The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

Based on the average quality of Nazi zombie movies, I thought it would be a cold day in hell before I saw a good one. I was almost right. The Norwegian Dead Snow is easily the best Nazi zombie movie I have ever seen — and it’s certainly cold.

Eight medical students head up to a secluded cabin for fun in the snow. Even before most of them have arrived, one falls prey to the as-yet-unseen undead soldiers. Shortly after the rest arrive, a mysterious and cranky old man appears to deliver the film’s back story (Nazis used to have an important base here, were evil, pissed off the locals, robbed them of their gold, were eventually chased into the mountains to freeze to death) before disappearing into the night to become the first victim we see get it. Before long, the revelers have found a stash of said stolen gold (what a surprise…) and the mayhem begins in earnest. From that point on, characters are dispatched at a decent pace in some impressive ways until the inevitable showdown between a whole army of mostly dead, extremely angry Nazis and a couple of survivors armed with tools.

This is a splatteriffic horror-comedy that wears its inspirations on its sleeve — almost literally, since one character is wearing a Braindead (aka Dead Alive) shirt. It’s the tone of that zombie classic — and, to a lesser degree the Evil Dead series, which is discussed by the same character at one point — the filmmakers seem to be aiming for, and they hit it for the most part. And while Dead Snow is nowhere near classic status itself, it is a lot of fun in its own way. The humor falls a little flat at times, but it manages to get off more good lines than bad. The writing and acting are both competent and more than up to the task of telling its meager story. The direction is impressive, apart from a few points where the pacing drags. Even better is the cinematography, which is beautiful and really makes the most of the bleak but gorgeous Arctic setting.

The zombie make up generally looks good but is a bit uneven — some zombies look pretty damn cheesy. The real star of the film is the outrageous gore. It’s creative, relentless and almost constant. The deaths and maimings are gruesome, clever and technically impressive. The highlight is several literally gut-wrenching intestine-centric scenes. Seriously, the filmmakers love the intestines. What Fulci was to eye trauma, these guys are to guts.

The movie does have some issues.  There’s no consistency to the toughness of the zombies. Some keep coming regardless of what’s done to them, others go down for the count after a single shotgun blast to the chest. The story itself doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you come right down to it — there’s a definite implication that the discovery of the Nazis’ gold stash is what riled them up, but at least two characters are killed by them before that happened. Since this isn’t a movie that takes itself too seriously, neither of these issues hurt it too much, but the nagging inconsistency was enough to subtract from its considerable charm nonetheless. Despite that, it’s definitely worth a look from any zombie fan, and it looks like U.S. audiences will get the opportunity, since a distributor picked it up  at Sundance.

Visit the movie’s web site to see a trailer and, hopefully at some point, information about its U.S. release.

There are plenty of so-called zombie movies that are actually something else. Some just don’t feature enough zombies to be a zombie movie (say, Night of the Comet) and are simply movies with zombies in them — a subtle difference, but worth noting. Others have a creature that could well be considered a zombie, but so closely hew to the plot structure, pacing and style of a different type of movie — a slasher film, say — that they can’t really be considered a zombie movie. That’s the case with Uncle Sam.

The movie shows us the story of an angry Gulf War vet who returns home dead (well, undead) and proceeds to wreak havoc and seek revenge against anti-war protesters, politicians and anyone else he thinks wronged him in any way. Despite the wooden performances and heavy-handed yet  somehow sleepy direction, this managed to be pretty watchable, even moderately entertaining. Maybe it was the ultra-creepy Uncle Sam mask the zombie/slasher wore? The weird-ass kid? The presence of veteran character actors Isaac Hayes and Robert Forster? I did watch it late at night, so maybe I was a little out of it and that helped? It’s hard to say. In any case, this is really a mediocre slasher movie with a zombie-like slasher, not a zombie movie.

Are you ready for a super wacky Japanese rock and roll zombie love story? That’s Wild Zero! And man, is it wacky! Think I am overselling it? Then just wait until you see how thick the actual movie piles it on.

It stars the ultra-cool band Guitar Wolf and a fan of the band named Ace, who really wants to be Guitar Wolf. A meteor brings the dead back to life as flesh-hungry zombies, Guitar Wolf is pursued by a double-dealing club manager, there’s a hot arms dealer and a transvestite who wins the heart of Ace. And it is so wacky.

I didn’t love this. It was too much rock-and-roll fantasy posturing and self-conscious wackiness and not enough zombie movie. It amounted to a long, self-indulgent music video in the vein of the old Beatles movies. It was still sort of entertaining, though. Just don’t believe the hype that this is anything special. It’s a mildly amusing, overly long, jokey music video for an overrated Japanese rock band — with zombies!

A lot of movies bore me. A fair number of them exasperate me. But very few anger me. It takes a special kind of awful to really make me mad and Dead and Deader fucking enraged me. I hated this movie with the kind of passion usually reserved for people that have done me wrong. Which, I guess, this sort of did. It was another zombie comedy except it wasn’t funny. At all. It was actually aggressively unfunny. Who told Dean Cain he could act? Worse, who told him he had the capacity to be funny, or react to funny things in a realistic manner? I want to hurt that person. I owe them pain.

It was poorly written, terribly acted, horrendously edited and barely coherent. Actually, no — it was completely incoherent. Plot? You want the plot? Yeah, so do I. It was largely missing from the actual movie, which just sort of skipped from moronic set piece to moronic set piece in a haphazard fashion. There were some scorpions that turn people into zombies and some army guys and … uh… who gives a fuck? Clearly not anyone involved in this production. There was a midget though, which was pretty much the movie’s high point.

The worst part is, the production values were clearly decent. And clearly wasted. I’ve seen movies ten times as good as this trash that were shot with budgets that were half what the craft service here probably cost. No one who worked on this should ever be allowed to make another movie, ever, and I wouldn’t watch this again if I was paid handsomely for the task. Avoid at all costs.

Every once in a while, I buy a movie without knowing anything about it. It rarely ends up well. A perfect example is the fact that I own Dead Moon Rising. It’s one of the dumbest and flat-out worst movies I’ve ever seen. The random, incoherent story pits a ragtag bunch of idiots in a fight against hordes of zombies, with nary an original idea in sight. Every fifteen minutes something new and stupid was added. The constant novelty kept it from being too slow, but made it extra retarded. The smirking, cartoonish goofball of a lead — who can barely act — delivers the majority of the story in a series of asides, which is just unforgivable. What else went into this shit sandwich? There were many lame attempts at humor. According to the cover, it has the largest zombie scene ever. I suppose that’s something, if it’s true (is there some kind of certifying board for that?). Basically, not worth anyone’s time unless you have to see absolutely every zombie movie ever made. In that case, save it for the last stretch and maybe you’ll luck out and die before you get to it.

Is The Beyond a zombie movie? It certainly has plenty of zombies, but at its core it’s more of a haunted/cursed house movie with zombies instead of ghosts. Our story introduces us to unlucky Liza, who’s inherited a hotel from her rich, bachelor uncle. It seems as if her luck has turned, but alas the hotel is built over one of the seven gateways to hell (way, way worse than being built over an ancient Indian burial ground, as it turns out). Plagued by a series of accidents and unusual (not to mention unusually awesome) deaths, poor Liza’s plan to reopen the hotel and solve her money woes is quickly derailed. Soon, she’s met a mysterious blind girl who seems to know a lot about what’s going on, a skeptical doctor who refuses to believe any of it and a whole slew of zombies. Things process haphazardly to a slow climax that sees her entering the gateway to hell for a long and likely unpleasant stay.

This is a hard movie to judge. It’s the third of Lucio Fulci’s forays into the wild world of the walking dead and while it’s beautifully shot and nicely paced, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. In some ways, it’s a precursor to the slasher film, concentrating most of its energy on a series of creative and outlandish death scenes. A man’s face gets eaten by tarantulas; a woman gets melted by acid into a frothy, bloody mess while her daughter looks on; a woman gets her neck torn out by a dog; a doctor gets a face full of glass; a woman gets her head impaled by a nail (complete with Fulci’s trademark eye-gouging action!). These are really the highlight of the film, and presumably the reason for its existence.

The zombies appear only intermittently until the last fifteen or twenty minutes, and then just kind of sway drunkenly while posing a vague, unconvincing threat. They look good, and there’s a definite air of menace to them when they are filling the halls of the hospital en masse, but the movie doesn’t do much with them. And the bits of movie between the death scenes and vague zombie menace are just bewildering and inexplicable. In a generous estimation, you could call it a surreal atmosphere reminiscent of a dream or drug trip. Less generously, you might call it an incoherent mess. And the characters? They exist solely to give the director some people to kill. They are not unlikable so much as unknown and unknowable.

Despite its shortcomings, it’s worth a watch. The gore is well done, if a little cheap looking in a few isolated instances. For all of its lack of a coherent storyline or decent characters, it’s remarkably entertaining. For the trainspotters out there, it’s sure to provide fodder for many a conversation about the films it’s influenced: Hellraiser in tone and, to some degree, story; every slasher flick ever in the pacing and buffet of clever death; probably others that didn’t occur to me. And hey, it’s Lucio Fulci and it’s got zombies.

This review was part of the Final Girl Film Club challenge for March. For more info and her takes on many other fine horror offerings, visit her invariably awesome blog early and often.

I was concerned that the recent bonanza of zombie movies was slowing to a trickle, but here are a handful of trailers arguing against that hypothesis. Admittedly, these look to be low budget, foreign and indie affairs, rather than the big-budget epics of the past few years (although World War Z is still on the horizon…). The best looking of the bunch is Zombies of Mass Destruction, but I refuse to get too excited about it. It’s as rare as hen’s teeth for a movie to be as good as the trailer and even though the trailer looks pretty good, you can see some rough acting and questionable humor in it. It’s another zombie comedy, this one poking a little fun at America’s terrorism hysteria. Okay, okay, they’re about six years too late for this to be really relevant, but there’s plenty of people who are still sure there’s a bioweapon under every bed just waiting to spread some kind of virus, zombie-making or otherwise. I just wish the movie’s web site had some real information, like a release date, whether it’s coming to theaters or straight to DVD or what. Oh well, I’m sure that will come presently. Until then, enjoy the trailer. Then, hit the jump for three more trailers.

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Apart from one of the best titles ever, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie has plenty going for it. It’s the story of a luckless, macho antiques dealer who gets sucked into a zombie murder-mystery. When a clumsy woman crashes into his parked motorcycle, he’s left the choice of being stranded or catching a ride with her. All things considered, he should have chosen to stay stranded. Before long, he’s being detained as a witness to a murder by an incredibly surly and spiteful police sergeant who seems more concerned with framing him for being a long hair than actually solving the crime. In the course of investigating the murder alongside with his ride/cause of all his troubles, he discovers not only the walking dead but what’s causing them to rise. Of course, no one believes him about either the zombies or what’s reanimating them, giving the dead a chance to wreak some serious havoc before the satisfying and unhappy ending.

The zombies are fairly original. They’re capable of working together and using tools, and while they don’t quite run, they can definitely shuffle at a good pace. Headshots do nothing but annoy them, but they do turn out to be roughly as flammable as kerosene. And strangely, they don’t show up in photos, a plot necessity that doesn’t make a lot of sense in context and is never explained. They look absolutely great, with realistically dead countenances and creepy-ass red irises. The zombie make up is unfailingly excellent, especially the autopsy zombie. The gore is nicely done too, apart from one fairly cheesy looking killing of a nurse.

Overall the acting is decent, but there is some silly overacting and clumsy delivery here and there. It’s not terrible, and it never derails the movie, but it’s definitely chuckle worthy. The story is strong, and in fine zombie tradition there’s even a heavy-handed message — pro-environment/back-to-nature in this case. The script is solid, if a little heavy on the talking and police procedural angle, which slows down the pace a bit. Still, everything is stylishly shot and the atmosphere is great, so the relatively languid speed at which it unfolds isn’t a problem. It also sounds incredible – the score and sound design, which intermingle in curious and effective ways, are top notch. All things considered, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is well-deserving of its status as a minor classic.

The Japanese have done interesting zombie movies such as Stacy and JUNK. The forgettable Living Dead in Tokyo Bay, however, is not one of them. After a meteor causes the dead to come back to life, a badass Japanese woman in a tight, futuristic jumpsuit has to rip off the plot of Escape from New York and rescue her scientist father, only instead of gangs, she faces zombies. And some super zombie Power Ranger-esque villains created by a corrupt military dude. And right now, if you are imagining something cool, stop. It sucks. It could have been fun, given better direction and a slightly more coherent plot, but it’s really lifeless (ha!) and slow and pointless. The zombies don’t get enough screen time and manage to underwhelm even low expectations when they do. The gore is gutless, the super-zombie villains are ridiculous and even a hot girl in a skintight jumpsuit manages to bore. Apart from being the oldest Japanese zombie movie I know of (1992) I can’t think of a single reason to even acknowledge this film’s existence.

Sweet lord, is Zombie Lake bad. Bad. It’s one of the curious subgenre of  Nazi zombie movies. You’d think angry, dead, fascist Germans eating folks would be a can’t-miss proposition, but you’d be very, very wrong. I swear this subgenre is cursed. So far every Nazi zombie movie I have seen has been god-awful. Seriously, these are some of the worst of the worst in a genre teeming with terrible ideas, half-baked execution and incoherence.

Anyway, you’ve got some Nazi zombies living in a lake. Or not living, I guess. They came to be there after being slaughtered by some French folks at or near the end of WWII. For some reason they revive to eat the occasional swimmer in the titular lake. Then they come out to terrorize the town, or in the case of one zombie, to reconnect with his daughter. Curiously, his daughter doesn’t seem particularly concerned with the fact that her dead father is a rotting, shambling mess, despite never having met him before. Eventually the town folk formulate a plan to save the day. Hooray. None of this is explained and it all happens at a plodding, interminable pace. Long, long before this is over you will be begging it to end.

The make up and gore effects were, hands down, the worst I have ever seen. Seriously, I’ve seen little kids’ Halloween makeup that was much better done. The gore was limited to buckets of fake blood — they basically didn’t bother faking wounds for the most part. A zombie bites, fake blood is doused on the area and they call it a day. Add to the mix execrable writing, dull direction and terrible acting, and you have a big pile of vomit. It did have plenty of nudity, which honestly is one of the few things saving this from being the single worst zombie movie I’ve ever seen. Let’s face it, some attractive naked women help break up the monotony. There are two full frontal nude scenes, one of which featured like ten women. All hot. It was still not enough to lift this off the bottom of the barrel, but I’ve helpfully included a NSFW shot of a few them after the jump, to save you the trouble of actually watching the movie. Read the rest of this entry »