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.