IFI Horrorthon Retrospective

IFI Horrorthon Retrospective

This blog is rapidly becoming a creature of the week feature. So, rather than have this piece relate entirely to films featuring the undead, I thought I would broaden its scope to include a retrospective of the IFI Horrorthon Film Festival.

This year's festival kicked off with a screening of the new Diablo Cody flick, Jennifer's Body. The film concerns her hotness, Megan Fox (scarily apt name, right?) and her attempts to – in the spirit of TV snooker show Big Break – kill as many men as she can within an alloted amount of screen time. I didn't attend the screening, and I have heard pretty lukewarm comments as far as reviews go, so I think this can wait until DVD.

However, I did attend Saturday's showing of the George A. Romero classic, Day of the Dead. The final movie in the initial ...of the Dead Trilogy, Day... depicts the remnants of a world largely overrun by zombie hordes. The band of survivors in this installment are a group consisting of army personnel, doctors, and a couple of standoffish civilians. Holed up in an underground bunker, the scientists seek a cure to what they see as a condition, while the soldiers, ostensibly protecting the others, engage in an ever deepening spiral of lunatic behaviour.

Romero needed to slash the budget for Day... in order to get it into production. The initial script, which envisioned the characters living overground, and battling an organised army of semi-sentient zombies was axed in favour of the underground setting, with a single self-aware corpse substituted for the undead throngs. What resulted was a more satisfactory, character-oriented piece, exploring the schism between mental and physical action and the shortcomings of the military-industrial complex. The unused ideas from the original Day... script were recycled into the mediocre Land of the Dead.

The screening which I attended boasted a little surprise extra; a guest appearance by Joe Pilato aka the manic, shouting, scenery-chewing Captain Rhodes. The slightly-too-ripped sixty year-old took to the stage before the film rolled, wearing a black string vest, Gordon Gecko braces, a suit jacket replete with a single red rose, and bedecked with more chains and medallions than a Spanish mobster. He then proceeded to reel off every quotable line of dialogue his on-screen character uttered, some more than once; I'm still not entirely sure what a pussf&%* is, even though I was referred to as such several times.

It was amusing, but slightly sad to see a man who once had a passable acting career, (and had worked – however briefly – with Quentin Tarantino) reduced to mugging for a bunch of hooting horror movie nerds. He told the crowd – no fooling – that genre fans were the most intelligent fans around, and that he would be signing autographs for his Irish fanbase – at a small fee – after the movie.

And then we were left alone with Romero's last great zombie opus. From ancient grudge, break to new mutiny, as it were. The movie opens with the survivors trying to contact other like-minded folk, without having chunks of their juicy flesh eaten in the process. They then decamp to the aforementioned underground lair, where the real fun begins.

Pilato's Captain Rhodes character – leader of the pack of army hyenas – is the true star of the show here. He screams his way through a plethora of so-over-the-top-they're-almost-funny lines, and screams his dialogue with such hatred for man and zombie alike, that his creation can't help but be addictive. His ultimate demise (sorry, hope I didn't ruin anything) is so gruesomely well conceived that it has acquired a place in cult horror history.

The rest of the non-military cast provide the relatively calm base upon which Rhodes and his men go apeshit. Lori Cardille - the strong female character which became a Romero staple post-Dawn - gives as good as she gets, openly challenging Rhodes' authority as well as that of her medical superior, Dr. Logan. Logan, nicknamed Frankenstein by the other inhabitants of the burrow, has been trying to control the undead, in order to restore them to polite society. It is the ultimate exposure of his mental frailties which initiates the kinetic finale, in all its baleful, bile-ful glory.

The session ended with a brief return from Pilato. He answered a handful of questions from his adoring public before retiring outside to sign autographs with all the grace that a man with an undead career can muster.

Zombieland Movie Review

Zombieland

Movie Review

By Alan Del Rio

George Romero has a lot to answer for. Over forty years after Night of the Living Dead reignited interest in a previously formulaic genre, the zombie horror film is still taking a bite out of global cinema box offices. Romero's 1968 film was subversive at the time – featuring a black hero who survives the zombies, but is killed by a redneck posse – and is still inspiring young filmmakers to have a go themselves. Zombieland is the latest take on the genre, and its about as fresh as a film featuring rotting corpses can be.

Set in a post-apocalyptic, zombie infested world, Zombieland follows a small group of survivors as they search for a small, safe patch of land to call their own. Pretty much par for the zombie owned, controlled and operated course so far, right? Well, what sets this film apart is the imaginative, hilarious script, a cast that extracts every last iota of humour, drama and action from same, and snappy direction from newcomer Ruben Fleischer.

I must admit that I had a hard time settling into the movie. The first five minutes, including credits, are more reminiscent of an eighties hair metal music video than a feature film. But, when the cast finally hit the screen, and lead character Columbus (all of the characters go by Pelham-like aliases – in this case their home town) outlines his rules for surviving a zombie holocaust, the movie begins to gain some momentum.

Zombieland is decidedly “new zombie”. It eschews Romero's shuffling, slow-moving undead in favour of the hyper-fast (and scarier) Zack Synder variety. The soundtrack is filled with the heaviest of metal, and all of the characters have adjusted to their decaying environment like the urban badasses they are. This last fact slightly undermines the menace which the zombies should possess, as mostly they are fodder for humourous set pieces, but the film never completely castrates their rotting unmentionables, and they play a key role in the unnerving finale.

The cast, only consisting of four main characters, and one unexpected, side-splitting, movie-stealing cameo, is immense. Woody Harrelson gives his funniest performance since White Men Can't Jump, as the tough but yielding Tallahassee, whose sole purpose is to find earth's last edible Twinkie. Jesse Eisenberg is fast developing a niche as the guy you get when Michael Cera is busy. He provides the everyman character to Harrelson's rampaging Tallahassee, and his rules form the linchpin of the movie.

Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin are terrific as the con artist sisters. Believable and above all funny, they add a welcome extra layer of conflict between the human characters. Now, how do I talk about the cameo without giving away that it's Bill Murray? Oops. Murray arrives at the midpoint, when the main characters stay in his house, and although he is only on screen briefly, he single-handedly drags the film through the usual second act slump. Best cameo I have seen since Will Ferrell in Wedding Crashers or Anthony Hopkins' brief appearance in Silence of the Lambs.

It's not all good news though. I was, at times, left wondering why certain creative choices were made, mostly because I was disappointed that a team which had gotten so much right had managed to drop the ball at all. For instance, Fleischer seems to adhere to the music video school direction, all décollage and slow motion action. And while this works well for the most part, it does occasionally draw attention to itself, which is a cardinal directing sin. Additionally, although the script is by far my favourite element of the movie, the semi-frequent voice overs are just plain lazy storytelling.

In an interesting (define interesting – ed.) aside for any movie trivia heads reading this, the reason for the breakdown of civilization in Zombieland is a form of human adapted mad cow disease. This form of infection is borrowed, whether intentionally or by coincidence, from the 2004 Irish zombie film Dead Meat, which is worth a closer look if you can find it on DVD. Yet again Irish ingenuity shapes the face of modern film making. That's why we're called “the Hollywood of Europe” (I'm pretty sure that's a lie - ed.).

Zombieland is funny, scary, savvy, tense, and above all ass-kickingly cool. All excellent reasons to go see it, but there is one thing above all else which makes me recommend this film; you've got to love a movie whose tag line is Nut Up or Shut Up.

4 out of 5 stars