping plot holes. You’ve got a romance subplot, a bullying rowdy supplot, the crazy sheriff, the city councilman who may or may not know what’s going on, you’ve got the scary deformed kid who once lived in the house, the family secrets, the … blech, I lost track at some point. The other big problem with this movie is it takes forever to get going, then crams all the good stuff — not that it’s actually very good, mind you, because the writing is terrible –  into the last 25 minutes. So it’s slow, slow, slow, then chaotic and incoherent. Fun! Only, not really. At least most of the cast was decent, so only some of the acting was painful.

The animated City of Rott is something of a curiosity, as one of the very few animated feature-length zombie movies in existence — the only other I am aware of is the CGI-animated Resident Evil: Degeneration. Unfortunately, its one-of-a-kind status is its only real appeal. It’s bad. Real, real bad. The art and animation is strictly student-film quality, and bad student-film quality at that. More to the point, it’s like the scribblings on a junior-high math notebook come to life, or undeath, or whatever. The main story — about an old man looking for new shoes in the midst of a zombie apocalypse — is nonsensical and meandering.  Compounding the issue is the fact that a whole new set of characters and plot points are introduced over halfway through, and none of them made much sense either. It was all done by one guy — art, animation, writing, voices, everything — and it shows. Especially noteworthy are the female voices, which are achieved by speeding up the creator’s voice — very clever. At only 78 minutes, the movie feels like 178 minutes. Apart from some vaguely interesting ideas (brain-infecting worms cause zombies) and one or two mildly amusing moments, CoR is without redeeming qualities. Do Not Watch.